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At least 127 killed in stampede after soccer game in Indonesia, police say
A torched car sits outside Kanjuruhan Stadium in Malang, East Java, on Sunday after at least 127 people were killed in a “mass commotion” after a soccer game. (Putri/AFP/Getty Images)
Indonesian police said 127 people died and 180 others were injured in a stampede following a soccer game Saturday evening.
Among the dead were 125 civilians and two police officers, the chief of East Java Police, Nico Afinta, told reporters. They suffered breathing problems and suffocated as they tried to leave the stadium, he said.
Thirty-four of the fatalities occurred at the scene, Afinta said, and the rest died at the hospital.
A “mass commotion” followed the match, and the number of those killed was still being determined, the soccer league, Liga 1, said in a statement.
The stampede occurred after the home team, Arema FC, lost to the visiting Persebaya, at which point dozens of fans stormed the field, according to local media reports.
Videos of the scene showed fans scattered across the field as loud bangs and clouds of smoke erupted in the arena. Uniformed officers carrying riot shields were seen chasing down fans on the field and beating them with batons.
Matches were suspended for a week, the league said. “Hopefully this will be a valuable lesson for all of us,” said the head of the league, Akhmad Hadian Lukita.
Llewellyn reported from Medan, Indonesia. | 2022-10-02T01:10:16Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Indonesia soccer stampede kills 127, police say - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/01/indonesia-riot-arema-fc-liga-football/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/01/indonesia-riot-arema-fc-liga-football/ |
FILE - This still image from video taken Oct. 4, 2021, and provided by the U.S. Coast Guard shows an underwater pipeline that spilled tens of thousands of gallons of oil off the coast of Orange County, Calif. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers granted the approval Friday, Sept. 30, 2022, to Amplify Energy Corp. to repair the pipeline. The Houston company pleaded guilty to federal charges last month of negligently discharging oil. (U.S. Coast Guard via AP, File) (Uncredited/U.S. Coast Guard) | 2022-10-02T02:20:27Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Ruptured oil pipeline off California approved for repairs - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/ruptured-oil-pipeline-off-california-approved-for-repairs/2022/10/01/c6c78cd4-41ee-11ed-8c6e-9386bd7cd826_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/ruptured-oil-pipeline-off-california-approved-for-repairs/2022/10/01/c6c78cd4-41ee-11ed-8c6e-9386bd7cd826_story.html |
Spirit ends disappointing season with loss to playoff-bound Houston
Goalkeeper Aubrey Kingsbury and the Spirit ended their season with a 2-1 loss to the Houston Dash. (Katelyn Mulcahy/Getty Images)
The Washington Spirit’s trying 2022 campaign ended with a 2-1 loss to the playoff-bound Houston Dash at a misty Audi Field.
In the wake of the defeat, interim coach Albertin Montoya praised the team’s effort, both Saturday and since his arrival, despite a 3-9-10 final record that included a winless stretch of more than four months.
“I’ve been in teams when I’ve played, I’ve coached where it’s just like you’ve got nothing to play for, and sometimes players just kind of stop and go through the motions. You can’t say that about any player out here. We were fighting until the end, so a lot of credit to them,” Montoya said. “The mentality of the players has been absolutely outstanding. I couldn’t ask for anything more.”
Houston opened the scoring in the 14th minute when Dash midfielder Marisa Viggiano curved a looping, left-footed strike into the top left corner, beating Spirit goalkeeper Aubrey Kingsbury. It was Viggiano’s second goal of the season.
The Spirit answered in the 36th minute as midfielder Andi Sullivan slotted a penalty kick into the bottom left corner, her first goal of the season.
The Dash took the lead for good in the 58th minute when Houston forward Nichelle Prince’s header deflected off Spirit defender Julia Roddar and into an open net for an own goal. The Spirit had a few promising attacks down the stretch but could not net the equalizer.
The win clinched home-field advantage for Houston (10-6-6) in the first round of the NSWL playoffs.
The loss marked the end of a tumultuous season for the Spirit. A year after winning the organization’s first NWSL championship, Washington mustered just three wins, hurt by injuries and national team call-ups that hindered continuity. The winless streak across all competitions lasted 18 matches, from May 4 to Sept. 10.
On Aug. 22, the Spirit fired coach Kris Ward after an incident at practice. Montoya was named on an interim basis and helped stabilize things, going 2-3-0 in five games on the sideline.
“It’s hard to think about this season and be super positive just because of what we were piggybacking off of from last year. I think we had a lot of really good moments individually and collectively,” said defender Sam Staab. “We just couldn’t put it all together pretty much all season.” | 2022-10-02T03:52:12Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Spirit ends disappointing season with loss to playoff-bound Houston - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/01/washington-spirit-houston-dash/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/01/washington-spirit-houston-dash/ |
CONWAY, S.C. — CJ Beasley ran 24 yards for the go-ahead touchdown in the final minute, leaping over a defender on the way to the end zone, and Coastal Carolina defeated Georgia Southern 34-30 on Saturday night in a game that saw three lead changes in the final six minutes. | 2022-10-02T03:52:36Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Coastal Carolina remains unbeaten after wild finish - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/colleges/coastal-carolina-remains-unbeaten-after-wild-finish/2022/10/01/987b93c8-4204-11ed-8c6e-9386bd7cd826_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/colleges/coastal-carolina-remains-unbeaten-after-wild-finish/2022/10/01/987b93c8-4204-11ed-8c6e-9386bd7cd826_story.html |
Dear Amy: My son and daughter are now middle-aged, and my parents have been gone for more than 20 years. I’ve not told my children the whole truth about my parents. It was awful growing up in a house full of alcohol, anger, and abuse.
I’ve wondered whether telling them both the true story of my upbringing, including traumatic events they have no clue happened to me and my siblings, would be all right this late in the game. They are highly moral, responsible adults, in solid marriages.
Mom: I don’t suggest initiating a discussion about this with your children unless there is some meaningful context, and until you are prepared for a wide spectrum of responses, ranging from compassion toward you — to blaming you for disparaging their grandparents after their death.
My gift was expensive, and personal, and ever since placing it on the table, I've been worried that it did not make it into the hands of the recipient.
Worried: Yes, call, text, or email. You can start by saying how much fun you had at the event, and thanking the person for inviting you.
If we can’t resolve it “tonight,” it’s out of our thoughts so we can rest and refresh for the next day. This also applies to taking calls or texts from others who will not contribute to our moment of respite.
Recharged: I appreciate the way you frame this choice, and recommend it for others. | 2022-10-02T04:44:08Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Ask Amy: Should I tell my kids the truth about their grandparents? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/10/02/ask-amy-grandparents-truth-kids/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/10/02/ask-amy-grandparents-truth-kids/ |
Relatives of Ukrainian military medics held as prisoners of war by Russia take part in a demonstration in Kyiv to demand the release of their loved ones. (Oksana Parafeniuk for The Washington Post)
KYIV, Ukraine — Medic Maryana Mamonova was taken prisoner in Mariupol this spring as Russian forces laid waste to the city. Late last month, she and several other medical workers were among the 215 Ukrainians swapped for 55 Russians in the largest such exchange of the war. Four days after her release, she gave birth.
Stories like hers only added to the country’s celebrations over the return of so many Ukrainians, men and women who were captured as the invading troops tried to overrun cities and towns across the east. Yet others continue to be held, their location and health uncertain. At least 150 are medics, according to some accounts, and many are from the 555th military hospital in Mariupol.
The Washington Post spoke to relatives of some of these medics, who, as Russian forces were bombing that city, sought refuge with local residents in its sprawling Azovstal and Ilyich steel plants. Their capture violated the Geneva Conventions, which specify that “personnel engaged exclusively in the collection, transport and treatment of the wounded and sick” should be “respected and protected under all circumstances.”
“If they fall into the hands of the enemy, they shall not be treated as prisoners of war,” the conventions read.
The opposite happened, though. And no one knows how Russia’s illegal annexations Friday of four Ukrainian territories will affect the medics’ fate.
‘They have taken our lives’
After she heard about the prisoner of war exchange on Sept. 21, Svitlana Harlinskaya was “waiting every second” for her older sister to call and say, “I’ve been freed.”
But the phone never rang. Olena Biiovska, 49, wasn’t among those released.
“You understand hopelessness, and you want to shout to the whole world,” Harlinskaya said.
Her sister had worked as a military medic for 18 years, serving in Kyiv and on the front in the east. Six months before the fighting broke out, Harlinskaya said, she was transferred to the 555th hospital in Mariupol.
Once Russia invaded, communications with Biiovska were sporadic. When a bomb destroyed the hospital, she and other medics moved to the Ilyich steel plant.
Sometimes she would send text messages or call with seconds-only messages. “She said, ‘I’m alive, I love you, I’m running to operate,’” Harlinskaya recounted recently. One call finally lasted a few minutes. “She said that there were so many wounded, all with serious injuries. She said it was unbearable.”
In mid-April, Russian forces broke through Ukrainian defenses at the Ilyich plant and took the troops and medical personnel prisoner. Biiovska’s last text message was that day. After that, nothing.
Her family knew through contacts that she was a prisoner. A photo of Biiovska and other medics showed up on a Russian Telegram channel. “She was very thin,” Harlinskaya said. At the end of August, the Red Cross delivered a letter that Biiovska had written two months earlier.
Biiovska’s two sons, ages 19 and 21, now live with their aunt. “They ask me every day when their mother will come home,” Harlinskaya said.
Her anguish comes through when she talks about the Russians: “They have taken our lives and the lives of our loved ones.”
A teddy bear demonstrator
Alona Koval’s younger sister, Maryna Golinko, is a medic and first lieutenant with the Ukrainian 36th brigade. She was transferred last November from Kyiv to Mariupol, where the start of the war meant a very different mission, evacuating and treating soldiers from the battlefield. “It was frightening,” Koval said.
The brigade was in the bunkers below the Ilyich steel plant for the final weeks before the city’s fall. In one of Golinko’s last text messages to her sister before being taking prisoner by Russian soldiers, she described the destruction around her and large numbers of dead and wounded.
“I can’t describe it all. I sit and cry,” wrote Golinko, 28. “The last day I’ve felt such fear and despair, and desire to live like no time before in my life.” In a separate text to her mother, she wrote that it might be her last message and that it made no sense to search for her body.
Then followed what Koval remembers as “horrible days” when the family didn’t know where Golinko was. They finally spotted her in that same photo on the Russian Telegram channel, and they also received a Red Cross-relayed letter in late August. Golinko wrote that she was eating three meals a day and being treated well.
Koval didn’t believe a word, though she “wanted it to be true.” Her fears were confirmed by one of the medics who was freed last month, who said her sister and others were being held in horrible conditions in Russia and regularly beaten.
Just days later, Koval was at Kyiv’s Independence Square as dozens of relatives of Ukrainian prisoners of war gathered. She held a little teddy bear, a treasured reminder of her sister as she helped demonstrate for the prisoners’ release.
“Maryna wanted to be a medic since she was 5. This was her first patient,” Koval explained. “We take care of him now because he’s so important to us.”
‘Be glad you’re alive’
At least Yurik Mkrtchian’s family knows where he was taken after being captured at the Ilyich steel works. And at least they know he survived the explosion that in July killed 53 Ukrainians and wounded 75 at the Olenivka prisoner of war camp in Russian-controlled territory in the east.
Mkrtchian, a 31-year-old anesthesiologist, managed a brief call to his sister Karina the day after the blast.
‘I’m alive, here, and in the same condition,” he told her.
About a month later, he sent a letter that he signed “a military doctor.”
“Today is one month in captivity and the words, ‘be glad you’re alive,’ begin to ring tensely in my head,” he wrote. “I demand only one thing: freedom for me and my work.”
His mother longs for her son to be released. Maryna Mkrtchian says she felt “joy” that so many others were part of the prisoner swap and came up with her own explanation as to why Yurik was not among them.
“He must be still needed,” she said. “There are still prisoners, there are wounded. I can’t despair and cry and scream — and not be happy that [another] mother can now hug her son or her daughter.”
Months of silence, again
Olha Shapkova and Volodymyr Shapkov met while studying at the Kyiv military academy, and both were stationed in Mariupol before the war. She returned to the capital to give birth to their first child, Yevgeny, in December. Her husband, a surgeon, followed for his son’s arrival.
“He came to us for a few days and then went back,” Shapkova said. “I planned to join him, but I didn’t make it in time.”
They spoke by phone at the beginning of March. Silence followed for months, and as the crisis in Mariupol worsened, she feared he might have been taken prisoner: “I monitored the internet, all the Russian Telegram channels, everything I could. But I didn’t want to believe it, of course, because it’s scary.”
In early June, Shapkov called from an unknown number and said he was being held in the Olenivka camp. The deadly explosion there was July 29.
“I didn’t sleep all night,” she said. “I’m a breastfeeding mother. I have to feed the baby. Everything is transferred to the child, all the nerves. He, too, does not sleep, cries, feels everything.”
When Russia finally put out a list of the dead, 28-year-old Volodymyr Shapkov’s name wasn’t on it.
His wife last got a glimpse of him in June when the Russians released two videos of medics they were holding. He was “frighteningly thin,” she said, but she still was relieved. “He had two legs and two arms — thank God.” | 2022-10-02T05:29:01Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Russia holds captured Ukrainian medics, a possible war crime - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/02/russia-ukraine-war-prisoners-medics/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/02/russia-ukraine-war-prisoners-medics/ |
The oil producers of the OPEC+ convene on Wednesday to set output targets for November. With Brent crude trading at $85 a barrel, the group is expected to agree to a second straight production cut. But even a big reduction to targets may have little impact on actual supplies, unless they can agree to redistribute production targets, or the Saudis step in to act alone.
Meeting virtually in early September, members agreed to a token cut of 100,000 barrels a day to output targets for October. This time around the curtailment is likely to be much larger, with some analysts estimating that it could be as much as 1 million barrels a day, although a figure of half that size is the most widely forecast number. The group has also taken a last-minute decision to meet face to face for the first time since March 2020. That may indicate that it will try to do something more significant than apply a pro-rata cut to existing targets. It certainly needs to.
OPEC+ can’t keep things as they are and retain credibility. The amount the group pumps and its theoretical target have become increasingly estranged from each other over the course of the year, with output lagging behind the planned volume by more than 3.5 million barrels a day in August, according to figures compiled by Bloomberg.
That big gap is going to dilute the effects of any cut decided on Wednesday, unless they can agree to redistribute targets among themselves to reflect the inability of most members to pump as much as they’re allowed.
Even a reduction of 1 million barrels a day, shared pro rata among the members, would require just six countries to make actual cuts. All the rest are pumping so far below their individual targets that a step-down would have no impact. The resulting reduction would be just 337,000 barrels a day — and that’s assuming, perhaps optimistically, that all six stick to the plan.
A contraction of 500,000 barrels a day would see just five countries needing to pump less and would deliver shrinkage in actual supply of just 126,000 barrels a day.
Any reduction will come a month before European Union sanctions on Russian crude exports come into effect on Dec. 5, complicating the outlook. Russia is a powerful and valued member of OPEC+, so despite the group’s self-declared role of balancing oil supply and demand, don’t expect other members to rally round and make up for any shortfall in global availability resulting from the EU embargo.
Seaborne crude shipments to Europe from Russia are currently running at about 820,000 barrels a day, but the sanctions could hit wider flows, with the EU also set to ban the provision of insurance and other services to tankers carrying Russian crude, no matter where they’re headed.
Defining acceptable baselines for output cuts back in April 2020, when the current arrangement was agreed, was difficult enough. And at that time crude was trading below $35 a barrel and still heading south, a guarantee of focused minds. With Brent at $85, many producers won’t feel the same existential threat that they did when the Covid pandemic struck. And giving up market share, even if it’s only theoretical market share, is never popular.
But it’s not impossible. The OPEC+ group has shown remarkable cohesion over the past two and a half years. And I wouldn’t underestimate the ability of Saudi Arabia to cajole, or bully, the rest of the group to see things as it does.
And if it fails, the kingdom can always make another of its voluntary additional cutbacks. With production now running at about 11 million barrels a day, the kingdom could certainly afford to trim output, and some of its oil infrastructure might benefit from a rest.
Saudi Energy Minister Abdulaziz bin Salman clearly enjoys springing surprises, especially when they’re designed to discomfit traders shorting oil. The fact that ministers have agreed to meet face to face suggests something more meaningful than a pro-rata cut in output targets is on the table. | 2022-10-02T06:59:26Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Oil Output Cut Will Underwhelm Without a Big Change - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/oil-output-cut-will-underwhelm-without-a-big-change/2022/10/02/42e6e566-4218-11ed-8c6e-9386bd7cd826_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/oil-output-cut-will-underwhelm-without-a-big-change/2022/10/02/42e6e566-4218-11ed-8c6e-9386bd7cd826_story.html |
For Brazilian voters, crime and violence are top concerns. But the jump in law enforcement officials across the ballot may not ease the high homicide rate.
Analysis by Isabel Laterzo
A police officer stands near the electronic voting machines that will be used to vote in the first round of the upcoming Brazilian presidential elections, at a voting station in Brasilia, on Friday. (Adriano Machado/Reuters)
Brazilians are voting Sunday in the first round of elections for a variety of offices. This election has received particular attention, as President Jair Bolsonaro — a retired member of the armed forces — seeks reelection. Bolsonaro, who is widely known for being tough on crime, once stated that “a police officer who does not kill is not a police officer.”
But the buck does not stop with him: compared to Brazil’s 2018 elections, the number of active and retired police and military officials running for public office has grown by 27 percent.
Why is campaigning on crime and violence a popular strategy among candidates across levels of government? And what does it mean for the Brazilian electorate? To analyze this, my research looks at the ways in which politicians campaign on public security. My fieldwork in Brazil during the 2022 election season includes over 60 interviews, including with politicians and campaign staff for state and national office. In addition, I use a survey to analyze what leads citizens — particularly progressives — to support “tough-on-crime” candidates.
Brazilian police killed 27 people in a single raid. That doesn’t make Rio de Janeiro safer.
What is the current situation of insecurity in Brazil, and what do voters want?
According to the Brazilian Forum on Public Security’s annual report, in 2021 Brazil recorded 20.4 percent of the world’s homicides — yet the country accounts for just 2.7 percent of the global population. The report indicates 78 percent of Brazil’s homicide victims were Black and 50 percent were between the ages of 12 and 29.
Concerns about personal safety can affect voter preferences. I conducted an online survey in Latin America in March 2021 — including 1,500 Brazilians — with a sample designed to approximate the population in terms of gender, age, socioeconomic status and region. My findings suggest that perceptions of insecurity and the belief that crime is driven by gangs can lead even the most progressive voters to support tough-on-crime candidates. Other research shows that victimization has a similar effect, and that shocks in the crime rate can increase the vote share of law enforcement candidates.
This makes crime and violence an important issue for Brazilian politicians. Signals to voters that candidates will be tough on crime can increase support at the polls, and likely helped Bolsonaro win the 2018 election.
How are politicians campaigning on this issue?
Research indicates that candidates for the 2022 election are campaigning on public security in three main ways.
First, the increase in the number of active and retired law enforcement personnel running for office is a powerful signal. Some candidates register with their professional titles to communicate their position to voters — examples include “Colonel Salema” or “Sergeant Clemente.” Research indicates that the use of professional names can help improve the likelihood of election. This phenomenon is not just happening among conservatives — in the state of Bahia, a police officer and member of the left-leaning Workers’ Party is running for election as “Major Denice.”
Second, experts from the Network of Security Observatories in Brazil have called attention to other, more violent, methods politicians may be using. For example, gubernatorial candidates seeking reelection seem to be deploying the police at increased rates to combat criminal groups. My interviews with politicians and experts suggest this is an effort to show a commitment to crack down on crime.
Here’s an example, from Rio de Janeiro — where the number of police operations jumped 18 percent in the months leading up to the election, compared to the same period in 2021. Rio’s Governor Cláudio Castro, a Bolsonaro supporter, is seeking reelection and has applauded police operations. He claims they are fighting organized criminal groups.
My research suggests leftist candidates are also working to capture votes from citizens concerned about security matters, including centrist voters and those who believe the left’s typical approaches are too “soft.” These candidates are shifting their focus away from human rights protection and crime prevention — instead campaigning on increased investment in the police, including better salaries and additional spending on intelligence and technology.
Some candidates even changed their policy priorities altogether. The leading progressive candidate for governor in Rio de Janeiro — Marcelo Freixo, from the Brazilian Socialist Party — built his career by fighting to defend human rights. But Freixo recently shifted gears, speaking out against the legalization of drugs, and about why is important “to put criminals in jail.”
The focus on being tough on crime is concerning
This election season, this focus has seen clear short-term consequences. And there are important long-term consequences.
In the short term, campaigning to appear tough on crime has taken a deadly toll — in the month of May alone 41 individuals were killed in police operations in Rio de Janeiro, including 22 deaths in the city’s second-most lethal police operation. This underscores the importance of restrictions on aggressive police operations, which recent research indicates can markedly decrease police use of force — and police killings — and bring about a decline in civil homicides.
In the long term, experts point out a number of possible negative consequences of the overrepresentation of law enforcement officials in politics. One report suggests that the election of city council members with careers in law enforcement can increase the homicide rate — particularly among low-income, non-White men — by favoring the allocation of police and state resources to communities that voted for them. Further, my interviews suggest that law enforcement candidates’ investment in efforts to “prevent” crime often involve investing in military schools for youths.
More broadly, if Brazilians elect candidates who claim to be tougher on crime, it would be a powerful and consequential message from voters. This outcome would represent continued citizen support for policies that the research suggests have little to no demonstrated efficacy — and support for a presidency that has almost tripled civilian gun ownership in three years. Further, it could point to increased threats to Brazil’s democracy, a possible second Bolsonaro presidency and the continuation of a repressive approach to public security.
Isabel Laterzo (@IsabelLaterzo) is a doctoral candidate in political science at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and a Fulbright-Hays DDRA Fellow. The views expressed in this article are those of Isabel Laterzo and do not represent the views of the Fulbright Program, the U.S. Department of Education or any of its partner organizations. | 2022-10-02T10:02:48Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Brazil's candidates say they're tough on crime. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/02/brazil-ballot-military-police-election/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/02/brazil-ballot-military-police-election/ |
Brazil faces pivotal decision: More Bolsonaro or back to Lula?
Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, driving the motorcycle with blue trim, greets supporters at a rally in the municipality of Poços de Caldas in eastern Brazil on Sept. 30. (Douglas Magno/AFP/Getty Images)
RIO DE JANEIRO — Millions across Brazil head to the polls Sunday for the first round of a presidential election that has deepened divisions in Latin America’s most populous country and raised fears of violence at a crucial point in the country’s history.
After years of anticipation, the vote comes down to a decision between messianic political giants with enormous followings who are distrusted — if not disdained — by large swaths of the electorate. Each carries extraordinary baggage.
Brazil's election: What you need to know
Former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, 76, is a charismatic union leader who came from extreme poverty to serve two terms as president but came to typify for many Brazilians the corruption that tarred his party and led to his imprisonment.
President Jair Bolsonaro, 67, rose to power decrying what he called the political rot of Lula’s party but has polarized the country with his bellicose rhetoric, chaotic leadership during Brazil’s devastating coronavirus outbreak and frequent attacks on Brazil’s civic institutions.
Voters, analysts and the candidates themselves have framed the election as an existential choice, less about policy than about the very character of the nation. Does Brazil want to be led by a man who dismissed a disease that has killed more than 685,000 people, presided over the accelerating deforestation of the Amazon rainforest and expressed admiration for the former military dictatorship? Or does it prefer a man who was convicted of corruption and imprisoned for it?
Lula, whose convictions were annulled by Brazil’s supreme court last year on grounds that the trial judge was biased against him, has led Bolsonaro by a wide margin throughout the campaign. He is within striking distance of an outright victory in the first round, which would represent both an extraordinary repudiation of the sitting president and also Lula’s own political resurrection.
What happens next is unclear. For years, Bolsonaro has sown concerns over electoral fraud, alleging repeatedly but without providing evidence that unseen powers opposed to him will manipulate the vote. His camp has threatened to dispute the election if he loses. | 2022-10-02T10:03:18Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Brazil election: Voters choose between Bolsonaro and Lula - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/02/brazil-election-bolsonaro-lula/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/02/brazil-election-bolsonaro-lula/ |
Jared Isaacman, who commissioned a private astronaut flight to orbit last year, has purchased three more space trips from Elon Musk’s SpaceX
Scott “Kidd” Poteet flies a Dassault/Dornier Alpha Jet over Bozeman, Mont., to prepare for the scheduled March launch of SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. (Jonathan Newton/The Washington Post)
BOZEMAN, Mont. — We’re heading down the runway, gaining speed for takeoff when the pilot says it calmly, matter-of-fact and without warning: “afterburner.”
I can barely make him out over the roar of the engines, but then the MiG-29 fighter jet we’re strapped into leaps to what feels like warp speed, points up severely and starts banking right with a force that shifts the horizon and fills me with a flash of panic. It feels like some part of me is left on the tarmac — my stomach most likely, or perhaps a vital organ. It’s a hollow, unbalanced sensation that leaves me with an unsettling thought: I’m in real trouble.
I knew we would fly fast and forceful. That we would pull serious Gs and go inverted. That, after all, is why we’re here. The pilot is an experienced aviator and astronaut, who is training to lead his next space mission the same way John Glenn, Alan Shepard and the rest of the Mercury astronauts with the “right stuff” did at the dawn of the space race.
Only, the pilot sitting in front of me in the cockpit is no NASA astronaut. He never served in the military. Rather, Jared Isaacman is a tech billionaire who dropped out of high school to start his company and is now in the vanguard of the new Space Age.
Last year, Isaacman, who is 39, and three other private citizens completed a historic mission, flying around Earth in a SpaceX capsule for three days in the first all-civilian spaceflight to orbit, known as Inspiration4. Recently, he has commissioned three more flights from SpaceX, the California company founded by Elon Musk, in what amounts to a private spaceflight endeavor that seeks to open a frontier in commercial spaceflight with what he calls the Polaris Program.
Isaacman, who has not said how much he paid for the Inspiration4 flight, or the Polaris Program, has said he intends to break new ground with each of the flights by leveraging SpaceX’s growing capabilities.
In the first of those missions — scheduled for March — Isaacman, two SpaceX engineers (Sarah Gillis and Anna Menon) and a former Air Force pilot (Scott “Kidd” Poteet) are planning to spend up to five days in orbit and fly deeper than any human spaceflight mission since the Apollo era. But perhaps the most daring part of what they call the Polaris Dawn mission is that they intend to attempt a spacewalk and become the first private citizens to do so.
The next of those flights could end up going to NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, docking with it and raising its orbit, which in turn would extend its life. For now, NASA and SpaceX are only studying whether that is possible. But during a news conference Thursday, Isaacman said it “would certainly fit within the kind of the parameters we established for the Polaris Program.”
The third flight would be the first human flight of SpaceX’s next-generation Starship rocket.
The Washington Post's Christian Davenport prepares for a flight in a MiG-29 fighter jet. (Video: James Cornsilk/TWP)
To prepare, his crew has already been scuba diving, which simulates weightlessness, and summited the more than 19,000-foot-high Cotopaxi volcano in Ecuador as a team-building exercise. They’ve also experienced a zero-G flight in a 727 airplane that flies in parabolas and gives passengers about 30 seconds of weightlessness at a time, and they spend hours training at SpaceX headquarters in simulators as well as a mock-up of the Dragon spacecraft.
Now I’m here with a few other journalists, SpaceX employees and people who have supported Isaacman in his spacefaring endeavors to participate in the fighter jet training portion of the program.
The idea is to get “comfortable with being uncomfortable,” says Isaacman, who founded Shift4 Payments, which processes more than $200 billion annually. Spaceflight is a difficult, scary endeavor that doesn’t come with a game-over button. On the Inspiration4 flight, a couple of crew members got sick on the first day, as often happens in space. The toilet broke, sounding an alarm.
“You can easily see any kind of just normal human being like, ‘You know what? I’ve had enough. I’m ready to come home now. I don’t feel good, and I’ve got no bathroom and I just want it to end,’ ” Isaacman says. “But it doesn’t work that way in spaceflight.”
So he takes the crew to the mountains, “where people are unhappy and cold and wet.” And in rollicking fighter jet rides that simulate the gravitational force of a rocket taking off or reentering Earth’s atmosphere.
The simulators at SpaceX are great for training, “but you can walk out of the simulator and go get a cup of coffee,” he says. In a jet, there is no escape.
For decades, NASA’s astronauts have trained in T-38 jets, breaking the sound barrier, pushing limits, getting used to operating in conditions that strain body and mind. So much of astronaut training is done on the ground, except when they step into those fighters.
“It’s actually the most important training that we do as astronauts,” former NASA astronaut Terry Virts once said. “It’s the one place where we’re not in a simulator. It’s real flying and if you make a mistake, you can get hurt or break something or run out of gas. There are a lot of things that happen in the real world in a T-38 that don’t happen in the simulator.”
Isaacman owns a fleet of fighter jets — the MiG he acquired from the estate of the late Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft and a fellow space enthusiast. Isaacman may be a civilian, but he’s an elite pilot who turned a lifelong passion into an enterprise. In 2009, he shattered the record for the fastest flight around the world. He’s flown in air shows and founded a company, Draken International, that provided training to U.S. military pilots.
As he performs a series of last-minute safety checks, I strap in. Helmet on, the sweet, rancid scent of jet fuel engulfing a cockpit already made claustrophobic with all sorts of levers and switches I dare not touch. It all feels real to me, and I check my heart rate on my Apple watch. We’re close to takeoff but still on terra firma, and yet I can feel the throb of my pulse. Sitting atop the Saturn V rocket that propelled the Apollo 11 crew to the moon, Neil Armstrong’s was 110 beats per minute.
Here, sitting on the runway, mine is 117.
Isaacman hits the afterburner, injecting a burst of fuel that ignites the exhaust and gives us additional thrust as we lift off. He banks the jet hard right, bringing the ground into clear focus. I don’t look at my watch again. I don’t want to see what ugly numbers appear.
The discomfort that accompanies takeoff comes as a shock. I’m strapped into the seat, tethered by twin harnesses that come over my shoulders and across my chest as well as another pair across my thighs, so that I can barely move. And yet I feel a deep sense of unbalance, as if in free fall, which makes no sense given that I’m strapped in tighter than a baby in a car seat.
The Washington Post's Christian Davenport flies in a MiG-29 fighter jet. (Video: James Cornsilk/TWP)
It’s a wholly unfamiliar sensation that, thankfully, comes with a precedent. I’ve never flown in a fighter jet before, but I have flown on a zero-G flight, and the sensation of being well outside my comfort zone — and the fear that accompanies it — is familiar. And so when Isaacman levels the jet and asks me how I’m doing, I reply that I’m fine. I don’t know that that’s entirely true, but my stomach — or whatever part of me that had gone missing — has returned. I feel balanced again, comfortable — ready, I think, for what is to come.
The MiG is no comparison to SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket. The top speed is Mach 2, or twice the speed of sound. SpaceX’s towering rocket is powered by nine engines that shoot the Dragon spacecraft into orbit at Mach 22. Still, the MiG is an impressive piece of machinery — a Formula One racecar with wings — that leaps when Isaacman wants it to.
Over the next half-hour, we fly in formation, with another pair of fighter jets unsettlingly close. We do a roll, flying upside down for an instant — a topsy-turvy sensation that mimics the disorienting feel of space, where there is no up or down. To keep from getting nauseous, I keep my head still, my gaze on the horizon, and watch the world twirl — the ground where the sky used to be.
Isaacman banks hard to the right and left, increasing the force of gravity, which makes me feel as if there is a crushing weight on my chest. Ultimately, we pull about 6 Gs, or six times the force of gravity. But thankfully, I’m wearing a pair of pants that automatically inflates whenever we start pulling Gs. The pressure from the suit keeps the blood in my torso, preventing lightheadedness or, in more serious circumstances, loss of consciousness.
Each pass gives me more confidence. What was once intimidating is now fun. Then, I can tell, the flight is nearly over. We’re heading back to the tarmac, and now, comfortable being uncomfortable, I want more. “Just one more roll?” I ask. But the other jets have joined us in formation, and it’d be too dangerous.
Still, Isaacman assures me, the flight’s not over yet. He points the jet low and roars past the hangar, where people are outside watching and waving. Another blast of the afterburner and he banks high and right again into the deep blue sky, and as I lean into the turn, I’m grateful to be aloft just a while longer.
The Washington Post's Christian Davenport describes what it was like to fly in a MiG-29. (Video: James Cornsilk/TWP) | 2022-10-02T11:26:03Z | www.washingtonpost.com | How this astronaut uses fighter jets to train for space travel - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/10/02/astronaut-training-fighter-jets/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/10/02/astronaut-training-fighter-jets/ |
Inspired by the great masters, acclaimed photographer Abelardo Morell has revolutionized the ancient camera obscura
ARLES, France — Abelardo Morell was on a country road outside Arles, in the South of France. Cicadas were buzzing with almost hallucinatory intensity. It was 10 a.m., a hot day at the start of July. Scattered across a field, half a dozen cypress trees stood like shaggy sentinels. Down the road, a field of heavy-headed sunflowers dazzled yellow under a blue sky.
Morell had come to Arles to take photographs in the places Vincent van Gogh painted 130 years ago. But, even as he stood amid the painter’s beloved Provençal landscape, he seemed undaunted.
Taking on Van Gogh requires chutzpah. The Dutchman’s life has been so thoroughly co-opted by mass culture (in the form of saccharine pop songs, Hollywood movies and, most recently, several virtual reality exhibits that try to bring his paintings to life) that any serious artist who so much as nods at Van Gogh is flirting dangerously with kitsch.
None of this has deterred Morell, an acclaimed photographer in his 70s. “The fact that most people said it’s a cliche encouraged me,” he told me that day in France. “I like challenges like that.”
A portrait of contemporary artist Abelardo Morell with a tent-camera, a device he created to merge landscapes with the texture and composition of the ground where he places his camera and tripod. (Marin Driguez/Agence VU for The Washington Post)
Morell was born in Cuba and came to the United States as a teenager. Over several decades, he has established himself as a top photographer, regularly appearing in exhibitions and museum collections across the country. He is an experimentalist with a keen and often witty sense not only of the history of photography, but also of the history of art.
Morell’s method, which is continually evolving, cannily combines ancient insights about optics with the most advanced photographic equipment. He has found a way to superimpose poetic or spectacular views on mundane, nondescript surfaces (dirt roads, muddy fields, dry grass), encouraging us to see the very ground we walk on with fresh eyes. His works combine intentional decisions with chance effects. Best of all, they reanimate a dialogue between photography and painting that seemed to have peaked in the 19th century.
This year, Morell wanted to use Van Gogh as a kind of medium in his process. He had no idea what would come out of it.
When the 34-year-old Van Gogh moved to Arles from Paris in early 1888 hoping to establish a community of artists, he walked around the town’s environs carrying everything he needed to paint outdoors on his back: a folding easel, canvas, brushes and tubes of paint. He was very much alone.
Abelardo Morell came to Arles, France, to take photographs in the places Vincent van Gogh painted 130 years ago. (Marin Driguez/Agence VU for The Washington Post)
Morell, by contrast, had come to Arles from Boston, via Lisbon and Marseille, accompanied by his wife, Lisa McElaney, his assistant, Max Labelle, his friend John Spritz, and their two partners. The six established themselves in an Airbnb across the Rhone River from the old town, with its Roman coliseum and narrow streets. When Morell went out with Labelle and Spritz to take photographs, they loaded a rental car with a tripod topped by a device like a periscope, a digital camera, a laptop computer and a large piece of black fabric.
Abelardo Morell, left, and his assistant, Max Labelle, set up the tripod of his tent-camera for a project on the outskirts of Arles, France. (Marin Driguez/Agence VU for The Washington Post)
Abelardo Morell at work with his assistant, Max Labelle. (Marin Driguez/Agence VU for The Washington Post)
LEFT: Abelardo Morell, left, and his assistant, Max Labelle, set up the tripod of his tent-camera for a project on the outskirts of Arles, France. (Marin Driguez/Agence VU for The Washington Post) RIGHT: Abelardo Morell at work with his assistant, Max Labelle. (Marin Driguez/Agence VU for The Washington Post)
The black fabric was important. Morell needed it to negate as much light as possible because he makes photographs using a “camera obscura” — literally, a dark room.
The earliest written account of a camera obscura was provided by the Chinese philosopher Mo-tzu in about 400 B.C. Mo-tzu described how light from an illuminated object that passed through a pinhole into a dark room projected an inverted image of that object inside the room. Today, one of the first things many photography students are taught is how to blackout a room to create a camera obscura — or (same principle) a pinhole camera. And that’s how Morell, who started out as a street photographer in New York, began working this way.
Ancient technique adapted to modern technology
For his daytime shoots, Morell creates a portable camera obscura with a tripod, a dark cloth and a lens.
Periscope lens
Tent camera obscura
Landscape projection
The lens projects the outside sunlit landscape onto the textured ground inside the darkened tent.
The digital camera, triggered from the computer, takes a picture of the textured surface blended with the landscape projection.
manuel canales / THE WASHINGTON POST
In the early 1990s, wanting to demonstrate photography’s fundamentals to a class he was teaching, Morell placed a cardboard box that once held bottles of sweet vermouth on its side on a table. He punctured a hole in one side and inserted a lens. He set up a bare electric bulb on a stand beside the box, and when he switched it on, the bulb was projected by the lens onto the inside wall of the carton. Morell then photographed the setup, showing both the real bulb (almost whited out and spectral because of the long exposure time) and its projection inside the box (comparatively real-looking, its glowing filament clearly visible).
Intrigued by this uncanny inversion of tangible reality and photographic projection, Morell went on to make dozens of photographs of rooms he’d converted into camera obscuras. He photographed the view across the street from his former home in Brookline, Mass., projected onto his son’s toy-strewn bedroom. He showed the visual chaos of Times Square projected onto the walls and bed of a hotel room. He made similar works from rooms in Paris, London, Florence and St. Louis.
“Brookline in Brady's Room,” 1992.
“Times Square in Hotel Room,” 1997.
Then, around 2008, Morell realized he didn’t need a solid, preexisting room to create a camera obscura. He could use a tent lined with dark fabric (“the blacker it is in there, the more vivid the image becomes,” he explained), using a periscope and lens to project the surrounding landscape onto the ground beneath. The “tent-camera,” as Morell called it, meant that he could take his technique on the road. And with that, a world of possibilities opened up.
Outside Arles on that midsummer day, Labelle, a talented photographer himself, was lengthening the legs of a tripod. Birds provided an intermittent descant to the insect buzz and the drone of a distant tractor. The deep calm of the setting was hard to square with the popular image of Van Gogh painting in an agitated frenzy, hounded by psychological demons.
“He walked a lot,” Morell said of the artist. “I think he was often in a state of meditation with the landscape. He painted quickly. But it wasn’t a case of ‘I’m gonna kill myself, I better hurry up and paint that.’ It was just an intense need to show the world as he saw it.”
Morell and Spritz were both wearing blue shirts, and in the morning light, they looked preternaturally crisp against the intense blue Provençal sky. I remarked on this, and Spritz, who has been friends with Morell for half a century, said, “Van Gogh would have loved it.”
“He would have worn yellow,” countered Morell.
“He probably had a whole wardrobe of yellow shirts,” said Spritz.
“And they were all Prada.”
“Right. He was really into product placement,” Spritz joked.
Once everything was set up, it was time to trigger the exposure — in this case 30 seconds. The banter ceased as the seconds ticked by. There was only the throb of cicadas.
“Wheat Field,” the Camargue, France, 2022.
“A Single Tree in Late Afternoon,” near Arles, France, 2022.
“Tree and Road,” La Crau, France, 2022.
“Grass Field With Path,” near Arles, France, 2022.
“Wheat Field,” the Camargue, France, 2022. “A Single Tree in Late Afternoon,” near Arles, France, 2022. “Tree and Road,” La Crau, France, 2022. “Grass Field With Path,” near Arles, France, 2022.
‘In the presence of history’
“It’s not like I want to make Van Goghs,” Morell said several weeks later. We were in his Newton, Mass., studio, which is downstairs from his home, and he and Labelle were showing me prints of the 20 photographs they had made in France. “But being in the presence of history — of someone who has walked there and seen something — is stimulating. It makes you feel you’re in a trajectory of great art, and that’s fun.”
Still, he said, “sometimes my tendency as an artist is to say ‘F--- history. Van Gogh might not have done this, but I’m going to do it and see.’ ” His own pictures, he noticed, often felt more like the work of Van Gogh’s predecessors, the poetic landscape painters Camille Corot and Jean-Francois Millet.”
Before going to Arles, Morell contacted Connie Homburg, a curator preparing a major Van Gogh retrospective for London’s National Gallery. Homburg lives in Montpelier, France, not far from Arles, so she traveled there to offer Morell insights into Van Gogh’s practices and his favorite locations.
“The Sower” by Vincent van Gogh, June 1888.
“Van Gogh is such a famous guy. So many people want to walk in his footsteps. I don’t love that, honestly,” she admitted. “But Abe didn’t want to document Van Gogh.”
Watching Morell work, she was often surprised by his choices. “There were views I thought he would jump at, but he couldn’t have cared less,” she said. One example was the cypresses, which Van Gogh said were the very essence of Provence and which feature in some of his most famous paintings, including “The Starry Night.” According to Homburg, Morell felt that he had to photograph those trees, “but he patterned the ground so much that the image almost becomes abstract. He also showed several cypresses dotted across the landscape — something Van Gogh never did.”
“Cypresses” (1889) by Vincent van Gogh.
“Cypress,” near Arles, France, 2022.
LEFT: “Cypresses” (1889) by Vincent van Gogh. RIGHT: “Cypress,” near Arles, France, 2022.
Copying Van Gogh would be “boring,” Morell told me. “And also silly.” With a playful smile, he said, “I want to be better than Van Gogh! I’m really just using him as a conduit for my own visions. What I really want to do is make something new.”
Morell first took his portable tent-camera to several American national parks, making photographs of famous sights projected onto the ground of those parks. In 2015, inspired by Claude Monet, he went to France.
He set up the tent-camera in Monet’s garden at Giverny, France, and then at other sites where Monet had painted, including the Normandy coast. Beautiful views — sometimes the very ones Monet had painted — were projected inside the tent onto nondescript gravel paths or rocky beaches, creating a new, richly layered patina, a palimpsest. Morell then took the tent-camera to England — to London’s Hampstead Heath and Flatford in Dedham Vale, where John Constable had painted.
“Being in the presence of history — of someone who has walked there and seen something — is stimulating,” Abelardo Morell says. (Marin Driguez/Agence VU for The Washington Post)
The portable tent-camera allowed him to layer the views observed by the painters he loved over the very ground they had stood on, creating effects, often by chance, that undercut the cliched landscape, augmenting it with new textures that can seem surprisingly “painterly.” Olive tree leaves meshing with grass in ways that resemble Van Gogh’s patterned, multidirectional brushstrokes. A field of lavender superimposed on a pebbled road creating the look of Van Gogh’s pointillist compositions. Stalks of dry grass and cracked mud looking like an old painting’s craquelure.
“I’ve long had the feeling of wanting to be a painter as a gateway into certain kinds of feelings,” said Morell. “Photography is wonderful and I’ll always be a photographer because I love the way photography looks at the world. But paintings can hold such emotional values and expressions!”
“Sunflower Field on Ground With Broken Tiles,” near Arles, France, 2022.
Making a portable camera obscura was, for Morell, a breakthrough comparable to the invention of paint tubes in the late 18th century. Before paint tubes, oil paints would dry out too quickly in the outside air, forcing artists to work in their studios. Paint tubes allowed the young painters who flocked to Rome in the late 18th and early 19th centuries to paint en plein-air (in the open air). Their methods were quickly adopted by such painters as Constable and Corot and, much later, Monet and Van Gogh.
Armed with portable paints, artists began painting subjects that caught their eyes rather than things invented and composed in their minds. A simple technical achievement had led to a revolution in art — a newly empirical way of looking at the world that, as the curator Peter Galassi pointed out in 1981, in many ways anticipated photography. When it was invented in the 1820s and ’30s, photography simply harnessed a way of seeing that painters had already been shaping.
But by the 1860s, photographs were everywhere. The most commercially successful painters of the day — including Jean-Leon Gerome and Adolphe Bouguereau — exploited photography to enhance the accuracy of their fastidiously detailed paintings. But Van Gogh and his fellow avant-garde painters were mostly hostile to the medium. The camera posed a clear threat — especially for portrait painters; portrait photography studios were sprouting up everywhere. Before the end of his first year in Arles — 1888, the year the first Kodak box camera was invented — Van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo saying that photographic portraits remain “dead.” By contrast, he said, “painted portraits have a life of their own,” a life that “comes from deep in the soul of the painter and where the machine can’t go.”
Morell seems beguiled by the 19th century, when painters paved the way for photographers, who then became a threat to painters. It’s as if he wants to dive back into this warring period and — by combining the latest digital technology with the most primitive form of photography — lay the groundwork for a detente. His recent tent-camera photographs, he told me, are his attempt “to ‘paint’ with photographs — or at least to say, ‘This is related.’ ”
“View of Fields on Plywood,” Arles, France, 2022.
“Sunset With Sunflower Field,” near Arles, France, 2022.
“A Stone Wall,” Abbaye de Montmajour, Arles, France, 2022.
LEFT: “Sunset With Sunflower Field,” near Arles, France, 2022. RIGHT: “A Stone Wall,” Abbaye de Montmajour, Arles, France, 2022.
Seeing potential
Morell, Labelle and Spritz were standing around the tripod, now more than six feet high, while Labelle, the tallest of the three, was preparing to pull off the black cloth draped over it. Perched atop the tripod was a metal device like a submarine periscope. It supported both the lens that projects the image outside onto the earth below and Morell’s digital camera, pointed straight down at the ground.
Two white horses were grazing behind some trees in the middle distance. These were the ubiquitous, semi-feral horses of the Camargues, another symbol of the region. (The previous night, dozens of them, cheered on by crowds, had paraded down the main street of Arles as part of a festival.)
The tent-camera Morell used for his Monet (2015-2016) and Constable (2017) projects had been an actual tent, 7-by-10 feet. It was “a monster,” said Morell. “Max and I would have to be inside it and when it was hot, it was torture. We could see the projection down on the ground. But to photograph it, we couldn’t really be over it because we would get in the way. So we had to photograph it at an angle, which is not ideal in terms of focus — it creates a slight distortion.” It also had lots of pinholes, compromising the intensity of the projected image.
This new “tent,” developed in response, looked much less cumbersome. With no frame apart from the tripod itself, it was more of a teepee. The black cloth draped over it, Morell said, “is the best thing I’ve ever found.” Several companies had sent him materials promising “total blackout,” but, he says, “we’d put a flashlight to it, and it just wasn’t good enough.” The cloth he eventually found is made by a scientific company that tests lasers in dark spaces. It creates “pitch blackness inside” the tent, Morell said, “so whatever’s intense out there is intense inside — focus, color, brightness.”
The black cloth Abelardo Morell uses for his tent camera is made by a scientific company that tests lasers in dark spaces. (Marin Driguez/Agence VU for The Washington Post)
A view from inside the tent. (Marin Driguez/Agence VU for The Washington Post)
LEFT: The black cloth Abelardo Morell uses for his tent camera is made by a scientific company that tests lasers in dark spaces. (Marin Driguez/Agence VU for The Washington Post) RIGHT: A view from inside the tent. (Marin Driguez/Agence VU for The Washington Post)
Morell and Labelle no longer have to be inside the tent. An orange cord connects the camera to a laptop perched on a stand just outside the teepee. Everything on the camera — exposure time, aperture, ISO (sensitivity to light) — is controlled from the laptop, on which Morell and Labelle can see what the camera is seeing.
Happy with the photograph of the cypresses, Labelle and Morell loaded the equipment into the car and drove down the road to the sunflower field. The previous day, Morell had photographed the sunflowers projected onto a circle of flat, jagged stones. He had noticed them nearby and arranged them into a circle on a nondescript patch of ground beneath the tent-camera.
Now, Morell again walked toward the field, looking out over the flowers and a row of cypresses and vines. “It’s not a view I’d usually photograph,” he said. “It’s picturesque. A bit cliched.” But he saw potential in the way it might interact with the rough, muddy ground underfoot. He pulled up a few small weeds, then picked up some stones and clods of dirt, scattering them beneath the tripod. The next work of art was already coming into focus.
Editing by Janice Page and Amy Hitt. Design editing by Eddie Alvarez. Design and development by Katty Huertas. Additional development by Irfan Uraizee. Photo research by Moira Haney and Kelsey Ables. Photo editing by Moira Haney. Copy editing by Susan Doyle.
Sebastian Smee is a Pulitzer Prize-winning art critic at The Washington Post and the author of “The Art of Rivalry: Four Friendships, Betrayals and Breakthroughs in Modern Art." He has worked at the Boston Globe, and in London and Sydney for the Daily Telegraph (U.K.), the Guardian, the Spectator, and the Sydney Morning Herald. Twitter Twitter | 2022-10-02T11:34:27Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Abelardo Morell reimagines Van Gogh with the ancient camera obscura - Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/interactive/2022/abelardo-morell-camera-obscura/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/interactive/2022/abelardo-morell-camera-obscura/ |
It’s the perfect starter home. But it’s only for rent.
The construction of tens of thousands of rental homes could help rebalance the broader housing market. But critics warn it could widen inequalities, replacing options for would-be first-time homeowners.
Homes under construction in The Oaks at Chisolm Trail neighborhood in Round Rock, Tex. (Montinique Monroe for The Washington Post)
As the housing market sours, families around the country are eschewing homeownership and turning instead to new homes in rental-only developments such as the one where the Gastons landed. When completed, the Oaks on Chisholm Trail will have 113 stand-alone homes, each with a kitchen island, two-car garage and tiny plot of lawn — all exclusively for rent.
Corporate landlords are gobbling up U.S. suburbs. These homeowners are fighting back.
This build-to-rent phenomenon took off before the recent slowdown in existing-home sales, which have fallen for seven straight months.
But decades-high mortgage rates are making homes even more unaffordable — which is expected to only increase demand for rentals. Today’s 20- and 30-somethings were already far more likely to rent than the generations before them — thanks to a mix of economic and societal factors, including aftershocks of the Great Recession, mounting student loan debt and a desire for more flexible living arrangements.
“We looked into buying a few times and just couldn’t swallow it,” said Adam, 34, who owns a dog-walking and -grooming business. “We fit the demographic of people who, five years ago, would’ve bought a huge house in the suburbs. But now prices are crazy, and we’re making different decisions.”
The new construction of tens of thousands of rental homes could help rebalance the broader housing market, which has been stuck in a construction crunch for years. By some counts, the U.S. economy is short as many as 5 million single-family homes.
But critics, including local housing economists, say build-to-rent arrangements are exacerbating long-simmering inequalities by replacing entry-level homes with rentals that make homeownership even more elusive.
Buying a home has long been one of the most direct and reliable paths to building wealth. But when renters face constantly rising rents, it becomes much harder to save for a down payment to buy a home. Data shows that renters spend much more of their incomes on housing than homeowners do, in part because rents tend to rise every year.
“We are replacing the supply of available starter homes with even more rental housing,” said James Gaines, an economist at Texas A&M University’s real estate research center. “It’s shifting the economic dynamics for entry-level home-buying and has a real impact on what kind of houses people can get and how much they can get them for.”
Rising rent: Why prices are only going higher
Meanwhile, many of the country’s biggest home builders, including Toll Brothers, D.R. Horton and Lennar, have begun investing billions in single-family rentals, according to Brad Hunter, founder of Hunter Housing Economics. He estimates that build-to-rent developments make up about 10 percent of the country’s new homes.
“Home builders were not doing a good job of producing affordable homes for young families before this,” Hunter said. “Millennials are getting dogs, they’re having children, they’re working from home and they’re saying, ‘I need to move out of my downtown apartment and into a single-family home because I want a yard and parks nearby.’ But they can’t afford to buy.”
At least six such build-to-rent communities already exist within 20 miles of Austin, with 11 more in the works, totaling more than 2,500 new homes. Most of the developments are in suburbs such as Round Rock, home to Dell’s headquarters, where middle-class families would’ve typically ventured to buy their first homes.
In interviews with nearly a dozen residents renting newly built houses in Central Texas, almost all said they were hoping to buy once they’d saved enough. Many were in their 20s and 30s, and were recently engaged or married. Some had young children. Nearly all had dogs.
“Buying a house is the next step — and this is holding us over until we get there,” said Justin Whited, 37 who moved into a two-bedroom house at Urbana at Goodnight Ranch, a rental development in southeast Austin, early in the pandemic. Although his rent has since gone up 20 percent to $2,200 a month, he said he’s hoping to stay put until he’s saved up for a down payment.
Rents are rising everywhere. See how much prices are up in your area.
“It’s got the home setup without the hassle of a long-term commitment,” he said.
That was also the appeal for the Gastons, who moved to Texas from New York, where $4,000 monthly rents are more common than in Texas.
Like thousands of others, the Gastons were lured early in the pandemic by the promise of warm weather, ample space and lower costs. That influx of new residents has lifted both rents and home prices in the Austin area by at least 30 percent in two years. Median home prices have jumped from $355,000 to nearly $500,000, according to the Austin Board of Realtors. Median rents, meanwhile, have risen from about $1,780 to $2,343 a month, Redfin data show.
“Our accountant, our financial adviser, just about everyone, kept asking, ‘Why aren’t you guys buying a house?’ ” Adam Gaston said. “For the generation above us, success equaled owning a home. But for our generation, that’s no longer the case.”
Developers began building entire subdivisions of rental homes about a decade ago, in the aftermath of the Great Recession. Constructing large swaths of 300 or 400 rental homes, they found, was more efficient and lucrative than buying up investment homes, one at a time.
At Invitation Homes, unpermitted work leaves leaky plumbing, faulty repairs, renters say
For years, there were just a handful of build-to-rent neighborhoods — mostly concentrated in Arizona, Texas and other states along the South — aimed at people who didn’t have the cash or the credit score to buy a house, but still wanted the feel of suburban living.
As covid-19 cases grew more common, suddenly young professionals around the country wanted to trade in their city apartments for suburban rentals. They prioritized space to work from home and yards for their pandemic puppies.
Home builders and investors were ready, flush with cash and access to cheap financing. And by renting out homes instead of selling them, they could capitalize on surging rent growth while also holding onto the fast-appreciating land underneath their homes, said Gaines, the economist at Texas A&M. The result was nearly 800 new build-to-rent homes in the Austin area between 2020 and 2022, a 134 percent increase from pre-pandemic building rates, according to RentCafe, a national apartment search site.
“All of a sudden, every time you see a few hundred acres down the road, instead of being available for people to buy, that land is being turned into houses for rent,” Gaines said. “We don’t know really know what their exit strategy is or how long they’re going to be here. Are these going to be rental neighborhoods forever? Are they at some point going to start selling the properties? There are a number of possibilities but there’s no question that the ultimate goal is: How much money can I make?”
Inflation is making homelessness worse
With the housing market grinding near a halt, some home builders and investors are beginning to convert entire neighborhoods of new properties into rentals, as was the case in the Gastons’ development. Some of the homes there had already hit the market last year when a private-equity firm from California scooped up all 100-plus lots and began putting them up for lease.
“We still get people coming in every week asking if they’re for sale,” said BriAnn Boruszewski, a leasing consultant at the Oaks on Chisholm Trail. “And we have to say, ‘No, sorry, just for rent.’ It’s a rental generation now.”
Housing economists say this shift toward rentals puts would-be home buyers at a disadvantage. Housing policy and poverty experts have long considered homeownership a one-way ticket to the middle class, and that’s particularly true at a time of soaring housing prices. Both rents and home prices have risen precipitously during the pandemic. But while homeowners have benefited from low interest rates and appreciating home values, renters have seen no such gains.
“Rental payments don’t go into building equity, which is a significant portion of most Americans’ household wealth,” said Daniel Pang, a research assistant at the Urban Institute’s Housing Finance Policy Center. “Homeownership is a vehicle, a pathway, through which a bunch of privileges can be delivered … It always has been.”
‘We’re all afraid’: Massive rent increases hit mobile homes
Developers and investors, though, say they’re simply filling a need for more rental housing. NexMetro Communities, a Phoenix-based home builder, is expanding throughout the country, building thousands of rental houses in suburbs near Dallas, Denver, Atlanta and Tampa. Two communities under construction north of Austin will have about 200 homes apiece, plus swimming pools and dog parks to cater to a mix of millennials and baby boomers.
The company typically holds on to its developments and operates them long term, though sometimes it sells entire communities of 100 to 200 houses to real-estate-investment trusts and other investors that then rent them out.
“There is an unmistakable appeal and popularity for this type of hybrid housing,” said Jacque Petroulakis, an executive vice president at NexMetro. “Build-to-rent is not replacing homeownership. It’s another leasing option that provides people a more appealing option in the interim before they buy a home.”
Earlier this year, Tim VanZile, 48, moved into a build-to-rent subdivision in Georgetown, Tex., about 30 miles north of Austin, with his wife and their deaf rescue dog, Soda. They pay $2,600 for a four-bedroom house and are saving to eventually buy their own place.
In the meantime, he said he likes having a detached home without having to deal with the hassles of homeownership, such as mowing the lawn or changing air filters.
“When a lightbulb goes out, I don’t have to replace it,” he said. “If I have to wait five years — or realistically seven years — to put aside enough for a down payment, at least we can live comfortably in a place that looks like Pleasantville.”
VanZile, who works as an inventory manager at a vehicle-leasing company, said he hopes to live in his rental home for at least five years — he and his wife are already adding a deck and making other improvements. But, he worries, there’s a chance he could get priced out before then.
“There’s no doubt our rent will go up at some point, so who knows how long we’ll be able to keep affording this,” he said. “Then what do I do? Move even farther out?” | 2022-10-02T11:34:33Z | www.washingtonpost.com | 'Build-to-rent' homes offer a new option, though critics say they fuel inequality - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/10/02/housing-build-to-rent-austin/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/10/02/housing-build-to-rent-austin/ |
Sergio Aragonés has drawn for the publication since he arrived in New York from Mexico 60 years ago‚ and at age 85 he’s contributed to its 70th anniversary issue: ‘Drawing has become like walking.’
Legendary MAD cartoonist Sergio Aragonés, 85, pictured in his home studio in Ojai, Calif., attributes his longevity to the spice of variety. He embraces different projects so “your mind changes pace and position.” (The Aragonés family)
Sergio Aragonés had long read MAD magazine back in Mexico by the time he first landed in New York, toting fresh artwork and hope. He stepped through the humor outlet’s front doors 60 years ago, expecting to find the place as wild in spirit as the publication’s satirically hip pages. This was, after all, the home of the staff’s self-anointed “Usual Gang of Idiots.”
“I thought it was going to be a lot of jokes on the walls,” Aragonés says by Zoom from his home in Ojai, Calif., where he celebrated his 85th birthday last month. After he was hired that day he walked in to sell his work, he suggested to publisher William Gaines, “Why don’t we paint one of the doors to make it look like an elevator — putting fake numbers at the top?” — befuddling visitors attempting to exit. Or perhaps better yet: “Why don’t we put a bomb in the roof with the sound effect ‘tick-tock-tick-tock’ ?”
What cartoonists cannot create in life, however, they are armed to imagine on the canvas. So for a new comic, Aragonés has drawn busy MAD office workers momentarily donning character masks — think “Spy vs. Spy” and grinning mascot Alfred E. Neuman — to entertain kid visitors taking phone photos.
That strip is among a selection that Aragonés contributed to a special edition of MAD, publishing Tuesday, that marks the magazine’s 70th anniversary. Although the outlet has predominantly reprinted past material since it ceased regular publication in 2019, most of this special edition will be original content, including a Johnny Sampson back-page “fold-in”: a film parody of Robert Pattinson as “The Batman”; and a mini-essay by fan Jordan Peele (whose current film “Nope” features a fictional MAD cover).
The special edition also spotlights Aragonés’s status as the oldest artist currently drawing for MAD. (Al Jaffee, 101, retired in 2020.) He says he’s been blessed with six fruitful decades at the iconic magazine, which reached millions of monthly readers at its 1970s peak and influenced writers at such shows as “The Daily Show” and “The Simpsons,” as well as Judd Apatow and “Weird Al” Yankovic.
Aragonés’s high standard for consistent creativity is legendary; for decades, he only missed contributing to a single issue, and that was because the mail from Europe was slow in the 1960s. The cartoonist, who also produces the fantasy comic book series “Groo the Wanderer,” attributes his mental fertility to mixing things up creatively, from narrative stories to the wordless art for the MAD margins — his signature domain. “The variety of my field,” he says with gusto, “allows me to never get tired of it.”
What you must understand about the beloved Aragonés, his colleagues say, is that beneath all his charisma is an ever-flowing fount of imagination. “I suspect if Sergio were to go and donate blood, ink would come out of him,” says John Ficarra, former MAD editor in chief. “He is incapable of not drawing.”
Aragonés acknowledges that he does not suffer writer’s block because cartooning is second nature: “Drawing has become like walking.”
And if there’s a central dynamic connecting his art and his life, it is that of being a man of action. Figures flow in fluid motion through his deftly loose cartoons — fitting for a world traveler who has spent much of his life on the go, able to draw from wherever his next destination is.
Aragonés was born in the Spanish province of Castellon, in Sant Mateu, but within six months, his mother fled the Spanish Civil War — Sergio in tow — while his father fought for the Republic. The family reunited a few years later, but by 1942 they were World War II refugees in Vichy France. They headed to the North American nation that would take them in: “I have a debt with Mexico I will never be able to repay.”
By the mid-1950s in Mexico City, Aragonés was reading the fledgling MAD. He didn’t yet grasp many of the references and colloquialisms — English would become his third language — but he could appreciate the artistry. Still, working for MAD seemed a world away.
In high school, Aragonés drew his own cartoons (a creative “form of escape,” he says), which a classmate submitted to a humor periodical unbeknown to him. They were purchased and published, sparking his self-belief. He briefly trained to be an engineer in college, then studied architecture with his father’s approval: “But I knew I wasn’t going to be an architect — I was going to be a cartoonist.”
He studied famous gag cartoonists like Virgil Partch, but another vital step in his development was meeting a mime troupe in Mexico City. He soon studied mime with future French-Chilean filmmaker and cartoonist Alejandro Jodorowsky — not to become an actor, but to master the art of pantomime within his drawing.
Once Aragonés left for New York in 1962, he didn’t know whether editors there would appreciate these wordless cartoons.
“The humor that I do wasn’t popular in the United States because American humor is always based on words — the British inheritance of the punchline,” he says. Pantomime humor lacked such respect in the States. “Mimes are a joke — you make fun of a mime in the park — but in Europe and other countries, pantomime is a very serious art form.”
MAD editors, though, valued Aragonés’s work immediately. They bought his cartoons featuring astronauts and asked for a piece on motorcycle cops. Aragonés decided then and there not to return to Mexico.
He embraced entering the realm of such legends as Jaffee, Jack Davis, Dick DeBartolo, Antonio Prohías and Mort Drucker.
“When MAD accepted me, that was a change of life, a change of mind, a change of everything — somebody liked what I did,” Aragonés says. Yet despite this “radical mind change,” he appreciated: “I didn’t have to change at all. It was what I had been doing since I was a kid: drawing, drawing, drawing.”
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Aragonés also cherished the famous annual MAD trips, sometimes to far-flung places. He roomed with his heroes in Switzerland; went on safari with them in Africa; and while onboard near Bermuda, helped surprise Gaines by re-creating the publisher’s favorite Marx Brothers moment: the crowded cabin scene from “A Night at the Opera.”
Aragonés’s favorite place for a MAD prank, though, was Mexico. As trip host, he ordered the “cheapest and ugliest wines” he could find, yet had waiters present them to MAD staffers as if it were a high-end tasting. By the third bottle, Gaines the connoisseur — laughing heartily — knew he’d been had.
That trip also touched Aragonés’s heart — as his mother made paella for the globe-trotting Gang of Idiots. In that moment, he felt the career approval of his Mexican family and the deep bonhomie of the MAD crew, which he calls his “American family.” Mulling that memory, he smiles wildly beneath his signature broad mustache.
“To this day,” he says, “it is one of my most precious moments ever.”
Today, near a framed photo from that trip, Aragonés draws regularly, basking in each day at the table: “Your only fear is that with age, your hand or brain will fail. So far, I’m 85 and I’m still OK: The brain is still thinking and the hand is not trembling.”
Aragonés cherishes that line by liquid line, as his ties to MAD remain vital. “The feeling is indescribable to have acceptance with your family and have acceptance with a medium you like and with the public — it keeps you alive.” | 2022-10-02T11:34:39Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Sergio Aragones, MAD magazine’s oldest active artist, is still spoofing our humanity - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/comics/2022/10/02/sergio-aragones-mad-magazine/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/comics/2022/10/02/sergio-aragones-mad-magazine/ |
Doing better than before the pandemic would require more effort than we seem capable of giving
A third grader raises their hand in Springfield, VA on Aug. 22, 2022. (Craig Hudson for The Washington Post)
When will the U.S. education system return to the learning levels of 2019? One headline summed up the problem this way: “Two Decades of Growth Wiped Out by Two Years of Pandemic.”
People who have been studying our schools for decades are cautious when answering my question. Some say reading and math averages could rebound by 2028, but they admit many children will never get everything they missed.
The experts have their own question: how willing are we to invest the effort and money needed to improve the learning of children whose families are at the bottom of the income scale? Giving students more time to learn and better-trained teachers appears to work. But many students didn’t have such help before the pandemic. How can we expect them to get it now?
Diane Ravitch is our best education historian and best-known writer about schools. She said: “My hunch is that the downward slide in test scores can be overcome, not quickly, but in less time than the time stolen by the pandemic. … My hope is that students will make up for lost time in a year or two if they have experienced teachers and stability — no school closures or disruptions.”
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That’s a big if. Education policy guru Chester E. Finn Jr.’s latest book assesses the national tests we use to measure progress in learning. He, too, offers a mix of hope and fear about the future. “Based on what we know today, history suggests that gains equivalent to the pandemic losses could be seen in as little as four or six years after 2022, but the more common pace of change in both directions is glacial,” he said. “I worry especially about reading, which has seen the fewest gains over the long haul.”
Some experts are optimistic. “This year’s NAEP [National Assessment of Educational Progress] scores should be the bottom in terms of pandemic effects,” said Tom Loveless, author and former senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “Barring another pandemic or Great Recession, I expect NAEP scores to return to 2019 levels within two NAEP cycles, by 2026.”
Michael J. Petrilli, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, noted that focusing on exam results ignores harm to children too young to be tested. “Not only do we have to consider the serious negative consequences of the pandemic and school closures on kids who were school-age during 2020-22, but also how the crisis impacted children ages zero to five,” he said. “There’s some evidence that many of those kids suffered developmental delays, and missed out on high-quality child care and preschool experiences, meaning they will come into school further behind as well.”
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Harvard University education expert Paul E. Peterson said the best studies of school closings in the past reveal lasting damage. In Austria and Switzerland, little touched by World War II except for the closing of schools, researchers found “those who lost years of schooling never recovered, judging by earnings received in adulthood,” Peterson said.
Karin Chenoweth, author of the books “Schools That Succeed” and “Districts That Succeed,” mentioned an important fact left out of the debate: “The ironic part of all the doomsaying panic about how the pandemic erased two decades of progress is that hardly anyone noticed that we had made such progress while we were making it.”
Recovering from the catastrophe, she said, requires recognition that progress in the recent past came “in large part because for the first time, schools were expected to teach all children, not just some. Many educators took that charge seriously and really ramped up the amount children in their charge learned.” Will that happen now?
Some experts emphasized that huge gaps in the public education system existed before the pandemic hit. “In 2019, just 15 percent of Black eighth graders were at or above reading proficiency,” said Eva Moskowitz, founder and chief executive of the Success Academy charter schools in New York City. “Low-income children of color deserve better, much better. First, schools should stop lowering standards and dumbing down curriculum.”
Successful programs train teachers to encourage students and earn their trust, rather than just make demands. Thuan Nguyen, chief executive of the nation’s largest college preparatory program, Advancement Via Individual Determination (AVID), said “we can collectively decide how long it will take to recover from the impact of the pandemic” by embracing the fact that “the best way … to accelerate learning is through relationships.” Nguyen said the bond between students and teachers is crucial: “There is nothing as powerful as having someone who believes in you and cares about you.”
Kinnari Patel-Smyth is acting chief executive and president of the KIPP Foundation, which oversees the nation’s largest charter school network. “Moving forward in this recovery means that federal and state politicians need to prioritize educational spending, at least for another decade,” she said. “It means we need to work harder to ensure every child is a strong reader. It means we need to address the trauma caused by this pandemic and the inequities in this country.”
There are many other suggestions for reform. Unfortunately we did not get very far with most of them before the pandemic. It is unlikely we will do better when our principal emphasis is just getting back to where we were.
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Middle schools shun challenges, such as teaching your kid algebra | 2022-10-02T11:34:45Z | www.washingtonpost.com | How do we improve learning for kids already behind before the pandemic? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/10/02/pandemic-learning-loss-recovery/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/10/02/pandemic-learning-loss-recovery/ |
Such issues are being recognized as legitimate reasons to miss school, along with sore throats, colds and tummy aches
By Andrea Atkins
Why tween girls especially are struggling so much
He had urged Pennsylvania state Sen. Judith Schwank (D) to introduce a mental health days bill in 2020, when he was an intern in her office the summer before his senior year of high school. He was still reeling, he said, from the suicide of a classmate a few months earlier. Maybe if that student had felt he could stay home to take care of his mental health, Ramirez thought at the time, he would still be alive.
Listen to your child: Ask open-ended questions about their relationships and experiences and about why they think they need a day off. Then let them talk.
Make it meaningful: Try to avoid catching up on school work or getting lost in social media. “Those are stressors for kids,” Solish said.
Pursue calming activities: Take a walk, bake, draw, get lost in nature. “Whatever brings your kid back to center is a good thing to do,” said Solish, adding that you don’t want to overschedule the day, because that will be stressful in its own way. Should parents allow kids to indulge in video games, television or other screen time? “Nothing is really off limits,” Solish said. “You just want to make sure you’re being really thoughtful about what is going to help.”
Ease up on the feelings talk: “You don’t have to push kids to talk about their feelings all day,” Solish said. You can talk about how important it is to take care of your mental health.
Know when you need more help: If your child is showing increased irritability, sleeplessness, a depressed mood, low motivation or is regularly asking to stay home from school, you may need help from a mental health professional, said Dave Anderson, a clinical psychologist with the Child Mind Institute in New York. Contact a pediatrician, school counselor or your family doctor to find a recommendation. | 2022-10-02T11:34:51Z | www.washingtonpost.com | More states are allowing children to take mental health days - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/10/02/student-mental-health-days/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/10/02/student-mental-health-days/ |
The U.S. Supreme Court building. (Elizabeth Frantz for The Washington Post)
As the Supreme Court embarks on a new term Monday, there is at least one development that should be welcomed by observers from all ideological backgrounds. The court announced Wednesday that it will allow the public back into the room for arguments. At the same time, it will maintain its live audio feed, which began during the covid-19 pandemic. Good for the court for embracing transparency and engagement with regular Americans. Now, it’s time to make live broadcasts permanent — and consider going even further with live video.
In 2020, the court closed its doors because of covid-19 restrictions and decided to instead broadcast audio recordings of oral arguments. Though the pandemic was the catalyst for the change, this was a long-overdue move: Numerous federal appeals courts and state Supreme Courts had already adopted live recordings, with great success.
There was resistance from some justices and court watchers, who were concerned that broadcasts would incentivize lawyers and justices to showboat and dramatize proceedings. But live audio has not harmed the quality of arguments during the pandemic — and it has made the judicial process much more accessible to the American public. In the first six months of broadcasts alone, more than 2 million people tuned in to at least one oral argument.
With public confidence in the Supreme Court at historical lows, this sort of engagement is crucial. If Americans feel more informed about jurisprudence, it would improve institutional legitimacy and repair trust — an important matter for the court, as calls for ill-advised reforms such as court-packing gain steam.
In fact, the court should not stop with audio broadcasts. There is no good reason to keep cameras out of courtrooms. When used in state proceedings, even ones that are high-profile and fraught, they have provided enormous clarity and insight into the legal process. Yet the Supreme Court — and most of the federal system — has maintained an archaic ban on cameras, let alone video livestreaming. According to polls, a majority of Americans would like that to change, as would members of Congress from both parties.
In 2021, Sens. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) and Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) introduced legislation to put cameras in the Supreme Court. Mr. Grassley and Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) also introduced a bill to expand video coverage of federal court proceedings. Both bills were approved by the Judiciary Committee last summer but have since stalled. There are reasonable debates over whether Congress should impose this kind of reform on the courts — but there is broad agreement that the change itself would be beneficial.
For centuries, the Supreme Court’s open proceedings were a mystery to all but a few Americans who could attend in person. The court’s recent embrace of audio technology has opened up arguments to millions more, offering the public an invaluable view into how major constitutional questions are resolved. That is an important step forward — but should be the beginning, not the end, of efforts to boost trust and transparency in the system. | 2022-10-02T11:35:09Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Good on the Supreme Court for keeping live audio. Now it’s time to go further. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/02/supreme-court-audio-broadcasts-cameras-video/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/02/supreme-court-audio-broadcasts-cameras-video/ |
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov delivers his address during the 77th General Debate inside the General Assembly Hall at United Nations Headquarters in New York on Sept. 24. (Peter Foley, EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)
Russia’s war against Ukraine exposed and exploited weaknesses in existing international systems, the most glaring of which could be the legal framework of the United Nations. One of five veto-wielding permanent members of the U.N.’s highest peacekeeping authority, the Security Council, Moscow used that position to thwart measures such as global sanctions that might have helped rein in its aggression. This abuse of power, in the cause of destroying a recognized U.N. member no less, certainly made President Biden’s appeal for U.N. reforms during his Sept. 21 address to the General Assembly a timely one. The situation unfortunately also illustrates why the president should not spend too much more of his valuable time on this oft-stated but elusive goal.
In proposing that not just Moscow but all permanent Security Council members — including the United States, China, France and Britain — should avoid using the veto, and that they should express detailed reasons when they do, Mr. Biden was associating the United States with long-standing complaints from among the U.N.’s 188 other member states about the “P-5’s” undue clout. Ditto for his promise to support permanent membership for one country each from Africa and Latin America, as well as for other “nations we’ve long supported” — likely a reference to Japan and Germany.
This suggestion might help Mr. Biden curry a little short-run diplomatic favor with these nations, but any such plan is a nonstarter because — Catch-22! — China and Russia would veto it. No doubt Beijing and Moscow have their own ideas for new permanent Security Council members, but it’s unlikely Japan and Germany — with which they have warred in the past, and which are current U.S. military allies — are on the list. Maybe China would recommend its friend Pakistan instead of India, another frequently mentioned candidate. India is arguably deserving, given its vast size and nuclear arsenal — and arguably not, given its recent authoritarian drift and acquisition of those weapons outside of the U.N.’s nonproliferation treaty regime.
Better for the United States to focus on shoring up what still does work at the United Nations. Though not living up to its loftiest global-governance promises, the U.N. has real crisis management capabilities and can facilitate limited cooperation among warring parties — when their mutual self-interest dictates. Ironically, the same Russian aggression against Ukraine that demonstrated the U.N.’s incapacity to prevent war has demonstrated the U.N.’s capacity for at least some damage control: Its diplomats were instrumental in negotiating and implementing a deal between Russia and Ukraine to lift the former’s previous blockade and allow the latter to export more than 1 million metric tons of much-needed grain through the Black Sea. A U.N. body, the International Atomic Energy Agency, has been providing a crucial neutral monitoring presence at Ukraine’s massive, Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant.
There is no ready-to-hand procedural fix for what ails the United Nations because its failures ultimately stem from substantive conflicts of interest among states, on the Security Council and in the body as a whole. If and when those conflicts can be lastingly resolved, institutional reform will become much easier — but also much less necessary. | 2022-10-02T11:35:15Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | U.N. Security Council reform is a self-defeating idea - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/02/united-nations-security-council-reform-biden/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/02/united-nations-security-council-reform-biden/ |
Jewish young adults participate in GatherDC's “alternate” Yom Kippur events in September 2021 at Hook Hall in Washington. (GatherDC)
When they gather on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish year and a traditional time of fasting, some members of D.C.’s Jewish community will bring something unexpected: food.
They might pack soup or a turkey sandwich, leftover pasta or a PB&J. What matters is that they’re choosing to eat on Wednesday, when Jewish law commands most of the faithful to abstain from food and drink.
The lunch meetup, hosted by the Jewish young adult group GatherDC, is intended to bring together people with physical or mental health reasons not to fast — centering the act of eating in their holiday observance and helping them cast off feelings of shame or isolation.
“The idea is to elevate and create a holy environment, rather than keeping it mundane and about the food,” said Ilana Zietman, GatherDC’s community rabbi.
On Yom Kippur, a traditional time for self-affliction as atonement for wrongdoing, many Jews avoid eating and other physical pleasures from sundown on the holiday’s eve until the following nightfall. But the tradition emphasizes the importance of preserving health and commands that people eat if medical conditions make fasting dangerous for them.
Some Jews across the country, though, fervently criticized Gather DC’s lunch after it was announced last month, arguing it encourages people to reject the fasting rule or transforms that medical necessity into a celebration that undermines the spirit of the day. The debate mirrors arguments playing out in faiths across a rapidly secularizing America, pitting the upholding of traditions against the need for more inclusive outreach.
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The idea for GatherDC to host a Yom Kippur lunch meetup originated last year, when one member told Zietman they had noticed other members in line with them for food after one of the group’s holiday programs. Wouldn’t it be nice, Zietman thought, to create a space for people to feel less alone in their need to eat?
The event seemed like a natural fit for GatherDC, which held a brown-bag lunch for Yom Kippur in 2015 for people who had to work — another prohibited act on the holiday — and would be taking a break to eat. Most members of the group are in their 20s and 30s, exploring and asking questions about how to be Jewish adults. The group aims to empower them to be their own guides and to center people who previously have felt excluded from institutional Jewish life — including, Zietman said, those who may feel guilty for needing to eat on Yom Kippur.
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Sarah Pergolizzi, 34, fasted on her first Yom Kippur after converting to Judaism in 2020. She said she found the practice constrictive, evocative of a time when she refrained from eating to try to make her body smaller, rather than her faith deeper. This year, Pergolizzi plans to attend GatherDC’s lunch to recognize how eating with intention can be a way to observe the holiday, too.
“I think it’s very Jewish to choose the [path] that’s sustaining, to choose the one that’s kind to myself, rather than following the rule for the rule’s sake,” she said.
Fasting is moderately popular among American Jews, 46 percent of whom reported abstaining from food for all or part of Yom Kippur in 2020, according to the Pew Research Center. Among religiously observant Jews, the figure was 56 percent.
To Joel Petlin, an Orthodox Jew, it’s important that people who need to eat do so privately so they don’t create the impression that consuming food on Yom Kippur is something to celebrate. He worried that GatherDC’s event is akin to hosting a party, on a day when Jews are supposed to be standing before God for judgment.
“I understand the reason why someone would need to eat as an individual,” said Petlin, superintendent of the Kiryas Joel School District, in Orange County, N.Y., which buses thousands of students to yeshivas each year. “But to make it a group event and try to add meaning to it seems antithetical and against the purpose to which Jews traditionally have celebrated the holiest day on the calendar.”
Other critics went further.
“When one celebrates ‘intentional’ eating with healthy people, specifically on Yom Kippur, it is not beautiful, it’s a mockery,” tweeted Rabbi Yaakov Menken, managing director at the public policy organization Coalition for Jewish Values.
After seeing the criticism, Zietman sought to clarify the meetup’s purpose. GatherDC removed a reference in the online event listing to those eating on Yom Kippur for “personal reasons,” she said, because arguments about what constitutes a valid reason not to fast were distracting.
“What is upsetting to some is that this space is creating a more open and joyful approach to eating than some people are comfortable with,” Zietman said. “We are an organization dedicated to building meaningful Jewish community, and this meetup is meant to create the space for people to be in community.”
Some Jewish organizations offer online resources, such as blessings and meditations, to support those who choose not to fast on Yom Kippur, but there appears to be little precedent for such a meetup centered on eating.
More psychotherapists are incorporating religion into their practices
In Southwest D.C. on Wednesday, Zietman plans to lead roughly 20 participants in a blessing about how fueling their bodies enables them to engage in the self-reflection and righting of wrongs central to the holiday. The group is not serving food, she noted, but rather supporting people who have already chosen to eat. Those people might otherwise stay away from Jewish community spaces on Yom Kippur out of embarrassment or to avoid eating in front of those who are fasting, she said.
“It has always been kind of a struggle throughout Jewish history of balancing those guidelines and those rules and wanting to practice in a similar way and to uphold our traditions with meeting the real-life needs of individuals,” Zietman said.
One 27-year-old lunch participant, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the controversy around the event, said she grew up observing Yom Kippur at a conservative synagogue, where her mom volunteered and sang in the choir. Although most of her family tried not to eat, they viewed fasting as more symbolic than required.
This year, she plans to take the morning off from her job as a consultant to attend some of GatherDC’s events. She hopes the lunch will be an opportunity to reflect on the blessing that Zietman shares, perhaps while eating alone. It will be a “comfort,” she said — but no celebration.
“I think it brings in people who potentially could have complex relationships with their religion, or people who feel very strongly in their religion but they don’t practice the ‘typical ways,’ ” she said. “And honestly, I see this as a way to extend a hand to people who might just want a different outlet but are still looking for that core connection to the Jewish religion, to Jewish people, to Jewish text.” | 2022-10-02T11:35:57Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Jewish group GatherDC hosts Yom Kippur lunch on day of fasting - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2022/10/02/yom-kippur-dc-fasting-gatherdc/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2022/10/02/yom-kippur-dc-fasting-gatherdc/ |
RENO, Nev. — Nevada Democratic Governor Steve Sisolak and his Republican challenger, Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo, are meeting for their only scheduled debate of this election year on Sunday, where they’ll face off after a botched inmate escape at the state Department of Corrections and air their long-simmering rivalry that has pitted the Las Vegas’ top law enforcement officer against its incumbent. | 2022-10-02T13:07:22Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Nevada governor, Las Vegas sheriff face off in first debate - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/nevada-governor-las-vegas-sheriff-face-off-in-first-debate/2022/10/02/2705b89c-424d-11ed-be17-89cbe6b8c0a5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/nevada-governor-las-vegas-sheriff-face-off-in-first-debate/2022/10/02/2705b89c-424d-11ed-be17-89cbe6b8c0a5_story.html |
Throwing Shade Is Solar Energy’s New Superpower
A staff member cultivates a field under solar panels at Ookido Agri-Energy Unit 1, operated by Chiba Ecological Energy Inc., in Chiba, Japan, on Thursday, April 7, 2022. The farm is at the forefront of a scheme called solar sharing -- or agrivoltaics -- that involves the simultaneous use of farmland for producing crops and generating power. (Photographer: Bloomberg/Bloomberg)
In rural America, the shoulder-high corn is increasingly competing with a new cash crop: solar power. Acres of solar panels shine brightly in fields along interstates and rural byways, signaling a change in how America’s farming country generates income. The need for a happy marriage between these old and new industries has inspired a burst of innovation and a new word to describe the combination: Agrivoltaics.
The Inflation Reduction Act includes billions of dollars in renewable energy funds that will accelerate the adoption of solar and other renewables. Some of the new solar panels will land on rooftops, but most will be concentrated in large utility-scale arrays that the US Department of Energy claims could eventually cover an area roughly equivalent in size to Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut.
Solar panels work best in light winds, moderate temperatures and low humidity. Rooftops share some of these characteristics. But nothing maximizes that combination of traits quite so well as cropland. For solar developers keen to get the most from their investments, that makes farm country irresistible.
For farmers, the attraction is mutual. Depending on the location, solar can be one of the most profitable uses of land. Texas farmers can receive as much as $500 an acre, annually, from solar leases, and California’s Central Valley farmers occasionally see as much as $1,000 an acre. That’s easy money compared to the complicated and often uncertain business of farming.
But the potential scale of these new projects has rattled some agricultural communities, where opposition is growing and threatening the effort to decarbonize the US power supply.
Critics are focusing on the drawbacks of converting farmland to solar generation. Panels are typically placed 18 to 36 inches off the ground, blocking access to the soil. Some dislike the aesthetics and fear that vast solar arrays will change the rural character of their communities. Meanwhile, false, social media-driven conspiracies about the alleged negative health impacts of the installations are growing in influence.
Right or wrong, rising opposition to solar in rural America is putting climate progress at risk, said James McCall, a researcher at the Energy Department’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory, in a call from Denver. “We need to find a solution that’s a middle ground,” he said.
Twice the Harvest
Brad Heins, professor of animal science at the University of Minnesota, is working on just such a compromise. He’s a leading researcher in agrivoltaics, a growing set of technologies and methods designed to exploit synergies between energy production and agriculture. “We harvest the sun twice,” Heins explains as he unlocks a gate to a large cattle pasture in west-central Minnesota, near the border of North and South Dakota.
Heins and his colleagues are at the cutting edge of this new field, but they aren’t alone. There are hundreds of agrivoltaics projects underway in the US. Some work better than others, and some may wind up not working at all. But the best will lead to a greener and more profitable rural America that embraces renewable energy as an asset.
The idea that shade cast by solar panels might boost farm productivity dates to the early 1980s. Japan, a country long obsessed with its limited land and energy reserves, was among the first to explore the concept. Its first known agrivoltaic facility was established in 2004, and by 2019 there were 1,992 agrivoltaic farms in the country.
For example, the high-grade green tea plant that’s ground into matcha is traditionally grown under shading nets for several weeks. Deploying those nets is not only a labor intensive process, but it can damage delicate and valuable plant shoots. Agrivoltaics offers an alternative. Farmers carefully position solar panels to provide the shade, thereby doing away with the need for netting and the expensive labor to deploy it. Farmers who invest in the system save money on production costs, while making money from renewable energy and a premium crop that they can market as sustainable.
None of these Japanese systems are designed to cover Midwestern corn fields or Texas livestock operations that sprawl for thousands of acres. Most Japanese farms are less than 3 acres and support the cultivation of high-value, hand-harvested crops that enjoy premium markets in Japan. Their agrivoltaics projects are adapted to that model.
Starting small, though, is a chance to prove the concept. In the US, some of the most successful agrivoltaics pilots also focus on hand-harvested crops. In Arizona, researchers recently found that tomato production doubled beneath solar arrays, and was 65% more efficient in the use of water. They also found that jalapeños were 167% more water efficient, even though production remained the same. That’s an important, money-saving finding for agriculture in arid regions, especially as the climate warms.
The benefits of agrivoltaics didn’t just accrue to the farmers. The Arizona studies found that solar panels with a garden growing beneath them stayed cooler and produced more energy. That kind of synergy is leading solar developers to look more carefully at working with farmers and encouraging further investments in rural solar.
The question now: Can techniques that have shown their greatest promise in small-scale demonstration projects and hand-harvested farms be scaled up enough to work for crops like corn, livestock and the communities that thrive on them?
“Twelve years ago, when I started here, I never imagined I’d be doing renewable energy,” Heins tells me as he stands beneath a solar panel array at the West Central Research and Outreach Center in Morris, Minnesota. He grew up on a dairy farm, and after receiving his PhD from the University of Minnesota, his research focused primarily on organic dairy production. “But the thing is, farming is very energy intensive,” he said. In 2013, the research center began looking at ways to reduce its energy footprint. So, in addition to seeking efficiency gains, it also began installing renewable energy systems, including solar arrays.
Agrivoltaics was part of the mix from the beginning. The center has some traditional installations just a few inches off the ground. But it’s also gone to additional expense to elevate panels several feet into the air. As we stand beneath an array shared with the University of Minnesota-Morris, Heins points to the cows grazing on the other side of the pasture. “Cows don’t do great in 80, 90-degree heat,” he said. Among other problems, heat stress in cows raises body temperatures and lowers milk production. One common solution is to place the cows in a barn with fans. But that requires electricity.
Heins and his colleagues tried a different approach: they raised the panels at least six feet, high enough to accommodate cows in search of shade. The cows didn’t hesitate to use it, and over the course of a study the cows stayed cooler and breathed more slowly. In other words: they were less stressed. “That’s a big issue with dairy cows,” explains Heins. Stressed dairy cows are less productive and, ultimately, less profitable. Heins tells me he’s received calls from livestock farmers outside of Minnesota keen to know whether their solar arrays can be made compatible with their herds.
It’s not just about the cows in Morris. During a morning tour, Heins and Esther Jordan, co-Director of the research center’s horticulture department, showed me a range of plants and crops that they’re trying to grow beneath solar arrays in this pasture and others. There’s good reasons to be hopeful about this work. A recent Yale study of Minnesota agrivoltaics projects found that incorporating pollinator-friendly plants not only improved the efficiency of the solar panels above them, but potentially spread benefits to surrounding farms that depend upon pollinators. It’s the kind of outcome, along with the direct economic benefits via improved crops, that could help to overcome opposition to solar arrays in US farm country.
For now, the conversation is in early stages. Agrivoltaics, at least on a large scale, remains a subject of research more than a method of doing business. Furthermore, the effort of lifting solar panels six to eight feet off the ground — rather than 18 inches — poses a considerable cost burden, especially when the price of steel is so high. More difficult yet, even eight feet isn’t high enough for many modern farming machines to operate under. The large-scale farming operations that define so much of US agriculture — and which depend on large planting and harvesting equipment— will not, for now, be a candidate for these new techniques.
But these are short-term issues. McCall, from the Department of Energy’s renewables lab, tells me that interest in agrivoltaics is high and growing. He said he’s hearing from landowners, state and local regulators, universities — ”people who want to see these sites. There’s lots of interest in setting up demonstration facilities in local communities.”
That’s good news for rural communities seeking ways to diversify their economies, for farmers keen to add on another income stream, and for anyone determined to see the US decarbonize its power grids. Agrivoltaics won’t solve every economic problem in farm country, nor will it ensure that President Joe Biden’s solar goals are met. But it’s an important tool that farmers and solar developers are just beginning to understand and use.
In coming years, agrivoltaics will bind them in an effort to build more sustainable farming and energy systems. That’s reason for long-term optimism down on the farm, and across rural America.More From Other Writers at Bloomberg Opinion:
US Green Energy Is Surprisingly Republican: Denning and Davies
Saving Planet Is More Important Than Saving Birds: Tyler Cowen
We Must Learn to Love Genetically Modified Crops: Amanda Little | 2022-10-02T14:37:46Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Throwing Shade Is Solar Energy’s New Superpower - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/throwing-shade-is-solar-energys-new-superpower/2022/10/02/f14ed070-4252-11ed-be17-89cbe6b8c0a5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/throwing-shade-is-solar-energys-new-superpower/2022/10/02/f14ed070-4252-11ed-be17-89cbe6b8c0a5_story.html |
When I recently took an Iranian, an Iraqi and an Emirati to lunch on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly, a breakthrough ensued. Not diplomatic, mind you, but gastronomic. After feasting on a Jordanian delicacy in a Palestinian restaurant, we arrived at a consensus that it was one of the best meals we’d ever had.
This was a turnabout, and no mistake. For years, Middle Eastern friends — politicians, diplomats, journalists and business executives — visiting New York for UNGA have complained that their cuisines are poorly represented in the city’s restaurant scene. My standard response, that my home city offers the best from everywhere else in the world, has been met at best with grumbling acknowledgment.
And, having endured diplomatic jamborees in faraway places, I can understand their frustration: After a few too many rubber-chicken meals, courtesy of this embassy or that think tank, any palate would hanker for the tastes of home.
That’s why I was delighted to inform my friends, and demonstrate to their satisfaction, that my city now has them covered. In the three years that I was away in London — where I was spoiled for Middle Eastern choices — New York has experienced an efflorescence of restaurants serving the region’s major cuisines: Arab, Persian and Israeli.
A quick caveat: New York has always had good hole-in-the-wall eateries that cater to Middle Eastern tastes, but few places where a visiting diplomat or business exec would feel comfortable entertaining their peers. One notable exception is Tanoreen, in Bay Ridge, where Rawia and Jumana Bishara have served up superb fare for over two decades, earning citations from the James Beard Foundation.
The new wave of Middle Eastern restaurants ranges from Ayat, a 10-minute walk from Tanoreen, which serves giant plates of Palestinian lamb dishes in a down-home setting, to the hot new Israeli eatery Laser Wolf, where the vibe is distinctly Williamsburg trendy and the Marabu-charcoal grilled brisket kebabs much pricier.
Somewhere in between those extremes are Qanoon, a mid-priced Palestinian spot in tony Chelsea and a pair of Persian fine-dining places, Sofreh and Eyval, in Prospect Heights and Bushwick, respectively.
I took my friends to Al Badawi, in Brooklyn Heights, which is a slightly upscale sibling of Ayat, and where I’d previously eaten, on separate occasions, with two fellow aficionados: Restaurant critic Robert Sietsema of eater.com and MSNBC host Ayman Mohyeldin. You can read Robert’s review here; he is especially fond of the flatbreads, which come in toppings ranging from ground pistachios on melted cheese to chicken marinated in zaatar.
Ayman ordered the fattat jaj, a layered dish of roast chicken, rice, chickpeas, mint yogurt, pita chips, garlic sauce and almond slivers. He lives within a stone’s throw of Al Badawi and has the opportunity to work his way through the menu. His verdict: It’s as authentic as you can expect to get from the West Bank or Gaza, places where he has spent much more time reporting (and eating) than I have.
Why has it taken so long for Middle Eastern cuisine to find its place under the New York sun? After all, the Big Apple has had sizeable Jewish and Arab populations for decades; Iranians have tended to go to the other coast.
Ayman’s best guess is that in recent years there’s been a generational shift. “My parents didn’t often go to Middle Eastern restaurants,” he tells me. “Maybe they felt they needed to conform to American tastes, or maybe it was just that they cooked this stuff at home.” Ayman himself is a terrific cook, but that’s rare for a second-generation Arab-American. “When we go out to eat, we are looking for connections to our ancestry, we’re looking for the authentic tastes,” he says.
Not that any of this mattered to my Middle Eastern visitors: Whatever the reason for the proliferation, they were happy to be the beneficiaries. We ordered the mansaf, a lamb stew that is practically Jordan’s national dish and long my personal favorite. The meat is slow-cooked in a fermented ewe’s milk yogurt known as jemeed, and served on a bed of rice, which in turns sits on an oval of saj bread. Sprinkled over the top are slivered almonds, which add a crunchy texture to the umami flavor.
On my many visits to Amman, I have always set aside at least one meal at Ajyad, where the mansaf is popular with the working-class clientele. Each of my fellow-diners had a recommendation for where to try the dish — interestingly, all in Dubai. My tablemates and I agreed that the version at Al Badawi was at least comparable, if not superior to our favorites.
As a New Yorker, this would have made me swell up with pride — that is, if all the lamb and rice had left me any room.
New Instant Coffee Fans Should Try This Hack From India | 2022-10-02T14:37:53Z | www.washingtonpost.com | New York Serves Up a True Taste of the Middle East - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/new-york-serves-up-a-true-taste-of-the-middle-east/2022/10/02/f113987a-4252-11ed-be17-89cbe6b8c0a5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/new-york-serves-up-a-true-taste-of-the-middle-east/2022/10/02/f113987a-4252-11ed-be17-89cbe6b8c0a5_story.html |
Snoop Dogg, a.k.a. Calvin Broadus, is escorted into the Los Angeles Criminal Courts building in 1996, when he and a former bodyguard were on trial for a 1993 killing. The rapper was acquitted. (Mark J. Terrill/AP)
Young Thug is latest rapper to have lyrics used against him in court
Tricia Rose, who specializes in African American culture and politics at Brown University and is the author of 2008′s “The Hip-Hop Wars: What We Talk About When We Talk About Hip-Hop — and Why It Matters” said bias against rap is linked to long-standing racist stereotypes of Black people as violent, hypersexual, criminal and unintelligent.
“This defendant who did this is the same defendant whose message is, ‘Murder murder, kill, kill, you f--- with me you get a bullet in your brain,’” prosecutor Bruce Dearing said during closing arguments, according to reporting by HuffPost. | 2022-10-02T14:38:05Z | www.washingtonpost.com | California restricts how lyrics can be used in criminal proceedings - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/10/02/california-rap-lyrics-law/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/10/02/california-rap-lyrics-law/ |
FILE - This photo provided by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in September 2022 shows tricolored bats. What tricolor bats lack in size, they make up for in their important role in insect control and pollination. The bats’ range includes Maryland and the Eastern Shore. But their survival is being threatened by biological and environmental factors. On Sept. 13, 2022, federal officials announced plans to list the animal as endangered. (U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service via AP, File) (Uncredited/U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service) | 2022-10-02T14:38:24Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Maryland’s smallest bat's survival threatened - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/marylands-smallest-bats-survival-threatened/2022/10/02/6846975e-4252-11ed-be17-89cbe6b8c0a5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/marylands-smallest-bats-survival-threatened/2022/10/02/6846975e-4252-11ed-be17-89cbe6b8c0a5_story.html |
By Ian Munro, The Virginian-Pilot | AP
VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. — Virginia Beach Realtor Melissa Ly said she was excited to go to the dentist in June. Even though she’d had a dental implant, it was her first time for the procedure in which the doctor was assisted by a robot. | 2022-10-02T14:38:30Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Robot helps with procedures at Virginia dental clinic - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/robot-helps-with-procedures-at-virginia-dental-clinic/2022/10/02/6f1e48b0-4252-11ed-be17-89cbe6b8c0a5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/robot-helps-with-procedures-at-virginia-dental-clinic/2022/10/02/6f1e48b0-4252-11ed-be17-89cbe6b8c0a5_story.html |
The House’s victory against Big Tech was limited. But it’s still a victory.
Logos for Apple, Meta, Google and Amazon. (Uncredited/AP)
The bipartisan gun-safety reform signed into law this summer was rather mild. It did not ban assault-style weapons. It did not increase the minimum age to purchase such weapons to 21. It did not enact a federal red-flag law. But it was a start. And it was a rare win against what seemed to be an invincible interest group.
The same could be said about the antitrust bill the House passed last week to rein in Big Tech.
The bill would allow state attorneys general to pick the venue for enforcement cases (preventing companies from having a home-court advantage in places such as Silicon Valley); increase merger fees for giant corporations; and require companies to disclose subsidies from foreign companies that pose a threat to our national security. Overall, House passage is a substantial loss for Big Tech, which launched a ferocious multimillion-dollar campaign to prevent any regulatory changes.
The legislation did not contain some of the most robust measures originally proposed, such as a key provision to prevent tech companies from favoring their own products on their platforms. Also excluded was a provision to shift the burden of proof in merger litigation to the companies. But in the spirit of “something is better than nothing,” the champion of the antitrust push, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), supported the scaled-down House bill.
“This package of bills will update merger filing fees and help ensure that the federal antitrust agencies can be properly funded, that information on foreign subsidies is made available to federal enforcers, and that state antitrust enforcement can proceed more efficiently and without needless delays,” Klobuchar said in a joint statement with Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.). There is bipartisan support for the measure in the Senate, which can vote on it when senators return after a recess.
The bill passed by a comfortable 242-184 margin, including 39 Republican votes in favor of the bill. Nearly all of the 16 Democrats who voted no came from California, home to many of the Big Tech companies. Apparently, the power of Big Tech’s support outweighed these lawmakers’ professed concern for even mild antitrust legislation.
Should those who believe Big Tech has become too powerful be pleased or frustrated with the bill? A little of both.
As with the gun bill, a victory against powerful, well-funded lobbyists who have as turned back virtually every previous attempt at regulation can be seen as a victory for consumers and the free market. There is reason for antitrust advocates to cheer, especially if this measure is the first and not the last effort to rein in an industry that has managed to enrage both sides of the aisle. (Republicans imagine these companies discriminate against conservatives, despite evidence to the contrary. Democrats are angry at platforms for their weak efforts to take down hate speech and disinformation as promised.)
It’s easy to be discouraged about the power of dark money and corporations. But powerful business interests took their lumps this session. This is true not only for the gun lobby and Big Tech, but also Big Pharma, which now faces cost control measures, and corporations more generally, which will have to pay minimum federal tax rates. Voter outrage about massive corporate profits, tax avoidance schemes and price-gouging might not be enough to totally ignore heavily funded lobbyists, but it is helping to level the playing field. It’s about time. | 2022-10-02T14:38:48Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | The House's victory against Big Tech was minor. It’s still a victory. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/02/antitrust-house-bill-big-tech/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/02/antitrust-house-bill-big-tech/ |
Rui Hachimura and the Wizards lost to the Golden State Warriors on Sunday, but he sees the team's trip to Japan as special. (Takashi Aoyama/Getty Images)
Given this wealth of information, one could expect Hachimura to help guide his teammates through the task they face now that the trip is over, the one that is even more difficult than playing the Golden State Warriors twice during preseason — the Wizards lost their second game at Saitama Super Arena 104-95 on Sunday.
Once they land back in D.C., the Wizards must reacclimate their body clocks so they can work efficiently toward being in tiptop shape for the start of the NBA season on Oct. 19.
“I think this coming week is probably the most important week of camp given the irregularity of what we've just done coming to Japan after only three practices,” Warriors Coach Steve Kerr said. And the Warriors aren’t traveling for the next three weeks or so.
Corey Kispert as of Sunday night in Japan was the more pressing concern — he sprained his left ankle in the first quarter Sunday and will have to receive treatment in the air because the Wizards left for their flight home directly after the game.
During international exhibitions, teams reap individual benefits to be sure, whether that’s putting Hachimura in front of his home fans or expanding the Warriors’ brand abroad. But they are also serving the league, sacrificing a comfy training camp at home for the greater cause of spreading the game of basketball — and the NBA product — around the world.
“I think all in all they really enjoyed the experience,” Unseld said. “Obviously Rui is a big piece of that. I think they rallied around him, and he’s been a bright spot — his personality’s showing more and more, he’s home, he’s happy, he’s excited to be here. Just the warm welcome that we’ve received since we’ve touched down, that certainly makes the trip a lot more enjoyable. … I know it’s a very compressed schedule. Well worth it.”
That doesn’t mean players won’t come back to earth on Monday when their bodies are crying out in the middle of the day for a long sleep. Unseld mentioned that the Wizards have planned for that — in addition to the few days off, the team’s medical squad has provided guidelines on the ideal nap lengths and times during the day. | 2022-10-02T14:39:07Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Rui Hachimura, Wizards face quick adjustment from Japan to NBA season - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/02/rui-hachimura-wizards-japan/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/02/rui-hachimura-wizards-japan/ |
NFL Sunday primer: Zach Wilson, Andy Dalton, Brian Hoyer to step in
Zach Wilson is set to make his season debut for the Jets as he returns from a preseason knee injury. (Steve Luciano/AP)
Quarterback changes are at hand on the Sunday of Week 4 of the NFL season. Zach Wilson makes his return for the New York Jets. Two backups, the New Orleans Saints’ Andy Dalton and the New England Patriots’ Brian Hoyer, make fill-in starts because of injuries to their teams’ starters.
Dalton will take the field first as the Saints face the Minnesota Vikings in London at 9:30 a.m. Eastern time in the first overseas game of the season. It is the 100th game, including preseason games, to be played outside the United States in NFL history.
The Saints ruled out starter Jameis Winston on Saturday because of back and ankle injuries. They initially had said after Winston sat out Wednesday’s practice that he was expected to practice Thursday. Instead, he didn’t practice all week. He reportedly had been playing in recent weeks with four fractures in his back.
Dalton signed with the Saints in March as a free agent. He is a three-time Pro Bowl selection and has made 148 career starts for the Cincinnati Bengals, Dallas Cowboys and Chicago Bears. But this is his fourth team in four seasons. He has become an NFL nomad after spending his first nine seasons with the Bengals. He’ll try to help the Saints rebound from a 1-2 start. But they’ll also be without wide receiver Michael Thomas, who is sidelined because of a foot injury.
Wilson, the No. 2 selection in last year’s NFL draft, makes the first start of his second pro season in the Jets’ early-afternoon game at Pittsburgh.
He underwent surgery after suffering a torn meniscus and a bone bruise in his right knee on a scramble during the Jets’ opening preseason game. Wilson has participated in only three full practices since then.
The Jets went 1-2 with veteran backup Joe Flacco filling in. They must hope the future is now with Wilson, who struggled last season as a rookie with nine touchdown passes, 11 interceptions and an unsightly passer rating of 69.7.
Hoyer attempts to keep the Patriots’ season from unraveling any further. But his task is formidable, with a late-afternoon game in Green Bay against quarterback Aaron Rodgers and the Packers.
Mac Jones, New England’s second-year starter, could miss multiple games after suffering a high ankle sprain in last Sunday’s loss to the Baltimore Ravens in Foxborough, Mass. Jones did make it back on the practice field Friday. But it never seemed realistic that he would attempt to play in this game. The Patriots officially ruled him out Friday.
Hoyer has made 39 starts in a journeyman career that has included stints with seven teams. He has made at least one start for each of the seven; this is his second start for the Patriots. He last led a team to a victory in a game he started in 2016 with the Bears.
If Hoyer struggles, it will be interesting to see if Coach Bill Belichick gives any consideration to turning to rookie Bailey Zappe, a fourth-round draft choice from Western Kentucky. The Patriots need a boost on offense. They’re ranked 10th in the league in total offense but are 25th in scoring offense. They have a record of 1-2. | 2022-10-02T14:39:13Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Zach Wilson, Andy Dalton, Brian Hoyer highlight NFL quarterback changes - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/02/zach-wilson-andy-dalton-brian-hoyer/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/02/zach-wilson-andy-dalton-brian-hoyer/ |
18-year-old man shot, killed Saturday night in Northeast D.C.
Ronald Porter was fatally shot on the 1300 block of Adams Street NE
An 18-year-old man was fatally shot Saturday night in Northeast Washington, police said.
Police said they responded to a report of a shooting around 8:25 p.m. in the 1300 block of Adams Street NE and found Ronald Porter, of Northeast D.C., suffering from gunshot wounds. Porter was pronounced dead at a hospital.
By Sunday morning, police had not made an arrest in the incident. The investigation is ongoing. | 2022-10-02T15:56:24Z | www.washingtonpost.com | 18-year-old man shot, killed Saturday night in Northeast D.C. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/02/dc-homicide-october-first/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/02/dc-homicide-october-first/ |
Damaged police vehicles lay on the pitch inside Kanjuruhan stadium after a stampede killed 125 people. (Sandi Sadewa/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)
More than 300 fans killed in 1964 in Peru
1982 Russian soccer disaster cloaked in secrecy
97 fans died at Hillsborough Stadium
Tear gas cited in Ghanaian tragedy
The global history of soccer includes a number of deadly stadium disasters at matches, often originating with fan violence and anger, and exacerbated by security and police responses that cause a crush of panicked fans attempting to flee.
Despite security changes, like converting stadiums from overcrowded standing-room areas to seating-only, stampedes like the one in which 125 fans died Saturday in Indonesia have occurred. In the most recent episode in Indonesia, fans who surged toward the field after the home team lost were beat back by uniformed officers carrying batons and riot shields. Security personnel fired what appeared to be tear gas, causing panic in a crowd estimated at 42,000.
Here’s a look at some of the worst soccer tragedies.
A referee’s decision during a May 24, 1964, Olympic qualifying match in Lima between Argentina and Peru caused at least two fans to run onto the pitch, setting off a police response that enraged fans and ended in a riot in which more than 300 people in the crowd of 53,000 were killed and more than 500 injured.
After a referee disallowed Peru’s tying goal in the final minutes, fans stormed the Estadio Nacional field and threw objects at police, whose decision to throw tear gas canisters into the crowd drove fans toward locked exits in stadium tunnels. Most of the fatalities were caused by asphyxiation, with an unknown number shot by police on the streets outside the stadium.
“The police didn’t let their dogs loose but they did let them tear his clothes off,” recalls Hector Chumpitaz, one of Peru’s football legends, who was playing at the time and saw the tragedy beginning to unfold, told the BBC. “The people were getting disturbed by the way in which they were taking the pitch invader away. It was driving them mad. We don’t know what would have happened if they had removed him in a peaceful fashion, but we can’t think about that now.”
Reports from the chaos that fuels disasters are often sketchy, and that is particularly true of the Oct. 20, 1982, match between the visiting Dutch team Haarlem and Moscow’s Spartak. In 1989, it finally emerged that at least 66 people had been killed, with one Soviet outlet listing the death toll to be nearly 350. Hooliganism was initially blamed before Soviet media later reported that police had channeled fans through a single corridor at Luzhniki Stadium, causing them to be crushed as others tried to run back into the stadium when they heard that Spartak had scored a late goal in a battle for a place in the UEFA Cup final 16.
Stone steps were icy and, with a small crowd of 15,000 or so in attendance, fans were jammed into a single section, with three-quarters of the stadium empty with snowy stands.
Liverpool fans have long stood and sung “You’ll Never Walk Alone” at their side’s games. It took on an emotional new meaning after an incident in which 97 soccer fans were killed in 1989. The violence occurred during an FA Cup semifinal between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest on April 15, 1989, in Sheffield’s Hillsborough Stadium and triggered a lengthy investigation that only relatively recently was resolved.
Liverpool fans had long been blamed for the tragedy, but a 2016 inquest determined that those who died were the victims of police mistakes — which Liverpool supporters had long claimed. Safety reforms followed, including the removal of standing areas and fences.
The site had been chosen as a neutral spot, but Liverpool fans were allowed to cram into already-full standing-room terraces and, five minutes into the game, a fence separating fans from the field gave way under pressure of the surging spectators, causing them to fall upon one another. According to the BBC, more than 3,000 people had tried to cram onto terraces that were designed to hold only half that number.
Ambulances were dispatched to the stadium, but few medical personnel made it to the field because police were keeping responders away or focusing on keeping the Liverpool fans away from the Nottingham supporters. Eighty-two of the people who died, according to the BBC, suffocated on the field or on the terraces, never making it to a hospital. Seventy-eight of the victims were aged 30 or younger. Thirty-eight were children or teenagers. The youngest was 10. In 2021, the death toll rose from 96 when a coroner determined that a fan who had suffered life-altering injuries in the crush died as a result of them.
Witnesses blamed Ghanaian police who fired tear gas into the crowd for a stampede in which at least 126 fans died during a May 9, 2001, game between the country’s two top clubs, Hearts of Oak and Asante Kotoko, in the Accra Sports Stadium.
Authorities triggered a panicked race for the exits when they fired tear gas into a crowd in response to angry Asante Kotoko fans who had thrown objects onto the field, according to the BBC. Gates at the 40,000-seat stadium reportedly were locked.
“I saw young men, young virile men, lying dead on the floor. I’m devastated. I couldn’t count [the dead],” said Ghana’s Deputy Sports Minister, Joe Aggrey said at the time, adding, “From the information that I have, I think the lack of control — and I don’t want to prejudge the situation but — I think that it was the tear gas that caused the problem.” | 2022-10-02T16:09:50Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Indonesia deaths are latest in history of soccer tragedies - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/02/soccer-deaths-history-indonesia/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/02/soccer-deaths-history-indonesia/ |
Amid a historic U.S. teacher shortage, a ‘Most Outstanding Teacher’ from the Philippines tries to help save a struggling school in rural Arizona
By Eli Saslow
Rose Jean Obreque assists a student during class at Fox Creek Junior High School in Bullhead City, Ariz., on Sept. 13. Obreque is one of several teachers who relocated to Bullhead City from the Philippines to help with a teacher shortage in the school district. (Joshua Lott/The Washington Post)
BULLHEAD CITY, Ariz. — Carolyn Stewart had spent the past five months trying to find teachers for the Bullhead City School District, and now she walked into the Las Vegas airport holding up a sign with the name of her latest hire. The 75-year-old superintendent wandered through the international baggage claim, calling out a name she had just learned to pronounce. “Ms. Obreque?” she said. “Teacher Rose Jean Obreque?”
She saw a woman smiling and moving toward her with a large suitcase.
“Are you our new teacher?” Stewart asked, but the woman shook her head and walked by.
Stewart raised the sign above her head and took out her phone to check in with her office 100 miles south in Bullhead City, Ariz. The 2,300 students in her district had been back in school for several weeks, but she was still missing almost 30 percent of her classroom staff. Each day involved a high-wire act of emergency substitutes and reconfigured classrooms as the fallout continued to arrive in her email. Another teacher had just written to give her two-week notice, citing “chronic exhaustion.” A new statewide report had found that elementary and junior high test scores in math had dropped by as much as 11 percentage points since the beginning of the pandemic. The principal of her junior high had sent a message with the subject line “venting.”
“The first two weeks have been the hardest thing I’ve ever faced,” he wrote. “My teachers are burnt out already. They come to me for answers and I really have none. We are, as my dad used to say, four flat tires from bankruptcy, except in this case we are one teacher away from not being able to operate the school.”
Stewart had been working in some of the country’s most challenging public schools for 52 years, but only in recent months had she begun to worry that the entire system of American education was at risk of failing. The United States had lost 370,000 teachers since the beginning of the pandemic, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Maine had started recruiting summer camp counselors into classrooms, Florida was relying on military veterans with no prior teaching experience, and Arizona had dropped its college-degree requirement, but Stewart was still struggling to find people willing to teach in a high-poverty district for a starting salary of $38,500 a year.
She’d sent recruiters to hiring fairs across the state, but they had come back without a single lead. She’d advertised on college campuses and at job fairs across the country and eventually come up with a half-dozen qualified applicants for 42 openings. “Basically, we need bodies at this point,” she’d told her school board, and they’d agreed to hire 20 foreign teachers with master’s degrees to move from the Philippines to the desert of rural Arizona.
“Excuse me, Dr. Stewart?” She turned around to see a young woman who at first glance Stewart mistook for one of her students. She was less than 5 feet tall, wearing a backpack, hauling two large suitcases and pointing at Stewart’s sign. “That’s me,” she said.
“Ms. Obreque!” Stewart said, pulling her into a hug. “Your suitcases are bigger than you. Let me help.”
“Thank you, ma’am, but I can handle it. I am very determined.”
Obreque, 31, grabbed her bags, and together they walked across the terminal to meet a few other Filipino teachers who had arrived in Las Vegas earlier that afternoon.
“How was your trip?” Stewart asked, and Obreque explained that she had left home four days earlier, traveled six hours to Manila, waited out a delay with her visa paperwork and then flown another 14 hours to the United States. She held up her phone and took pictures of the airport concourse, the escalators, the fast-food restaurants and a sign that said, “Welcome to Las Vegas.”
“My first international trip, and it is to my dream country,” she said.
“You must be so exhausted,” Stewart said.
“And excited,” Obreque said. “I am very eager to be in the classroom.”
Eleven different teachers had already substituted in what would soon be Obreque’s eighth-grade English classroom at Fox Creek Junior High, including the principal, the vice principal, the band director, a softball coach, a school board member and then finally Stewart, who’d volunteered one day when another substitute was called away to a different class.
Despite the fact that “superintendent” was imprinted on her name tag, some of the students had tested her, folding their handouts into paper airplanes and talking during her lectures. It had taken all five decades of her experience to harness control of the room and successfully complete her lesson, and by the end of the day she was so exhausted that she’d sat through 45 minutes of muscle cramps in the teachers’ lounge before she felt well enough to walk back out to her car.
“We’re very grateful to have you here,” she told Obreque.
“Thank you for the opportunity to teach in America,” Obreque said. “It will be the pinnacle of my career.”
She left the airport in a car with three other Filipino teachers and pressed her phone against the window to photograph the casino hotels, the downtown high-rises, the glistening pools of the suburbs and the neat rows of palm trees on the outskirts of town. Civilization began to give way to red dirt and jagged rock formations. The car’s thermometer showed an outside temperature of 114 degrees. Obreque put away her phone and watched heat waves rise off the desert.
“I imagined it would be greener,” she said.
“This isn’t like America in the movies,” said Anne Cuevas, a Filipina who’d already been teaching in Bullhead City for four years and had traveled to greet the new teachers in Las Vegas.
Cuevas had been hired before the pandemic as one of the first foreign teachers in Bullhead City, when the school district began to recognize signs of an impending teacher shortage. The Philippines and the United States have similar school calendars, curriculums and grading systems, which is why U.S. schools have hired more than 1,000 Filipino teachers in the past few years. Most Filipino teachers have master’s degrees or doctorates. In the Philippines, teaching is considered a highly competitive profession, with an average of 14 applicants for each open position, and teachers are constantly evaluated and ranked against their peers.
“What were your ratings?” Cuevas asked her passengers, all of whom had arrived in the United States for the first time earlier that afternoon.
“I was rated Outstanding Teacher — top five in my school,” said Vanessa Bravo, a seventh-grade math teacher who’d left behind her husband and three sons, ages 15, 12 and 10.
“Outstanding Teacher as well,” said Sheena Feliciano, whose father drove a bicycle taxi in Manila.
They looked at Obreque and waited for her answer. “It’s okay if you’re too embarrassed to tell us,” Cuevas teased.
“Most Outstanding Teacher,” Obreque said. “Last year, I ranked first of 42 teachers at my school.”
It was something she had worked to achieve for almost a decade, ever since she had earned a master’s degree in education and couldn’t find a teaching job anywhere. She’d worked the night shift at a call center, improving her English as she offered technical support for an American company based 7,000 miles away, until finally her 17th teaching application led to a job at a school in the farmland outside of La Carlota City for the equivalent U.S. salary of $5,000 per year.
Her seventh-grade students there were the children of fishermen and sugar cane farmers. They arrived for school early, even if they had to walk more than a mile to get there. They called her “ma’am.” They brought her homemade lunches. They wrote thank-you notes at the end of each week. They aspired to become engineers or doctors or teachers like her, and they volunteered to stay after school for extra lessons rather than returning home to work in the sugar cane fields. Obreque started an after-school program for struggling readers. She led the school’s innovations club to a regional first-place finish. She recorded daily video lessons during the pandemic and hiked to remote villages to make home visits, until her ambition landed her at the top of the teacher rankings and she began to hear from recruitment agencies around the world.
“Teach the World’s Best in America!” read the brochure from one international teaching agency. Obreque had talked it over with her husband and agreed that the possibility of a $30,000 raise was worth the hardship of living apart. She’d interviewed over Zoom with schools in New Mexico and Arizona and then received an offer to teach in Bullhead City under a J-1 visa, which granted her permission to live in the United States for three years. She’d taken out $8,000 in high-interest loans to pay for the agency fees, a plane ticket, two new teaching outfits and the first month’s rent on a two-bedroom apartment she planned to share with five other foreign teachers.
Now the sun set on the Mojave Desert as they drove over a hill and began descending toward Bullhead City, a town of 40,000 across the Colorado River from the casinos of Laughlin, Nev. They drove by riverside trailer parks and run-down taquerias.
“Welcome home,” Cuevas said, as Obreque stared out the window at the scattering of city lights surrounded by blackness.
“It’s smaller than I thought,” she said.
“Everything here is different from what you expect,” Cuevas said.
She woke up jet-lagged on a mattress on the floor, changed into one of her new outfits and piled into a car with four other foreign teachers at Fox Creek Junior High to say hello to the principal, who was busy staring at the daily class schedule on his computer, trying to solve the puzzle of another day. Lester Eastman was down to one special-education teacher when he was supposed to have three. He was missing a teacher for five of that day’s art classes, five English classes, 10 math, 10 science and five journalism. All of his available teachers would have to cover an additional class during their planning periods. Eastman would spend his day teaching math. The vice principal would babysit art. “Plugging holes on a sinking boat,” Eastman said, as he finished filling in the daily grid, and then he left his office to greet the new teachers.
“What time is it right now in the Philippines?” he asked, as he shook their hands.
“It’s tomorrow, sir,” Obreque said.
“Well, we’re going to give you a little time to adjust before we throw you in front of a class,” he said, and then he thought about what else he wanted to tell them about Fox Creek, and all the ways he could characterize their new school. There was its F letter grade from the state of Arizona, issued shortly before the pandemic. There were the standardized test scores that showed fewer than 20 percent of students were proficient in either English or math, and more than half were performing at least a few years below their grade level. There were the $4.5 billion in statewide education cuts over the past decade, which had left him with a shortened four-day school week and some of the lowest-paid teachers in the country. There was the fact that many of those teachers in the district were now working beyond retirement age and taking on extra classes because they refused to walk away from a student population that so many others had abandoned. There was the school dining room, where every student qualified for free or reduced-price meals. There was the continued fallout of the pandemic, which had decimated their working-class town of casino dealers and hotel service workers, killing almost 1 percent of the population. There was the scene that moved Eastman each morning, when 600 children from those same families managed to show up on time in matching blue Fox Creek shirts to a school he sometimes worried was failing them.
But for at least the next few weeks, Eastman had decided that he wanted his staff to focus on only one aspect of life at Fox Creek: student behavior. After years of remote and hybrid learning, some of the students had come back to school full time in 2021 with little sense of how to act in a classroom. Disruptions had been constant. Suspensions had nearly doubled. Eleven of his 28 teachers had resigned at the end of the previous school year, and now Eastman had instructed what was left of his staff to avoid teaching any new material until they had established control of their classrooms.
“Rules. Procedures. Classroom management,” Eastman said. “These middle-schoolers can be like the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park. They test the fence. They push the boundary. It’s in their DNA.”
“Discipline is crucial,” Obreque said. “Consistency is important.”
“Some of these kids will take timid and quiet and just eat it for lunch,” he said. “Once you win their respect, you’ll all do great.”
He showed Obreque to her classroom, where her job for the day was simply to observe. She wrote notes as she watched a PE teacher silence a class with his whistle. Then Cuevas came in to teach the next class, and she called Obreque to the front of the room to introduce herself.
“I’m Ms. Obreque, and I’m honored to be your new teacher,” she said.
“Miss who?” a student asked. “Can you talk louder?”
She nodded and stepped forward. “Ms. Obreque,” she said again, and several students began to talk at once.
“Are you strict?”
“How old are you? You look like you’re in high school.”
“How do you say your name again? Miss teacher something?”
“Raise your hands, please,” Obreque said. “We will be living together in this room for the next year. If you respect me, I will respect you. If you love me, I will love you.”
Several of the boys in the room started to laugh and then shout more questions. “One at a time please,” Obreque said, but a chorus of voices overwhelmed hers, until Cuevas clapped her hands. “Guys, enough!” she said. She handed out their vocabulary work, and Obreque watched and took notes until the final bell.
“How’d everything go?” Eastman asked later, when he saw her in the hallway.
“I’m learning a lot, sir,” she said.
He gave her a thumbs-up, went into his office and opened the class grid for the next day. Twenty-six empty squares. Nineteen overworked teachers left to fill in during their only planning period. One of those teachers had diabetes, and she’d gotten a note from her doctor saying she needed more breaks to recuperate. Another had told Eastman he was worried about suffering a heart attack from stress.
“This is a very devoted staff, but we’ve reached a breaking point,” Eastman said, and he hoped that with some supervision and mentorship, the new foreign teachers could begin providing a little relief. He clicked on a blank square for an eighth-grade English class and typed in a name: “Obreque,” he wrote.
She stepped in front of the class and clasped her hands together to stop them from shaking. “Let’s start with something easy,” she told the students, as the PE teacher sat in the back of the room in case she needed help. She handed out a blank sheet of paper to each student and explained their first task: to fold the paper into a name tag, write their first name in large letters and copy down a few classroom rules. “See? Simple,” she said, as she held up her own paper and demonstrated folding it into thirds. “Any questions?”
A student in the front row raised her hand: “Can I go to the bathroom?” she asked.
“Of course,” Obreque said, and then another student stood from his desk.
“Me too. Bathroom,” he said.
“Next time please raise your hand,” she said. “But yes. Go ahead.”
The students began to fold their papers as Obreque walked around to check on their work. There were 24 students in the room — half the size of her typical class in the Philippines. They had backpacks and proper school supplies. They had a classroom with state-of-the-art technology and air conditioning. “Wonderful work,” she said, as she watched a student draw hearts to create a border around her name tag, and then Obreque circled toward the back row, where a group of boys were huddled in a circle. “Let’s see your progress,” she said. One boy held up a name tag that read “Donut Man,” as the others laughed. Another student had folded his paper into an airplane. Another had dropped his paper on the floor and was stabbing his pencil into the side of his desk.
“Is everything all right?” Obreque asked. “Why aren’t you participating?”
“’Cause my pencil’s broken,” he said, banging it harder against the desk until it snapped. He picked up the two broken pieces and held them out to her as proof. “What do you want me to do?” he asked, smiling at her, and Obreque looked at him for a moment and then decided that his behavior was her fault. Maybe she hadn’t communicated the assignment properly. Maybe, instead of beginning the class by making name tags, she should have started with the rules so they knew how to behave. She walked back to the front of the room. “Eyes up here,” she said, as several of the students continued to talk. “Five, four, three …” she said, as the students shouted over her, until finally the PE teacher blew his whistle. “Hey! Try doing that to me and see what happens,” he said. “Be quiet and listen to your teacher.”
Obreque nodded at him and then continued. “I want this class to be systematic,” she said. “We are not animals. We are not in the jungle. We should be guided by rules, or we will not be successful in our learning, right?”
“Yeah, guys. We’re not animals,” one student said, and then a few boys began to make jungle noises until the PE teacher blew his whistle again.
“If you want to be respected, show me respect,” Obreque said. “Human beings are supposed to be able to follow simple instructions. You come to school to learn, right?”
“Nah, I come because my parents make me,” one student said, turning to smile at his seatmate.
“Yeah, and because somehow you haven’t gotten expelled yet,” his seatmate responded, shoving his friend in the shoulder.
“And ’cause the girls here are fine as hell,” the student said, punching his friend back in the arm.
“Enough!” Obreque shouted, using a voice louder than she’d ever used in seven years of teaching in the Philippines. “What is an example of behaving with dignity and respect? Please, answer and raise your hand.”
A boy in the front row raised an arm that was covered with tic-tac-toe games played out in marker. “Yes,” Obreque said. “Thank you for volunteering.”
“Can I go to the bathroom?” he asked.
She sighed, nodded and scanned the room for another hand. “Who else?” she asked. “Anybody? Remember, cooperation is very important for a class to be successful.”
“Bathroom?” another student asked, but before Obreque could answer she heard the sound of the bell. The students rushed out. The PE teacher put his whistle in his pocket. “Sorry. They can be brutal,” he told her, and he left to teach his next class as Obreque stood alone in the room, still trying to make sense of what had just happened. Sixteen bathroom trips. Seven completed name tags.
“I am capable of doing so much better,” she said, as another class began to arrive. She would start by going over the classroom rules. She would establish control. She would demand their respect instead of asking for it.
“Can I go to the bathroom?” a student asked, a little while later, and Obreque shook her head.
“Not now,” she said. “We are in the middle of working.”
The student slapped his desk and turned to his friend. “This teacher wants me to pee my pants,” he said, and Obreque told him to move to a desk across the classroom.
“Honestly, this is America. We have a right to go to the bathroom,” another student said, and more students called out in agreement until Obreque was straining her vocal cords to shout over them. “I want you to listen!” she said. “We are not in the jungle. We are human beings, right? We cannot proceed with all this disruption.”
“We cannot proceed!” one of the students yelled out, as if declaring victory, and others started to laugh and yell, too. “Please, have some respect!” Obreque said, but only a few students seemed to hear her. “Five, four, three, two, one,” Obreque shouted, but they weren’t quieting down, and there was nothing but more humiliation waiting for her at zero. She decided to try a tactic she’d used a few times in the Philippines, planting herself quietly at the front of the room, modeling silence, looking from one student to the next and waiting for them to recognize their own bad behavior. A boy was chewing on the collar of his shirt. A girl was taping pencils to each of her fingers and then pawing at the boy next to her. Two boys were playing a version of bumper cars with their desks. A girl was pouring water from a cup into another girl’s mouth, and that girl was spitting the water onto the student next to her. “Ugh, miss teacher lady? Can I go wash off this spit water?” the student asked. A boy was standing up and intentionally tripping over his friend’s legs. A girl was starting a game of hangman on the whiteboard. A boy was walking up to the front of the classroom, holding out a piece of paper rolled into the shape of a microphone, and pretending to interview Obreque. “So, what do you think of life at Fox Creek?” he asked.
“I heard the bell ring!” one student shouted, and suddenly a dozen students were scrambling out of their desks.
“Wait for me to dismiss you!” Obreque said, looking up at the clock, because she hadn’t heard anything, and she wasn’t sure if the class was supposed to be over.
“We heard the bell,” another student said, as he opened the door to leave, and before long the students were gone and the classroom was empty. Obreque held her hand up against her sore throat. She wiped the game of hangman off the whiteboard and started to collect several paper airplanes and notes left behind on the floor. “Can you even understand her?” one of the notes read, and she dropped it into the trash and then took out her phone, where there was a message waiting from her husband. “I’m proud of you,” he’d written. “I know you will impress them.”
She wiped her eyes and put the phone back into her purse, and only then did she hear the bell actually begin to ring.
She wanted to quit. She wanted to leave Bullhead City, travel back across the desert to Las Vegas and fly to La Carlota City, but she was $8,000 in debt and 7,000 miles from the Philippines, and instead the only safe place she could think to go was a few doors down the hall, into Cuevas’s empty classroom at the end of the school day. Three of the other new foreign teachers were already seated around the room, recovering from their days. Obreque dropped her bag on the floor and walked over to join them.
“I don’t know even what to say,” she said.
“One day teaching here is like a month in the Philippines,” another teacher said.
“Five of these students is like 20 back home,” another said.
“I don’t know how to handle them,” Obreque said. “I can’t connect. I can’t teach.” She looked at Cuevas. “I’m sorry if I am a disappointment, ma’am. What could be a bigger failure than crying on my first day?”
“Oh, I did that every day for six months,” she said, and the other teachers looked at her in disbelief, because they knew Cuevas as the model of Americanized self-assurance, with her own YouTube channel to share teaching tips and a new designation as one of Bullhead City School District’s employees of the month. “I was the worst teacher here for a whole year,” she told them. “The students ran all over me. I lost my confidence. I wanted to go home.”
She told them that it had taken her a year to pay off her debts to the international teaching agency, two years to get her Arizona driver’s license and three years to move out of a bedroom she’d shared with other international teachers and into her own apartment. She’d applied for an extension on her J-1 visa to stay in Bullhead City for two extra years as she continued to figure out how to build strong relationships with her students. “You have to prove that you really care about them,” she said, so she’d gone to the dollar store, spent her own money on art supplies and redecorated her classroom into a movie theater on premiere night, with a red carpet and a VIP door and a banner that read: “Every Student Is a Star.” She started attending her students’ sporting events, staying after school for volleyball and basketball games, and watching YouTube videos to learn the rules for American football. She watched every one of the Marvel movies they talked about during class. She called their parents not just with concerns but also to share praise each time a student impressed her. She gradually moved beyond her Filipino instinct for classroom formality and began asking her students about their lives, and they introduced her to a version of America much different from what she’d first expected: abusive families, homelessness, surging drug overdose deaths, conspiratorial ideologies, loneliness, suicide, alcoholism and poverty every bit as bad as anything she’d encountered in the Philippines.
“In a lot of ways, they are broken and hurting,” she said, and because of that she’d come to admire her colleagues for their dedication and appreciate her students for their resilience, their irreverence, their bravado, their candor and, most of all, for their vulnerability. She’d turned herself into one of the most beloved teachers in a school that couldn’t find enough teachers, and yet she would be legally required to return to the Philippines when her visa expired in eight months.
“The students here are difficult, but they need you,” Cuevas told the other teachers now. “Maybe you can do something to motivate them, to give them more hope.”
“I don’t know if I’m going to be able to help them,” Obreque told her.
“There is literally no one else,” Cuevas said.
The top-ranked teacher from La Carlota City was standing outside her classroom the next morning, ready to teach her students how to learn. “This is how you enter the classroom,” she said, forming them into a line and leading them in. “This is how you throw away your garbage,” she said, as they walked past the trash can and she dropped a piece of paper directly into it. “This is how you sit and listen,” she said, lowering herself into a desk, demonstrating stillness. “This is how you participate,” she said, raising her right hand.
Their lesson for the day was a three-paragraph reading comprehension exercise, the kind of assignment that would have taken Obreque about 20 minutes to complete with her seventh-graders in the Philippines. But at Fox Creek only 19 percent of her eighth-graders were proficient in reading, based on their state assessments, so she planned to take it slowly using a teaching strategy she’d learned in her master’s program, called higher-order thinking skills, which involved asking a series of simple comprehension questions after each sentence of the story to build confidence and encourage class participation. She handed out the assignment, which came from the school’s preplanned curriculum, and read the title of the story out loud: “Life, Liberty, and Ho Chi Minh.”
“Okay, so the title of our reading today is life, liberty and what?” she asked.
“Ho Chi Minh?” a few students said.
“Yes. Very good,” Obreque told them. She asked for someone to read the story aloud, and when no one volunteered, she pointed to a boy in the front row.
“Seriously?” he said, and she nodded at him. “Fine. Whatever,” he said, leaning down to look at the story. “‘By 1941, Ho was known as a …’ Sorry. I don’t know this next word.”
“Fierce,” Obreque said, reading along.
“Okay. Yeah. Fierce. ‘A fierce supporter of Vietnamese independence. Ho …’ ”
“Ho!” another boy called out, laughing.
“Shut up and let me read,” the student said.
“Whoa. Watch your language, bro. This isn’t the jungle, remember?”
“Yeah, then how come I’m about to punch you in the mouth?”
“Enough!” Obreque shouted, but several students continued to laugh and yell and disrupt the reading, until finally another teacher came into the room from his classroom next door. “You think it’s funny that I can hear you through the wall?” he said. “It’s not funny. It’s embarrassing. Do better.” They’d been working for more than half an hour to read seven sentences, and Obreque was beginning to lose her voice. “Please, I can feel that I’m hurting myself to make you listen,” she told them, putting a hand up against her throat, and then she pointed back at the text and asked another student to read a passage about how Ho Chi Minh had drawn inspiration from the U.S. Declaration of Independence.
“Okay,” Obreque said, once the student had finished. “Ho Chi Minh lived all the way across the ocean. Why do you think he would use America as his example?”
The students stared back at her.
“Why America? What is so special about America?”
“Fast cash and fast food,” one student said.
“Okay, yes. Fast food is an export. But what makes this country great?”
She waited for a moment as the students began to talk to each other, write notes, fold airplanes, bounce in their seats, stare off into space and rest their heads on their desks, until finally one girl raised her hand and stood from her seat. “Bathroom?” she asked, and Obreque nodded and turned back to the class.
“America is a beacon of freedom, is it not?” she asked. “You have education. You have independence. You can achieve anything, right?”
She looked around the room and found no raised hands, no answers, nothing at all to quiet her own rising doubt, so she attempted the question again. “Isn’t America supposed to be a model for the world?” she asked. | 2022-10-02T17:06:15Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Teachers from Philippines help struggling U.S. schools amid teacher shortage - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/10/02/teacher-shortage-bullhead-city-arizona/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/10/02/teacher-shortage-bullhead-city-arizona/ |
Fox’s Terry Bradshaw reveals he was treated for bladder, skin cancers
The health of Terry Bradshaw (shown in 2015) has been a concern among viewers since the season began. (Ronald Martinez/Getty Images)
When the Fox Sports “NFL Sunday” crew returned with the start of the season last month, it was clear that something was different about Hall of Fame quarterback Terry Bradshaw.
He looked heavier, for one thing, and on last week’s broadcast, an incident made him aware of the need to address what is going on with his health.
“I ran out of breath and Howie [Long] helped me off and a lot of people have asked what’s wrong with me, what’s happened to me physically and I just want to address it and let you know what has happened in my life,” he said Sunday morning.
“In November, I was diagnosed with bladder cancer. I went to the Yale University Medical Center for treatment and as of today I am bladder cancer free. All right, that’s the good news.”
Cancer wasn’t done with the 74-year-old former Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback, however.
“In March, feeling good, I had a bad neck, I get an MRI and now we find a tumor in my left neck,” he said. “And it’s a Merkle cell tumor, which is a rare form of skin cancer. So I had that surgery done at M.D. Anderson [Cancer Center] in Houston.”
Merkle cell carcinoma is described by the Mayo Clinic as “a rare type of skin cancer that usually appears as a flesh-colored or bluish-red nodule, often on your face, head or neck. Merkel cell carcinoma is also called neuroendocrine carcinoma of the skin.”
It is a form of cancer that “most often develops in older people” and “tends to grow fast and to spread quickly to other parts of your body. Treatment options for Merkel cell carcinoma often depend on whether the cancer has spread beyond the skin.”
Bradshaw revealed no other details.
In a Facebook Live chat three days ago, he explained why his neck has looked bloated and said his first follow-ups are in 40 or so days.
“The cancers are not there, so I’m not dying.” Bradshaw said, noting the swelling in his face. “That is part of the treatment [radiation]. It maintains fluid in my face and my jaw, and this side of my face is partially numb. It’s coming, it’s slow, it’s gonna take a while. But I’m totally fine. I may not look fine, but I’m totally fine. So that puts that to rest.”
Bradshaw previously has publicly discussed his experience with depression.
“I have a lung issue from surgery,” Bradshaw said. “A nerve was blocked and primarily what is happening now is asthma and I have a hard time out there [in California]. I have been dealing with a lot of stuff, I’m not someone who wants to talk about it and say, ‘Woe is me, poor Terry.’ I hate that. I am just telling you to shut everybody up.”
His Fox colleagues expressed their support, admiration and love, but Michael Strahan had a wisecrack.
“I’m just curious why it took this long for people to ask what’s wrong with you,” he joked. | 2022-10-02T18:59:51Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Terry Bradshaw reveals he was treated for cancer - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/02/terry-bradshaw-cancer/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/02/terry-bradshaw-cancer/ |
FRONT ROYAL, Va. — The son of a 77-year-old man who died after sustaining injuries during a traffic stop in Virginia earlier this year has filed a $6 million lawsuit that alleges the deputies involved in his father’s arrest used excessive force.
The sheriff’s office has previously said deputies began following Ralph Ennis early on April 2 after he was observed speeding and driving erratically. After initially failing to stop during a chase that covered nearly 4 miles (6 kilometers), Ennis drove and parked his truck at a convenience store near Front Royal, according to the sheriff’s office. | 2022-10-02T19:13:03Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Excessive force lawsuit filed after Virginia man's death - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/excessive-force-lawsuit-filed-after-virginia-mans-death/2022/10/02/8f1951ea-4280-11ed-be17-89cbe6b8c0a5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/excessive-force-lawsuit-filed-after-virginia-mans-death/2022/10/02/8f1951ea-4280-11ed-be17-89cbe6b8c0a5_story.html |
D.C. police ‘street justice’ in gun seizures without arrest is no justice at all
D.C. Police Chief Robert J. Contee III, with Mayor Muriel E. Bowser, during an Aug. 29 news conference. (Amanda Andrade-Rhoades for The Washington Post)
Growing up in the Foggy Bottom/West End area of Northwest D.C. in the late 1940s, we heard about cops assigned to the 3rd Precinct, then located at 23rd and K streets NW, who sometimes confiscated criminal proceeds — gambling money, shoplifted items — and sometimes let the thieves go, with a kick in the pants or the smack of a billy club upside the head.
We may have speculated about what happened to the proceeds. But this we knew: The wrongdoers didn’t go to jail.
That was back in the day when some police ignored their duty to arrest and charge suspects, and decided, instead, to administer what became known as “street justice.”
In that climate, they, not prosecutors, disposed of crime. They, not courts, decided guilt or innocence. They didn’t uphold the law because in their minds, they were “The Law.”
So, it’s disgusting to learn that even today, some D.C. police officers might be abusing their authority in a similar fashion.
D.C. Police Chief Robert J. Contee III announced in a news conference Friday evening that an internal police investigation found that several officers at the department’s Seventh District station confiscated illegal guns without making arrests.
“In these cases, the suspect was not arrested, and the suspect should have been arrested,” Contee said. “The firearm was taken and placed into evidence. However, the suspect was allowed to go free, and that’s just not the way that we conducted business here in the Metropolitan Police Department.”
Except I know, based upon my childhood, that police business has, on occasion, been conducted that way. At issue is the extent to which this misconduct is occurring.
The manner of discovery offers grounds for deep concern. It was an unrelated community complaint against D.C. officers that triggered the internal probe. While investigating that complaint, officials came across information of a separate incident involving two officers confiscating an illegal gun from a suspect without making an arrest.
Contee said the discovery sparked a closer look into gun-seizure cases over the past three weeks. Comparing written reports from officers of what unfolded during the gun seizures with their body-camera footage revealed noticeable inconsistencies, and examples of other similar behavior by police officers. Now five additional officers stand accused of misconduct. All have been placed on administrative leave or desk duty.
The city’s police union has suggested that the officers were just following Contee’s orders. That’s not good enough. Where is the evidence that the D.C. police chief told his officers to confiscate guns and let the suspects go free? Put up or do otherwise.
The investigation of these cases is now in the hands of the U.S. attorney’s office.
But the discovery of other police officers not upholding the law — regarding gun seizures and other criminal behavior — must continue. Yes, the seven Seventh District police officers are on the front lines in targeting crime. But getting illegal guns off the streets is not their choice alone. It is a mayoral mandate, backed by strong public sentiment. The fact that police have seized more than 2,000 illegal guns this year is proof that the city is awash in deadly weapons.
But the practice of “street justice” constitutes no justice at all. Letting gun-toting suspects walk away doesn’t make the community safer. It only corrodes respect for those bearing badges, and it gives a go-ahead to gun up again.
Even as too many citizens pay with their lives. And our children, like this once-upon-a-time youngster, find it hard to fully trust the police. | 2022-10-02T19:13:40Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | D.C. police ‘street justice’ in gun seizures without arrest is no justice at all - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/02/dc-police-street-justice-gun-seizures-without-arrest-is-no-justice-all/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/02/dc-police-street-justice-gun-seizures-without-arrest-is-no-justice-all/ |
People walk toward a ferryboat to be evacuated from Sanibel Island, Fla., on Saturday, following Hurricane Ian. (Ted Richardson for The Washington Post)
SANIBEL ISLAND, Fla. — Crossing the causeway bridge from the mainland, visitors’ first glimpse of this cherished Gulf Coast getaway was often Point Ybel Light, an iron tower built in 1884 at the tip of the 33 square-mile spit of land, surrounded by a thick green mix of palms and seagrapes. Spot the lighthouse, and you had reached paradise.
The barrier island was home to 6,500 locals, but that swelled during the winter to 20,000 retirees, tourists and other seasonal residents, many of them Midwesterners seeking relief from frigid climates. Locals list famous visitors, from Denzel Washington to Johnny Depp, Eric Clapton to former vice president Mike Pence.
Seashell collectors came to scour Sanibel’s beaches, renowned for their diverse bounty. Birdwatchers frequented its nature preserves; golfers its resorts. They built multimillion-dollar mansions or bought mobile homes, then rubbed shoulders at businesses on Periwinkle Way, at The Sandbar, Tipsy Turtle and Jerry’s Foods.
The lighthouse survived Hurricane Ian, but the storm devastated much of the rest of Sanibel. It tore homes and apartment complexes apart, killing some residents. It flooded Periwinkle businesses, mobile home parks, condos and resorts, knocking out power, water and a stretch of the causeway, filling streets with debris and sticky gray mud. No one knows how long it will take to rebuild — much hinges on the three-mile bridge officials haven’t said will be repaired any time soon — or how lasting the damage will be to the barrier island’s spirit.
Many living on the island evacuated before the storm and have not been allowed back. On Saturday, the fire department warned holdouts that Sunday was the last day they’d be driven from their homes to the makeshift ferry service at the Sanibel Boat Ramp. It was clear that some were staying: They could be seen bicycling to spots with cellphone reception, to the grocery store or to the beach to take makeshift baths.
At a briefing late Saturday in a Fort Myers hotel, Sanibel’s temporary city hall, City Manager Dana Souza stressed the island wasn’t yet safe for Sanibelians.
“Sanibel remains under a 24-hour curfew, and we ask people not to go to the island,” Souza said, urging those on the island to evacuate and noting that about a hundred left Saturday. “We don’t want people staying on the island. We know that you’re anxious to do that, but it’s still a dangerous situation out there.”
He said there have been four fatalities so far, but that searches and rescues were still underway and National Guard troops were expected to arrive Sunday. On Saturday, police escorted several people from the island after they were caught stealing property, he said.
Souza and Sanibel Mayor Holly Smith faced a barrage of questions from homeowners, business owners, renters and seasonal residents about how they could rebuild remotely, many of which depended on restoring the causeway bridge, which one man called the island’s “umbilical cord.”
“What do you tentatively foresee as time for life on the island again, with the causeway sustaining life on the island?” a woman asked.
Exhausted Sanibel Island residents arrived in Fort Myers, Fla., on Sept 30 and attempted to contact family members while mourning the loss of loved ones. (Video: Reshma Kirpalani/The Washington Post)
Kyle Sweet, 51, lives on the east end but works to the west, as superintendent at The Sanctuary Golf Club. Driving by the boat ramp Saturday, he said the west end’s power lines and poles sustained far more damage, and would likely take months to repair.
“This area will be sooner to recover, and the Periwinkle downtown area,” he said.
Beside the damaged causeway, volunteers ran ferryboats and small groups of residents formed at the boat ramp, the island’s new hot spot. It was one of the few areas on Sanibel with decent cellphone service.
“They’re all great friends. I don’t know who’s going to stay or go,” said Captain Paul Primeaux as he sat with one group.
Primeaux runs Sanibel & Captiva Fishing Charters, and has been an island institution for 20 years. Neighbors waiting with him near the dock listened as he took stock of which Sanibel landmarks had weathered the storm.
The Lazy Flamingo, Tipsy Turtle and other Periwinkle restaurants were battered. Jerry’s survived. He wasn’t sure about George and Wendy’s Sanibel Seafood Grille.
“Shalimar Hotel was scraped clean,” Primeaux said, his face grim. “Beachview Cottages: Wiped.”
His house?
“Done. I’m ground level,” he said, adding, “The Mucky Duck survived.”
Bob Butterfield grinned. Butterfield, 38, was a server and bartender at the restaurant. Others would rebuild too, he was sure. But that didn’t mean they would truly restore Sanibel.
“It’s going to be weird to see everything new. It’s going to ruin that old island look,” Butterfield said.
Neighbor Robin Roberts, 39, was working as a bartender at The Island Cow until it caught fire in August. Before the owner could rebuild, the hurricane struck.
“It’s just destroyed now,” she said.
Roberts had been working more recently at Cips Place Restaurant, she said, but when she visited after the storm, “It looked pretty bad, too.”
Bailey’s Grocery Store & Deli survived, said June Bailey, 84, whose family built Sanibel in the 1800s, including the general store that became Bailey’s and was still family-run.
On Saturday, she was escorting her grandson to the mainland on the ferry while his parents spent one more day cleaning their home. Dylan Stevens, 13, said he was a 7th grader at Sanibel Elementary, but, “I guess that’s not going to be operational.”
Bailey, a retired executive secretary now hosting evacuated family at her home in Fort Myers, wasn’t sure how long it would take to rebuild the island. “I just hope they recover fairly soon,” she said.
Much will depend on how fast officials rebuild the bridge, a lifeline to mainland Florida for Sanibel’s residents and economy.
“The big wild card for everyone is the causeway. Repairing is going to be slow,” said Primeaux, the charter captain. And that will delay the supplies necessary to rebuild everything else, he said, “and the tourists we all rely on.”
Yet even in the wake of the disaster, the island exerted its familiar pull: With so much work to do, many were torn about leaving.
Lorraine Regan, 57, a gym teacher and mother of four from coastal New Jersey, retired to Sanibel this summer to live in her late grandmother’s ranch house. She bought a condo at Seawind Apartments to rent out, and that’s where she ended up surviving the storm, safe on the second floor while her first floor flooded. The hurricane inundated her grandmother’s house with storm water, churning the contents, leaving a muddy flood line inches from the ceiling and rendering it uninhabitable for now.
When a search and rescue team stopped by to check on her the day after the storm, Regan told them she was staying at her condo, which seemed structurally sound. Later, a passing police officer urged her to leave. But she’d already started cleaning muddy, flooded floors on the first story and was sleeping upstairs. She’d filled the bathtub with water before the storm hit Wednesday, and had enough food to last for days. Sometimes she walked to the local fire station to get water and sandwiches.
“All I thought is if I can try to salvage this place,” she said as she stood in the muddy living room. Before the storm, she had rented the condo to someone for three months starting in January. “But that’s not going to happen,” she said.
She missed her neighbors, most of whom had evacuated before the storm, leaving their street, East Gulf Drive, eerily silent even at midday.
“It’s pretty desolate,” Regan said, but she has her condo and her Havapoo dog, Lola.
Her children live far away, in Chicago, Nashville and Washington, D.C. Regan said she knows shelters on the mainland allow people to bring pets, but she doesn’t feel safe going to one.
“I’ve already put my life in jeopardy once,” she said as she walked over to check on her late grandmother’s flooded house on Beach Road, now nearly blocked by fallen trees and an errant boat. “I’m not doing it again.”
On Sept. 30, Project DYNAMO, a veteran volunteer group that rescues civilians, traveled to Sanibel island to search for and rescue survivors of Hurricane Ian. (Video: Reshma Kirpalani, James Cornsilk/The Washington Post)
Down Beach Road, where a muddy footpath connects it to Bailey Road, longtime residents Flor and Mario Cruz were surveying their blue and white rental cottage before evacuating. They pointed to the roof, which had been ripped off by Ian as they sheltered in a neighbor’s million-dollar elevated home across the street.
Natives of Yucatán, Mexico, the Cruzes had lived on the island for 20 years. Mario Cruz, 60, worked as a cook at the Bubble Room restaurant on nearby Captiva Island. He was wearing his black work shirt, one of the few belongings he was able to salvage.
“We threw away almost everything,” he said.
They planned to stay at a shelter on the mainland. When a Sanibel police officer arrived with a search and rescue crew in a pickup truck to take the couple to the evacuation ferry, Flor Cruz, 57, joked: “Where am I going, Disneyland?”
“I love your spirit,” the officer said.
“What do I do, cry?” Mario Cruz said, smiling ruefully.
“I know,” the officer said, leading them to the truck, “Let’s get you off this island.”
A barge was expected to arrive this weekend to carry construction, fire and police equipment to the island, city manager Souza said. Once a structural safety team arrives Monday and completes inspections starting at the island’s east end, residents in those areas will be allowed to return for day-long visits via the barge or boats the city had arranged with space for 40 passengers, he said.
The island’s main roads have been cleared by city crews, along with about 80 percent of roads on Sanibel’s more heavily populated east end, home to the main business district. But crews have only restored enough water to supply first responders and city hall. More than half of the wastewater pump stations were damaged by salt water, and it wasn’t clear how soon power would return, Souza said.
Search and rescue crews combed through the wreckage of mobile homes at Periwinkle Park and Campground Saturday, but didn’t find any holdouts. Ferries ran all day, but some residents longed to remain in Sanibel even as they prepared to board the boat.
“It was horrible to leave,” said Susan Wener, a retired registered nurse who’s lived on Sanibel for 25 years in an elevated house that survived the storm. “You look inside my house and it’s perfectly intact.”
But step outside, and the Sanibel she loved was a disaster zone.
“I have two hot tubs in my driveway; I don’t know whose they are,” said Wener, 74, as she waited with her husband, a part-time internist at the local Veteran’s Administration hospital, and their Havanese, Charlie.
Once the ferry arrived in Fort Myers, they would get a ride from a friend from St. Petersburg, but Wener wasn’t sure if they would stay there.
“Naples is closer, but I don’t know: Are we coming back?” she asked.
Janis Gregg shared the same worry as she sat nearby with her husband Jim.
“I want to stay here, but he wants me to go to his son’s in Sarasota,” said Gregg, 76, who retired to Sanibel after a career working for newspapers and a local Fox News affiliate in Northern California and Nevada. Her husband, 81, was in the real estate business and bought a house on Sanibel in the 1970s. So that was where they had settled with their pets and vintage cars, ultimately in a three-story elevated home. While their first floor garage flooded, ruining the cars, Gregg said the house mercifully didn’t flood and she couldn’t bear to leave it.
She called her stepson, who was supposed to pick them up at the other end of the ferry in Fort Myers.
“Are you sure you can make it?” she asked.
Someone in the crowd of about a dozen residents shouted, “There’s the boat!”
“We’re going,” her husband said.
Gregg tried to reason with him. The island was home. She didn’t want to let the hurricane claim it.
“I really want to stay,” she pleaded. “Please, please let me stay. You can come back in a few weeks. I want to be a survivor.”
Her husband walked toward the boat. Gregg followed, grumbling that she might try to take the ferry back. But she let her husband lead her aboard, unsure when she’d see her island home again. | 2022-10-02T19:47:52Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Sanibel residents hope for recovery after Hurricane Ian's destruction - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/10/02/hurricane-ian-sanibel/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/10/02/hurricane-ian-sanibel/ |
A lamentable lament on Manchin’s permitting reform bill
Eric Weltman of Food and Water Action rallies with Appalachian and Indigenous climate advocates against the Mountain Valley Pipeline project on Sept. 8. (Craig Hudson for The Washington Post)
The Sept. 29 editorial “The country’s climate goals are in danger” made a strangely twisted argument while lamenting the failure of Sen. Joe Manchin III’s (D-W.Va.) so-called permitting reform bill that included unprecedented congressional meddling in the judicial oversight of his pet project, the Mountain Valley Pipeline.
“Such a package would not pass the Senate,” the editorial stated, referring to a hypothetical bill without the baggage of projects such as the pipeline. Well, we don’t know whether a bill without the pipeline baggage could be crafted so it would pass the Senate. But we do know that a bill with the pipeline baggage cannot pass the Senate. Isn’t that exactly what just happened?
Anshul Gupta, Valhalla, N.Y.
The Sept. 29 editorial argued that Sen. Joe Manchin III’s (D-W.Va.) sweeping proposal to speed up environmental permits for big energy projects should be attached to this year’s government funding bill, two days after widespread opposition persuaded the senator to abandon his attempt to do just that.
That bill included a requirement forcing federal agencies to approve the once-dead Mountain Valley Pipeline stretching from Mr. Manchin’s West Virginia to southeastern Virginia. But the issue is not the relatively short time it took for government agencies to approve the pipeline’s construction. Mountain Valley’s real problem is that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit in Richmond has repeatedly ruled that several of the permits it obtained violated the Clean Water Act and other laws.
In retaliation, Mr. Manchin’s “permit reform” bill not only ordered federal agencies to sign off on the Mountain Valley permits but also prohibited federal courts from determining whether those approvals complied with environmental law. That would set a terrible precedent.
The Supreme Court’s 1803 decision in Marbury v. Madison established long ago that once Congress enacts a law, the Constitution gives federal courts the power to interpret its requirements. Depriving courts of the right to review whether a government’s decision to approve a permit was illegal would reverse two centuries of constitutional law. The long-term consequences could be more destructive than even the worst pipeline accident.
Eric Schaeffer, Washington
The writer is executive director of the Environmental Integrity Project. | 2022-10-02T19:52:20Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | A lamentable lament on Manchin’s permitting reform bill - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/02/lamentable-lament-manchins-permitting-reform-bill/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/02/lamentable-lament-manchins-permitting-reform-bill/ |
Out of Ukraine means all the way out
A man carries a Ukrainian flag in Kharkiv, Ukraine, on Sept. 19. (Wojciech Grzedzinski for The Washington Post)
David Von Drehle’s Sept. 28 op-ed, “What will the West choose if Putin wants out of Ukraine,” and his final sentence, “The hard truth is that Putin’s endgame must be embraced, if it comes,” are a blatant contradiction.
“Out of Ukraine” in plain English means a return to Ukraine’s borders as they were on Feb. 20, 2014, when Russian military forces began a lower-key war. It does not mean Russian retention of the portions of Ukraine that it occupied on Feb. 24, 2022, when it launched an additional massive invasion of Ukraine. And “out of Ukraine” most certainly does not mean Russian retention of the entire Donbas area, four provincial segments which comprise 15 to 20 percent of Ukraine that Russia has annexed and declared to be parts of Russia, and no longer “Ukraine.”
Milton Leitenberg, Gaithersburg | 2022-10-02T19:52:26Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Out of Ukraine means all the way out - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/02/out-ukraine-means-all-way-out/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/02/out-ukraine-means-all-way-out/ |
There doesn’t have to be a teacher shortage
(iStock) (Gobalstock/iStock)
Regarding the Sept. 28 news article “Schools still plagued by inadequate staffing, national survey indicates”:
Indeed. There are “employee vacancies.” There are no shortages of teachers. There is, however, a critical leadership shortage at the national, state and local levels that set educational policy. There is a critical shortage of strategic planners as well as a critical shortage of problem solvers at all levels.
In 2000, anticipating a higher-than-normal rate of retiring teachers and realizing that there was no way of filling those vacancies, Maryland implemented a retire-rehire program. The law was designed to retain teachers of math, science, world languages, English as a second language and special education. It allowed teachers who could retire at full retirement to retire and then be rehired. That meant that teachers would receive their full retirement income and the salary that they were earning before they retired. It amounted to about a 40 percent increase in income. Four of my colleagues and I entered the program. We all retired in June, and then we were rehired for the next school year, effective July 1. Who were we? We taught chemistry, biology, French and Latin. As a group, we have more than 150 years of classroom teaching; we each have at least a master’s degree. One of us was the science department chairman, and one of us was the university coordinator for the entire school. Three of us were teaching or had experience teaching advanced placements classes. Two of us were varsity coaches with more than 30 years of coaching combined.
Maryland ended the program in 2004; we all retired at that point. Most of us would probably have retired in 2000 if the retire-rehire program had not been implemented. Could that program reduce the current shortages of available classroom teachers? Undoubtedly.
Need teachers? They’re out there. Start by contacting those teachers who retired last. If they were at full retirement, for example in Maryland, they had at a minimum 30 years of teaching and had at least a master’s degree. Need more teachers? Contact those teachers who retired two years ago, then three years ago, etc. To attract teachers to come back into the classroom, the financial incentive must be substantial. If you think that teachers will come back as per the thinking of Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, who recommended “reducing the endless paperwork collected for administrative purposes and district-wide reports,” you are wasting your time. There is no shortage of teachers.
Eugene Robertson, Silver Spring | 2022-10-02T19:52:45Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | There doesn’t have to be a teacher shortage - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/02/there-doesnt-have-be-teacher-shortage/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/02/there-doesnt-have-be-teacher-shortage/ |
Lorde jokes that she’s now a ‘radioactive creature’ after Potomac swim
The singer told a D.C. audience in August she had taken a swim in the Potomac River. At a Maryland music festival this weekend, she laughed it off.
Lorde performs in June at Glastonbury Festival in England. (Joel C Ryan/Invision/AP)
Pop singer Lorde returned to a controversial subject during her set at the All Things Go festival Saturday at Maryland’s Merriweather Post Pavilion: Did she or didn’t she take a dip this summer in the Potomac River, a ghastly thought for Washington-area locals? All signs point to yes.
In August, the singer told a shocked crowd at the Anthem in D.C. that she had spent time “lying in the Potomac River.” “I love getting to swim in the water where I’m playing, it makes me feel like I know you a bit better, somehow,” she said. While Lorde may have been trying to relate to her local audience, most area residents know that swimming in the river has been illegal since 1971.
No, Lorde will not grow a third eye because she swam in the Potomac
Jokes soon erupted on Twitter about the state of the star’s health after venturing into the water and news organizations jumped onto the story, turning Lorde’s misadventure into an internet phenomenon. Speaking with fans later Lorde, seemingly unfazed, said that she was “happy to be a D.C. meme.”
On Saturday, she addressed the controversy in a more public arena — to almost 20,000 fans at the sold-out festival. Perched on a giant spinning staircase , Lorde discussed her last journey to the DMV. “I was in the D.C. area recently. I had a lovely swim in the Potomac.”
The festival, full of soggy and emotionally drained fans who had spent the past few hours listening to the songs of indie artists Lucy Dacus and Mitski while battling the final waves of Hurricane Ian, erupted into laughter.
“We were on the Maryland side, which is much cleaner right?” she continued. “But I said it in my show and I heard this rumble of chatter and I was like, ‘What did I say?’ And then I trended on Twitter. But it’s kinda cool, I feel like I’m a radioactive creature now. Nothing can kill me.” Questions had been raised about whether the singer had actually swum in the river; her comments Saturday appeared to confirm it.
Depending on where she enjoyed her swim, the water may be considered swimmable. The Potomac Riverkeeper Network released the Swimmable Potomac Report in 2022, which looked at locations in the Potomac to investigate bacteria in the water and found that the “sites passed state bacteria standards 76% of the time, with sixteen of our twenty sites passing more than 50% of the time, and five of our sites passing more than 90% of the time — indicating safe overall bacteria levels in our sampling region.”
The artist then launched into “Liability,” off her 2017 album “Melodrama,” which drowned out any remaining laughs. | 2022-10-02T20:31:31Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Lorde jokes that she’s now a ‘radioactive creature’ after Potomac swim - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/10/02/lorde-jokes-that-shes-now-radioactive-creature-after-potomac-swim/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/10/02/lorde-jokes-that-shes-now-radioactive-creature-after-potomac-swim/ |
At St. Matthew’s 70th Red Mass, a celebration of God and good work
Church members in the processional at the conclusion of the 70th Annual Red Mass to bless the work of judges, lawyers and civil servants at the Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle, in Washington, D.C. (Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post)
To the soaring strains of ancient hymns and patriotic songs, hundreds of worshipers gathered in Washington’s Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle on Sunday for a traditional Red Mass meant as a reminder to believers — and especially judges, lawyers and other civil servants — of a higher power stretching far beyond themselves.
On the day before the start of a new Supreme Court term in an America wrestling with deep divisions, Washington’s Catholic leaders reprised a celebration of God and good work that has stretched 70 years.
Supreme Court Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. joined Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett, retired Justice Stephen G. Breyer and other government officials for the Red Mass, a centuries-old tradition hailing from Europe named in part, organizers noted, for the color of fire symbolizing the Holy Spirit.
That spirit drew Virginia Court of Appeals Judge Junius P. Fulton III to make the drive from Norfolk with his wife Darnell for a morning of contemplation. It provided, he said, a reminder of how not to “lose humanity around how we treat people,” whether a criminal defendant or a civil litigant.
“Power tends to corrupt. This is a reminder of that,” Fulton said.
District resident Aiseosa Osaghae knew nothing about the tradition of the Red Mass before she started at Georgetown as a law student in 2019. But after graduating in May and starting work as a health law fellow at the university, she still finds it refreshing to have a Mass targeting lawyers and public servants.
“It’s just a nice thing to come to a mass with people who share that passion for the betterment of people,” Osaghae said.
Prayers were offered for judges and law enforcement, “that the Holy Spirit may constantly draw their attention to the least among us.” They were offered for “peace in our world, especially in Ukraine,” and for those affected by hurricanes Fiona and Ian.
Brett Palmer, who lives in Gaithersburg, Md., and works at the Department of Energy, is a regular parishioner at St. Matthews cathedral, named after the patron saint of civil servants. After his assassination, President John F. Kennedy’s funeral was held there.
“It’s a very dignified place to worship,” said Palmer, who was moved by the consecration and Holy Communion Sunday.
“Having that blessing helps keep our priorities in order,” Palmer said. “We’re here to serve the American public, not to enrich ourselves or enjoy grand positions in life.”
The Red Mass is traditionally timed for the day before the Supreme Court’s new session. It came this year at a time of discord over the legitimacy of the nation’s highest court, which in June overturned the Roe v. Wade decision that established a constitutional right to an abortion.
A recent Gallup poll recorded a sharp decline in Americans’ trust in the judicial branch and found just 40 percent of Americans approve of the way the Supreme Court is doing its job.
The partisan scars over the court’s direction and makeup were bypassed in Sunday’s service, which was hosted by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Washington and the John Carroll Society, a group of Catholic professionals.
The homily from Bishop John O. Barres cited the theologian Romano Guardini’s observation that the greatest things “are accomplished in silence — not in the clamor and display of superficial eventfulness, but in the deep clarity of inner vision.”
Then, Barres asked: “What's all this got to do with the practice of law?”
His answer was that a deeper discipline in prayer “animates and focuses dedication to civil law responsibilities.” Barres cited the example of zero-sum games in public life, such as “the difficulty the government currently has in balancing care for the environment against reducing inflation and allowing for affordable energy.”
To best balance those goals, Barres said, “we need wise counselors to guide us, and most especially, that wisest of counselors — the Holy Spirit who brings us the gifts of wisdom, understanding, and counsel to let us see through our selfishness and past the boundaries of our own limited intellects.”
The worshipers sang the national anthem and later, after Communion and a concluding rite, followed with America the Beautiful, in verses reaching beyond spacious skies and the fruited plain.
America! America! God
mend thine ev-‘ry flaw,
Confirm thy soul in
self control, Thy
liberty in law. | 2022-10-02T21:54:47Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Red Mass celebrated at Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/02/red-mass-cathedral-matthew-apostle/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/02/red-mass-cathedral-matthew-apostle/ |
Fairfax County Police officers said they expect the incident was ‘not a random act’
A man was shot and killed Sunday morning in the Alexandria area of Fairfax County, police said.
The incident occurred in a parking lot off Jeff Todd Way just before 7 a.m. Police said a man walked up to a vehicle with multiple occupants, a confrontation occurred, and the man fired multiple rounds inside the car.
At least one person was struck by bullets, according to Fairfax County police. That man, who has not been identified, was dropped off at a hospital and later pronounced dead.
Police said they expect it was not a random act, and that the assailant and occupants of the car knew each other.
The investigation is ongoing and an arrest had not been made by Sunday afternoon. | 2022-10-02T22:03:11Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Man fatally shot Sunday morning in Alexandria, police said - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/02/homicide-october-second-fairfax-county/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/02/homicide-october-second-fairfax-county/ |
Nats’ home schedule ends with another clunker from Patrick Corbin
Phillies 8, Nationals 1 (6 innings)
Patrick Corbin earned his 19th loss of the season on Sunday afternoon in Washington's 8-1 loss. (Katherine Frey/The Washington Post)
The Washington Nationals’ final home game of the 2022 season looked a lot like their first one — a dreary, rainy day with Patrick Corbin on the mound.
When Corbin pitched Opening Day, the Nationals hoped he could rediscover the version they signed to a six-year, $140 million contract in December 2018. By the time he left the mound Sunday afternoon, after 4⅔ innings, a few fans in the upper deck who stayed through the weather booed him in another lost season.
Corbin slogged through Sunday’s 8-1 loss against the Philadelphia Phillies, allowing seven runs on 10 hits to move his ERA up to 6.31. The game lasted six innings before it was called with conditions getting worse.
“The cleats were just kind of filling up a little bit and just felt really rotational today,” Corbin said. “But just tough on both sides, but it is what it is.”
Washington earned its 104th loss — the most since the team moved to D.C. — and finished a dismal 26-55 at home this year. And Corbin picked up his majors-leading 19th loss, a figure that could have been higher if not for back spasms that pulled him out of his last start and forced him to miss a turn in the rotation.
The Nationals and their fans know the bottom. This isn’t it.
The Phillies were desperate to hit and push themselves closer to a spot in the playoffs, as they battle the Milwaukee Brewers for the final National League wild-card spot.
Philadelphia loaded the bases in the second inning when Corbin walked Nick Castellanos with one out and allowed back-to-back singles. Bryson Stott hit into what could have been an inning-ending double play, but the turn between Luis García and CJ Abrams wasn’t quick enough, and the Phillies jumped ahead 1-0. They added three more runs in the fourth when Stott laced a two-run double and then scored on a single by Bryce Harper.
Corbin again tried to work his way through a bases-loaded jam, this time in the fifth, but with little success. Kyle Schwarber poked a bases-clearing single, and he would be the final batter Corbin faced.
Both teams added a run in the sixth.
Corbin’s struggles served as a microcosm of another difficult season for him. He has allowed more hits (210) and earned runs (107) than any other pitcher. He had looked decent of late, finishing September with a 3.10 ERA in 20⅓ innings pitched.
But his positive stretches have always been met with regressions. Corbin said after the game that he knows he still has the stuff to be the pitcher he was before. And Manager Dave Martinez is still preaching faith, too.
“I got a good feeling that next spring he comes in, he’s in shape, we’ll get him ready, that we’ll see a different Corbin,” Martinez said. “The Corbin that we saw in ’19.”
Martinez has repeatedly said Corbin needs to keep the ball down in the zone, and the left-hander threw sinkers on 65 of his 101 pitches Sunday. Though Martinez has maintained Corbin will be in the rotation next year, this season has only created further doubt about his future.
How bad were the conditions Sunday? Poor. The warning track had large puddles for most of the game. The Nationals’ grounds crew put drying solution on the field from the fourth inning on.
Outfielders were slow to chase after balls, and base runners pulled up early instead of trying to take the extra base. In the bottom of the sixth inning, Phillies first baseman Rhys Hoskins misplayed a groundball from Abrams and slipped trying to chase it. The hit was ruled a double by the official scorer “due to field conditions.”
Who will start for the Nationals in the final week of the season? Cory Abbott, Paolo Espino and Erick Fedde will start the final three games of the season against the New York Mets, who are fighting for the NL East crown.
The set rotation means Josiah Gray will not make another start this season. Gray, in his first full season in the majors, finished with a 7-10 record and a 5.02 ERA. His final start of the year came against the Atlanta Braves on Wednesday, when he allowed two hits over six innings and produced one of his most efficient starts of the year.
Martinez said his goal was for Gray to throw 130 innings this year, though Gray convinced him to extend that total to 150. Gray threw a career-high 148⅔, and the team managed his innings down the stretch by spacing out his starts. | 2022-10-02T23:13:01Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Nats fall to Phillies as home finale ends because of rain - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/02/nationals-phillies-rain-corbin/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/02/nationals-phillies-rain-corbin/ |
Boy, 2, is shot and wounded in Prince George’s, police say
D.C. police found the boy in the 2500 block of Q Street SE in D.C.
D.C. police found a 2-year-old boy suffering from gunshot wounds in the wee hours of Sunday, according to authorities.
It was unclear when and where the boy was shot, police said. He was in stable condition by Sunday evening with non-life-threatening injuries.
D.C. police said they found the 2-year-old in the 2500 block of Q Street SE when officers responded to a traffic accident about 12:25 a.m. Sunday. A department spokesperson said the shooting appeared to have taken place in Prince George’s County, and the driver of the vehicle was trying to take the boy to a hospital when the accident occurred.
Prince George’s County police said they are working with D.C. to determine the time and location of the incident. | 2022-10-02T23:17:23Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Toddler shot, wounded in Prince George’s County - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/02/toddler-shot-prince-georges/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/02/toddler-shot-prince-georges/ |
NFL live updates Kansas City Chiefs face Tampa Bay Buccaneers on ‘Sunday Night Football’
Buccaneers host Chiefs after Hurricane Ian
Tom Brady and Patrick Mahomes last faced each other in Super Bowl LV at Raymond James Stadium, which the Bucs won. (Patrick Smith/Getty Images)
Tom Brady and Patrick Mahomes will face off for the first time since Brady’s Buccaneers beat Mahomes’s Chiefs in the Super Bowl in February 2021. Since then, both teams’ rosters have evolved, and Coach Todd Bowles now leads the Bucs after Bruce Arians’s retirement.
Sunday night’s game looked to be in danger of being rescheduled or relocated due to Hurricane Ian’s projected path, but after the storm made landfall in southwest Florida and spared Tampa the worst of its effects, the game will go on as planned.
Kickoff: 8:20 p.m., Raymond James Stadium
Radio: SiriusXM
Line: Tampa Bay -1
The Buccaneers host the Chiefs at Raymond James Stadium in Tampa, three days after the teams and the NFL decided against rescheduling or relocating the game in the aftermath of Hurricane Ian at the behest of local authorities.
The Buccaneers left the Tampa area ahead of Ian’s landfall Wednesday afternoon along the western coast of Florida, near Fort Myers and Cape Coral, as a powerful Category 4 storm with maximum sustained winds around 150 mph. The team temporarily moved its operations to Miami and practiced at the Dolphins’ facility before returning to Tampa on Friday. | 2022-10-02T23:48:27Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Kansas City Chiefs face Tampa Bay Buccaneers on 'Sunday Night Football' - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/02/bucs-vs-chiefs-nfl/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/02/bucs-vs-chiefs-nfl/ |
Karl Dorrell's Buffaloes went 4-15 following his 4-0 start in 2020. (AP Photo/David Zalubowski, File)
Colorado became the latest Power Five conference team to fire its coach midway through the 2022 season when it let go of Karl Dorrell on Sunday following an 0-5 start. The 23 points by which the Buffaloes fell on Saturday, in a 43-20 loss to Arizona, represented their closest margin of defeat this year.
The 58-year-old Dorrell was in his third season at Colorado. After starting with a 4-0 mark in 2020, his Buffaloes went 4-15 to leave him with an overall record of 8-15, with all but one of those losses coming by at least 15 points.
Colorado’s defensive coordinator, Chris Wilson, was also dismissed Sunday.
Mike Sanford, in his first season as the Buffaloes’ offensive coordinator, will take over as interim coach.
“I want to thank Karl for his hard work in leading our program since 2020,” Colorado Athletic Director Rick George said in a statement. “Ultimately, however, the results on the field just did not measure up to our expectations and standards, which made it necessary for us to make this change at this time. It was an extremely difficult decision and I wish Karl all of the best in his future endeavors.”
Before this season, Colorado had suffered through 0-5 starts just three times, most recently in 2006. The Buffaloes, who joined the Pac-12 in 2011, are well on their way to their 15th losing season in the past 17 years.
Dorrell becomes the second Pac-12 coach fired this season, following Herm Edwards, who was let go by Arizona State last month after a 1-2 start. Two other Power Five coaches have not made it through this season thus far: Nebraska’s Scott Frost and Georgia Tech’s Geoff Collins.
When hired in 2020, Dorrell replaced Mel Tucker, who left the Buffaloes after one season for the job at Michigan State. At the time, Dorrell said he was “kind of floored” when Colorado reached out to him to gauge his interest in the job. He hadn’t been a head coach since holding that position at UCLA from 2003 to 2007; following his firing by the Bruins, Dorrell bounced around as a position coach with several NFL teams, as well as at Vanderbilt in 2014. However, after developing an affinity for the Boulder area during two previous stints as an assistant with the Buffaloes, Dorrell made his home there and described the top gig as his “dream job.”
On Sunday, Colorado Chancellor Philip DiStefano said he “fully” supported George’s “difficult decision to dismiss Coach Dorrell.”
“The football team is an important part of the university and I know our students, alumni, and fans have high expectations for a winning product on the field,” DiStefano said in a statement. “I thank Coach Dorrell for his dedication to CU Boulder and his unwavering commitment to our student-athletes.” | 2022-10-02T23:48:34Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Colorado fires coach Karl Dorrell after 0-5 start to season - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/02/karl-dorrell-colorado/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/02/karl-dorrell-colorado/ |
Iran’s release of Iranian-American not conditioned on asset unfreezing, U.S. says.
A woman steps through a door covered by a mural of American hostages being held abroad on July 20 in Washington. At left is Siamak Namazi, who has been in captivity in Iran since 2015. At right is Jose Angel Pereira, who has been imprisoned in Venezuela since 2017. (Patrick Semansky/AP)
An Iranian American jailed in Iran for nearly seven years on widely discredited espionage charges was temporarily released Saturday while Iran also lifted a travel ban on his ailing father, who had been imprisoned after traveling to the country to plead for his son’s release.
Siamak Namazi, 51, and Baquer Namazi, 85, are among a growing list of U.S. and European nationals who have been held by Iran as political pawns, according to western officials.
Tehran claimed Saturday that following the Namazis’ release Washington would unfreeze $7 billion in Iranian assets held in South Korea due to U.S. sanctions.
“With the finalization of negotiations between Iran and the United States to release the prisoners of both countries, $7 billion of Iran’s blocked resources will be released,” State News Agency IRNA said Sunday.
A U.S. State Department spokesperson denied that any assets would be transferred as part of a deal. The spokesperson, unnamed per State Department protocol, told The Washington Post that Washington was still working to secure the full release of Siamak Namazi, as well as several other U.S. nationals jailed in Iran.
British charity worker Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, freed from Iran after nearly six years, arrives in U.K.
“We remain committed and determined to securing the freedom of all Americans unjustly detained in Iran and elsewhere,” State Department spokesperson Ned Price said in a statement Saturday.
Price also thanked “U.S. allies and partners who have worked tirelessly to help the Namazis, including the U.N. Secretary General, Switzerland, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, and the United Kingdom.”
Iranian media reported Saturday that an unnamed “regional country” helped to facilitate the deal.
An informed source, who was not authorized to speak publicly on the matter, told The Post that Iraq had a key role in mediating between Iran and U.S. and British counterparts.
Washington and Tehran cut off diplomatic relations shortly after the 1979 revolution that brought Iran’s ruling clerics to power.
But the two countries have most recently been engaged in now stalled indirect talks to revive the 2015 Iranian nuclear deal that Washington left in 2018. Iran has billions of assets frozen in banks around the world due to western sanctions. A return to the deal would include U.S. sanctions relief needed to revive Iran’s collapsed economy.
Reports by state-affiliated media in Iran emphasized that the release of the Namazis has coincided with the lack of progress around the nuclear deal.
The younger Namazi, a businessman, was arrested in 2015 while visiting Iran and has been held in the notorious Evin prison. An Iranian court convicted him in 2016 of espionage charges, which he denied.
Namazi’s furlough is for one week, during which he will stay with his family, Jared Genser, the family lawyer, told Reuters. It remains unclear if the furlough will be extended.
The elder Namazi, a former U.N. official, traveled to Iran in 2016 to plead for his son’s release. He was subsequently detained and convicted of “collaboration with a hostile government.” Authorities furloughed him from prison in 2018 due to health conditions and closed his case in 2020, though he remained under a travel ban.
“The Secretary-General is grateful that, following his appeals to the president of the Islamic Republic of Iran, our former colleague Baquer Namazi has been permitted to leave Iran for medical treatment abroad,” a spokesperson for U.N. Secretary General António Guterres said Saturday in a statement.
“This is a critical first step but of course we will not rest until the entire family is able to return to the United States and their long nightmare is finally over,” Genser, the family lawyer, told Reuters.
Former political prisoners have described being subject to abuse, torture and forced confessions of such offenses as spying , while in prison.
Iran has falsely blamed “foreign enemies” for fomenting more than two weeks of nationwide anti-government protests sparked last month by the death of a young woman, Mahsa Amini, while in police custody. Authorities said Friday that they arrested nine European nationals for their role in the protests in a move likely to increase tensions with the west.
U.S., European and U.N. officials have condemned Iran’s crackdown on demonstrators, which has included using live fire and cutting off internet access. At least 52 protesters have been killed, and hundreds more injured and arrested, according to London-based Amnesty International.
ERICAS Venezuela frees 7 jailed Americans in exchange for Maduro family drug smugglers
The demonstrations, which have pulled people from a cross-section of ethnic, geographic and class groups, are the biggest surge of unrest since a wave of protests in 2019 triggered by economic grievances.
In a separate case, Venezuela, another U.S. adversary, said Saturday that it had freed seven Americans held for nearly five years. The detainees, who included five oil company executives, were exchanged for two nephews of President Nicolás Maduro’s wife jailed in the United States for drug smuggling.
John Hudson contributed reporting from Washington; Mustafa Salim contributed reporting from Baghdad. | 2022-10-02T23:50:12Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Release of Iranian-American Namazi not conditioned on asset unfreezing, U.S. says. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/02/iran-namazi-release/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/02/iran-namazi-release/ |
Serhiy Morgunov
A Ukrainian serviceman in Bakhmut, Ukraine, on Sunday sits on a tank he claimed had been captured from the Russian army. (Inna Varenytsia/AP)
KYIV, Ukraine — Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky announced the full recovery of a strategic town in eastern Ukraine on Sunday as a public brawl intensified in Russia over responsibility for the latest setback to the Kremlin’s goal of conquering wide swaths of Ukraine.
Meanwhile, Kyiv’s Western backers hailed the advance of Ukrainian forces into areas Moscow has declared will soon constitute part of Russia.
Zelensky said the town of Lyman, which Russian troops used as a key logistics hub in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region since their arrival this spring, was completely “cleared of the Russian occupiers” as of midday local time, the Defense Ministry said on Twitter.
The president’s statement came a day after the Russian Defense Ministry acknowledged it had been forced to withdraw troops from Lyman “to more advantageous lines.”
The cementing of Ukrainian control of the town, following other gains those forces have made since launching a major counteroffensive last month, offered a sharp contrast to Russia’s advancing steps to officially incorporate Donetsk and three other eastern regions into Russia following a series of staged referendums there last week, which Kyiv and its Western supporters have denounced as illegal and illegitimate.
Former top U.S. officials David Petraeus and H.R. McMaster on Oct. 2 said Russian President Vladimir Putin’s latest threats in Ukraine would not change the war. (Video: JM Rieger/The Washington Post)
Zelensky referred derisively to Putin’s attempt to declare Russian authority by fiat over areas now being taken back by Ukrainian troops.
“This, you know, is the trend,” he said later in his nightly video address. “Recently, someone somewhere held pseudo-referendums, and when the Ukrainian flag is returned, no one remembers the Russian farce with some pieces of paper and some annexations.”
The continued advance into Russian-held areas heightens the stakes of repeated threats that President Vladimir Putin and other Russian officials have made in recent days, suggesting that Moscow could go so far as using nuclear weapons to defend territory it considers part of Russia, including annexed areas of Ukraine.
Putin made reference to America’s use of atomic bombs against Japan in 1945 during a fiery speech Friday, in which the Russian leader cast the annexation of vast swaths of Ukraine as a fulfillment of Russians’ destiny.
Ukraine’s supporters in the West, like leaders in Kyiv, have insisted they won’t bow to Russian intimidation. On Sunday, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin cautioned Russia against following through with any escalatory retaliation linked to Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine.
“Again it’s an illegal claim; it’s an irresponsible statement,” he said in an interview with CNN. “Nuclear sabre-rattling is not the kind of thing that we would expect to hear from leaders of large countries with capability.”
Austin said he expected Ukrainian forces to continue offensive operations aimed at recapturing all Russian-held territory, despite Putin’s recent order to mobilize 300,000 additional troops to bolster the fight in Ukraine. Ukrainian forces are also trying to push deeper into Russian-controlled areas of southern Ukraine, toward the city of Kherson.
“I don’t think that’s going to stop, and we will continue to support them in their efforts,” he said.
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg described the recapture of Lyman as an example of the progress Ukrainian forces were making “because of their bravery and skills, but, of course, also because of the advanced weapons that the United States and other allies are providing.”
He noted that countries including Norway and Germany were stepping up their aid to Ukraine. “This is making a difference on the battlefield every day,” he told NBC.
The recent string of battlefield reversals may indicate that Russia’s military is reaching a “breaking point,” said H.R. McMaster, a retired three-star general who served as national security adviser during the Trump administration.
“What we might be at here is really at the precipice of really the collapse of the Russian army in Ukraine. A moral collapse,” he told CBS.
But U.S. officials have cautioned that despite Russia’s failure to achieve the initial goals of Putin’s Feb. 24 invasion, including the capture of Kyiv, the ongoing mobilization may still present a formidable challenge to Ukraine. Even with larger sums of Western aid, Ukraine’s military is dwarfed in size and weaponry by Russia’s.
The leaders of nine Eastern and Central European nations on Sunday condemned Putin’s annexation, which will be formalized by Russia’s parliament Monday and Tuesday, saying they could not “stay silent in the face of the blatant violation of international law.”
“We do not recognize and will never recognize Russian attempts to annex any Ukrainian territory,” the presidents of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Poland, the Czech Republic, North Macedonia, Montenegro and Slovakia said in a joint statement.
As Russian forces attempted to set a new line of defense after their retreat from Lyman, a torrent of public recriminations and bickering on who was to blame for Moscow’s recent setbacks poured forth on hard-line pro-Kremlin Telegram channels.
In open conflict that underscored the disarray in Russian ranks, two powerful figures with their own armed forces fighting Ukraine launched scathing attacks on Russian Defense Ministry commanders. It began with Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov’s criticisms on Saturday of Russian military commanders, and his call to use tactical nuclear weapons against Ukraine.
Then in rare public remarks, Russian oligarch Yevgeniy Prigozhin, founder of mercenary group Wagner, added his own blunt attack.
“Kadyrov’s expressive statement, of course, is not entirely in my style,” he said, according to a Wagner-affiliated Telegram channel. “But I think that we should send all these bastards barefoot to the front with machine guns,” he said in an apparent reference to top Russian military commanders.
Elena Panina, a former lawmaker and director of Russtrat, a pro-Kremlin think tank, called the public attacks on top Russian military figures “unprecedented” before piling on with her own criticisms, complaining about the lack of any tough military retaliation to punish Ukraine for the forced Russian retreat.
She called Ukraine’s recapture of Lyman “a direct act of aggression against Russia,” in reference to Russia’s illegal move to annex the region. Panina said the criticisms of Russia’s military command came “in the midst of military failures and to the delight of the enemy.”
But sweeping Russia’s failures under the carpet was a path “fraught with real disaster,” she said. In what appeared to be a call to dismiss top military officials, she called for “qualitative changes in personnel, of an organizational and operational nature, up to and including emergency measures.”
“According to numerous estimates, Russia is facing an enemy that is more numerous, better armed, better prepared and better motivated,” Panina said, adding that it would take a “superhuman effort” to win.
Pro-Kremlin Telegram news outlet Readovka described the public airing of recriminations as “worse than betrayal” and called for an end to the public accusations by “hot heads” and “turbo-patriots,” in a commentary on its Telegram channel.
Ukraine continued on Sunday to push for the release of an official overseeing its Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant who authorities said has been detained by Russia. Fighting in the area around the facility, which is under Russian control but operated by Ukrainian engineers, has triggered concerns about a nuclear accident.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said he had spoken with the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Rafael Grossi, who had told him the IAEA was working to secure the release of Ihor Murashov, the plant’s director.
“I stressed Russia must withdraw troops and military equipment from the station,” Kuleba said in a tweet.
Morgunov reported from Kyiv. Dixon reported from Riga, Lativa. | 2022-10-03T01:20:53Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Zelensky says Lyman in Donetsk is fully liberated - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/02/ukraine-russia-lyman-donbas/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/02/ukraine-russia-lyman-donbas/ |
Tom Stoppard’s ‘Leopoldstadt’ on Broadway is simply devastating
The esteemed playwright writes an epic account of European Jewry in the early 20th century
The Broadway company of Tom Stoppard's “Leopoldstadt,” directed by Patrick Marber. (Joan Marcus)
NEW YORK — I can’t recall the last time I broke down with the brutal release I felt at the conclusion of “Leopoldstadt,” Tom Stoppard’s anguishing portrait of a Viennese Jewish family consumed by the flames of Nazi persecution and mass murder. My response felt entirely emotional — quite a departure for a playwright over whom I’m far more accustomed, in plays such as “Travesties” and “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,” to be left dazzled by Olympic-caliber verbal gymnastics.
I also know from long experience that every Holocaust work ends, spiritually or physically or philosophically, at Auschwitz. But that knowledge — and Stoppard’s immersing an audience in a story whose every plot point essentially has been documented before — did not prevent me from erupting in heaving sobs after 2 hours and 10 minutes in the Longacre Theatre, where the play marked its official opening Sunday night.
Perhaps what moved me so was the pain layered on in delicate brushstrokes in this fictionalized account, which was deeply influenced by Stoppard’s later-in-life discovery of his own Jewish roots. Or maybe it was the breathtaking dexterity of director Patrick Marber’s meticulously acted production, which propels about 30 cast members across more than a half-century of harrowing events. Or it could simply have been the mournful tally of the losses at play’s end, rendered as a roll call of the dead and the manners in which each of their lives ended.
Tom Stoppard at 85: 'Without the writing, life isn't purposeful'
“Suicide,” an actor reports after a character’s name is recited. The litany goes on and on: “Transport ... Dachau ... Death march.” And yes, repeatedly, “Auschwitz.”
I’ve omitted the characters’ names here, because you’ll want to take the full journey with them, knowing and yet not knowing what tragedies await them. Stoppard is endlessly intrigued by questions of fate, chance, coincidence, in history as well as in love, and in “Leopoldstadt,” he examines the unfathomably heartbreaking consequence of an entire people trapped in a common fate and caught between the expectation that things can’t get worse, and the fact that things do.
Jewishness as an inexorable facet of identity — whether it’s embraced, rejected or buried — is a concept aswirl in the intermissionless production. The 85-year-old Stoppard only learned the extent of his own Jewish heritage in midlife; if not an apparently life-changing revelation for him, then certainly as a dramatist of nonpareil curiosity, a natural springboard for elucidation on a stage.
The playwright follows the characters of “Leopoldstadt” through successive generations, starting in 1899 in the household of an affluent Jewish family so comfortably assimilated into Austrian life that it celebrates Christmas. The narrative leaps to the 1920s and the aftershocks of World War I — embodied most potently by Seth Numrich as Jacob, a horribly injured young veteran — and then to the late 1930s, after Hitler annexes Austria and the floor drops out of the family’s hopes. The final movement occurs in 1955, when the handful of family survivors gathers in the looted ancestral home in Vienna; one of them, Leo (the terrific Arty Froushan), who had escaped as a child to a life of privileged bliss in England, is compelled to face the harsh inquiries of two other survivors, Rosa and Nathan (Jenna Augen and Brandon Uranowitz, both superb).
“Being made British was the greatest good fortune that could ever have happened to me,” Leo says, a declaration that speaks to the inscrutable forces that spare some people in the path of annihilation, and condemn others.
In the turn-of-the-20th-century scenes, set designer Richard Hudson creates the sort of luxe environment that envelops the family persuasively in a false sense of permanent security, and costume designer Brigitte Reiffenstuel dresses the ensemble in warmly appealing bourgeois finery. Across the board, the performances earn your compassion — clearly, a family album in which Stoppard wanted us to invest our most profound sympathies.
David Krumholtz, Betsy Aidem, Eden Epstein, Caissie Levy and Sara Topham are among the other actors who expertly bring to life Stoppard’s panoramic survey of lives lived vibrantly, then turned to dust. As in such devastating documents as Anne Frank’s diary and “Schindler’s List,” you can’t help but follow along helplessly, and grieve.
Leopoldstadt, by Tom Stoppard. Directed by Patrick Marber. Sets, Richard Hudson; costumes, Brigitte Reiffenstuel; lighting, Neil Austin; sound and original music, Adam Cork; projections, Isaac Madge. With Betsy Aidem, Faye Castelow, Eden Epstein, Arty Froushan, Aaron Neil, Sara Topham. About 2 hours 10 minutes. At Longacre Theatre, 220 W. 48th St., New York. telecharge.com. 212-239-6200. | 2022-10-03T02:12:19Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Tom Stoppard’s ‘Leopoldstadt’ on Broadway: Simply devastating - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/theater-dance/2022/10/02/tom-stoppard-leopoldstadt/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/theater-dance/2022/10/02/tom-stoppard-leopoldstadt/ |
Wisconsin's Paul Chryst was on the resoundingly losing end of a showdown with Illinois and former Badgers coach Bret Bielema. (AP Photo/Kayla Wolf)
Just under a year ago, Wisconsin gave Paul Chryst a nearly million-dollar raise, and in January he was handed a contract extension.
Things can change quickly in college football, though, and on Sunday, Chryst lost his job coaching the Badgers’ football team.
Chryst, who was in his eighth season with Wisconsin, became the second coach of a Power Five conference team to be fired Sunday, following Colorado’s Karl Dorrell. Wisconsin defensive coordinator Jim Leonhard takes over as interim head coach.
“I also have confidence in Jim Leonhard to guide the program for the remainder of the season,” McIntosh continued. “There is still a lot of season left to play and I know Jim will do a great job while the program is under his leadership.”
Wisconsin made its decision following a 34-10 home loss Saturday to Big Ten rival Illinois, which dropped the Badgers’ record this season to 2-3 and 0-2 in conference play. It was the program’s most lopsided home loss since 2008, and it came against an opponent that hadn’t won in Madison since 2002.
The Illini outgained the Badgers on the ground by an eye-opening 137-2 margin, and possibly adding to the loss’s upsetting nature for the home team was that it came against Illinois Coach Bret Bielema, who held that position at Wisconsin from 2006 to 2012. With 68 wins as the Badgers’ coach, Bielema is second only to Barry Alvarez (118); Chryst departs with a third-best 67 wins against 26 losses.
“Something needs to change because that’s not us,” Wisconsin safety John Torchio had said after Saturday’s defeat. “That’s not the Wisconsin football we all know.”
Leonhard, a former standout safety for the Badgers, said Sunday that he appreciated the “trust” McIntosh had placed in him to “lead our team.”
“I owe a lot to Coach Chryst,” the 39-year-old Leonhard added in a statement. “Everyone in our program does. He gave me my first coaching job, and for that I am forever grateful. As a Badger, I thank him for his impact on our football program and our players over many years.”
A former Wisconsin player in his own right, Chryst took over the program in 2015 after going 19-19 over three seasons at Pittsburgh. Replacing former coach Gary Andersen, who made a sudden departure to Oregon State, Chryst immediately led the Badgers to seasons of 10, 11 and 13 wins, with top-10 rankings in the final AP poll in 2016 and 2017. Wisconsin dipped a bit after that, but Chryst still managed an overall record of 31-16 between 2018 and 2021, including a mark of 9-4 last season.
The 2021 campaign ended with a Las Vegas Bowl win over Arizona State. Now, both Chryst and his counterpart in that contest, Herm Edwards, are no longer with their respective programs. Edwards was let go by Arizona State after starting the 2022 season at 1-2.
Two other Power Five coaches, Nebraska’s Scott Frost and Georgia Tech’s Geoff Collins, have also lost their jobs since the beginning of this season. Chryst started with a win over Illinois State before a 1-3 skid that included a 52-21 thrashing at the hands of Ohio State. | 2022-10-03T02:20:43Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Wisconsin fires coach Paul Chryst after home loss to Illinois, 2-3 start - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/02/paul-chryst-wisconsin/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/02/paul-chryst-wisconsin/ |
Fan dies at Steelers’ stadium after fall from escalator following game
Fans at Pittsburgh's Acrisure Stadium are shown during a September game against New England. (AP Photo/Don Wright)
An attendee at Sunday’s Steelers vs. Jets game died after falling from an escalator inside Pittsburgh’s Acrisure Stadium.
According to Pittsburgh police, the incident occurred at approximately 4:45 p.m., shortly after visiting New York completed a comeback win.
The as-yet-unidentified victim was described as an adult male, who received care from medical personnel at the stadium before being transported to a hospital in critical condition. He was said to have subsequently died of his injuries.
“We are aware of an unfortunate incident that occurred inside Acrisure Stadium today,” the Steelers said in a statement (via the Associated Press). “We are working with local authorities and helping their investigation into the matter. We are sending our thoughts and prayers to the guest’s family.”
The incident remains under investigation by police. | 2022-10-03T02:25:04Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Man dies at Steelers’ Acrisure Stadium after falling from escalator - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/02/fan-dies-escalator-fall-steelers-acrisure-stadium/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/02/fan-dies-escalator-fall-steelers-acrisure-stadium/ |
Woman killed in Fairfax hit-and-run, police say
Pedestrian was struck in Annandale, according to authorities
A female pedestrian was killed Sunday evening in Fairfax County in a hit-and-run, the police said.
A driver struck the woman at Annandale Road and Maple Place in the Annandale area, the police said. Her name and age were not available.
She was taken to the hospital, where she died, they said. Authorities are looking for the vehicle involved in the incident. | 2022-10-03T04:09:50Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Woman killed in Fairfax County hit-and-run, police say - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/02/woman-killed-fairfax-hit-run/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/02/woman-killed-fairfax-hit-run/ |
Officials in Ohio are investigating allegations that the two anglers cheated by adding weights to their entries
Jason Fischer confronts Jacob Runyan with the weights he had just pulled out of a would-be winning entry at the Lake Erie Walleye Trail fishing tournament in Cleveland. (Jimmy Dean)
Jason Fischer knew the two fishermen needed their catch to weigh in at about 16 pounds to secure the team-of-the-year award at a competition in Cleveland on Friday. Eyeballing their entry, the tournament director figured they were about to easily clear that mark with five fish he estimated would come in at about 20 pounds.
When the scale nearly hit 34 pounds, he grew suspicious.
“It just kind of deflated me, because I just knew it wasn’t right,” Fischer, the director and owner of the Lake Erie Walleye Trail fishing tournament, told The Washington Post.
Fischer grabbed one of the fish, ran his hand over its stomach and squeezed. He felt something hard — too hard.
Fischer sliced open the dead walleye and plunged his hand into its flesh. He rooted around until he found what he hoped he wouldn’t find.
“We got weights in fish!” he yelled, holding one of 10 steel-gray, egg-sized weights that would be pulled from the entry.
Then, Fischer disqualified the two-man team that had submitted the entry.
“Get out of here!” he yelled, inserting a curse word as a mob of competitors swarmed, heckled and harangued one of them.
Jacob Runyan and Chase Cominsky would have won Friday’s event, snagging nearly $30,000 in various prizes, if they hadn’t been disqualified. Having won several of the tournament’s other competitions over the past few months, they also would have bagged the Lake Erie Walleye Trail’s overall prize, which Fischer described as “an MVP award.” Instead, their disqualification brought their previous wins into question, sparked an investigation by the Ohio Department of Natural Resources and shined a light on the underbelly of competitive angling, in which tens of thousands of dollars can be at stake even at the amateur level.
Runyan and Cominsky did not respond to requests for comment from The Post.
Tournament organizers contacted the Ohio Department of Natural Resources on Friday, Stephanie O’Grady, a spokeswoman there, said in an email to The Post. Wildlife officers went to the event site, where they collected evidence, and are now working on a report for the Cuyahoga County prosecutor’s office.
“As this is an open investigation, we have no further comment at this time,” O’Grady added.
Chase Parsons, who’s been a professional walleye fisherman for 20 years and stars in the national TV show “The Next Bite,” called the cheating scandal “sickening” and “pathetic.” His group text of people in the industry blew up when news of the scandal broke. Parsons said he and other elite anglers are worried people will assume this kind of cheating is rampant.
“It is absolutely not,” he told The Post, adding that he can count on “very few fingers” the times this kind of cheating has happened. “I don’t think 99.9 percent of anglers would ever dream of trying to do something like this.”
And they couldn’t in a lot of cases, Parsons said. For example, he competes in pro-am tournaments in which he’s randomly paired with an amateur he’s never met, which means they don’t share the years of trust needed to engage in a cheating conspiracy. “You could never get away with even trying to think about something like that.”
The Lake Erie Walleye Trail tournament has been going on for more than 20 years, Fischer said. He started running the competition about four years ago and purchased the tournament from its previous owners in 2020.
The tournament consists of multiple competitions spanning several months, all dotted along the shores of Lake Erie, and Runyan and Cominsky had been lighting it up this year, Fischer said. They won an event in Lorain in June, Ashtabula in July and Geneva in September, Fischer said, and were poised to cap off the tournament by winning the vaunted team-of-the-year award with a good showing at the marquee event in Cleveland.
“A lot of things come to a head here,” Fischer said.
If they had won Friday’s competition, Runyan and Cominsky would have bagged about $28,750 in various prizes. Fischer said he’s not sure what will happen to the tens of thousands of dollars that Runyan and Cominsky have already been awarded this year.
The competition in Cleveland was supposed to last two days but was cut down to just Friday because of bad weather. Fishermen in roughly 65 two-man teams started the day in a specific location on Lake Erie and had eight hours to catch the biggest set of five fish.
That was going to be Runyan and Cominsky, until Fischer pulled 10 weights totaling seven pounds out of their entry, the tournament director said. Plus, Fischer added, he found filets from other fish that had been stuffed down the walleyes’ throats to beef them up. Unlike weights, filets escape the notice of metal detectors.
“It was just simply walleye filets inside of a walleye,” he said.
After Fischer announced he had found weights inside Runyan and Cominsky’s fish, the reaction from their rivals was immediate. Their fellow fishermen swarmed Runyan, while someone asked where Cominsky had gone. Surrounding Runyan, they screamed and swore at him. Fischer said that, after his initial outburst, he found himself worrying about things getting violent.
“I had to stop myself for a second and say, ‘Hey, please, nobody touch these dudes,’ ” he said, adding that the crowd was “wild.”
And Fischer said he understands their rage. They’re part of each other’s lives, a community. They attend each other’s weddings, spend time with each other’s families and help one another when things get bad. When one competitor got cancer recently, several of his buddies raised money for his treatment.
“It’s more of a family,” Fischer said. | 2022-10-03T04:22:56Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Fishing tournament ends in cheating scandal after weights found in walleye - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/10/03/fishing-tournament-cheating-weights-walleye/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/10/03/fishing-tournament-cheating-weights-walleye/ |
She was the first Native American woman to stand onstage at the Oscars and made headlines for calling attention to the historic mistreatment of American Indians
Sacheen Littlefeather appeared at the Academy Awards in 1973 to announce that Marlon Brando was declining the best actor award for his role in “The Godfather.” (AP)
Sacheen Littlefeather, a Native American actress and activist who made Oscars history in 1973, declining the best actor prize on behalf of Marlon Brando and jolting the Academy — and an estimated 85 million television viewers — with her speech condemning the mistreatment of American Indians, died Oct. 2 at home in Marin County, Calif. She was 75.
A family statement said she died peacefully, surrounded by loved ones. It did not list a cause of death. Ms. Littlefeather was diagnosed in 2018 with breast cancer that spread to her right lung, according to an article in A.frame, the digital magazine of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
For decades, the Oscars largely steered clear of politics and social issues, acquiring a reputation as Hollywood’s biggest night while serving as a glitzy showcase for the movies and the people who made them. Ms. Littlefeather’s speech helped change that, ushering in a new era in which actors and filmmakers increasingly used their acceptance speeches to call out injustice, criticize politicians and urge the industry to diversify its ranks and better represent women and people of color.
The 26-year-old Ms. Littlefeather was the first Native American woman to appear onstage at the Oscars, according to the Academy. Addressing the audience in moccasins and a buckskin dress, she explained that Brando, an activist for Native American rights, had written “a very long speech” but that she was unable to deliver it “because of time.” She later said that the show’s producer, Howard W. Koch, had threatened to have her arrested if she spoke for more than a minute.
Onstage, she went on to call out offensive cliches of American Indians perpetuated on film and television, and drew attention to “recent happenings at Wounded Knee,” where a dispute over corruption at the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota led to a standoff with federal authorities.
Her speech was interrupted once by a mix of boos and applause, and she later recalled looking out at the overwhelmingly White audience — “a sea of Clorox,” as she put it — and seeing the tomahawk chop, a racist gesture. By the end of the night, Brando’s front door had been pierced by two bullets, according to Ms. Littlefeather.
Ms. Littlefeather had known Brando for about a year when she stepped onto the stage of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion on his behalf, declining the award he had received for playing Mafia boss Vito Corleone in “The Godfather.”
Waiting in the wings, according to Ms. Littlefeather and Oscars telecast director Marty Pasetta, was western star John Wayne, who allegedly tried to rush onstage and attack Ms. Littlefeather but was held back by six security officers. That account was later dismissed as a Hollywood fable by film historian Farran Smith Nehme and Wayne biographer Scott Eyman, who noted that the actor was in poor health and that the “six security men” were mentioned only years later.
Regardless, the general reaction to Ms. Littlefeather’s remarks was clear from the rest of the ceremony. Presenting the best-actress winner, Raquel Welch quipped, “I hope they haven’t got a cause.” When Clint Eastwood announced best picture, he joked, “I don’t know if I should present this award on behalf of all the cowboys shot in all the John Ford Westerns over the years.”
Within a few days, other Hollywood stars had weighed in as well, dismissing Ms. Littlefeather’s speech as a publicity stunt and chastising Brando for not appearing at the ceremony in person. Rumors proliferated about Ms. Littlefeather, who was said to have been a stripper or a hired actress from Mexico. She went on to appear in a half-dozen movies, with small roles in westerns such as “The Trial of Billy Jack” (1974), but said she was blacklisted — or “redlisted,” as she put it — by Hollywood studios who refused to hire her because of her Oscars appearance.
Native American filmmakers and producers, including Bird Runningwater, also saw Ms. Littlefeather as a trailblazer, a crucial link in a movement toward more sensitive and accurate depictions of Native American life in television shows like “Reservation Dogs” and films such as “Prey.” “The moment we’re having now,” Runningwater told NPR in August 2022, “is something that she and our filmmaking community had always dreamed of 50 years ago.”
In June 2022, then-Academy President David Rubin sent her a “statement of reconciliation,” writing that the harassment and discrimination she had suffered over the years “was unwarranted and unjustified.”
Academy apologizes to Native American woman who declined Brando’s Oscar
“All we were asking, and I was asking, was, ‘Let us be employed. Let us be ourselves. Let us play ourselves in films. Let us be a part of your industry, producing, directing, writing,’ ” she said in an August interview with A.frame about the night she took the Oscars stage. “ ‘Don’t write our stories for us. Let us write our own stories. Let us be who we are.’ ”
She told the Guardian she “was abused and neglected” as a child, and dated her career as an activist to the evening when she saw her father beating her mother and tried to stop the attack by thwacking him with a broom. She ran out of the house and, when her father pursued her in his truck, scampered up a tree.
Ms. Littlefeather was raised primarily by her maternal grandparents, and said she was bullied in school for her dark skin and straight black hair. As a teenager, she attempted suicide and was hospitalized for a year, following a mental breakdown that she attributed to her struggle to reconcile her White and Native American identities.
By her early 20s she had moved to San Francisco and become involved with the American Indian Movement, joining other urban Indians in reconnecting with their ancestry and campaigning for Native American rights. She began using a new name, Sacheen, and supported herself as a model, winning the Miss American Vampire beauty pageant in 1970 as part of a promotion for a Metro-Goldywn-Mayer horror film.
She also appeared in television commercials and was the public service director at a San Francisco radio station. As she told it, she met Brando through her Bay Area neighbor Francis Ford Coppola, the director of “The Godfather,” who promised to pass the actor a letter she had written about his interest in Native American issues. Their relationship culminated in Brando calling her the day before the Oscars to invite her to attend the ceremony on his behalf.
Brando went on to praise her appearance during an interview on “The Dick Cavett Show” — “they should have at least had the courtesy to listen to her,” he said — while Ms. Littlefeather studied at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco. | 2022-10-03T05:54:36Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Sacheen Littlefeather, who declined Brando’s Oscar, dies at 75 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/10/03/oscars-activist-sacheen-littlefeather-dead/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/10/03/oscars-activist-sacheen-littlefeather-dead/ |
WINDSOR, UNITED KINGDOM - SEPTEMBER 19: (EMBARGOED FOR PUBLICATION IN UK NEWSPAPERS UNTIL 24 HOURS AFTER CREATE DATE AND TIME) The Sovereign’s Orb, Sceptre and The Imperial State Crown sit on top of Queen Elizabeth II’s Royal Standard draped coffin at her Committal Service at St George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle on September 19, 2022 in Windsor, England. The committal service at St George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle, took place following the state funeral at Westminster Abbey. A private burial in The King George VI Memorial Chapel followed. Queen Elizabeth II died at Balmoral Castle in Scotland on September 8, 2022, and is succeeded by her eldest son, King Charles III. (Photo by Max Mumby/Indigo/Getty Images) (Photographer: Max Mumby/Indigo/Getty Images Europe)
When the economy tanked after the financial crisis of 2008, the Conservative Party managed to blame, with the help of its cheerleaders in the media, a supposedly wasteful public sector for its banking disaster. The Tories’ rotten economics of “austerity” was always likely to lead to scoundrel politics. And so, as spending cuts stoked mass disaffection, a section of the Tories began, in a desperate bid for fresh political legitimacy, to promote Brexit: a transparently fraudulent attempt to conjure an imaginary “Global Britain” by curtailing immigration and breaking with its immediate neighbors and main trading partners in the European Union.
The industry of demagoguery that sprung up around Brexit polluted British institutions. People around the world watched aghast as a once respectable Conservative Party and mainstream journalists abandoned their scruples. Boris Johnson, a notorious mountebank, was elevated to 10 Downing Street. Finally sunk by the accumulated weight of his own lies, Johnson was replaced by not Rishi Sunak, a sober technocrat, but the darling of the right-wing media, Liz Truss, a self-confessed “thrill seeker” who loves to “embrace chaos.”
This parade of rogues and fantasists through the inner sanctum of British power was briefly obscured by the flawlessly choreographed funeral of Queen Elizabeth II. For a few hours, the world held its breath at the pageantry of an empire on which the sun never used to set. Two weeks later, the funeral suddenly seems the last spectacle of the white-imperialist chic with which Britain has beguiled, for too long, itself and much of the world.
• Confessions of an Accidental Monarchist: Howard Chua-Eoan
• The Monarchy Is the UK’s Most Successful Invention: Martin Ivens | 2022-10-03T05:54:54Z | www.washingtonpost.com | British Bungling Makes It Hard to Be an Anglophile - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/british-bungling-makes-it-hard-to-be-an-anglophile/2022/10/03/60a8e11a-42d8-11ed-be17-89cbe6b8c0a5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/british-bungling-makes-it-hard-to-be-an-anglophile/2022/10/03/60a8e11a-42d8-11ed-be17-89cbe6b8c0a5_story.html |
Europe Can Fight Putin By Capping Gas Prices
Analysis by Kyriakos Mitsotakis | Bloomberg
These prices have helped attract supply into Europe but at an exorbitant cost — we have secured supply but neglected cost. Europe is paying two to three times more for gas than Asian nations. A certain price increase was unavoidable, but Europe’s success in acquiring gas is partly due to the economic slowdown in China. In a typical year, China’s liquefied natural gas imports rise by 25 percent; so far this year, they have fallen by 20 percent. This shift, more than high prices, has allowed Europe to import the gas it needs.
The emerging consensus is converging toward a small set of options. The common denominator is the desire to impose a cap on all gas, not just the small volumes still coming from Russia. The cap should be high enough to act as a circuit breaker but allow market activity at reasonable levels to continue. I have a specific cap in mind, but that figure is the subject of confidential member-state negotiations that I want to respect – so I won’t disclose it here. Still, with high enough prices, suppliers will still send their gas to Europe, and consumers will still have reason to reduce their demand. A cap should be an upward limit on how high prices can go, not an artificially low number that will destabilize markets.
Kyriakos Mitsotakis is the prime minister of Greece. | 2022-10-03T05:55:00Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Europe Can Fight Putin By Capping Gas Prices - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/europe-can-fight-putin-by-capping-gas-prices/2022/10/03/613fe5ec-42d8-11ed-be17-89cbe6b8c0a5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/europe-can-fight-putin-by-capping-gas-prices/2022/10/03/613fe5ec-42d8-11ed-be17-89cbe6b8c0a5_story.html |
Europe Failed Its First Winter Energy Savings Test
If Europe was a school student, last week it sat its first exam in Energy Savings 101. It failed. And that doesn’t bode well for much tougher tests to come in January.
Despite strong imports of liquefied natural gas to replace Russian shipments, Europe needs to reduce gas consumption — by a lot — if it’s going to make it through the winter. Extra supply won’t be enough. Conservation is absolutely paramount.
The exact amount varies from country to country, but on average, the European Commission has suggested a 10%-15% demand reduction. Germany and a few other nations, which in the past relied on Russian gas significantly, need to cut consumption even more, by as much as 20%.
Because these savings targets are fixed, a warmer winter would make conservation a lot easier, a colder one much harder. But irrespective of how harsh the winter gets, Europe needs to consume less gas than it did in 2021 and what it averaged over the last five years.
High prices so far have encouraged industrial firms to reduce consumption. In some cases, particularly in the chemical sector, some companies have simply shut down production. As a result, gas demand across Europe has been running as much as 20% below normal.
Household and small businesses’ gas demand, which in Germany account for about 40% of the country’s consumption, is highly seasonal, with the bulk concentrated during roughly 25 weeks of the heating season, from around Oct. 15 to around March 15. Until now, we didn’t know how households would react, although the assumption was that public messaging about the need to save energy, coupled with higher retail prices, would discourage consumption.
The reality? As the first autumnal cold snap hit the continent, Germans households and small firms, commonly known as the private sector, increased their gas demand 14.5% above the five-year average. Klaus Muller, the German official in charge of monitoring the gas network, called the figures “sobering.”
To be sure, it has been cold: Mean temperatures in northwest Europe fell below the 30-year average. The mean temperature on Thursday was of just 10.5 Celsius, a figure that was not reached last year until mid-October, according to Bloomberg data. And yet, as Muller rightly said, “gas must be saved, even if it gets even colder.” Europe desperately needs a warm winter, but it cannot bank on a mild season similar to last year’s. The region may get lucky, but it will be in serious trouble if it doesn’t. Even an average winter would be problematic.
What’s at stake? “Without significant savings in the private sector, too, it will be difficult to avoid a gas shortage in winter,” says Muller.
In the last four weeks, European governments have intervened to cap utility bills, curbing the price impact, but they haven’t redoubled their public messaging on conservation. Families and small businesses were previously hearing “prices are going to be high and you need to save gas.” Now, they are hearing “the government is capping your bill, so rejoice.” That’s the wrong memo.
The stronger-than-expected gas demand should be a wake up call to European policymakers. The gas market, which runs from Oct. 1 to Sept. 30, entered a new year on Saturday, marking the arrival of winter. It’s time to redouble public campaigns for saving energy with concrete examples of what people must do. Telling couples to take showers together, as a Swiss minister recently suggested is cute, but unserious. The focus should be on bringing down thermostats and the water flow temperature in gas boilers. And encouraging gas-to-oil switching wherever possible, too.
The forecast for this week points to a return of warmer weather. But the current outlook from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecast suggests that October, as a whole, would be largely in line with the 30-year average. By Oct. 25, northwest mean temperatures typically drop below 10 Celsius, increasing heating consumption. So Europe has only a precious few days until then to get the gas-saving message out. It doesn’t want to fail its next exam. | 2022-10-03T05:55:06Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Europe Failed Its First Winter Energy Savings Test - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/europe-failed-its-first-winter-energy-savings-test/2022/10/03/6186b936-42d8-11ed-be17-89cbe6b8c0a5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/europe-failed-its-first-winter-energy-savings-test/2022/10/03/6186b936-42d8-11ed-be17-89cbe6b8c0a5_story.html |
NEW YORK — Alabama reclaimed No. 1 from Georgia in The Associated Press college football poll in one of the closest votes in the recent years, and six teams — including Kansas — made their season debut on Sunday.
MADISON, Wis. — Wisconsin fired head coach Paul Chryst after a 2-3 start to his eighth season leading the school where he played, in the city where he grew up. The surprising move comes a day after Wisconsin lost at home 34-10 to Illinois and former Badgers coach Bret Bielema.
ATLANTA — Dansby Swanson and Matt Olson homered for the third straight game, Travis d’Arnaud hit a go-ahead two-run single in the third inning, and Atlanta Braves beat the New York Mets 5-3, completing a three-game sweep of their NL East rival and taking a two-game lead in the division with three games to play.
SAN DIEGO — The San Diego Padres are going back to the playoffs for the first time in a full season since 2006, a spot that they clinched during the seventh inning of a 2-1 loss to the Chicago White Sox.
GREEN BAY, Wis. — Mason Crosby made a 31-yard field goal as time expired in overtime, and the Green Bay Packers topped the New England Patriots 27-24, spoiling rookie quarterback Bailey Zappe’s NFL debut.
JACKSON, Miss. — Mackenzie Hughes made birdie on his third time playing the 18th hole, and it gave him a playoff victory over Sepp Straka in the Sanderson Farms Championship.
THE COLONY, Texas — Charley Hull put a little extra time into putting practice and it paid off for her in a big way when she ran off four birdies on the back nine for a 7-under 64 to win The Ascendant LPGA.
TALLADEGA, Ala. — Chase Elliott raced his way into the next round of the playoffs with a victory at Talladega Superspeedway in the first clean race yet of this year’s postseason. | 2022-10-03T07:27:04Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Weekend Sports In Brief - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/weekend-sports-in-brief/2022/10/03/912ad77c-42e6-11ed-be17-89cbe6b8c0a5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/weekend-sports-in-brief/2022/10/03/912ad77c-42e6-11ed-be17-89cbe6b8c0a5_story.html |
Ukraine live briefing: Moscow to finalize illegal annexation of Ukrainian regions
Russian President Vladimir Putin, center, with Moscow-appointed officials during a ceremony Friday to sign treaties for their respective Ukrainian regions to join Russia. The officials are, from left, Volodymyr Saldo of Kherson, Yevhen Balytskyi of Zaporizhzhia, Denis Pushilin of Donetsk and Leonid Pasechnik of Luhansk. (Mikhail Metzel/Sputnik/Kremlin Pool/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock)
Russian lawmakers are poised to finalize the illegal takeover of four Ukrainian regions this week, with annexation documents expected to pass through both houses of Russia’s rubber-stamp parliament Monday and Tuesday.
Ukraine on Sunday celebrated the retaking of Lyman, saying the key logistics hub in the Donetsk region was completely “cleared of the Russian occupiers” as of midday local time. Russian forces’ retreat from Lyman and other recent setbacks have led to unusually open criticism of the Russian military on hard-line pro-Kremlin Telegram channels.
Russia’s so-called treaties on annexation are expected to pass this week. Both houses of Russia’s parliament are expected to approve the documents Monday and Tuesday, after which Russia will consider the annexation of Zaporizhzhia, Kherson, Donetsk and Luhansk to be complete. Western leaders have referred to last month’s orchestrated annexation vote as a “sham.”
Annexation means Donetsk and Luhansk forces would be incorporated into the Russian military, the Russian ruble would be introduced, and Ukrainians could become Russian citizens, after an oath of loyalty to Russia, said Pavel Krasheninnikov, the chairman of the State Duma committee on construction and legislation. Prosecutors would be appointed and Russia’s judicial system would be imposed, he said.
The town of Lyman, which Russian troops used as a key logistics hub in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region since their arrival this spring, was completely “cleared of the Russian occupiers” as of midday local time, the Defense Ministry said on Twitter. In his nightly address, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said the “successes of our soldiers are not limited to Lyman,” referencing other liberated settlements without naming them. Western military leaders and analysts said Russia’s retreat showed how weak the Kremlin’s forces are, and underscored that Russia is destined to fail in Ukraine.
Russian officials are probably struggling to provide training and find officers to lead new units amid Russian President Vladimir Putin’s partial mobilization, the British Defense Ministry said Monday in a Twitter update, noting dysfunction in the effort’s first week. “Local officials are likely unclear on the exact scope and legal rationale of the campaign,” it said.
Rockets struck the city of Zaporizhzhia and two nearby villages early Monday, the regional governor, Oleksandr Starukh, reported on Telegram. The strikes damaged infrastructure facilities, he said, and injured one person.
U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin on Sunday cautioned Russia against following through with escalatory nuclear threats, which he said were “irresponsible.” “Nuclear saber-rattling is not the kind of thing that we would expect to hear from leaders of large countries with capability,” he said on CNN. Austin said he expected Ukrainian forces to continue their counteroffensive to attempt to regain all of their country’s territory. “I don’t think that’s going to stop, and we will continue to support them in their efforts,” he said.
Pro-Kremlin proxies and propagandists are becoming increasingly vocal in their criticism of Russia’s military in the wake of its retreat from Lyman. Some are blaming the setbacks on Russian military failures to properly supply and reinforce troops, the Institute for the Study of War, a D.C. think tank, wrote in its latest update, and they no longer conceal their disappointment with the conduct of the partial mobilization.
About 150 Ukrainian schools have been destroyed and 900 damaged, first lady Olena Zelenska said in an interview with “60 Minutes” that aired Sunday. “Around 3,500 schools will operate online only, because schools cannot receive students and because their parents are afraid to send their children to school,” Zelenska said, adding: “We will not give our children up. I don’t know how we can forgive this. I don’t think we will.”
In a joint statement, the leaders of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Poland, the Czech Republic, North Macedonia, Montenegro and Slovakia on Sunday condemned Putin’s annexation, saying that they could not “stay silent in the face of the blatant violation of international law,” and that they would never recognize Russian attempts to annex Ukrainian territory.
Authorities called for Russian forces to release the director of the Zaporizhzhia power plant, Europe’s largest nuclear facility. Igor Murashov’s detention is “frank Russian terror, for which the terrorist state must bear an ever-increasing punishment,” Zelensky said in his Sunday night address. Earlier, the Institute for the Study of War called Murashov’s detention a sign that “Russia is likely setting conditions to assume legal responsibility” for the plant.
Pope Francis appealed to Putin directly on Sunday, imploring him to “stop this spiral of violence and death” for the sake of humanity and his own people. At the same time, he urged Zelensky to “be open to serious proposals for peace.” The leader of the Roman Catholic Church said in his Sunday address that the staged referendums and annexation declarations in recent days had increased “the risk of nuclear escalation.”
Putin overruled his top security service in prisoner swap with Ukraine. A prisoner swap between Russia and Ukraine in late September was approved by Russian President Vladimir Putin over the objections of his top security service, the FSB, which had concerns about a public backlash in Russia, according to senior Ukrainian and U.S. officials familiar with the matter.
The lopsided numbers in the exchange — almost four times as many Ukrainians released as Russians, John Hudson and Isabelle Khurshudyan report — and the type of Ukrainian soldiers involved, 108 from the Azov Regiment, concerned Russia’s Federal Security Service, the officials said. | 2022-10-03T07:27:10Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Russia-Ukraine war latest updates - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/03/russia-ukraine-war-latest-updates/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/03/russia-ukraine-war-latest-updates/ |
British Chancellor of the Exchequer Kwasi Kwarteng reacts during a television interview at Britain's Conservative Party's annual conference in Birmingham, Britain, Monday. (Toby Melville/Reuters)
LONDON — The British government said “we get it” as it abandoned plans to abolish the top rate of income tax for its highest earners, a key part of its centerpiece economic plans that spooked the markets and saw the British pound slump to an all-time low against the U.S. dollar.
In a major U-turn for the British government, Prime Minister Liz Truss said on Monday that the proposed scrapping of the 45 percent rate for those earning more than 150,000 pounds ($167,000) had become a “distraction.”
Kwasi Kwarteng, the new chancellor, issued a similar statement, saying: “We get it, and we have listened.”
Truss’s government unveiled its hugely controversial economic plan in a “mini-budget” on Sept. 23 that would see the U.K. borrowing billions to pay for tax cuts and spending to insulate consumers from soaring energy bills.
The Conservative Party’s polls dropped, too. In one eye-watering poll by YouGov, the Conservatives were down 33 percentage points against the opposition Labour Party, a gap not seen since the 1990s. | 2022-10-03T07:27:16Z | www.washingtonpost.com | U.K. Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng backtracks on 45 percent tax rate cut - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/03/uk-kwarteng-45p-tax-cut-reverse/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/03/uk-kwarteng-45p-tax-cut-reverse/ |
When Hurricane Ian hit Florida, Johnny Lauder rescued his mother, Karen, from her flooding home in Naples. (Johnny Lauder)
As Hurricane Ian battered Florida last week, leaving neighborhoods in Naples looking like they had been swallowed by a river, Johnny Lauder dove into the murky, debris-filled waters that others were trying to escape.
The 49-year-old was on a mission to save his 84-year-old mother, who uses a wheelchair. She lives a few blocks away and had made a panicked call on Wednesday as the water rushing into her house reached her chest.
“If I would’ve waited, she wouldn’t be here,” Lauder told The Washington Post. “And that’s my mom. I would’ve done it for anybody’s mom or anyone else in that situation. You know, that’s what you’re supposed to do.”
Forecasts had initially predicted the hurricane would hit the Tampa Bay area, but on Tuesday afternoon, its track veered south. The next day, it became one of the most powerful hurricanes to strike the country in decades, making landfall in southwest Florida as a Category 4 storm.
Naples faced a ferocious storm surge that swamped houses, knocked down power lines and “left the downtown area looking like Atlantis,” Lauder said. Under those conditions, the former Chicago police officer and rescue diver said he was prepared to do anything to save his mother, Karen, whose legs are amputated.
Lauder, his mom and his son all have homes in the same Naples community. They had chosen not to evacuate and did their best to prepare before Ian hit. Once it did, Lauder stayed at his son’s place. His mother stayed home, as she’d insisted.
“She’s a very stubborn 84-year-old woman,” Lauder said. “And she said, ‘You’re not taking me anywhere. I won’t have any privacy. I’m staying home.’ ”
When Ian first arrived, things didn’t seem that bad, he said. But then Lauder took a peek out the windows, and “it was like looking into an aquarium.” The water soon began gushing inside and rising quickly. Lauder’s two sons, his son’s girlfriend and their animals took refuge in the attic. Then he got the call from his mother.
“That’s when I knew I had to bounce,” Lauder said. “So I jumped out of the window and began wading through the water.”
Outside, the signs of destruction were everywhere — power lines were bent, cars were swept away and a hodgepodge of household items was washed up by the surge. But there were also signs that gave Lauder hope, like a caterpillar that managed to cling to his hat and a kneeboard that seemed to appear out of nowhere.
“It was like an act of God when the kneeboard just floated in front of me,” he said. “There was nothing on the street and it just appeared, like, ‘Wow, okay, someone’s looking out for me.’ ”
He powered through the half-mile journey in neck-deep, fast-moving water until he finally reached his mom.
“She was the happiest she’s ever been to see me,” Lauder said.
The house looked like a fishbowl. The water was over four feet deep, with furniture, papers and mementos floating all around Lauder’s mother, who was drenched and “shaking like a Chihuahua.” After Lauder wrapped her in a set of dry sheets, he stacked some tables on top of each other, and the two waited inside for the water to recede — by that time, Lauder’s youngest son arrived to help pull Karen out of her flooded house.
The three began making their way back to Lauder’s son’s home. But as they were about to leave his mother’s residence, they realized one of Karen’s neighbors needed help. As the sky began to darken, Lauder’s son pushed his grandmother’s wheelchair through the water — which was now below his waist — while Lauder carried the other woman to a hotel.
They were safe.
Recovery operations continue in Florida, where state officials said Sunday that at least 58 people — many older than 60 — had died in the storm. In Naples, Lauder’s family lost two homes, almost all of the belongings inside of them and their cars. He’s living with his son until he can find a new place. His mother will join them once she’s out of the hospital, where she’s being treated for infected wounds she got from the bacteria-ridden water.
But Lauder said everything that was lost could be replaced.
“I have my mom, my sons and my job. So I still have my hope,” he said.
The outpouring of support from the community also keeps him going. His sister-in-law, who lives in Miami, organized a GoFundMe account that has raised over $3,400 to help the family start from scratch. Every day, people — many of whom are in similarly devastating situations — show “all sorts of acts of kindness,” Lauder said.
“It sucks that it sometimes takes a natural disaster to make us actually start helping each other,” he said. “But I think these hard times sometimes bring out the best in people.”
During the next hurricane, however, he won’t be around to dive into the water. “I’m going to leave early and make it a vacation with my family,” he said.
“Please heed the warnings,” he said. “I’d still save my mother all over again, but it’s definitely better to not stick around.” | 2022-10-03T08:44:49Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Man saves mother from flooding house in Naples during Hurricane Ian - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/10/03/rescue-mother-flood-hurricane-ian/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/10/03/rescue-mother-flood-hurricane-ian/ |
Arema FC players and officials pay respects Monday to victims of a stampede at a soccer match in Malang, Indonesia. (Mast Irham/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)
MEDAN, Indonesia — As hospitals and mosques in Malang, Indonesia, work to identify victims of Saturday’s stadium stampede, anger is mounting toward police and the role they might have played in the deadly disaster — particularly against the scandal-ridden National Police force.
On Saturday night, after the final whistle at a soccer match at the Kanjuruhan Stadium in Malang, fans from the losing team, Arema FC, leaped over barriers and entered the field, prompting security personnel to beat them back. Riot police in helmets and shields eventually fired canisters of tear gas directly into tightly packed stands, fueling mass panic.
As of Monday morning, local health officials said at least 125 people, including 17 children, were killed while trying to escape through the stadium’s narrow exits, some of which were closed, according to survivors. An additional 44 spectators were injured.
Nico Afinta, the police chief in East Java, where Malang is located, said officers used tear gas because “there was anarchy” and because Arema supporters “were about to attack the officers.” But witness testimonies, along with videos from the event that have been widely shared among Indonesian users on social media, dispute his account.
The police department’s narrative has made relatives of those who died in the stampede feel “re-victimized,” said Usman Hamid, executive director of Amnesty International’s Indonesia office.
“First, their family members died. Now police is trying to blame their loved ones for it,” said Hamid, adding that Amnesty has received dozens of messages from angry, grieving families.
Hundreds gathered for vigils and protests Sunday night in Malang, many of them calling for the government to launch an independent investigation into what happened.
“The biggest question that everyone has is ‘why?’ ” said Yandi Hartantyo, 45, a radio journalist who was sitting in the stadium’s media box when officers began to fire tear gas. “I cannot understand why tear gas was being fired at the spectators in the stands. I have no idea why they did this.”
Mohammad Mahfud Mahmodin, Indonesia’s chief security officer, said Monday that he will launch an independent inquiry, investigating whether laws were broken and what measures can be taken to prevent similar disasters. The inquiry will be led by “officials or representatives of the relevant ministries, professional soccer organizations, experts, academics and mass media,” he said, and last about two weeks.
Hamid, the Amnesty director, said he welcomed the move but thinks the credibility of the investigation will hinge on who is allowed to participate, as well as the mandate that investigators will have.
“What has been done by the police … has to be under strict and strong scrutiny,” he said.
Listyo Sigit Prabowo, chief of the Indonesian National Police, did not respond to requests for comment.
Inside the push to tear-gas protesters ahead of a Trump photo op
Jacqui Baker, a lecturer at Australia’s Murdoch University who studies policing in Southeast Asia, said that based on what she has learned about what happened at Kanjuruhan, police overreacted to the post-match commotion. This was not a situation that warranted the use of tear gas, she added.
“This is not to dismiss the serious threats [the police] may have faced,” Baker said, noting that there were two officers among the dead. “But this should not have been an unfamiliar situation for the police, and they should have been prepared.”
Baker said there appear to have been a range of security forces at the stadium, including the local Malang police, members of the Indonesian military and the Mobile Brigade Corps — also known as Brimob — a paramilitary wing of the Indonesian National Police that has often been accused of using excessive force.
“There are a lot of different parties here with blood on their hands,” Baker said.
The Indonesian National Police has struggled for decades to rid itself of allegations of corruption and brutality.
In recent months, the force has come under particularly intense scrutiny following the killing of a 28-year-old officer, Nopryansyah Yosua Hutabarat, who worked as the bodyguard and personal driver of Inspector General Ferdy Sambo, head of internal affairs for the force and a two-star general.
Hutabarat, also known as known as Brigadier J, was found dead at Sambo’s home in Jakarta in July. The general was arrested as a suspect following weeks of fevered speculation, and more than 80 officers from different branches of the police have since been questioned about their involvement in covering up the incident. Sambo was dishonorably discharged in September for his part in the scandal — widely considered one of the worst cases of police corruption in Indonesia’s history.
Like the Brigadier J scandal, the incident at Kanjuruhan Stadium is “another nail in the coffin of the failure of police reform in Indonesia,” Baker said.
“In the absence of police reform,” she continued, Indonesia has “a broken police force.”
Tan reported from Singapore. Winda Charmila in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and Adi Renaldi in Jakarta, Indonesia, contributed to this report. | 2022-10-03T10:12:06Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Anger mounts toward police in Indonesia soccer stadium tragedy - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/03/indonesia-soccer-stadium-death-police-gas/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/03/indonesia-soccer-stadium-death-police-gas/ |
Friends celebrate a birthday while their kids are in school at the Bristol Casino, future site of Hard Rock Hotel and Casino in Bristol, Va. (Mike Belleme for The Washington Post)
BRISTOL, Va. — Sonya Ratliff and about a dozen friends put on sparkly clothes and left early on a Tuesday morning to celebrate another mom’s birthday. In years past, that might have meant brunch.
Now, in this Bible Belt town on the edge of the Appalachian Mountains, it means slot machines, blackjack and other games of chance at the newly opened Bristol Casino.
How long would the women gamble? “Until we have to pick up our kids from school,” Ratliff, 42, said to roars of laughter from her friends gathered around a roulette table.
Since July 8, Virginia’s first casino has been doing big business in a former abandoned shopping mall near the Tennessee line. More than 25,000 people from 49 states visited in just the first three weeks of operation, raising visions of economic salvation in a city that’s been desperate for it.
“It’s going to be phenomenal — I’m beyond thrilled,” said Karen Hester, a local retailer who has been investing in downtown Bristol for years in hopes of a turnaround. She’s already adding employees to her food and gift shops as sales tick up, she said.
Virginia resisted the lure of casino gaming for decades before the General Assembly voted in 2020 to authorize a handful of cities to roll the dice. Bristol launched first, though the shopping-mall version is a fraction of the $400 million Hard Rock Casino and hotel that’s slated to debut on the site in 2024.
The state’s three other projects are in varying stages of completion: Rivers Casino in Portsmouth is slated to open in February 2023; HeadWaters Resort and Casino in Norfolk expects to open a temporary facility next year, with completion of the permanent one in mid-2024; and Caesars Danville is scheduled for late 2024.
Virginia cities hope to cash in after voters approved casino measures
All of those places hope casinos will jump-start the local economy, but Bristol’s situation is unique: The gambling tax revenue won’t just stay in the host city but will be evenly divided among the 14 cities and counties of southwest Virginia.
It’s a high-stakes bet on behalf of one of the poorest regions of the state. The coal jobs that built southwest Virginia are mostly gone, and the population is aging and declining. Could the flash of a slot machine be the light at the end of the tunnel?
“You’re going to have a steady source of revenue coming in on an annual basis … It’s very much needed,” said Fred L. Ramey Jr., city manager of the city of Norton, farther out in coal country. “I think it will be a big deal for many of our communities down here.”
Compared with the high-profile perch of Maryland’s MGM National Harbor casino just outside the nation’s capitol, Bristol seems like a humble place for high-rollers. Some six hours from D.C., Bristol has a poverty rate of 22 percent — more than double that of Virginia as a whole, according to 2020 U.S. Census data. The city’s median household income is about $39,700, compared with $76,400 statewide.
Two cities share a name, water and a library. But one is in big trouble.
But Bristol has roots as an entertainment hub, ever since the Carter family came down from the mountains and made the first popular country music recordings there in 1927. And it is really two cities — one in Virginia, the other in Tennessee, facing each other downtown along State Street.
The southern side is more of an economic powerhouse. Tennessee’s Bristol Motor Speedway is one of the biggest sports venues in the country, with a capacity of more than 150,000 spectators. A bustling commercial center called the Pinnacle lines Interstate 81 in, Bristol, Tenn., with shops, restaurants and hotels.
Virginia’s Bristol, meanwhile, has struggled to get tenants in a publicly funded roadside retail development called the Falls. The city’s landfill is a major environmental hazard, and the municipal budget is wheezing under about $107 million in public debt.
When the Bristol Mall closed in 2017, it was yet another indignity for local residents. For a time, the city put its hopes in a medical cannabis facility that was going to locate in the mall’s shell and generate new jobs.
But then local entrepreneur Jim McGlothlin, who made a fortune in the coal industry, and developer Clyde Stacy came forward with the idea of turning the mall into a casino. In an interview with a local television station, McGlothlin acknowledged the unlikeliness of the proposal, which he said was Stacy’s brainstorm.
“That’s something we never, ever thought about, but instantly I saw the real opportunity to have a business that would make sense and to take Bristol from where it is today to a big-time success,” McGlothlin said. “If this works, we’re going to bring so many jobs to Bristol.”
The developers proposed sharing tax revenue with the region to build political support, which “allowed us to work together as one cohesive unit in Richmond to pass the legislation,” Bristol City Manager Randall Eads said.
Once the General Assembly gave the green light, the proposal had to be put to Bristol voters in a referendum in 2020. A handful of local churches opposed it, using billboards and a rally to make a biblical case against gambling as having “the same life-wrecking potential as cocaine,” according to a flier mailed out to residents.
But 71 percent of voters approved the casino, the most support of any Virginia city considering gaming that year. Residents were “overwhelmingly” hungry for economic development, Eads said. “That quieted down any critics.”
Two of the pastors who led the campaign against the casino did not respond to requests for comment for this article.
With the mall already in place, Hard Rock decided to renovate part of it and open a temporary, 30,000-square-foot facility right away as the full project takes shape around it.
“It’s great to be first in Virginia,” said Allie Evangelista, president of the Bristol Casino. Getting the jump on others is good for competitive purposes, she said, and allows Hard Rock to do the hiring and training necessary to build a local workforce from scratch.
About 93 percent of the 600 workers at the temporary facility are local, said Marc DeLeo, vice president of marketing. The customer base is largely local as well, with about 60 percent from Tennessee, 24 percent from Virginia and maybe 6 percent from North Carolina, DeLeo said. He and Evangelista expect little impact once the rest of the state’s casinos open; the nearest will be Danville, some three and a half hours away.
The numbers so far from the small temporary casino have been eye-opening. In August, the Bristol Casino generated almost $14.3 million in revenue. That produced more than $2.5 million in taxes, of which more than $850,000 goes to the Regional Improvement Commission formed to handle proceeds for the 14 jurisdictions in southwest Virginia.
Each county or city has a representative on the commission, which is in the process of setting up a bank account and other mechanisms to administer the funding. Payments will go out to the localities once a year, beginning next year.
At the current rate, that could mean roughly $750,000 per locality — more when the full casino opens.
In Norton, which has an annual budget of around $10 million, the payments will “allow our community to focus on some capital projects we really haven’t been able to do in the past,” said Ramey, the city manager. Those could include new firetrucks, road improvements or police equipment.
Bristol has similar plans — state law requires that the money be used for education, transportation and public safety — and Eads hopes it will give the city breathing space to pay down its debt. On top of the gambling tax revenue, Bristol expects to see increases in revenue from sales, meals and lodging taxes.
So far, Eads said, city police have reported no incidents tied to the casino. He emphasized that he’s taking a conservative approach, not building any miracles into the budget, unwilling to pin all the city’s hopes on one development. After all, casinos have a spotty record as the anchor for a thriving community (Exhibit A: Atlantic City).
But Eads stressed that the region’s plight makes it appropriate to take a bit of a gamble. “What’s going to happen in southwest Virginia if you don’t get the population to come back and get some kind of industry? It’s bad, if you don’t do something different,” he said.
Eads is especially hopeful about the jobs the casino is bringing — some 1,200, once the full facility opens, with entry-level positions starting at $18 an hour.
The casino has also made a priority of involving local merchants and suppliers for its restaurants and souvenir shop. Hester, the downtown business executive, owns a candy and ice cream store called Southern Churn that’s now supplying fudge to four different Hard Rock casinos. She’s hired staff and bought a new vat to handle the demand.
‘Boring’ no more? Virginia has already begun embracing casino-style gaming.
Hard Rock executives have stayed in some of the loft apartments she renovated in old buildings downtown, Hester said, and the casino sells items from her Cranberry Lane gift shop.
“It’s like an anchor, an economic driver [that] … adds a different layer of excitement for people,” said Beth Rhinehart, president of the local Chamber of Commerce. Initially, she said, some in the community were worried that the casino might draw traffic away from downtown or drive up wages to a level at which others couldn’t compete.
But the performance so far has put those fears to rest, she said. “It’s been a good partner, a fit for the assets we already have.” And when it comes down to it, Rhinehart added, “if we really want our young people to stay here, to choose to live here, there has to be a job here for them.”
The positions can be transformative for someone like Sierra Hill, 29, a single mother raising an 8-year-old daughter. Hill worked a long list of jobs in construction, plumbing and residential and commercial cleaning around Bristol, never earning more than $12 an hour, never getting health benefits, she said.
Earlier this year she landed a spot on the cleanup crew at the casino, with health coverage and a 401(k) plan. She had lost her subsidized apartment over the summer, but now she’s staying with a friend and saving up to buy a home.
“I couldn’t even tell you the excitement,” she said. “It has literally been such a blessing.” When the fair came to town last week, Hill took her daughter and splurged on face painting and tickets for rides.
Her grandparents, she said, initially opposed the casino. Now they’ve taken the sign out of their yard. “They’re happy that I’m happy,” she said.
Tabitha Whitesides, 43, grabbed a few minutes at lunchtime on a recent weekday to bring her daughter Kalyn for a quick look at the casino. Walking up to what had been the doors to the shopping mall was a surreal experience.
“This is where the Piccadilly cafeteria used to be, right?” Kalyn asked.
“No, that was that entrance right over there. This was Belk,” Tabitha said.
Both had been sad to see the mall die. “When I was running around out here it was an exciting, fun place to be. It’s where everybody was on Friday and Saturday night,” the mother said.
Having it reborn as a casino is “pretty cool,” Kalyn said. Like many other locals who visited, they were excited to go inside and see a sentimental landmark: several walls covered with colorful tiles that had been painted by local schoolchildren some 25 years ago, preserved by the casino next to its sports bar.
That seemingly minor touch has endeared the project to many local residents. “The tiles were beautiful,” said David Hoelscher, 58, a retired chef from Bristol, Tenn.
Hoelscher’s father used to run the Piccadilly, and the son started washing dishes there at age 14. Now he was thrilled to see the mall get new life as a casino — which he has visited “once with my wife’s permission and about six, seven times without it.”
Until it opened, the nearest place he could play legal blackjack was the casino in Cherokee, N.C., about two and a half hours south. Tennessee does not allow casino gaming, and Hoelscher said he knew some people were against the idea in Virginia, as well.
“Everybody thought it would bring in a bad element,” he said. “And it still might, we don’t know. We’re still new to this.”
For now, he’s enjoying the diversion and looking forward to the day when heroes like Hank Williams Jr. can perform concerts there. With that, Hoelscher headed for the doors. He only had an hour for blackjack before he had to pick up his grandson. | 2022-10-03T10:16:28Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Coal jobs are almost gone. Could a casino help rescue southwest Virginia? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/03/bristol-casino-hard-rock-virginia/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/03/bristol-casino-hard-rock-virginia/ |
Stewart Rhodes, founder of the Oath Keepers, has been charged with seditious conspiracy. (Susan Walsh/AP)
Stewart Rhodes is on trial in federal court in Washington along with four people described by prosecutors as “top lieutenants” in the militia-movement group he founded, the Oath Keepers. Rhodes is the highest-profile defendant charged so far in the investigation into the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol and is accused of steering a months-long effort to prevent by force the swearing-in of President Biden. Rhodes is among 14 fighting the historically rare charge of seditious conspiracy in what the government has called one of the largest investigations in U.S. history.
Which Oath Keepers are facing trial, when and why?
What do we expect or hope to learn from the trial?
What connection is there to former president Donald Trump?
What is the Insurrection Act and why does it matter? | 2022-10-03T10:16:41Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Who are the Oath Keepers? What to know as Stewart Rhodes goes to trial - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/03/oath-keepers-trial-stewart-rhodes-faq/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/03/oath-keepers-trial-stewart-rhodes-faq/ |
Would you buy a $400 Marvel action figure? Thousands of people can’t wait.
A monstrous 32-inch-tall plastic Galactus could point the way to the future of superhero toys
Hasbro's largest Marvel action figure was crowdfunded with more than 30,000 backers. (Hasbro)
In comic books, Galactus is known as the devourer of worlds. When it comes to action figures, Galactus is now the destroyer of wallets.
Hasbro decided that its newest figure depicting the giant planet eater from Marvel’s Fantastic Four wouldn’t be the typical six-inch toy that retails in the $20 to $30 range and decorates work desks and bookshelves. This Galactus, with a design based on the art of famed Marvel writer-artist John Byrne, would be a towering 32-inch-tall monstrosity of plastic articulation. The figure, scheduled for release some time this fall, is the biggest toy Hasbro has ever built for its Marvel line, which is fitting, given Galactus’s gigantic stature.
The price for such oversize ambition? $399.99.
How do you know whether a fan base will step up to luxury-level action-figure pricing? Hasbro’s answer is to crowdfund in advance to gauge interest, as part of the toy maker’s HasLab series, which started in 2018 and is aimed at creating dream-scenario action figures not available in stores.
A product is presented online for fans, who then have 45 days to pledge the full price. If the goal number of backers is reached, those backers are charged, and the toy goes into production. If not, the toy doesn’t go into production, no one is charged and it’s back to the drawing board.
“We are very aware that money is very precious, and things can be tight. And while these items might not be for everybody, we hope they are accessible for anybody and everybody who has the opportunity to save up for them,” said Dwight Stall, the principal product designer for Hasbro’s Marvel team. “We thought [32 inches] was a really strong size that you could still manipulate and get in and play with it, and it wouldn’t be too [overbearing] for the user. But it would still look massive and powerful on your shelf to tower over all your action figures.”
A superhero action figure approaching half a grand or more isn’t an anomaly. Hong Kong action figure maker Hot Toys has a highly detailed Iron Man figure based off the character’s movie appearances that cost over $400. A Wolverine statue from Sideshow Collectibles costs $575. Name-brand recognition and a promise of greater detail in design contribute to those prices. So Hasbro knows when it goes bigger in size and price, it isn’t alone — and its crowdfunding model allows the toy maker to be imaginative with its ideas and test the pulse of its fandom, who will always have the final word.
The Galactus figure’s call for backers came in summer 2021, with a goal of achieving 14,000 of them, a number it didn’t reach until its 40th day of fundraising. But in the final five days, something unusual happened: The number of backers doubled. The final total: 30,811. Figures will ship out to backers later this fall, but that hasn’t stopped some from already offering Galactus on eBay starting at prices as high as $790.
Ryan Ting, Hasbro’s senior manager of global brand development and marketing for the Marvel Legends line, refers to the surge of support as FOMO (fear of missing out). A section of fans was not ready to commit unless they knew the toy was going to be made, but when they saw the figure would go into production, they jumped at the chance to get it.
“The whole premise of the HasLab model is that we build to order,” Ting said. “Once the campaign is closed, it’s not available for sale later on. Fans who missed out have no other choice but to go to the secondary market.”
The voracious appetite for Baby Yoda toys
The HasLab’s first attempt to go big with Marvel was in 2020, when it announced the crowdfunding of a 26-inch Sentinel action figure. The characters — robotic mutant hunters from the world of Marvel’s X-Men — are known for being gigantic, and served as a litmus test of sorts to see whether Hasbro’s fandom would take to such a large action figure with an even larger price tag. The Sentinel needed 6,000 backers minimum, and in 45 days gained almost 22,000 pledging the full price of $349.99. The Sentinel figures shipped the next year.
“For us, the natural progression was going from something from the X-Men universe with the Sentinel to what’s even bigger, what’s even badder, and that was the Fantastic Four’s Galactus,” Stall said.
Hasbro isn’t stopping there. The next HasLab is now live online, featuring a six-inch Robbie Reyes version of Ghost Rider, with a flamed-out muscle car almost 19 inches long, for $349.99. It’s already amassed more than half of its needed 9,000 backers, with around a month left of fundraising to go.
“I think we’ve definitely seen that over the last couple of years that people aren’t afraid to spend money for something that is really a centerpiece in their collection,” Ting said. | 2022-10-03T10:29:40Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Marvel's $400 Galactus action figure could be the future of superhero toys - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/comics/2022/10/03/galactus-hasbro-marvel-action-figure/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/comics/2022/10/03/galactus-hasbro-marvel-action-figure/ |
The Nobel in medicine awarded to Svante Pääbo for discoveries on human evolution
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded Monday. (Jonathan Nackstrand/AFP via Getty Images)
Pääbo, an evolutionary geneticist at Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, did groundbreaking work to sequence the genome of long-extinct Neanderthals, showing that they interbred with prehistoric humans.
Before Pääbo’s contributions, scientists studied ancient bones and artifacts to understand human ancestors. His work has established a new field of science, paleogenomics, that uses DNA analysis to probe questions about human origins. | 2022-10-03T10:29:55Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The Nobel in medicine awarded to Svante Pääbo for discoveries on human evolution - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/10/03/nobel-prize-medicine-svante-pbo/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/10/03/nobel-prize-medicine-svante-pbo/ |
The one point abortion rights activists need to keep making
Nobody should be forced to sacrifice their body.
Abortion rights demonstrators hold signs as they protest near the Supreme Court building in June. (Eric Lee/For The Washington Post)
Last month, in Atlanta, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams told the audience attending her panel discussion that “there is no such thing as a heartbeat at six weeks. It is a manufactured sound designed to convince people that men have the right to take control of a woman’s body.”
Her remark became a thing, and it’s not hard to see why. Abortion arguments often coalesce around the question of heartbeats. If you’re antiabortion, then you might be deeply invested in the idea that embryos have signs of life at a few weeks’ development. Conversely, if you support abortion rights, then you’ll want to make Abrams’s argument: Embryos at this stage might show “cardiac activity,” but not a heartbeat. What a patient hears at the doctor’s office is actually the electrical impulses of pre-heart infrastructure, translated into sound by a sonography machine. A genuine heartbeat doesn’t appear until around week 10.
And this is where the abortion debates have landed, three months after the fall of Roe v. Wade. Quibbling over terminology, hairsplitting the medicine, trying to litigate when life begins — a question that science and spirituality haven’t even begun to sort out. We’re in the weeds.
We need to get out of the weeds.
I will happily accept any sound science that keeps abortion legal, but Embryos don’t technically have heartbeats is not the most compelling point to make in discussions about abortion rights. (When I had my emotional seven-week sonogram for my now-daughter, after multiple early miscarriages, I did not tearfully exclaim, “listen to that pre-heart infrastructure!”) Nor is Can we at least agree on rape and incest exceptions? Nor the arguments about whether abortion patients regret ending their pregnancies (even though, overwhelmingly, they don’t), or about whether abortion is dangerous (even though, overwhelmingly, it isn’t).
The point to begin with is this: Regardless of when life begins, in the United States, nobody can force you to donate your own body to save another person. Even if you are physically capable of doing so. Even if that person will die.
The United States does not require you to donate your kidney or liver to a person in need of a transplant, even if you are a perfect match. If the president himself was going to perish unless he was surgically attached to a citizen’s abdomen for nine months, nobody could force that citizen to agree to this assignment. You might argue that agreeing would be the noble thing or the moral thing or the humane thing, but it would not be a compulsory thing.
It wouldn’t be compulsory even if we were talking not about a president but about a child.
The philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson, in 1971, put forth the most famous version of this argument as it related to abortion: Imagine that a woman woke in bed intravenously hooked up to a famous violinist, Thomson wrote in her seminal and controversial essay, “A Defense of Abortion.” The musician in this scenario suffered from a rare medical ailment, and only this woman’s circulatory system could keep him alive. His survival requires her to sacrifice her own bodily autonomy. Must she? Is she a murderer if she does not?
Detractors of Thomson’s argument pointed out the obvious differences between a famous violinist and an unborn fetus: The woman did not choose to be hooked up to the violinist, whereas she did choose to have sex, and pregnancy is a possible outcome of sex. Thus, she must now see the pregnancy through. She asked for it.
Over the years, philosophers have found more nuanced ways to express their disagreement. In the New York Times, Anglican priest Tish Harrison Warren recently wrote, eloquently and poetically, that “no human has complete bodily autonomy from birth to death. The natural state of human beings is to be deeply and irrevocably interdependent on one another.” (Of course the burden of “interdependence” placed on a pregnant person is, as Warren does acknowledge, vastly greater than pretty much any other example we might find in the real world. There is a difference between an elderly person needing help getting into the bathtub and a woman being required to donate her body, 24/7, to a pregnancy.)
Warren aside, even the most poetic phrasings often end up concealing an unpoetic argument: that a woman should be forced to birth a child because she asked for it. She asked for it by slipping up on birth control, or she asked for it by not immediately knowing to get the morning-after pill, or she asked for it simply by daring to be a sexual being. And “she asked for it” is the unofficial slogan of misogyny.
It’s worthwhile to note that even the folks arguing that heartbeats do exist at six weeks often support rape and incest exceptions. Meaning, they’re making one of two incoherent arguments: 1) Life begins when there’s a heartbeat except in cases of rape, or 2) Life does begin when there’s a heartbeat but if a woman was raped then murdering the fetus is fine.
Does personhood begin with a heartbeat? If your answer is yes, as many antiabortion activists say it does, then Thomson’s argument follows that the six-week-old “person” inside a woman’s uterus should have the same claim to that woman’s body as does any other person, which is to say, limited claim — even if, in your opinion, she asked for it. In Thomson’s view, a pregnant individual’s right to bodily autonomy permits them to unhook from the violinist, so to speak, no matter anyone else’s view of what is noble or moral or humane; therefore they should be allowed to terminate the pregnancy if they wish.
If your answer is no, personhood does not begin with a heartbeat, then an embryo at six weeks of pregnancy is not a person yet; therefore the pregnant person should be allowed to terminate the pregnancy if they wish.
Of course, it’s more complicated than that. Pregnancy is the most liminal of states, a nine-month-long transition into existence. A growing of bones, of fingernails, of the lungs whose first cry of life comes during a mother’s last cry of labor — the moment at which the two beings are, at last, fully two beings. For centuries, before we knew of Dopplers and ultrasounds, a pregnancy became real only at the point of “quickening,” the moment when an expectant mother first felt her baby move, somewhere in the second trimester. “Quick,” in old English, used to mean “alive.” I am not exaggerating when I tell you that experiencing that first movement is, for a person who wants a baby, a lightning bolt to the soul.
But the starting places for discussions about abortion should not be the weeds. The starting place should be above the weeds, at eye level with the person who owns the body where these mysteries are meant to unfold. The debate about the legality of abortion should begin with that person’s right to bodily autonomy even in the face of decisions that others might personally disagree with, or believe they would make differently.
As I started writing this column, I thought I should try to interview Judith Jarvis Thomson — to see how she felt her argument had aged, to see what she would make of this current era in which the potential lives of fetuses are increasingly (if certain lawmakers and legislative bodies have their way) viewed as more important than the actual lives of women. It turns out she died in 2020, at the age of 91, leaving behind a staggeringly important body of work related to what it means to make moral decisions.
I would have loved her guidance on how to think through this moment: when heartbeats become heartbeats, or when a heartbeat constitutes life, or when embryos might become people with rights. I would have loved her guidance on what you do when so many politicians are so good at making the argument that six-week pregnancies are people, but so bad at making the argument that women are people, too. | 2022-10-03T10:30:01Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Abortion rights and bodily autonomy: The one argument advocates should keep making - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/10/03/abortion-rights-bodily-autonomy/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/10/03/abortion-rights-bodily-autonomy/ |
Limiting academics’ freedom to tell the truth about racism is not new
When academics try to advocate for racial equality or teach about race, it has often been labeled communism or un-American
Perspective by Eddie R. Cole
Eddie R. Cole is associate professor of higher education and organizational change at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and the author of "The Campus Color Line: College Presidents and the Struggle for Black Freedom" (Princeton University Press, 2020).
Idaho students fill the gallery as the Idaho Senate debates and approves legislation on April 26, 2021, aimed at preventing schools and universities from “indoctrinating” students through teaching critical race theory. (Darin Oswald/Idaho Statesman/AP)
Last summer, the University of Nebraska president and campus chancellors were forced to defend academic freedom following a state resolution to ban teaching critical race theory. A few months later, the Board of Regents for the University System of Georgia issued new guidelines for tenure and post-tenure review policies that sparked a backlash. And similar concerns exist in Oklahoma, Mississippi and other states where recent demands to prohibit teaching about race and the history of racism has widespread public support.
In response, faculty senates and professional associations have issued public statement after statement condemning those political efforts, which they argue weaken academic freedom. For example, the faculty senate at Virginia Tech noted, “As scholars and educators, we are called to affirm that limits on discourse and inquiry are antithetical to intellectual and psychological growth.”
But these attacks are not new and, like today, limitations placed on academic freedom have a history long rooted in racism. Race has been at the center of many of the most aggressive attempts to dismantle academic freedom in the nation’s universities.
In 1940, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) issued its Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure, a document that still guides the association today. The statement’s purpose was “to promote public understanding and support of academic freedom.” It added, “Institutions of higher education are conducted for the common good. … The common good depends upon the free search for truth and its free exposition.” Professors, the statement read, “are entitled to freedom in the classroom in discussing their subject.”
But academic freedom was not a colorblind concept, nor were the assaults on scholars.
In 1941, for example, Georgia Gov. Eugene Talmadge dismissed Walter Cocking, dean of the College of Education at the University of Georgia, because he believed the administrator sought to enroll Black students. Scholars later noted that Cocking did not advocate for desegregation, but he was concerned about “the plight of black Americans.” That sympathy was enough for Talmadge to fire Cocking under the ruse of fighting communism. In fact, faculty who expressed views in favor of racial equality were often branded as communists, or un-American, as a way to silence and delegitimize their claims, regardless of their race.
The Cocking affair, according to one report, prompted the governor to fire anyone who supported “communism or racial equality.” Within the year, 10 more University of Georgia employees were dismissed and labeled communists.
Talmadge’s attacks in Georgia resulted in the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools removing accreditation from all the state’s public segregated White colleges. That was not enough, however, to keep other states from taking similar actions at their universities, as the free exchange of ideas over issues of race remained contested.
After World War II, Cold War fears of communist infiltration only accelerated the attacks on academics, particularly Black scholars.
In 1949, renowned scholar W.E.B. Du Bois had a speaking invitation rescinded by Morgan State College, a public Black institution in Maryland. Du Bois had appeared with civil rights activist Paul Robeson during the World Peace Congress in Paris and did not distance himself from Robeson’s condemnation of the United States. This posed a challenge to Morgan State officials dependent on state funding.
As White elected officials increasingly tied demands for racial equality to communism, Black scholars found their academic freedoms stifled to an even greater degree. The same limitations to academic freedom also applied to White academics who expressed sympathetic views of Black Americans’ struggle for racial equality.
In 1955, the same year 14-year-old Emmett Till’s murder in Mississippi garnered national headlines, the Mississippi Board of Institutions of Higher Learning passed a policy to screen all campus speakers. Historian Joy Williamson-Lott has noted that such Southern bans were used to prohibit anyone who advocated for overthrowing the U.S. or states’ constitutions — a common framing to label critiques of racism un-American. Russell H. Barrett, a then-professor at the University of Mississippi, later explained that the board had bowed to political pressure when implementing the policy because it “would reinforce the university and college administrators’ normal sensitivity to public and political criticism.” The campus and state chapters of the AAUP condemned the policy as antithetical to academic freedom, but the aggressive attacks continued.
Such was the case again in 1956, when University of Mississippi Chancellor John D. Williams rescinded a campus speaking invitation to Alvin Kershaw, an Ohio-based minister who championed desegregation. Kershaw was invited as part of the university’s Religious Week, but concern soon spread when the visiting minister said he would discuss his views on segregation if asked while in Mississippi. The governor and others retreated from supporting the chancellor’s initial decision to welcome the speaker.
The Kershaw episode proved how academic dialogue was limited to ensure that faculty could not engage in ideas that challenged segregationist beliefs.
The episode helped precipitate direct attacks on Williams’s leadership. His attackers cited a list of liberal speakers, the attempted desegregation by Black applicants in the 1950s and professors who supported such attempts as evidence that Williams had permitted the campus to go awry in teaching communist-inspired beliefs that hailed desegregation as viable.
Beyond canceled lectures at Southern universities and its effect on some White scholars, Black faculty across the country felt the limits of academic freedom more than any other group as politics and racism continued to entwine.
In September 1969, the University of California Board of Regents fired activist and scholar Angela Davis from her position as a philosophy professor because of her stated membership in the Communist Party. At the time, the Los Angeles Sentinel reported that 25-year-old Davis characterized the firing as an attack that affects “the entire black community and the university and obviously is an attack on the autonomy of the university.” The University of California academic council unanimously opposed the termination and defended Davis’s right to be a member of the Communist Party, despite Gov. Ronald Reagan’s demands to fire her.
In late October, a California Superior Court judge ruled Davis’s firing was illegal, and she was able to stay on the UCLA faculty. It was determined that the “mere membership” in the Communist Party was not grounds for firing. However, as historian Ibram X. Kendi has argued, Reagan then sought to find another reason to fire her.
In May 1970, despite her victory the previous fall, the regents fired Davis again. Instead of citing her communist affiliations, this time Reagan and the regents justified their action as simply not renewing her contract as a visiting assistant professor.
The attacks on Davis and state-level political interference were responses to the Black activism seen on college campuses across the nation with Black faculty, again, taking the worst of racist attacks on academic freedom.
Elected officials headed these attacks and garnered widespread public support. This is eerily like current issues, and it raises numerous questions about academic freedom today.
Academic freedom remains valuable to higher education. The pursuit of truth is only possible when faculty are allowed to pursue uncomfortable topics. This is the case for a range of topics, not just those that confront the nation’s history with racism. However, if leaders will not defend scholars’ right to challenge racist norms, then no scholar of any topic — climate change, political critique or others — has true academic freedom.
Part of being a knowledgeable and engaged citizen is to know the history, whether it is good or bad. That makes defending academic freedom to discuss the truth about racism essential if academic freedom is to survive.
This essay is the sixth in the Freedom to Learn series sponsored by PEN America, providing historical context for controversies surrounding free expression in education today. | 2022-10-03T10:30:14Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Limiting academics’ freedom to tell the truth about racism is not new - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/made-by-history/2022/10/03/limiting-academics-freedom-tell-truth-about-racism-is-not-new/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/made-by-history/2022/10/03/limiting-academics-freedom-tell-truth-about-racism-is-not-new/ |
Moore v. Harper asks whether state legislatures should have universal power over elections. The Founding Fathers didn’t think so.
Perspective by Adam Jortner
Adam Jortner is a historian of early America at Auburn University. He is the author of "The Gods of Prophetstown and No Place for Saints," as well as the Audible series "Faith and the Founding Fathers."
The U.S. Supreme Court is considering the question of who runs elections and sets election law. (Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)
But after the North Carolina Supreme Court struck down the congressional map drawn by its legislature as a violation of the state constitution, two legislators appealed, setting up the showdown in Moore v. Harper. The legislators contend that there should be no checks and balances in elections. Citing a theory promoted in conservative circles in recent years, North Carolina’s state representatives claim that state legislatures alone have the power to set election rules — and their power over elections is absolute. Some of the briefs filed in Moore v. Harper make the claim that not even the federal government can overturn the decisions of state legislatures when it comes to elections.
And yet, even though many of the current Supreme Court justices claim to use original intent to interpret the Constitution and laws — a practice that analyzes the meaning of words at the time they were drafted — the media has paid little attention to what the Founding Fathers intended in crafting the Constitution’s election provisions. But their thoughts on this topic were quite clear: they opposed extending this sort of power to state legislatures because they believed legislatures would inevitably abuse it.
To get to that clause, the Constitutional Convention of 1787 debated other options — including allowing states to set the rules for elections themselves. But the delegates had qualms about such a system. James Madison, often called the father of the Constitution, argued that “Legislatures of the States ought not to have the uncontrolled right of regulating the times places & manner of holding elections.” He thought this because the legislatures “will sometimes fail or refuse to consult the common interest.” Gouverneur Morris followed Madison by suggesting that “the States might make false returns and then make no provisions for new elections.” The convention agreed with Morris and Madison and therefore unanimously adopted the article giving Congress an explicit check on state legislatures.
After the delegates agreed on the Constitution, they sent it for ratification to the states. Several states ratified the Constitution, but made their acceptance contingent on adoption of a Bill of Rights. Some of the ratifying conventions actually submitted proposed amendments to be included in the Bill of Rights. At least three states suggested amendments guaranteeing state legislatures full and untrammeled control over elections. Yet, none of these proposed amendments made it into the Bill of Rights — a sign that the first Congress also explicitly rejected giving state legislatures unfettered control over the rules governing federal elections.
So while the Founders did give state legislatures the right to set the “Times, Places and Manners” of elections — subject to checks by the federal government — it strains credulity to claim that they intended to do so with no role for governors or state courts to insist that the legislatures follow their own laws in carrying out this responsibility.
Yet, North Carolina’s legislature is asking the Supreme Court to find the opposite — to rule that state courts cannot force legislatures to follow state constitutions. And they have a serious possibility of success. Despite the claims of several of the justices to subscribe to originalism when they interpret the law, at least three have expressed openness to the theory being propagated by the North Carolina legislature.
But the question before the court — and before the whole nation — is whether the weight of one word in the Constitution abstracted from the context of the Founders’ thinking and their debates over the document matter more than their clearly expressed intent. The drafters of the Constitution never intended to give state legislatures universal power over elections. Madison feared the ability of state legislatures to run elections, and when states asked for an amendment to give state legislatures unilateral power over elections, the first Congress, full of men who had served at the Constitutional Convention, refused. | 2022-10-03T10:30:21Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The Supreme Court’s biggest case this term threatens American democracy - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/made-by-history/2022/10/03/supreme-courts-biggest-case-this-term-threatens-american-democracy/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/made-by-history/2022/10/03/supreme-courts-biggest-case-this-term-threatens-american-democracy/ |
Ga. woman’s mysterious death was ‘deliberate and personal,’ officials say
Hours before Debbie Collier was reported missing, she visited a Family Dollar store and purchased a tote bag, a tarp, a poncho and a lighter, according to surveillance footage. (WAGA)
On a Saturday afternoon last month, 59-year-old Deborrah “Debbie” Collier walked into a Family Dollar store in Clayton, Ga., and bought a red tote bag, a blue tarp, a poncho and a lighter.
When she didn’t return home that night, her family grew worried and reported her missing. The next day, about 13 miles south of the Family Dollar, law enforcement authorities found a van she had been renting parked along a northeast Georgia highway. It was unlocked, but Collier was not inside.
Searching the woods near the van, officers first found a red tote bag lying next to an uprooted tree. Farther down the embankment, they found a blue tarp, which appeared to be partially burned. Then they found a body.
The woman was naked, with signs of “charring” on her stomach area, and she was holding what deputies described as a “small tree” in her right hand, according to an incident report by the Habersham County Sheriff’s Office.
The woman was soon identified as Collier.
Collier’s death is now being investigated as a homicide, though the medical examiner is still determining the cause.
At a news conference Friday, officials with the Habersham County Sheriff’s Office said they are not ready to publicly name suspects, but authorities said they believe Collier was killed by someone she knew.
“We believe that this act was deliberate and personal,” Murray Kogod, chief deputy at the Habersham County Sheriff’s Office, told reporters Friday.
Collier’s son, Jeffrey Bearden, told the Daily Beast that the loss of his mother has upended the lives of his family.
“Our grief is here and our pain is deep,” the 33-year-old told the news outlet.
Collier, who lived in Athens and worked in the city as an office manager at a real estate company, was reported missing the evening of Sept. 10 by her husband and daughter. Earlier that day, Collier had left the house in a 2022 black Chrysler Pacifica rental, her 36-year-old daughter, Amanda Bearden, told police, according to a report obtained by WAGA.
Amanda Bearden said she was troubled by a $2,385 Venmo transfer she received about 3:17 p.m. that day with a note attached: “They are not going to let me go love you there is a key to the house in the blue flower pot near the door.”
Bearden told police that she believed her mother had sent the message and that it scared her. George Cason, an investigator with the Habersham County Sheriff’s Office, told reporters on Friday that officials have not determined who sent the message.
Earlier in the day, around 2:17 p.m., cameras outside a school in Tallulah Falls captured Collier’s black Pacifica traveling northbound on Georgia State Route 15. About 2:54 p.m., cameras at the Family Dollar store in Clayton showed Collier enter and buy the tote bag, tarp and lighter, as well as a poncho and some paper towels.
The cashier told WXIA that she did not think the items were unusual and that Collier “didn’t seem in distress or anything.”
Collier walked out around 3:09 and then sat in the van in the parking lot for 10 minutes before driving away and heading southbound on Georgia State Route 15, Kogod told reporters. It was around this time that the Venmo payment was sent.
That was the last time Collier was known to be alive, officials said.
The next day, around 5 p.m., Habersham County sheriff’s deputies located Collier’s black Chrysler, deputies said in the incident report. Athens police notified Collier’s daughter, and a short time later, Amanda Bearden arrived in a hysterical state at the scene, investigators wrote. She started screaming that the van belonged to her mother, according to the report.
When deputies went into the woods to look for Collier, they came upon the trail of items that led to her body — beginning with the tote bag near the uprooted tree where there appeared to be the “remains of a fire,” deputies wrote in the incident report.
On Friday, officials declined to say whether there had been other injuries to Collier’s body aside from the burns to her abdomen, saying that they are awaiting the release of the medical examiner’s report. But they have not ruled out the possibility that Collier was alive when she was burned.
“Please understand that this case is very complex in nature and has a lot of questions and unknowns that aren’t found in a typical death investigation,” Kogod said. | 2022-10-03T10:30:27Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Debbie Collier’s death was not random, but ‘deliberate and personal’ - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/10/03/debbie-collier-death-investigation/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/10/03/debbie-collier-death-investigation/ |
Both outside and within Iran’s government, women have been strategizing for this moment. So why did the movement catch fire now?
Analysis by Mona Tajali
Demonstrators opposed to the Iranian regime hold a candlelight vigil to pay tribute to those who have died protesting the death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old who was killed in police custody after allegedly violating the country's hijab rules, outside the White House on Saturday. (Bonnie Cash/Getty Images)
Loud chants for “women, life, and liberty” have shaken Iran’s streets for the past weeks. They’re part of the popular protests that erupted after young Kurdish-Iranian woman Mahsa Amini died in police custody, after being detained for allegedly violating Iran’s conservative hijab laws.
The chant came before the protests, from pro-Kurdish rights movements across the region. That’s because women have been key in organizing those protests. But this is the first time Iranian protesters more generally have taken it up.
While these protests started over women’s freedom of dress, Iranians have joined across lines of age, gender, ethnicity and class. Collectively, they’re expressing their anger and loss of patience with the theocratic state. As in the past, Iran’s security forces have cracked down hard.
A longer history of Iranian women’s protests
These protests against gender discrimination and mandatory veiling grow from a long history. In my research on women’s rights movements and activism in Iran for the past decades, I’ve found that Iranian women’s rights movements have long demanded equal access to the public sphere — the street, parks, city councils, the parliament and more.
In fact, just weeks after Iran established its theocratic regime, on March 8, 1979, women took to the streets of Tehran to protest after rumors spread that the government would enforce mandatory veiling. As a result, the regime could only insist on hijab in steps, and couldn’t fully enforce mandatory compliance until 1981.
Since then, as I outline in my recently published book, Iranian women have been strategizing on how to challenge gender discrimination in Iranian politics and society, from both outside and within government structures.
Outside formal state institutions, women have for decades been relentlessly agitating for gender equality and greater access to the public sphere. Initially, women’s rights activists and self-identified feminists were the ones who demanded reform of discriminatory rulings, including on forced hijab.
But particularly within the past decade, young women who lack formal ties to feminist movements have joined into such activism, feeling powerful enough to non-violently protest such gendered restrictions. For instance, the Girls of Revolution Street protests began in 2017 when Vida Movahed, a 31-year-old mother, removed her headscarf and waved it in the air on top of a platform on Revolution Street in central Tehran. Many other women followed suit despite the threat of arrest and harassment, removing their headscarves in nonviolent protest. Their images and videos spread quickly through social media. Many men showed their support by posting either selfies showing them donning the hijab themselves, or by appearing in social media expressing their support for their unveiled family members.
Some women within the government took notice of such widespread popular opposition, led by grass-roots women. In 2018 women members of the parliament, most of who had entered the parliament thanks to women’s support of the reformist List of Hope, arranged to have Iran’s Parliamentary Research Center (PRC) study public opinion on the hijab — the first time a formal state institution conducted such a study. The research found that more than half (at least 55 percent) of Iranians disagreed with state’s religious rulings forcing rules on women’s dress. The study also blamed the Islamic regime’s failure in hijab enforcement on violence and arrests by morality police. Former President Hassan Rouhani’s repeated statements that “culture cannot be made with vans and soldiers.”
Iran's security forces have little incentive to ease up on protesters
A conservative takeover
Many women activists whom I interviewed welcomed the nationwide discussions that followed Iranian women and girls’ peaceful protests against mandatory veiling. They also supported the responses of some bold women parliamentarians, themselves products of the Islamic regime, who expressed, often in coded terms, the need to respect women’s dignity and basic rights.
Those debates worried many ultraconservative elites. While preparing for the 2020 parliamentary elections, these conservatives either banned these outspoken women from running or opened judicial cases against them to discourage them to stand for elections.
Given that crackdown, many women activists pushed to boycott the 2020 parliamentary elections, alongside other opposition activists dismayed by the mostly conservative candidate slates. As a result, only 42 percent of eligible voters cast ballots in that election, the lowest turnout since the 1979 revolution. Nearly all incumbent women MPs were replaced with conservative women who have poor records on women’s rights. The regime doubled down on that approach in the 2021 presidential election, which the state-favored hard-liner Ebrahim Raisi won. Since then, the morality police and other security forces have once again been enabled to crack down on Iranians’ civil rights with impunity.
How Iran’s hijab protests differ from past protest waves
Will the continued protests matter?
Iranians have lost patience with the regime. That’s in part because of the conservative takeover and in part because the sanctions are pressuring them economically and socially. They’ve repeatedly protested those economic pressures over the past few years.
But this protest is different. Women are leading this time, for the first time in years. Mahsa’s killing has brought many into the streets to utter their grievances. Various identity groups are joining as they haven’t before: ethnic minorities, youth, women, the unemployed, workers’ unions and more. The women’s demands are becoming part of wholesale challenges to the Islamic Republic itself, making mandatory hijab a symbol of the repressive regime more broadly.
These protests may not force major concessions; escalating government violence and repression may shut them down or force them to change form. But they reveal that Iranian women’s continuing protests are closely tied up with broader movements for democracy and rule of law.
Mona Tajali (@MonaTajali) is an associate professor of international relations and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Agnes Scott College, an executive board member of Women Living Under Muslim Laws (WLUML) and author most recently of Women’s Political Representation in Iran and Turkey: Demanding a Seat at the Table (Edinburgh University Press 2022). | 2022-10-03T10:30:41Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Women's protests in Iran have long history - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/03/iran-protests-hijab-women-mahsa-amini/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/03/iran-protests-hijab-women-mahsa-amini/ |
Now a Republican candidate for the Senate in Pennsylvania, Oz has made his medical background and his popular TV show a centerpiece of his campaign
Mehmet Oz, Republican Nominee for U.S. Senate, speaks during a fall campaign kick off rally with U.S. Senator John Neeley Kennedy (R-La.) in Newtown, Pennsylvania. (Hannah Beier for The Washington Post)
Mehmet Oz looked directly into the camera and introduced his daytime television viewers to a “controversial” weight loss approach: taking a hormone that women produce during pregnancy combined with a diet of 500 calories a day.
“Does it really work? Is it safe? Is it a miracle? Or is it hype?” he asked in a 2011 episode of “The Dr. Oz Show” before introducing his audience to “human chorionic gonadotropin,” or HCG, and to a weight loss doctor who promoted it.
In fact, there was little uncertain about the HCG Diet. Numerous studies conducted years before Oz’s show had shown that the fertility drug does not cause weight loss, redistribute fat or suppress hunger. Ten months later, the Food and Drug Administration warned seven companies marketing HCG products they were violating the law by making such claims, and the agency issued additional warnings to consumers in subsequent years. Nevertheless, Oz revisited the topic in 2012, providing a platform for the same weight loss doctor, who claimed that HCG worked.
Now as a Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania, a key battleground in the fight for control of the upper chamber of Congress, Oz, a cardiothoracic surgeon, is putting his medical background and his popular TV show at the center of his campaign pitch. At a recent town hall in a Philadelphia suburb, he said his approach to medicine and politics is similar: “If you teach people on television or whatever forum you use, they actually begin to use the information and they begin to change what they do in their lives. I want to do the same thing as your senator. Empower you.”
But during the show’s run from 2009 to 2021, Oz provided a platform for potentially dangerous products and fringe viewpoints, aimed at millions of viewers, according to medical experts, public health organizations and federal health guidance. The treatments that Oz promoted included HCG, garcinia cambogia — an herbal weight-loss product the FDA has said can cause liver damage — and selenium — a trace mineral needed for normal body functioning — for cancer prevention, among others.
“He spouts unproven treatments for things and supposed ways to maintain and regain health,” said Henry I. Miller, one of 10 physicians who in 2015 tried to have Oz removed from the faculty at Columbia University Irving Medical Center. “He’s the ultimate grifter.”
Oz and his defenders have said that his approach on the program was to give viewers hope and provide different points of view. While Oz has been criticized for promoting problematic medical claims, he also received some praise over the years for raising awareness about preventive health. He’s been bolstered by high-profile guests who appeared on his daytime show, including Oprah Winfrey — who had him as a health expert on her show before producing “The Dr. Oz Show” in 2009 — then-first lady Michelle Obama and former Newark mayor and now-Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.).
The Oz campaign declined a request for an interview with the candidate. After The Washington Post submitted detailed questions in an email, a campaign representative sent back broad statements addressing attacks from his opponent, his career, and products promoted on his program, but leaving many specific inquiries unaddressed.
“On his show, Dr. Oz welcomed open, honest conversations and opinions from all kinds of folks,” said Brittany Yanick, a spokeswoman for the Oz campaign. “It’s idiotic and preposterous to imply that he shared the same beliefs and opinions as every guest on his show, or that having someone on his show constitutes a blanket endorsement of their beliefs.”
Oz did often present caveats to the treatments he spotlighted on his program. During the initial HCG episode, he told his viewers not to eat fewer than 1,200 calories a day “without a doctor getting involved,” and to avoid over-the-counter versions of the product that might be adulterated.
Pieter Cohen, who appeared as an anti-HCG expert on that episode, warned of the possible life-threatening risks of the diet and noted that research showed the injections were no better than placebo in numerous studies. Oz concluded that there was no proof HCG had worked in the past, but with a doctor’s help, he told viewers, “I think it’s worth trying it.” And more research might give millions struggling to lose weight “an option,” he said.
Cohen, associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and an expert on dietary supplements, said that Oz used his reputation as an elite physician to undermine trust in legitimate medical practice.
“What’s really sad about the situation is how he used all that prestige and authority to then lead people down a path of nonsense,” Cohen said. “It undermines all of us, all of us trying to be credible physicians, doing the right thing.”
HCG and severe food restriction can be dangerous themselves, the FDA said. The agency said in late 2011, when it issued the warning letters between the two Oz episodes on HCG, that it had received reports of blood clots in the lung, cardiac arrest and death among people who injected themselves with HCG.
Oz earned his undergraduate degree from Harvard University and his medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania. He trained in surgery at Columbia. Yet his show often strayed to the outer edges of nontraditional health practices, including homeopathy. He has hosted psychics and a proponent of “iridology,” the belief that examining patterns in the iris yields diagnoses for any part of the body.
The Republican Senate nominee’s television work is now a target of his Democratic rival, John Fetterman, whose campaign has organized “Real Doctors Against Oz,” a collection of more than 100 Pennsylvania physicians who have railed against Oz’s past medical advice. A recent TV ad from the Fetterman campaign shows Oz hyping “miracle” supplements, including one he called “fairy dust for your belly.” “Too bad there’s no miracle cure for being a total fraud,” Fetterman tweeted with the video.
Oz’s pivot from TV celebrity to political candidate is filled with reminders of his prior job and TV show. At his events, he stands in front of banners emblazoned with “Dr. Oz” and his campaign slogan, “Dose of Reality.” He’s also used the theme, “The Doctor is In.” His voter town halls are situated like his TV set, with an audience surrounding him as he works the room with a microphone.
When a team of Canadian researchers examined episodes of his show in 2014, they found “believable or somewhat believable” evidence for just 33 percent of the 80 recommendations and claims they randomly selected and then reviewed. When evidence was defined as “at least a case study or better,” a low standard, it supported 46 percent of Oz’s recommendations, contradicted 15 percent and was not found for 39 percent, they wrote in the British Medical Journal. The Oz campaign did not comment on the study.
One of the lead researchers on that study, James McCormack, a professor of pharmaceutical sciences at the University of British Columbia, noted that not all medical advice from doctors rests on tested science. “Consumers should be skeptical about any recommendations [from] pretty much any televised medical talk show,” McCormack said in an interview. “Dr. Oz had lower percentages. But where do you draw that line?”
Full episodes of Oz’s show are difficult to find online. Some sites with links to episodes of his program redirect to his campaign website. The Washington Post reviewed clips of episodes, often uploaded to sites like YouTube and Vimeo by supplement companies for use in promoting their products, and then compared them to transcripts. The clips showed that Oz frequently spoke in animated tones and the program sometimes had the feel of an infomercial.
“Everybody wants to know what’s the newest, fastest fat buster. You’ve been stopping me on the street, emailing me. Even my family’s asking the same question. How can I burn fat without spending every waking moment exercising and dieting?” Oz said in one episode before introducing viewers to garcinia cambogia, another supposed weight-loss supplement. “Well, thanks to brand new scientific research, I can tell you about a revolutionary fat buster. You heard it here first.”
Steven J. Dell, an eye surgeon in Austin and former president of the American-European Congress of Ophthalmic Surgery, first looked into Oz’s show after a patient mentioned coming across a mention of Oz hosting an iridologist. Dell said he began to watch and read about the man he knew as a brilliant surgeon and found a steady stream of troubling ideas.
He wrote an opinion paper for a newsletter where he was chief medical editor that claimed: “Although the scientific community has turned against Oz, the unfortunate reality is that he is perceived as a scientific authority by millions of people who receive their relationship advice from Dr. Phil and, presumably, their time-traveling advice from Dr. Who.”
“I think it’s pretty clear we don’t have definitive evidence for every single thing we do in medicine,” Dell said in an interview. “But that doesn’t mean we should believe in … taking magic potions that have been shown to contain nothing but water.”
Republicans in the state dismissed concerns that Oz’s reputation would damage his standing with voters. Charlie Gerow, a longtime Pennsylvania GOP consultant, said he hasn’t heard anyone mention Oz’s show as a factor. “The celebrity is a big plus, they know who he is, that’s very important,” Gerow said.
Public polls suggest there has been some skepticism about Oz’s authenticity. A CBS News/YouGov survey released in mid-September found 29 percent of Pennsylvania voters said they think Oz says what he really believes and 71 percent said they feel that Oz says what he thinks voters want to hear.
Oz has been sued in his roles as medical practitioner and television host, but a search of public records did not show large judgments against him. By the time a California judge approved a $625,000 settlement in July to end six years of class-action litigation over the alleged fat-busting powers of garcinia cambogia and green coffee bean extract, Oz and his production companies were no longer defendants.
A 2015 Federal Trade Commission settlement collected $9 million from a seller of green coffee bean extract for false advertising. The lawsuit said the company took advantage of appearances on the Oz show and Oz’s enormous popularity — the so-called “Oz effect” — but Oz and his companies were not defendants.
“You may think magic is make-believe, but this little bean has scientists saying they found that magic weight-loss cure for every body type: it’s green coffee beans and when turned into a supplement this miracle pill can burn fat fast for anyone who wants to lose weight,” Oz said on his show in 2012, according to online clips. “This is very exciting and it’s breaking news.”
Under the heading “Supplements and products Dr. Oz promoted on his show,” Yanick, the Oz campaign spokeswoman, said in an email that “Oz discussed the scientific studies and research around these supplements after vetting by his show’s medical unit.” After mentioning in her emailed response to The Post a retracted study on green coffee bean pills, Yanick added, “Dr. Oz never sold these weight loss products himself.”
Oz promoted more than weight loss promises on his show. He also frequently offered unproven, and in several cases disproved solutions for dire health circumstances, such as cancer and Alzheimer’s, as well as providing a platform for people to discuss the debunked conspiracy that vaccines cause autism. In 2015, Oz tweeted, “Just a reminder: there is no evidence that there is any link between vaccines and autism,” after a Republican presidential debate where Trump suggested there was a correlation between the two.
In 2011, Oz claimed a diet of “endive, red onion, and sea bass” could decrease ovarian cancer by up to 75 percent, suggesting people have the “power of prevention in their grocery cart.”
“What I love that you’ve been able to accomplish is you move past the oranges-are-good-for-you stage to specifically, this is how they work to kill off cancer cells, just the way chemotherapy can. For the first time ever, we’re going to talk about some cutting-edge foods that work and why they work,” Oz said.
The Ovarian Cancer National Alliance challenged that claim, and after reviewing the studies the Oz producers used, the organization determined the data was “not strong enough to support the claims made on the program.” In 2014, researchers published an article in the peer-reviewed medical journal, Nutrition and Cancer, that critically revisited Oz’s promotion of “anti-ovarian cancer” foods, concluding there is no evidence that any one food can reduce cancer risk.
“While perhaps not as 'sexy’ as Dr. Oz would like, the public needs more information about the effects of diet as a whole on cancer risk, as well as the importance of achieving and maintaining an ideal body weight, regular physical activity, and avoiding a sedentary lifestyle,” the researchers wrote.
Oz also promoted selenium supplements — a mineral found in foods like Brazil nuts — in 2012, calling them the “holy grail of cancer prevention.” Several medical reviews, including by the National Institutes of Health, said there’s no evidence that selenium could stop cancer. The NIH also warns that “extremely high intakes of selenium can cause severe problems, including difficulty breathing, tremors, kidney failure, heart attacks, and heart failure.”
In 2015, 10 doctors from around the country appealed to Columbia University to take a stand against Oz by removing him from its medical school faculty.
“He has manifested an egregious lack of integrity by promoting quack treatments and cures in the interest of personal financial gain,” they wrote to Lee Goldman, dean of the faculties of Health Sciences and Medicine.
The Oz show responded in a statement at the time that “I bring the public information that will help them on their path to be their best selves.
“We provide multiple points of view, including mine, which is offered without conflict of interest.”
The university declined to take action, citing academic freedom. Oz became a professor emeritus in 2018 and retains that title, as well as special lecturer, said Lucky Tran, a spokesman for Columbia University’s Irving Medical Center.
A year before that letter, in 2014, Oz appeared before the Senate Subcommittee on Consumer Protection, Product Safety and Insurance for a hearing on false advertising in the diet and weight-loss industry. Then-senator Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), who chaired that panel, said she was driving and heard an advertisement plugging green coffee beans for weight loss. McCaskill, who said she has struggled with her weight her entire adult life, described feeling enraged and asked Oz, who had promoted these supplements, to testify.
“Imagine my shock when he said yes. Which shows you the ego, the arrogance. He believed he was going to come in there and blow us all away with his charm and charisma,” McCaskill said in an interview. “OK, you want to do this? Let’s dance.”
Senators on the committee grilled Oz on the language he used on his show. Asked by then-Republican Sen. Dean Heller of Nevada whether he believed there was a magical cure for weight loss, Oz admitted that he did not know of one without diet and exercise.
“My job, I feel, on the show, is to be a cheerleader for the audience when they don’t think they have hope and they don’t think they can make it happen,” Oz told the senators. “It jump-starts you. It gives you the confidence to keep going.” | 2022-10-03T10:30:47Z | www.washingtonpost.com | As TV doctor, Mehmet Oz provided platform for questionable products and views - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/03/mehmet-oz-senate-television-show/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/03/mehmet-oz-senate-television-show/ |
Buffalo Bills kicker Tyler Bass (2) celebrates with teammates after kicking a field goal on the final play of the game to give the Bills a 23-20 win over the Baltimore Ravens on Sunday. (Julio Cortez/AP)
The NFL is a stage for human achievement at the cost of human suffering. The thrill of the games and the brilliance of the athletes can push that into the background, but it is always there. It hovered over Week 4 more starkly than usual after Thursday night, when Dolphins quarterback Tua Tagovailoa’s head smashed into the Cincinnati turf and the distressed neurons in his body made his fingers twist into a claw. The NFL and the NFL Players Association decided to alter their concussion protocols, but no measures can remove the danger from football.
Moving on after horrific injuries is baked into the NFL, and the games continued apace Sunday. Here is what to know.
The Bills finally won a close game. As they emerged as the Super Bowl favorite, the Bills could not shake a deserved reputation as front-runners. They usually annihilated their opponents. But when they didn’t, they lost.
The Bills lost all six of their regular season games decided by one score last year, and their season ended when they couldn’t prevent the Chiefs from scoring a touchdown despite kicking off with 13 seconds left in regulation. This season started the same. They crushed the Rams and Titans, and then last week they wilted in Miami in a two-point loss.
In Baltimore on Sunday, quarterback Josh Allen proved he can win a close one. The Bills erased a 20-3 victory and beat the Ravens, 23-20, in a game defined by Ravens Coach John Harbaugh’s controversial choice to eschew a field goal from the 2-yard line with the score tied at 20.
The Bills played the endgame to perfection, bleeding the clock inches from the Ravens’ goal line once they advanced the ball. Tyler Bass kicked the game-winner as the final seconds ticked off, not allowing Lamar Jackson any chance to respond. Playing on the road in a rainstorm, the Bills did not allow a point in the second half.
The Bills often destroy opponents. If they can start winning the close ones, too, they’ll run away with the top seed in the AFC.
How coaches try (and often fail) to master end-of-game chaos
Harbaugh made the right call. Over the past three seasons, the coach has frequently placed himself at the center of controversy with his aggression on fourth down. He found himself defending a decision that backfired again Sunday, drawing ire from the Ravens’ fan base and his own cornerback; Marcus Peters screamed at Harbaugh and chucked his helmet on the sideline as the game ended.
With 4:15 left in regulation and the score tied at 20, the Ravens, after marching 93 yards, faced fourth and goal from the Buffalo two-yard line. A field goal would have been automatic for Justin Tucker.
But Harbaugh kept his offense on the field. If he kicked, it would’ve meant giving Allen the ball back around the 25-yard line with four downs at his disposal. Harbaugh didn’t want to let Buffalo win with a touchdown. At worst, he’d limit what the Bills could call on offense by pinning them deep. He didn’t say it this way, but he’d rather let Jackson decide the game than Allen.
The math recommended the Ravens go for it, but, as Harbaugh explained last week, he navigates the endgame through analysis and feel less than strict probability. By either measure, Harbaugh made the best call for the situation.
That remained true even though it backfired in every way. Jackson drifted backward and lofted an interception, which cost the Ravens the advantage of sticking the Bills inside their own 5-yard line. The Bills only needed a field goal, which allowed their offense to methodically move down the field and drain the clock. In hindsight, the call led to disaster. In the moment, everything about it made sense.
Nobody does it like Patrick Mahomes. The Kansas City Chiefs have a penchant for sleepwalking through some weeks, as last week’s fluky loss in Indianapolis showed. When they play motivated and focused, they remain the class of the NFL. The reason is Mahomes, who provided another reminder Sunday night that he is the best player in the NFL.
In a 41-31 victory over the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Mahomes exacted a measure of revenge from the beating he took in the Super Bowl two years ago. He beat them in every way the game allows, in ways only he could conjure. He shredded them through the air. He danced around them. He zipped, flipped, pushed and flung passed. For one score, he braked next to the sideline, spun around a defender and kind of squirted the ball out of his hand to the back of the end zone, where it nestled into running back Clyde Edwards-Helaire’s hands.
Mahomes finished with 249 yards and three touchdowns, averaging a pedestrian 6.7 yards per attempt. It’s not always what he produces that makes him special. It’s how he does it.
The Kenny Pickett Era arrived in Pittsburgh. The Steelers could have used their mini-bye after playing two Thursdays ago to replace Mitchell Trubisky with Pickett, the rookie they chose with the 20th pick in April. But Coach Mike Tomlin vociferously backed Trubisky and committed to him as Pittsburgh’s starter — a commitment that lasted until halftime Sunday, at which point Trubisky had continued his miserable season by completing seven of 13 passes for 84 yards with an interception and three sacks.
Pickett injected needed energy into the Steelers offense, plowing for one touchdown on a sneak and scoring again on a keeper. He also threw a late interception that led to the New York Jets’ 24-20 victory in Pittsburgh, a loss that dropped the Steelers to 1-3 with a harrowing chunk of their schedule upcoming.
With a new QB for the first time in 18 years, Steelers plan to keep on winning
Tomlin made the right — if not only — call going to Pickett. The offense functioned more efficiently, and his verve lifted offensive teammates whose frustrations with Trubisky had grown more visible in recent weeks. Pickett completed 10 of 13 passes with three interceptions, but two of those picks hit his receiver’s fingers, and the other came on a Hail Mary.
The upgrade to Pickett may not be enough for Tomlin to preserve his 15-year streak of never having a losing record. Tomlin was noncommittal, but it seems certain Pickett will become the full-time starter. If so, his first four starts will come against the Bills, Buccaneers, Dolphins and Eagles, with only the Bucs coming at home. Lots of luck, Kenny.
The Eagles’ dominance in second quarters is absolutely wild. The Eagles remained the NFL’s last unbeaten team with their 29-21 victory over the Jaguars and former coach Doug Pederson, overcoming a 14-0 deficit built by Andre Cisco’s interception return for a touchdown. The Eagles have been the best team in the NFL through four weeks, and it’s possible they could claim the bizarre distinction of being the best team in league history in the second quarter.
The numbers are bonkers: The Eagles have scored 85 points in four second quarters and only 30 in the other 12 quarters combined. They have outscored opponents 85-14 in second quarters this season, a staggering total considering it equates to the amount of time in one whole game. They have scored at least 17 points in the second quarter in each of their four games. In the past two weeks, they throttled the Commanders and Jaguars by a combined 44-0 in second quarters.
The New York Giants single-winged their way to 3-1. With 8:55 left in the fourth quarter, the Giants ran out of quarterbacks. Daniel Jones had been sidelined with a rolled ankle, and backup Tyrod Taylor took a hit to the head that necessitated a concussion evaluation. On the fly, Coach Brian Daboll installed a wildcat offense with Saquon Barkley at quarterback.
Jones returned to the game, probably so the Giants could communicate with him through the helmet headset. He lined up as a wide receiver and stood still during plays. The Giants did not attempt a pass for the remainder, running 11 times for 40 yards. Bears rookie wide receiver Velus Jones Jr. muffed a punt, a key play as the Giants salted away a 20-12 victory.
The most important development of the Giants’ season has been the reemergence of Barkley, who leads the NFL in rushing after he gained 146 yards on 31 carries Sunday. The Giants have rarely been impressive, squeaking past the Titans and Panthers by a field goal for their first two wins. Their point differential is only plus-five, and their roster lacks talent. But there are only eight teams with a 3-1 record or better, and the Giants are one of them.
The New England Patriots are making progress. Bill Belichick raised eyebrows this summer and early in the season with his sanguine comments in the face of struggle. Belichick, a bottom-line coach if there ever was one, expressed belief the Patriots would coalesce over the course of the season. After losses, he would discuss the one or two plays that could have changed the result — as if he hadn’t build his career on winning those one or two plays.
In a 27-24 overtime loss to the Packers, Belichick’s attitude started to make a little more sense. After looking lost as they adjusted to a new offense designed by Matt Patricia, the Patriots played like a team with an identity for the first time. With Mac Jones out with an ankle injury and veteran backup Brian Hoyer sidelined with a concussion, they turned to fourth-round rookie Bailey Zappe and bullied the Packers with their running game. Rookie defensive back Jack Jones returned an Aaron Rodgers interception for a touchdown. Zappe played with poise and made two big throws. The Patriots nearly pulled off a massive upset at Lambeau Field.
They are 1-3 and still not a very good team. For the first time, they showed signs of how they could be one.
Matt Rhule might not survive Baker Mayfield. The 1-3 Panthers have cycled through quarterbacks since Rhule arrived three seasons ago, and through four games Mayfield has been a disaster. In a 26-16 loss to the Cardinals, the Panthers could not run a functioning offense. Arizona batted down nine of Mayfield’s passes. He completed 22 of 36 passes for 197 yards — 72 of which came on a late fourth-quarter drive while trailing by three scores — and threw two interceptions.
The Panthers scored a defensive touchdown in the first quarter, at home, against a 1-2 team mired in its own dysfunction. They still could not come within two scores. In the fourth quarter, Mayfield had to cover the earholes of his helmet to hear a play call over boos. He entered Sunday averaging 6.8 yards per attempt with an 80.8 quarterback rating, both worse than last year, when the former No. 1 pick played his way out of Cleveland.
Rhule is now 11-25 since Panthers owner Dave Tepper hired him out of Baylor. The Panthers have lost and played dull, plodding football under Rhule. He does not have many cards to play, either; Matt Corral, the quarterback Carolina drafted out of Ole Miss, tore a ligament in his foot in preseason and is out for the year. Carolina’s backup is Sam Darnold, the passer whose failures last year led to the acquisition of Mayfield. | 2022-10-03T10:31:11Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The Bills finally won a close game, and John Harbaugh was right - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/03/nfl-week-4-bills-harbaugh/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/03/nfl-week-4-bills-harbaugh/ |
Monday briefing: Hurricane Ian’s damage; Clean Water Act case; Russian retreat from Lyman; soccer stadium disaster; and more
At least 62 people died because of Hurricane Ian.
Many of the victims were older than 60, and the death toll in Florida is expected to rise as search and rescue efforts continue.
The hardest-hit communities don’t have running water or power. Road closures and flooding are making it difficult to deliver supplies.
The big picture: Florida is dealing with an estimated $60 billion in property loss — second only to Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
Russian troops withdrew from a crucial town in eastern Ukraine.
Why? Lyman — a key Russian supply hub since the start of the invasion — was surrounded by Ukrainian troops on Saturday.
Why this matters: It’s another big setback for Russia and a major embarrassment right after Moscow illegally annexed large parts of east Ukraine.
The Supreme Court starts its next term today.
What to watch: Cases about race-conscious college admissions policies; voting rights; LGBTQ rights; the Clean Water Act; and more.
The makeup of the court: There’s a 6-to-3 conservative majority. It’s already reigned in federal agencies, shifted separation of church and state, and allowed more abortion restrictions.
The timeline: The term will go through January, with the first major hearing (on the Clean Water Act) today.
Brazil’s presidential election is headed to a second round.
The latest: Neither right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro nor left-wing former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva won enough votes for outright victory yesterday.
What’s next? A potentially destabilizing four-week period before an Oct. 30 runoff.
Why this matters: It’s the latest test for the worldwide struggle between democracy and authoritarianism.
A stampede at a soccer game in Indonesia killed 125 people.
What happened? Officers fired what appeared to be tear gas after fans ran onto the field on Saturday, causing panic and deadly bottlenecks as thousands tried to leave the stadium.
The aftermath: There were calls for an investigation into how police handled the disaster, which was one of the deadliest in the history of soccer.
The Native American woman who brought activism to the Oscars died yesterday.
Who was she? Sacheen Littlefeather, the first Native American woman ever onstage at the Academy Awards. The 75-year-old died of breast cancer.
How we’ll remember her: Littlefeather declined the best actor prize on behalf of Marlon Brando in 1973, condemning the mistreatment of American Indians in her speech.
New dinosaur tracks were discovered this summer in Alaska.
How? A powerful earthquake last year may have uncovered more than 30 of them from three different species, scientists think.
Why this is exciting: The larger the number of footprints, the more researchers may be able to learn about dinosaurs and how they lived.
And now … what to read: 10 noteworthy books for October. Plus, it’s officially soup season: Try one of these delicious recipes. | 2022-10-03T10:31:29Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The 7 things you need to know for Monday, October 3 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/the-seven/2022/10/03/what-to-know-for-october-3/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/the-seven/2022/10/03/what-to-know-for-october-3/ |
Waking up once to urinate usually isn’t a cause for concern, but anything beyond that may be worth looking into
Advice by Petar Bajic, MD
(Chelsea Conrad/The Washington Post)
Petar Bajic is a urologist at Cleveland Clinic and assistant professor at the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine of Case Western Reserve University.
Q: I keep waking up in the middle of the night to pee and worry it’s affecting my sleep. Why is this happening?
In fact, one of the strongest diuretics known to man isn’t something you eat or drink. It’s actually something that can be released from within your own body.
Sleep apnea — a condition that affects breathing during sleep — can lead to lower oxygen levels in the bloodstream. When blood oxygen levels drop due to sleep apnea, the heart can experience a false signal of fluid overload and release a hormone called type B natriuretic peptide (BNP). BNP is a very potent diuretic that tells the body to get rid of sodium and water. It then causes an overproduction of urine.
Nocturia can also be a warning sign for other health conditions, such as diabetes, heart failure, urinary tract infections and an overactive bladder, as well as a reaction to some medications, including those used to treat hypertension and kidney conditions. Sometimes, it’s linked to other sleep issues, such as insomnia.
The more common causes usually aren’t anything to worry about. Here are some of them, as well as other medical conditions linked to nocturia.
There are many foods and drinks whose byproducts are passed into the urine and can irritate or “tickle” the bladder, producing an urge to pee. This includes teas (green, white and black), spicy foods and artificial sweeteners, such as the calorie-free sweeteners you might add to your drinks or those that come inside diet or sugar-free foods. In a study involving rats, these sweeteners were shown to increase bladder muscle contraction, which causes an urge to urinate.
Caffeine is another common culprit, whether it’s in coffee, tea or soda, and so is alcohol. Both are known diuretics.
Most young people don’t wake up at night to urinate. Those who do are probably taking in too much fluid before bedtime or consuming bladder irritants or diuretics. But it’s important to keep in mind that even young people can be diagnosed with medical conditions linked to nocturia, such as sleep apnea, particularly those who are overweight.
But if you’re waking up twice or more times — or you think you might have sleep apnea, a prostate issue or any other medical condition related to nocturia — connect with your primary care provider or a urologist and get evaluated. They’ll run a urine test and check to make sure your overall health is in order. | 2022-10-03T10:31:42Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Why do I pee so much at night? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2022/10/03/pee-at-night-urinate-nocturia/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2022/10/03/pee-at-night-urinate-nocturia/ |
How Design Army’s Pum Lefebure would spend a perfect day in D.C.
Pum Lefebure was 16 when, on a trip to the United States, the Bangkok native flew from New York to Washington, glanced at D.C. from high above and made herself a promise: “I will live here one day.”
“Everything was green and beautiful, and there was so much space,” Lefebure recalls. “It was love at first sight. Because I grew up in a city of 10 million people, I had never seen a space so bright. For me, at 16 years old, D.C. looked like heaven, in a way.”
Three decades later, Lefebure doesn’t just call the District home — the entrepreneur is a fixture of D.C.’s creative community, having co-founded the H Street firm Design Army with her husband, Jake, and launched the studio space At Yolk. Over the course of her career, during which she has grown from a foreign exchange student who didn’t know English to a chief creative officer and industry trailblazer, Lefebure has crafted campaigns for such clients as Pepsi, Bloomingdale’s and the Academy Awards.
The Brookland resident is fittingly inventive on her perfect day in D.C., beginning and ending her day in unusual locales — and squeezing in plenty of food and fashion in between.
When I open my eyes, I want to wake up inside of the [Yayoi] Kusama exhibition at the Hirshhorn after a night at the museum. I’d start my day by walking around the Hirshhorn to get my creative brain going, then walk over for a quick breakfast at the National Gallery of Art Sculpture Garden. It has that Parisian vibe, and a fall day there would just be perfect. I’d sit there with my feet in the water with my daughter, Sophie — she just went to New York for college, so I miss her dearly — and enjoy some coffee and a croissant.
I need to have some self-care time, and I like getting a medical grade facial — not a little spa but the real deal — so I’d go to the MI Skin Dermatology Center. Dr. [Melda] Isaac is amazing, and her staff is incredible. After 90 minutes, I’d magically appear at the Ritz-Carlton spa in Georgetown to melt the tension away with a massage.
Next, I’d do lunch at Centrolina at CityCenterDC. There’s usually a cool art installation there, so it would be quite nice to sit outside with Sophie and my French bulldog, Luna. I’d order the pasta of the day, with a little bit of champagne — after detoxing, I need to put some bad stuff back in me. Then I’d stop by Maketto on H Street for a quick afternoon coffee break. It’s a one-stop shop since they also have cool sneakers and T-shirts and I can do some shopping as well.
In the evening, I’d go for a walk from the Yards over to Nationals Park — it’s a really lovely place to watch the sunset, enjoy the scenery and do some sketching. Then I’d stop by Somewhere, which is another coffee shop that sells sneakers and clothing, too. A lot of people don’t know about this store, but they carry really cool brands — it’s almost like a fashion-as-art space, and the owners spend time carefully selecting the pieces there.
For dinner, I’m going to eat at the White House with all of my creative friends and a meal from Sidra Forman, who is this really incredible private chef. She only cooks with the best available seasonal ingredients, she does great wine pairings and makes this herb-based cocktail that is so unique, and I always taste something I have never tasted before. She’s an incredible florist as well, so it’s the whole package when you have her do dinner. Since I love Duke Ellington, and would want to celebrate the king of jazz who was a true Washingtonian, we’d have a pianist playing his music the whole evening.
Then I’d walk across the street to the Off the Record bar, in the basement at the Hay-Adams. My husband would join me at the end of the evening, and I’d have a gin and tonic in front of the fireplace. After a few drinks, we’d sneak into the National Arboretum — I just think that place is magic — and fall asleep watching the stars. | 2022-10-03T11:43:47Z | www.washingtonpost.com | How Design Army's Pum Lefebure would spend a perfect day in D.C. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/03/pum-lefebure-dream-day/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/03/pum-lefebure-dream-day/ |
The war on abortion rights meshes perfectly with MAGA authoritarianism
Abortion rights advocates demonstrate in Boise, Idaho, on May 3. (Sarah A. Miller/Idaho Statesman via AP)
According to the Center for Reproductive Rights, in the 100 days, as of Sunday, since the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade, nearly 80 million people find themselves in 13 states that, in effect, ban abortion. There will be a record number of abortion-related measures on the midterm ballot. It would be a mistake to see the focus on abortion as distinct from the MAGA war on democracy.
Pundits and politicians tend to observe a bright distinction between the Donald Trump MAGA movement’s assault on democracy and the right-wing evisceration of women’s reproductive rights. After all, some pro-democracy voices on the right are antiabortion. But simply because not all forced-birth advocates are MAGA authoritarian supporters, that doesn’t mean a critical point should be overlooked: The attack on women’s self-determination and autonomy is as much a part of MAGA’s fascistic affinities as is the cult’s fondness for violence and white Christian nationalism.
One need only look at right-wing regimes present and past to see that they invariably include appeals to hyper-masculinity and demands for women to be limited to their roles as women and mothers. Modern authoritarian regimes — such as Viktor Orban’s Hungary or President Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil — and European fascists of the 1930s alike have sought to compel motherhood and limit women’s participation in society.
“Fascism is a rejection of the notion of a quality, of an expansive definition of the people. And it comes at a time where people are pushing the parameters of an existing definition, one that basically included males, often male property owners only,” Anne Wingenter, professor of history and women’s studies at Loyola University Chicago, explained in a radio interview in April. “It was pushback against expanding that definition to excluded groups. What we seem to be experiencing today, to me, looks a lot like an attempt to define down that notion of the people again. And some people get to be fully autonomous, and some don’t.”
That was certainly the pattern in 1930s fascist Italy. Wingenter explained, “[Benito] Mussolini was known for his kind of pithy little quotes. And he is on record as saying, ‘War is to man, as maternity is to woman.’ ” She continued, “The ideal woman in fascist Italy was the wife and mother of many children.”
The xenophobic right-wing movement in the United States today is obsessed with “replacement theory,” regarding women in the dominant group as essential to the preservation of white supremacy. There was a “kind of demographic panic in the wake of the World War I in Italy,” Wingenter said. Now, in the United States, it is the MAGA hysteria over white replacement. In both, part of the “solution” is for White mothers to have lots of children and forgo not only abortion but birth control.
We therefore should recognize, as Wingenter puts it, that those who “tolerate the removal of a whole series of rights for people, in the sense of a full ban on abortion,” strike not only at the rights of women to participate fully in society but to destroy the democratic ideal of equal rights and equal opportunity.
Mainstream media coverage has no problem recognizing the link between the MAGA anti-democratic movement and racism/white nationalism. One need only look at the Confederate flags carried through the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, or listen to right-wing fearmongering about immigrants to understand racism is intrinsic to the MAGA movement. However, when it comes to women’s rights, we see little acknowledgment in mainstream reporting and commentary that misogyny and deprivation of women’s rights are central to a movement playing largely on White male hysteria.
In sum, MAGA support for government intrusion into Americans’ most intimate decisions reflects an authoritarian outlook. It is not a coincidence that this targeting of women is occurring in tandem with a developing voter registration gender gap favoring women. They understand all too well that the GOP’s quest for a national abortion ban is about their reproductive rights — and also about their inclusion in society and ultimately the preservation of democracy. | 2022-10-03T12:01:46Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | MAGA fascism inevitably attacks women - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/03/maga-fascism-women/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/03/maga-fascism-women/ |
By Dan Morain
California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) speaks at a mental health treatment center in San Jose on March 3. (Karl Mondon/Bay Area News Group via AP)
Dan Morain, former editorial page editor of the Sacramento Bee, is the author of “Kamala’s Way: An American Life.”
In 1967, Ronald Reagan, California’s Republican governor, signed legislation that would have far-reaching impact on people with severe mental illness. That was also the year Gavin Newsom was born; now, 55 years later, he is the state’s Democratic governor, attempting to deal with the fallout — for those who are mentally ill and for the communities where they live — from the law.
The 1967 legislation had been years in the making, a bipartisan undertaking that proponents hailed as the Magna Carta for people in state hospitals. It provided patients with basic rights, accelerated the emptying of those antiquated institutions and became a template for states across the country.
As hospital population fell, Reagan cut state hospital funding but also allocated more money to counties to provide care for newly released patients. Among the legislation’s flaws, it did not compel counties to spend the money to help former patients, who were under no obligation to seek care. It was a prescription for social disaster.
Like virtually every California governor before him, Newsom has ambitions that go beyond Sacramento. Unlike his predecessors, he is confronting the daunting issue of untreated mental illness. His success or failure could determine his future.
The problem is huge: 160,000 homeless people in California, a fourth of them severely mentally ill. Tens of thousands of others with mental illness are confined in prisons and jails. Newsom understands why few have taken on the issue.
“You’re just immediately criticized and protested, and the ROI” — return on investment — “on that often is pretty modest,” Newsom told me in a recent interview.
On the national stage, his presidential ambitions are hardly a secret. Newsom regularly trolls Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, including challenging him to a debate over immigration and last week sending hurricane disaster aid to the state, underlining DeSantis’s past opposition to hurricane aid elsewhere.
Tending to his own state, Newsom last month signed what could be the governor’s legacy legislation, creating what he calls CARE Court, short for Community Assistance, Recovery and Empowerment. It’s aimed at compelling those with severe mental illness to obtain help.
People would come under CARE Court jurisdiction if they’re diagnosed with serious psychotic disorders, unlikely to survive without supervision and would deteriorate without help.
Family members, doctors and police could petition to have individuals placed into the CARE Court system, and judges could refer defendants to the system if they’re deemed to be incompetent to stand trial.
Once in the system, individuals would receive treatment, access to medication and housing in the least restrictive setting. They would also have attorneys and could refuse medication.
Assuming the law survives inevitable court challenges, seven counties will implement the system by next October, followed by the state’s other 51 counties no later than Dec. 1, 2024.
It won’t be cheap. California will spend at least $37.7 million just to operate CARE Courts, a Senate staff analysis shows. Newsom says 12,000 people could qualify. Additionally, the California State Association of Counties estimates the price tag for treatment and other services at $40,000 per participant, with a total annual cost of up to $1.3 billion.
Reflecting voter impatience over tent cities throughout the state, the bill received only two no votes in the 80-seat Assembly; the 40-seat Senate approved it unanimously — over the objections of civil-liberties groups.
In writing about mental health care over decades, I found that the subject is often personal to those attempting to address it. So it was with the CARE Court bill. Legislators involved in its passage told of a brother-in-law, an aunt or some other family member who was ravaged by mental illness.
I, too, have a story. My brother, Frank, crashed his car in 1969 when he was 22. Because of a brain injury, he could not care for himself and, try as they did, our parents could not handle him. He spent his days in California state hospitals and a nursing home until his death in 2000.
Frank was not mentally ill. His brain was damaged. But he taught me that society has an obligation to care for people who are incapable of caring for themselves. He received care, but many others with brain disease and damage end up on the streets or worse, as we Californians witness each day.
In August, a few days after grabbing headlines by donating $100,000 to DeSantis’s Democratic challenger, Charlie Crist, Newsom announced at a Fresno high school that the state would spend $4.7 billion on mental health programs for the young, including training 40,000 mental health workers.
He also did something he rarely does in public, telling the gathering that his maternal grandfather killed himself. His mother, he later told me, never recovered. It’s one reason he has focused on mental illness throughout his years in public office.
Cynics may note that if Newsom does aspire to higher office, he must be able to show that he tried to address California’s chronic problems with the homeless and mentally ill. That may be true, but political calculation that achieves something worthwhile could also be called leadership. | 2022-10-03T12:01:58Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Behind Newsom’s move on California’s chronic problem with the mentally ill - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/03/newsom-california-mental-health-care/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/03/newsom-california-mental-health-care/ |
Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba stands in prayer near a poster outlined with plans for improving the primary water system plant in Jackson, Miss., on Sept. 13. (Rogelio V. Solis/AP)
The crisis over undrinkable water in Jackson, Miss., and the decision by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida to remove a twice-elected Tampa-area prosecutor may seem unrelated. They are not.
They are two examples of a decade-long Republican attack on Democratic-led cities and counties that has weakened and undercut them through two tactics in particular: power-stripping and neglect.
Two political trends that have accelerated over the past decade are driving Republicans in this direction. Increasingly, the mayor of any large city is a Democrat — even in red states. Of the United States' 100 biggest cities, only 26 are run by Republicans. And those mayors are fairly left-wing on many issues, as the Democratic Party has become increasingly ideologically consistent across the country. At the same time, state governments have become more dominated by Republicans. In 23 states, Republicans control both the state legislature and governor’s office, up from only nine in 2010.
In most states, the big metropolitan areas are where the action is — they are the centers of population, economic development and education policy. Republican governors and state legislators don’t want to be cut out of the most important decisions in their states, particularly since they aren’t likely to agree with the choices Democratic officials make.
Enter power-stripping. Over the past decade, wherever Republicans have control of state government, they are consistently passing laws putting strings on cities and counties. For much of the 2010s, Republicans were stopping local governments from raising the minimum wage, creating universal paid leave, increasing taxes or regulating businesses. In 2020, they rolled back or suspended numerous municipal covid-19 restrictions.
Last year, Republican legislators and governors across the country banned provisions adopted in Democratic cities in 2020 that made it easier to vote, such as ballot drop boxes and longer hours and more locations for early voting. They also made it harder for cities to change their policing practices and restricted how schools could teach racism, both attempts to rein in the racial liberalism that emerged in urban areas after the killing of George Floyd and resulting protests.
Now, Republican officials have begun going a step further — literally removing left-leaning officials from key posts to prevent them from enacting Democratic policy goals.
Andrew Warren, who was first elected as Hillsborough County state attorney in 2016 and then reelected in 2020, had taken a series of liberal stances, most notably pledging not to prosecute women who get abortions or doctors who perform them. DeSantis argued this was an improper use of Warren’s prosecutorial discretion and last month suspended him and replaced Warren with a lawyer who is a member of the conservative Federalist Society.
Pennsylvania Republicans are trying to impeach Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner, even though he was elected in 2017 and reelected in 2021. Like Warren, Krasner is part of the national cohort of more progressive prosecutors.
This power-stripping is a terrible trend. It prevents cities from adopting sound policies and seems aimed at punishing people who vote for Democratic politicians. Removing local officials, particularly those who were popularly elected, over policy differences is an erosion of democracy. Other Democratic officials in Florida are already watching their words for fear of the governor removing them, according to a report from Bolts, an online magazine that focuses on local and state politics. If local officials are making decisions to placate DeSantis instead of their constituents, it makes local government and elections a bit of farce, with a man in Tallahassee really driving policy.
Power-stripping is the tactic Republicans usually use when they are fighting metro areas with a lot of population growth, economic development and well-off White Democrats. When it comes to areas that have large Black populations and are struggling economically, Republican state officials just neglect them. It’s less the passage of policies to rein in these cities than the absence of policies to help them.
State Republican officials in Mississippi long refused to provide Jackson, which is about 83 percent Black, with enough money to improve its infrastructure, despite previous water crises.
Milwaukee, which is 39 percent Black, is planning to reduce spending for its fire department and cutting library hours as Republican state legislators in Wisconsin refuse to provide enough funding to the city or allow Milwaukee to raise sales taxes.
The Republican governor of Tennessee has over the last two years shifted funds for low-income housing to rural towns and away from the Memphis area, which is 54 percent Black.
Twelve Republican-dominated states, mostly in the South and with large Black populations, have refused federal expansion of Medicaid funds, much of which would otherwise go to uninsured people and the hospitals that serve them.
The problems of disproportionately Black cities aren’t caused solely by the neglect of Republican officials. Blue states across the country aren’t doing enough to lift Black communities either. For example, the water was also not safe to drink in Baltimore for some time in early September, and Maryland’s state legislature is controlled by Democrats. And sometimes blue states strip power from cities, such as when California passed a law in 2018 that prevented cities from imposing taxes on sugary drinks.
But it’s mostly Republicans employing these tactics — and they are likely to accelerate their use. Republican officials win state-level elections with the support of White rural and suburban voters in part by casting themselves as defenders of the rest of the state from what they describe as failing, overly liberal cities. Once they are in office, either neglecting or stripping power from these cities is an almost inevitable next step. There will be more Jacksons and more Andrew Warrens unless Republicans decide to respect cities and the people who live in them. | 2022-10-03T12:02:04Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | The two ways Republican politicians are undermining cities - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/03/power-stripping-neglect-gop-attack-cities-bacon/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/03/power-stripping-neglect-gop-attack-cities-bacon/ |
What influences the Supreme Court? Here’s what we learned.
The reasoning in amicus briefs shows up in the decisions. Lawyers’ experience makes a big difference as well.
Analysis by Morgan L.W. Hazelton
Rachael K. Hinkle
The U.S. Supreme Court begins its new term Monday. (Joshua Roberts/Reuters)
The Supreme Court begins its 2022 term Monday, in the shadow of its momentous last term. In the final weeks, the court released important decisions that fundamentally changed constitutional law regarding gun rights, abortion and environmental protection, among other important issues. The upcoming term may grab just as many headlines. The justices will hear important cases about college admissions, states’ ability to regulate commerce and copyright law. Just in these first few days they will consider the standard under which the Environmental Protection Agency can regulate wetlands and the power of states to control elections in light of federal voting rights.
How do the justices make their decisions? Decades of research suggest that while their ideologies have an influence, that’s not the only influence. In our new book, we examine how information flows to the court and what the justices do with this information. Attorneys spend hours learning to craft arguments and clients spend large sums for such work. The parties in the lawsuits give the justices written arguments called “party briefs.” But other groups can weigh in, too. Interested groups and individuals can make written arguments in what are called “amicus curiae” or friend-of-the-court briefs.
These briefs matter, our research finds. They influence both who wins and how the justices write opinions that will shape future cases. But other resources, such as experienced attorneys, matter as well.
How we know briefs influence the Supreme Court
To do our research, we use measures from relevant texts. For instance, borrowing from text analysis, we use a measure computational linguists call “cosine similarity scores” to see which briefs are most like the resulting opinions. This approach weights unusual words more than common terms, so that everyday language contributes less to the score than rarer or more specific words. For instance, in Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr.’s opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the case in which the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, we found frequent use of the term “quickening” — which was often used in the Thomas More Society’s amicus brief.
We also consider novel language within briefs using something called “term frequency — inverse document frequency.” This accounts for how much of a brief is devoted to discussing concepts that scarcely show up in other briefs. Finally, we measure many things about the parties themselves, the organizations filing amicus briefs, and their attorneys — for instance, the attorneys’ years of experience — that can shape the results.
Why have so many Americans come to mistrust the Supreme Court?
These approaches can help us understand recent decisions
For instance, let’s apply these tools in examining Dobbs v. Jackson. As you can see in the figure below the two sides were equally matched on many factors that influence the outcome and the content of the opinion, like total number of words, types of information, and the novelty of the information.
We see that the side seeking to overturn Roe had a significant advantage in the experience levels of the attorneys listed first on the briefs. We also looked at the attorneys named on the 136 amicus briefs filed, many of whom are among an elite circle of specialized lawyers who regularly practice before the Supreme Court. Those seeking to overturn Roe collectively had appeared in 1,827 prior briefs since the 1970s, far more than the 896 Supreme Court appearances by attorneys filing briefs in support of the clinic.
Our research indicates that the Supreme Court produces opinions that borrow more from the briefs written by experienced attorneys than from the others. The court’s opinions are legal precedents that dictate the law in that area and define the decision’s impact. That happened in Dobbs; attorneys with more Supreme Court experience filed briefs that were more likely to be similar to the final opinions, while briefs by attorneys with less Supreme Court experience were less likely to resemble the final results.
These approaches may help us estimate results in upcoming cases
We can use these tools to examine upcoming cases as well. On Monday, the court will hear oral arguments in Sackett v. Environmental Protection Agency, which looks at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit’s test for assessing whether wetlands fall under the Clean Water Act. Here, the sides are relatively balanced in both the information they provide and the resources they have available, although the petitioners — who seek a more restrictive understanding of the Clean Water Act — have a slight advantage.
As you can see in the figure below, the petitioners offer lengthier briefs, but those are not particularly novel. However, they do have more experienced attorneys.
On Tuesday, the court will hear arguments in Merrill v. Milligan, about an Alabama redistricting plan that the Northern District of Alabama ruled dilutes Black votes and therefore violates the Voting Rights Act. Here, the petitioners — who argue that the redistricting plan does violate the Voting Rights Act — offer the most information and are backed by more resources, as you can see in the next figure, with briefs supporting that are numerous, longer and less novel. (Perhaps counterintuitively, we have found that consistency among large groups of briefs — avoiding new arguments and coordinating among themselves — is a good sign for that side.) Although the court asks amicus filers not to repeat information found in other briefs, we, like other scholars, have found evidence that repetition helps that side. The petitioners, who oppose Alabama’s redistricting plan, also have more experienced attorneys.
The Supreme Court took a case on the EPA's authority that could undo most federal laws
Of course, the justices make their own decisions; they could well rule for the side that looks, to us, less fully briefed. And it’s also true that justices are influenced by their own ideologies — and that the Supreme Court tends to take cases to reverse lower courts’ rulings.
But the amount and kind of information flowing to the court, the attorneys’ levels of experience, and resources brought to bear in that litigation also matter. If our analysis is correct, observers might be surprised by this highly conservative court deciding in Merrill that Alabama has indeed violated the Voting Rights Act and must draw its district map all over again.
Morgan L.W. Hazelton is an associate professor of political science and law (by courtesy) at Saint Louis University.
Rachael K. Hinkle is an associate professor of political science at the University at Buffalo, SUNY.
Together they are authors of Persuading the Supreme Court: The Significance of Briefs in Judicial Decision-Making (University of Kansas Press, 2022).
10:39 AMNoted: Democrats embrace a dark midterm message
10:37 AMTake a look: On the Sunday shows, officials talk about lessons learned from Ian | 2022-10-03T12:02:12Z | www.washingtonpost.com | How will the Supreme Court rule this term? Here's what influences that. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/03/supreme-court-term-rulings-amici/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/03/supreme-court-term-rulings-amici/ |
Where to vote and how to watch your favorite bears of Katmai National Park and Preserve
’Tis the season to be jolly, and I’m not talking about Christmas. It’s Fat Bear Week, a pure and wonderful treat for people who need a break from the harsh realities of life.
The competition champions the brown bears of Katmai National Park and Preserve as they complete their transformations from scrawny to elephantine for hibernation. With the internet watching via live Bear Cams, the contestants go beast mode on the millions of sockeye salmon that run from Bristol Bay down the Brooks River.
Then it’s up to voters to interpret the “fattest.”
“There’s no real set criteria that you’re supposed to vote on,” said Mike Fitz, a resident naturalist with Explore.org who started the competition in 2014. “You could vote on just simply the largest bear, or look at relative fatness or consider the extenuating circumstances of each bear’s life like the challenges of raising offspring.”
For the uninitiated, here’s everything you need to know about the week, and how to celebrate accordingly. | 2022-10-03T12:02:46Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Fat Bear Week 2022: What to know about Katmai National Park's big event - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2022/10/03/fat-bear-week-2022-katmai/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2022/10/03/fat-bear-week-2022-katmai/ |
Catalans, in contest for tallest human tower, climb to dizzying heights
Morgan Coates
Members of the winning Vilafranca team descend after completing their human tower during the 28th Human Tower Competition in Tarragona, Spain, on Sunday. (Joan Mateu Parra/AP)
Defy fear — and gravity — by building the highest-possible human towers.
That was the goal of thousands of people who gathered in a stadium in northeastern Spain, climbing on top of each other to perilous heights in a competition for the tallest formation.
The human towers are called “castells” and building them is a centuries-old practice in Catalonia, an autonomous community within Spain with a strong identity and language.
An “integral part” of the Catalan people’s “cultural identity,” according to UNESCO, the tradition is believed to have originated from human towers built at the end of the 18th century by dance groups.
In the city of Tarragona, some 60 miles south of Barcelona, 11,000 spectators filled a stadium to watch 41 teams of “castellers” compete, the first time the biannual event was held since 2018, due to the pandemic.
The team from Vilafranca secured the 16,000 euro ($15,624) prize — as well as local acclaim — with a human tower that reached nearly 43 feet. Its castellers dismounted safely, earning them extra points, Reuters reported.
That’s not to say the performance was without drama: Photos show the Vilafranca castellers falling in one of the rounds. Event organizers told journalists that throughout the event, 71 people were treated for injuries, and 13 were transported to a hospital.
The greens, as the team is known for the teal color of their shirts, are the reigning champions of Tarragona: They won the competition every time between 2002 and 2016, according to local outlet Corporacio Catalana de Media Audiovisual.
In a tweet on Sunday, Vilafranca thanked “the best fans in the world” and said, “Today Tarragona is greener than ever!”
For Catalan residents, castells are an important cultural tradition, passed down between generations “and providing community members a sense of continuity, social cohesion and solidarity,” UNESCO said in 2010, the same year it included the practice on a list of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.
Catalonia’s human towers to pop up on the Mall
When building castells, people coalesce around a base in a support formation known as the “pinya.” Above the base, castellers stand on each other’s shoulders to form between six and 10 levels.
The tower in the middle is called a “tronc” and is typically made up of broad-shouldered men who serve as the anchors while lighter adults, and then children, make up the upper rings.
At the end, one child, the “enxaneta,” ascends to the very top of the tower, above the last three levels known as the “pom de dalt.”
Sunday’s competition was an upbeat event that attracted crowds from around Catalonia and the world.
The Colla Joves Xiquets de Valls, clad in red shirts, came in second, with nine-level castells. But they were held back by falls and the fatigue of their castellers, Spanish newspaper El Pais reported.
In the stadium and on social media, the team celebrated “the best performance in our history.” | 2022-10-03T12:02:52Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Photos: Catalans compete to build highest human tower - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/03/catalan-human-tower-competition-spain/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/03/catalan-human-tower-competition-spain/ |
Cholera resurfaces in Haiti as gangs imperil water and hospital access
Lauré Adrien, chief of Haiti's Ministry of Public Health and Population, speaks about cholera at a news conference Sunday in Port-au-Prince. (Ralph Tedy Erol/Reuters)
At least one person has died of cholera in Haiti, officials said this week, stoking fears of an outbreak as widespread gang control over several parts of the country worsens access to fuel, clean drinking water and medical care.
Two confirmed cases, one resulting in death, of the acute diarrheal illness — which killed more than 10,000 people in the country more than a decade ago — have been detected so far, Haitian Health Ministry officials said during a news conference Sunday.
After three years with no new cases, the government’s announcement of a potential outbreak on Sunday intensified fear about public health crises in the poor and politically unstable country.
Haiti is still reeling after last year’s assassination of President Jovenel Moïse, and gangs have violently tightened their chokehold on several parts of the country. More than 470 people in Haiti were killed, injured or unaccounted for amid a wave of heightened violence between July 8 and July 17 this year, the United Nations said, and at least 3,000 people had fled their homes. Many are also trapped inside their neighborhoods, unable to access key supplies like medicine and food.
Gang war traps thousands in Haitian slum
“You are in a lawless country. Nobody is in charge. It’s the gang that’s in charge,” said Cécile Accilien, vice president of the Haitian Studies Association, a nonprofit that fosters discussion and research on Haiti and the Haitian diaspora. “People cannot go get clean water because they are barricaded by the gang. … People have died because they can’t get to the hospital.”
For more than two weeks, thousands of Haitians have taken to the streets to protest the government and soaring fuel prices, caused in part by gang control over the country’s main fuel terminal, in Port-au-Prince. Regional leaders have called the heated demonstrations a “low-intensity civil war”; video footage has shown gunfire and piles of burning tires on city streets.
The fuel shortages have forced hospitals and at least one major distributor of potable water to shut down. Gang blockades have prevented water trucks from resupplying some neighborhoods, Reuters reported, and fuel is also needed to make city water pumps work.
All of this is a problem for controlling cholera, which is primarily spread when people ingest contaminated food or water.
“Many people will die if effective measures are not taken,” said Etzer Emile, an economist in Haiti. “The gangs will make things worse.”
Vélina Élysée Charlier, a member of an anti-corruption group called Noupapdòmi, said she has been living in self-imposed “house arrest” to protect herself from gang violence.
Bottled-water prices have gone up by about 100 percent in some areas, she said, and she recently spent 3,500 gourdes — about $29 — per gallon of gasoline on the black market.
“I’m very worried. I have four daughters — my youngest is almost 5 months,” she said in a WhatsApp message. “Access to clean water is a big challenge, and the poorest who already had no access to clean water will suffer more.”
In general, with early intervention, cholera’s fatality rate is less than 1 percent, but many Haitians are at the mercy of unofficial borders drawn by rival gangs and have little access to health care.
“You don’t go to any areas that are controlled by gangs, unless you’re a journalist, and even then, you are taking the risk of not making it back alive,” Charlier said. In the event of a medical emergency, her plan is to “start walking and calling friends to see if anybody can help.”
Amanda Colette contributed to this report. | 2022-10-03T12:02:59Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Haiti confirms cholera cases as gangs threaten water, hospital access - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/03/haiti-cholera-gang-violence-water/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/03/haiti-cholera-gang-violence-water/ |
In ‘Mr. Wilder and Me,’ Billy Wilder is a character worthy of his films
You don’t have to be a film buff to love acclaimed British author Jonathan Coe’s at once melancholic and laugh-out-loud funny novel “Mr. Wilder and Me.” But don’t be surprised if reading it inspires you to binge-watch Hollywood movie classics “Some Like It Hot,” “Sunset Boulevard,” “The Apartment” and others written and directed by cinema great Billy Wilder (1906-2002), the Austrian-American producer, director and screenwriter to whom Coe gives star credit in his title.
The “me” of the title is first-person narrator Calista Frangopoulou, whose fictional life story Coe nimbly intertwines with Wilder’s real-life history. Theirs is not a romantic love story, but something more tender and rare: a charming, ironic fairy tale about an accidental, intergenerational friendship that, even as it changes the entire trajectory of young Calista’s future will also help the aging Wilder accept his own limitations.
Book review: 'Billy Wilder on Assignment'
The novel opens in pre-Covid London, where the happily married Calista is a moderately successful film composer in her 50s and at a crossroads. Her fading professional career, combined with the imminent departure of her 18-year-old twin daughters (affectionately named after characters in Wilder’s movies), has left her feeling adrift, without purpose. Wondering what comes next, she flashes back to herself at 18, a naive Athens native venturing abroad for the first time, on a low-budget trip across America.
The year was 1976 and at that point, too, Calista had contemplated her future with gloomy uncertainty. Her British mother had taught her flawless English, a highly useful skill to be sure, but one she worried would doom her to spend the rest of her life as a language tutor and translator. And yet translating her true passion, playing and writing music, into a professional career seemed like a far-fetched dream.
It’s in hopes of escaping such thoughts that Calista makes her way across America. She soon finds a friend and travel companion in Gill, a British college student of about the same age and similarly at loose ends. Their connection turns out to be fortuitous; once in Los Angeles, Gill invites Calista to a boring dinner with a friend of her father about whom she knows only that he is a Hollywood director.
The improbable evening that follows is a perfect setup for the kind of witty farce Wilder reveled in.
The two young women arrive at the posh Beverly Hills bistro so underdressed in T-shirts and beach shorts they are at first refused entry. Even after their host — Billy Wilder — graciously introduces them to his wife Audrey and to his longtime writing partner I.A.L. Diamond and his wife Barbara, Gill and Calista have no notion that they have stumbled into an evening with Hollywood royalty.
Just as mystifying to them as the haute cuisine menu is the conversation, sprinkled with references to “Marlene” (as in Dietrich), “Garbo” (as in Greta) and “Al” (as in Pacino), who happens to be sitting at a nearby table. Calista listens, bewildered, as Wilder and Diamond lament their inability to gain financial backing for their latest film project — “Fedora,” about an aging, reclusive movie star — which has been universally nixed by ever-youthful Hollywood bigwigs who dismiss the distinguished team as long past their Oscar-winning prime. In the era of “Jaws,” they were dead in the water.
Soon enough, Calista becomes so drunk on martinis and red wine that all she can do is yawn and yawn — and in so doing thrills her hosts by giving them the comic twist to top off a key scene that they’d been struggling to find for days.
One year later, back home in Athens, she receives an unexpected reward: Wilder and Diamond have finally found financing for their film — which is being shot in Greece — and hire her as their translator.
Even better, they keep her on the payroll as an assistant when filming shifts to Paris and Munich. The settings strike Calista as magical. For Wilder, though, they carry different associations. He had lived in each as a fledgling filmmaker before Hitler’s rise to power had compelled him, as a Jew, to flee Nazi Europe for America. He had saved his own life, but the family members he could not take with him had been murdered in the Holocaust. No wonder he is outraged when a German dinner guest asserts that the Holocaust never happened. In a feat of bravura storytelling, Coe relates the horrors of those years through an imaginary screenplay conceived in the style of Wilder. The centerpiece is Wilder’s description of his postwar job, as a U.S. Army colonel based in Munich, editing a documentary film titled “Death Mills,” composed from newsreels that exposed the horrors uncovered by Allied troops at Auschwitz and other death camps: field after field filled with corpses and the dying.
All Wilder could do while gazing at these images is wonder if one of these lifeless bodies could be his mother — and all he can do in responding to the callous Holocaust denier is ask the stingingly simple question: “If there was no Holocaust, where is my mother?”
This, Calista realizes, was the tragic burden Wilder could never unload. Yet he had also managed to create a body of work that embraced all human possibility, ranging from blunt evil and base cynicism to daffy humor and unaccountable generosity and love. That is the lesson he embedded in his films: that every life story inevitably commingles possibilities for both heartbreak and joie de vivre. And that model for adaptation and creativity also becomes his personal gift to Calista in her own path to reinvigorate the rest of her life.
Although I was disappointed that I could not find “Fedora” available to rent or stream, I was not surprised, since it was one of Wilder’s least successful films. But now that a film adaptation of “Mr. Wilder and Me” — to be directed by Stephen Frears and starring Christoph Waltz — is in the works, I suspect that will change. Its rediscovery, as a result of Coe’s gem of a novel, would be a perfectly ironic outcome worthy of Wilder himself.
Diane Cole is the author of the memoir “After Great Pain: A New Life Emerges.”
Mr. Wilder and Me
By Jonathan Coe
Europa Editions. 256 pp. $27 | 2022-10-03T12:58:01Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Mr. Wilder and Me by Jonathan Coe review - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2022/10/03/billy-wilder-novel-jonathan-coe/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2022/10/03/billy-wilder-novel-jonathan-coe/ |
Several engineering reports have deemed the building on Talbert Street, in Anacostia, dangerous and unlivable
Homeowner Jeanita Brown shows one of the many cracks in the basement floor of her D.C. townhouse on Aug. 26, 2021. (Astrid Riecken for The Washington Post)
More than a year after countless calls, meetings and messages to city officials, little has changed for the dozens of first-time home buyers who were forced to flee their crumbling Anacostia building.
Their mortgage payments still come due every month. Homeowners remain unsure when or how they will be able to return to the condos they bought as part of a D.C. effort to empower first-time home buyers and grow the number of Black homeowners in the District. The condominium association, which has been tasked with pricing out solutions, is barely staying afloat.
That’s why in June, a handful of homeowners staked out Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) at a Ward 5 polling center, where the mayor had come to cast a vote for her own reelection.
“Our housing is falling apart!” said Theresa Brooks Hill, a resident of the River East at Grandview Condominiums on Talbert Street. “We cannot go back there at all.”
Nearly all the residents have moved into temporary housing throughout the city, aided by financial assistance from the D.C. government — a one-time, $7,000 cash payment and monthly rental assistance, an arrangement that was extended from one year to two after the confrontation.
Several engineering reports have deemed the building dangerous and unlivable. The problems begin with the very foundation the structure was built on and extend throughout the complex, the reports say, affecting everything from the plumbing to the retaining wall, which has been sliding slowly toward a steep drop-off and the busy residential street below.
The building, residents say, has to be torn down.
“I don’t plan on moving back unless my unit is completely fixed; knock it down and start from the ground up,” said Yvonne Lawson, a young mother who was pregnant when she moved and now lives near Union Station.
Tearing down and rebuilding a 46-unit apartment complex is well out of budget for the condo association, which has been saddled with legal fees and insurance costs that shot up from $19,000 annually to $15,000 a month in less than a year. Though a lawsuit was filed against developer Stanton View and its subcontractors last year, it remains unresolved.
Neither Stanton View Development nor its attorney responded to requests for comment. In 2020, Stanton View filed a lawsuit against six subcontractors that had worked on the Talbert Street project for $2 million each, alleging they had performed work that was “faulty, negligent, not in accordance with plans ... and not in accordance with industry standards.” Last year, with the case still unresolved, the developer also filed for bankruptcy.
“We still don’t know what’s going to happen,” said Ty’on Jones, a homeowner and one of five members of the condominium association. “What everyone wants is to be back in the home they own. We all went through the process to be homeowners, but no one has made any commitments to assist with the cost to rebuild.”
They found dream homes through D.C.'s first-time homeowners program. Now they have to evacuate.
Before construction began in 2016, the D.C. government underwrote a $6 million loan to Stanton View Development to build the property, which included a subsidy from the city’s Housing Production Trust Fund, the primary cash reserve for D.C.'s affordable housing projects.
Nearly all of the homeowners are Black women and first-time home buyers who received loans through the city’s Home Purchase Assistance Program (HPAP), one of the Bowser administration’s primary programs for boosting homeownership among Black Washingtonians. Starting in October, the program — which has been criticized by some enrollees for being overly cumbersome in a lightning-fast housing market, but is generally well regarded among D.C. officials — will offer more than twice as much assistance to qualified first-time homebuyers.
Following months of outcry from the homeowners and just before they were forced to leave last year, the District quickly assembled a task force composed of several city agency leaders to distribute benefits and help them find new housing.
In an interview last month, D.C. Department of Housing and Community Development interim director Drew Hubbard, who sits on the task force, said the mayor met virtually with some of the homeowners in July and promised them another year of rental assistance, though it remains unclear how long it will be until the Talbert Street building is safe to inhabit.
“That was the first sit-down she agreed to despite us reaching out to her office on several occasions,” said homeowner Davina Callahan, who sought therapy after her move to manage her anxiety amid months of uncertainty. “I’m managing as best as possible.”
The city, Hubbard said, spent months waiting for a follow-up report from the engineering firm hired by the condo association, the Falcon Group, to bring in geotechnical experts for a second, more thorough examination of the property. Unlike the broad overview offered by the Falcon Group’s first report, this one sought to assess the structure’s underlying soil and determine how the building might be saved.
Engineers laid out a stark choice: Attempt to repair the structure by raising up the building and addressing the faults with the foundation underneath — work that could cost upward of $12 million — or demolish it and start anew.
Once homeowners learned what was happening underneath the property, Jones said, the choice became clearer. The shifting foundation put pressure on pipes and other structures that gave way and burst underground. The leaking water accelerated the erosion of the soil under the building, Jones said. With residents gone and fewer people flushing toilets or running water, he added, the damage has slowed, but it’s still shifting.
Tearing down the building altogether, Jones said, would “cost less over time” and would be “faster and easier” for work crews to start from scratch rather than attempt to rebuild faulty construction.
“Knowing that there are sloped floors or the windows that had never been able to close, we knew that you would have to go into each persons’ unit and repair it piece by piece, even after dealing with the foundation issues,” Jones said. “For some units, the floors have sloped for so long you couldn’t repair the units without tearing down and rebuilding certain homes. So at that point, we talked about it as a community, and decided it makes more sense to demolish the building and rebuild.”
But that will be costly, too.
Jones and other members of the condominium association’s board are waiting on cost estimates to present to D.C. officials. But, he said, they have received no assurance that the District will offer any financial aid.
He worries they’re running out of options.
Muriel Bowser ups aid to first-time home buyers in hot D.C. housing market
“Unless some millionaire decides to drop the cost of whatever this number comes out to the condo association, there’s no one else that could potentially help us but the city,” Jones said. “We are 100 percent certain that the owners don’t have the capacity or resources to fund a rebuild on our own — people have had to apply for assistance just to pay their condo association fees. With the new insurance, we’re barely keeping up now. So if the city does not help, we’re all going to be stuck with a property that is continuing to move and be a danger to everyone around it.”
Hubbard said the city was waiting for more information from the condo association before deciding how to proceed and “the ability of the city to help with remediation.”
The deterioration of the building may also pose a public safety risk to those beneath the property along Morris Road SE, a busy thoroughfare dotted with homes and bus stops, according to a July engineering report. The retaining wall at the rear of the property is slowly moving toward the drop-off just above the road, experts wrote, and is in dire need of repair.
“We’re concerned not only about the Talbert site itself, but those other structures underneath and off of Morris Road,” Hubbard said.
LaRuby May, a former Ward 8 D.C. Council member and lawyer representing nine residents, including her sister, LaDonna May, said despite the District’s offers of rental assistance and sympathy for the homeowners, she and her clients believe D.C. must do more to bail out residents who were saddled with a dangerous and deteriorating property after being promised a stable future — and a way to build wealth for their children and families — by the District’s first-time home buyer program, which connected many of the condo owners to the properties on Talbert Street.
Homeowners are still on the hook for their monthly mortgage payments. To “right the wrong” done to these families, LaRuby May said, D.C. officials should determine a way to either expedite the repairs needed to the building or free the homeowners from the obligations of their mortgages and give them another chance to purchase an affordable home with the same assistance offered the first time around.
“The District has to create a structurally safe place for these families to come and build the legacy of wealth that we need in our Black communities,” she said. “This is a righteous fight. The residents of this property deserve better.”
Hubbard said the city is committed to forgiving Home Purchase Assistance loans, interest-free loans that D.C. offers to qualified home buyers to help with gap financing and closing costs. But because each homeowner secured mortgages from different sources, broad mortgage forgiveness is more challenging.
D.C. officials are working with the 40 or so mortgage lenders who represent the various homeowners, Hubbard said, adding that many of the lenders have asked to review the engineering report to better determine options for forgiveness or flexibility in the event the building undergoes significant repairs or renovations. Jones and the condo association’s attorneys have also been in contact with banks to see what options exist for mortgage holders.
“We’re trying to see where there’s a willingness to look at forbearance,” Hubbard said. “Mortgages are more complicated than HPAP.”
In the meantime, LaRuby May is fighting to bring the District back in as a defendant in a lawsuit seeking to hold the developer and subcontractors responsible for damages and emotional distress suffered by homeowners.
To help bolster their case, LaRuby May said, the residents have agreed to bring on a new attorney to act as co-counsel: Ron Austin, an attorney in Louisiana who recently won a $20.5 million settlement from Brad Pitt and his now-defunct charity, Make it Right, for providing New Orleans residents 109 new, affordable, allegedly flood-proof homes in the Lower Ninth Ward after the area was decimated by Hurricane Katrina. The homes that Pitt’s foundation built, the lawsuit said, began to fall apart almost immediately after homeowners bought them.
The situation in that case, LaRuby May said, is strikingly similar: Black homeowners who sunk all of their life’s savings into a newly constructed residence, thinking it would be a safe place to live and allow them to build wealth for their families, only to be confronted with the reality of faulty construction and a litany of dangerous problems.
“Ron has an expertise in this area and a passion for getting justice for Black and brown folks,” LaRuby May said. “We’re excited to bring him onto the team.”
The D.C. Court of Appeals has yet to rule on several petitions in this case, including whether the District can be brought back in as a defendant.
Hubbard said the city has already shown a commitment to aiding these homeowners and vowed to “ensure they’re in a good place” as the situation evolves. But for residents who have already suffered so much disappointment, hope is hard.
“I am one of those homeowners who worked really hard to buy my house and I’m tired,” Jones said. “But I still want to fight for the other owners who are single moms, single parents when they moved in, who have two, three kids and may not have as much time and energy to stay on top of all this stuff while being displaced from our property. I know how important it is for someone to look out for these people.”
He paused, choosing his words carefully before adding: “I hope the government feels that way, too.” | 2022-10-03T12:58:04Z | www.washingtonpost.com | For D.C. Talbert Street homeowners, future remains uncertain - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/03/dc-talbert-street-housing/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/03/dc-talbert-street-housing/ |
Perspective by Tamar Haspel
Holy moly, the fight over beef!
Forget the health part, although there’s plenty of fighting there, too. I’m looking at the environmental part. According to lots of climate people, beef is absolutely the worst thing for the planet. But to others, cattle can single-hoofedly reverse climate change.
What’s true?
Most of beef’s climate impact comes from two sources: the enteric methane cows produce when they eat, and the deforestation happening to accommodate increasing global demand for beef. Each kilogram of beef (about 2.2 pounds) adds the equivalent of nearly 100 kilograms of CO2 (about 220 pounds) into the atmosphere. Just under a quarter of those 100 kilos is due to the land-use changes, and slightly over half is due to on-farm emissions, which include enteric methane and greenhouse gases from equipment, manure and fertilizer.
That makes beef’s footprint (by weight) more than 10 times that of chicken and 200 times that of potatoes. Which is why, in climate circles, it’s Dietary Enemy No. 1.
But there’s an important part of the calculation that those numbers leave out. In some systems, grazing cattle can sequester carbon in soils, and that carbon can offset some of the other emissions. Absolutely nobody disagrees that this happens, but absolutely everybody disagrees about the crucial part: Just how much carbon can be sequestered?
To figure out whether beef is a plus or a minus, you have to wade into the weeds (and grasses, and forbs) on how, and how much, cattle can change soils.
To do that, I enlisted the help of Paige Stanley. She’s doing postdoctoral research at Colorado State University on how grazing affects soil, but she’s also a patient, evidence-based, totally reasonable voice on social media, where this conversation can get — let’s call it “heated.” She’s also a co-author of papers on some of the most rigorous experiments involving cattle and carbon.
First, I asked her to explain how cows can sequester carbon and generally improve soils.
For starters, cows eat some of the plants and deposit manure, a high-quality fertilizer. By eating those plants, she explains, they encourage competition, which promotes biodiversity and can prevent encroachment by invasive species. In the absence of grazing, plants move more quickly from their vegetative stage (after germination), where most of the growth happens, to flowering, after which they “lignify,” or turn brown and eventually die. Cattle keep plants greener longer, which encourages more root growth.
So far so good, but the crux of the biscuit is how much carbon they can sequester. Enough to make beef carbon-neutral?
“I have a hard time talking to people about carbon-neutral beef because that’s five steps ahead of where we are,” Stanley says. “There’s not been a single study to say that we can have carbon-neutral beef.”
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There have, however, been papers modeling and hypothesizing about just how much carbon cattle can sequester. But I’m an empiricist, and models have an annoying tendency to reflect the beliefs of the modelers. Let’s go to the videotape and look at the results when people like Stanley actually measure soil carbon, which she did in the most compelling study I’ve seen on this issue. She and her co-authors used a technique called “adaptive multi-paddock grazing,” in which the animals are moved around to mimic the movement of wild ruminants, and found that the carbon sequestered by the steers did indeed outweigh the carbon emitted by their manure and digestion.
Stanley cautions that this is only in the finishing stage, and, of course, this is an experimental and not a production system, but still. And she says other researchers have reported similar amounts of sequestered carbon, about 1½ metric tons (about 3,310 pounds) per acre, with grazing.
That’s a lot of carbon. But there are some other considerations.
For starters, there’s land use. The grazed animals in Michigan required more than twice as much land as the feedlot-finished animals. If we’re going to feed the world without deforesting it, we need to do so on the 50 percent of habitable land that’s already used for agriculture. Any system that requires twice as much land means we have to appropriate more land for agriculture somewhere else. Deforesting can outweigh the carbon gains of grazing, and that’s a cost that isn’t factored into the equation in most of these studies.
Stanley notes that there’s not a lot of research on how shifting some production to grass would affect land use in other places, and it’s hard to predict that relationship. And she’s right. But I think we have to make the effort, because land use is the fly in the carbon-neutral beef ointment.
It’s not the only fly. There’s also opportunity cost. What would happen to that land if it wasn’t grazed? If it was previously used for crops, where do those crops go? And if it was being grazed at a heavier stocking density, how do you make up for the beef you’re not growing?
It’s also important to note that not all experiments are seeing the kind of sequestration rates achieved by the Michigan study. A grazing experiment at White Oak Pastures, in Georgia, found that sequestered carbon could reduce the carbon footprint of beef by two-thirds. Former presidential candidate Tom Steyer has been doing regenerative grazing on his California cattle ranch since 2011 and getting great results in terms of biodiversity and water infiltration, but carbon stocks haven’t increased. And, of course, there are lots of kinds of grazing, and sometimes the type (stocking density, rotation style) affects soil carbon. Sometimes, it doesn’t seem to. There are almost always benefits to grazing, but it’s hard to weigh things like biodiversity against carbon sequestration.
We also have to ask how much of the sequestered carbon in these systems is actually due to the cattle. What would happen to the land if it were simply left fallow?
The answer is, depending on the land, and on the kind of grazing, it might sequester even more carbon. In studies of grazed vs. ungrazed land, soil carbon stocks sometimes increase. Sometimes, they’re very similar: A study of areas in the Great Plains found that sites that hadn’t been grazed in 74 years had soil carbon stocks similar to comparable sites that had been. In a study done in Texas, the ungrazed plot was, by many measurements, healthier than any of the three grazing conditions.
Where does that leave us? Carbon-neutral beef is absolutely a theoretical possibility. But for it to work, it would have to:
Be based on measured, not modeled, carbon sequestration.
Take into account any food production that was displaced by grazing.
Take land-use change, including deforestation, into account.
Count only the carbon that cattle sequester beyond what no grazing sequesters.
I would love to have carbon-neutral beef, from cattle grazing in environments they actually benefit. But we have to be clear: We’re not there yet. And genuine carbon neutrality means including factors that most studies don’t yet. But ranchers and scientists are working on it, and I believe the needle will mooooooove.
More food-policy commentary
Diet soda is fine, and 3 other food truths it’s time you believed | 2022-10-03T13:15:31Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Carbon-neutral beef? Soil may show if it's possible or a pipedream. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/food/2022/10/03/beef-soil-carbon-sequestration/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/food/2022/10/03/beef-soil-carbon-sequestration/ |
How to deal with your leaves
A beginner’s guide to leaf blowers, leaf blower bans, and when to just leave the leaves alone
Getting a yard tends to complicate people’s feelings about fall foliage. Maybe the changing leaves once conjured a childhood of leaping into big piles or weekend drives taking in the autumn colors. Now, what you’re peeping will eventually land on your lawn and consume your weekend.
Plus, leaf cleanup has never been more fraught. Blow those leaves at the wrong time of day or with the wrong kind of equipment, and you’ll wind up with neighborhood beefs and maybe a fine, thanks to increasingly common local ordinances. So, here’s some guidance to help you choose the right leaf blower — or whether you really need to clean up the leaves at all.
First, let’s deal with gas-powered leaf blowers, which are viewed about as favorably these days as smoking indoors.
Gas blowers pose serious health and environmental risks. They’re powered by a “two-stroke” engine that’s much less efficient than the kind used in cars. According to the California Air Resources Board, operating a gas-powered leaf blower for an hour is equivalent to driving a Toyota Camry for 1,100 miles.
They’re also s0 loud that they can cause hearing damage, plus they emit noise at a low frequency, which means the sound travels far distances. They release fumes that contain carcinogens and cause headaches and dizziness.
Gas blowers do have one advantage: They are more powerful than their battery-powered counterparts. For most homeowners, though, that shouldn’t matter, since a typically sized yard doesn’t require maximum power. (Professional landscape crews, on the other hand, almost all use gas blowers to keep up with maintaining dozens of yards for hours on end.)
According to tool-manufacturer Stanley, Black & Decker, 85 percent of personal-use blowers on the market now are electric. “That’s been pretty steady over the last five years,” says Christine Potter, president of the company’s outdoor business unit.
Electric blowers come in handheld and backpack models, the latter of which is more powerful. They’re either corded or powered by a rechargeable battery. There are two other key specifications to consider: miles per hour, which is the speed of the air as it blows, and cubic feet per minute (CFM), which refers to the volume of air (and affects the amount of leaves moved).
Here’s how Dale Vogelsanger, senior lawn and garden expert at online retailer Power Equipment Direct, explains it: “If you have a small yard with a lot of leaves, you really don’t need a lot of miles per hour because you’re not blowing them far. You need a higher CFM because you’re moving a lot of product.”
If you’ve got a larger yard without too many leaves, you should instead prioritize miles per hour because you’ll want to move a small amount of foliage a farther distance. In a big yard with a lot of leaves, you’ll want high numbers for both. (In handheld electric blowers, CFM typically ranges from about 350 to 605, and MPH from about 95 to 250.)
Beyond that, there are lots of extra features available. Some blowers can convert into leaf vacuums, which suck debris into bags. Others have attachments that can shred leaves into mulch or clean your gutters.
In D.C., where gas blowers were banned in 2018 with a three-year phase-in period, people who still use them can face a $500 fine. From January to Aug. 18, 2022, according to data released by the city under a Freedom of Information Act request, D.C.’s consumer regulatory agency received 452 leaf blower complaints. So far, 11 of those have led to fines.
How to spot sick trees before they damage your home.
The case for just leaving the leaves
There is another option: “All of us need to [reconsider] this hyper-manicured aesthetic expectation that’s been in place,” says Daniel Mabe, president of the American Green Zone Alliance, which certifies landscaping companies for sustainable practices.
Mabe suggests using “people-powered” machines — a.k.a. rakes and push lawn sweepers — to consolidate some leaves. You can then shred them into mulch with a lawn mower or a leaf blower attachment, and spread them around as fertilizer. This method won’t leave your lawn pristine, but that’s the whole point. It’s part of a broader movement to trade perfect grass for more biodiversity.
“Leaf litter is an astonishingly rich habitat” for animals, especially insects, which lay their eggs there in winter, says Matthew Shepherd, director of outreach and education at Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation. It also improves soil health, which in turn helps sustain plants that attract pollinators.
Xerces Society has a “Leave the Leaves” campaign, encouraging people not to completely tidy up fallen foliage. Shepherd emphasizes that it’s not an all-or-nothing proposition: “You don’t have to keep your lawn smothered with them.” (He also stresses that the campaign does not apply to climates prone to wildfires, where collecting leaves is a matter of safety.)
“We’re facing all sorts of issues in our lives: climate change and loss of species and pollution,” Shepherd says. “Often, people are looking for simple things they can do, and what you do in your garden is a really straightforward, simple, direct action that people can take.” | 2022-10-03T13:15:39Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The beginner's guide to leaf blowing and leaf-blower bans - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/home/2022/10/05/how-to-blow-leaves/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/home/2022/10/05/how-to-blow-leaves/ |
How much do you know about the Supreme Court?
The highest court in the United States starts its new term in October, and you can test your knowledge about its history.
The United States Supreme Court starts a new term on the first Monday in October. Test your knowledge about the court and its history. (Joshua Roberts/Reuters)
The United States Supreme Court starts a new term on the first Monday in October. This is a historic term because Ketanji Brown Jackson, appointed in February, is the first Black woman to serve on the court. It’s a fitting time to look back at the history of the court and test your own knowledge.
You probably know that when the Founding Fathers set up the government, they created three parts: legislative (Congress), executive (president and federal agencies) and judicial (courts). The idea was to share the power and allow each part to stop the others from getting too much. The job of the courts was to figure out what laws mean and whether laws agree with the Constitution or go against it.
They decided that one court should be the highest in the country. So they created the Supreme Court as part of the Constitution, but they didn’t include many details. Who would serve on it? For how long? How many lower courts would be needed? Congress passed the Judiciary Act of 1789, which provided a basic structure, some of which still exists.
The court has decided thousands of cases. Here are a few big ones:
Brown v. Board of Education: Public schools can’t separate students based on their race.
Miranda v. Arizona: Police must tell people before asking them questions that they have a right to remain silent and to have an attorney present.
Tinker v. Des Moines: Students have freedom of speech at school unless they are disrupting school.
Find out what else you know about the Supreme Court by taking our quiz. We invite kids ages 8 to 13 to have a parent or teacher fill out contact information on the form linked below and give permission for them to submit the quiz. We will randomly select three kids who answered all the questions correctly and send them a KidsPost prize package. One entry per person. Entries are due by October 24. The correct answers will be published in KidsPost later this month. Winners will be notified by October 31.
KidsPost quiz: How much do you know about the U.S. Supreme Court?
To mark the start of the U.S. Supreme Court's 2022-23 term, KidsPost is asking kids ages 8 to 13 to test their knowledge of the nation's highest court. A parent or teacher must fill in the contact information and provide permission for kids to enter. One entry per person. Entries are due October 24. Only U.S. residents are eligible. Three kids who have correctly answered all 10 questions will be selected at random to receive a KidsPost prize package. Answers will be published and winners will be notified by October 31. | 2022-10-03T13:16:06Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Supreme Court quiz: How much do you know? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/kidspost/2022/10/03/supreme-court-quiz-for-kids/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/kidspost/2022/10/03/supreme-court-quiz-for-kids/ |
Amylyx’s New ALS Drug Costs $158,000 and Might Not Even Work
Yesterday, the Food and Drug Administration approved a new ALS treatment from Amylyx Pharmaceuticals Inc., despite its own assessment that the evidence the drug works is too thin. Today, the company released its list price for the drug, called Relyvrio, and it is predictably very expensive.
Amylyx will charge $158,000 per year for Relyvrio. The Institute for Clinical and Economic Review, an independent nonprofit that analyzes the value of pharmaceuticals, found that a fair price for Relyvrio would be between $9,100 and $30,700 per year.
I’ve discussed before the downsides of granting this drug full approval — namely, the challenge the FDA will have removing it from the market if it turns out not to work, and the lowered bar it might set for other drugs (for ALS and beyond). We can now add another problem: a price that seems wildly out of sync with the evidence of Relyvrio’s benefits. That price also sets a bar for future ALS drugs, ones that might have similarly modest value.
The US needs fresh approaches for getting desperate patients early access to drugs without compromising on data or allowing them to be sold at prices that well exceed their known value.
But no one seems able or willing to exert real pressure for the system to change.
The FDA is not allowed to consider what a drug might cost in its deliberations over its approval. It can only weigh the science. Companies, meanwhile, don’t have any reason not to try to maximize their profits.
Then there are patient advocacy groups, which have become an increasingly powerful force in drug development and the regulatory process. They raise money to provide companies with critical early funding, help mobilize participation in clinical trials, and make clear to regulators that they want drugs reviewed quickly and with their perspectives in mind.
That effort has helped bring astounding advances in certain diseases. For example, someone born with cystic fibrosis in 2019 is expected to live 14 years longer than someone born in 1999, thanks in large part to treatments that the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation helped realize.
ALS groups gave Amylyx grants and investments that were essential to the company’s early existence. That money allowed the biotech firm to collect enough data to convince venture capitalists and later public investors that Relyvrio was worthwhile. People with ALS and their family members rattled cages in Congress to pass legislation last year that would accelerate the search for cures — in part by getting a commitment from regulatory authorities to prioritize them. Hundreds came forward to voice their support for Relyvrio at the FDA’s advisory committee meeting.
But this powerful community of advocates doesn’t seem to get a vote on price. While some people in the ALS community voiced their dismay on Twitter, I’ve yet to see an advocacy group call for the price to be reduced.
That position isn’t unique to ALS. The pricing issue has in general become something of a third rail for advocacy groups. Their very real concern is that companies won’t pursue urgently needed treatments if they don’t have the freedom to charge whatever they want for them.
The question comes down to “whether we’re going to allow a company to profit from a drug early,” says Holly Fernandez Lynch, an assistant professor in the department of medical ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine.
And the answer, for now at least, appears to be yes. So what’s the fix? One option would be a different type of approval pathway, a “conditional” approval system that would allow a drug onto the market early, but with hard commitments on completing studies that confirm its benefits. If the studies aren’t completed by a certain deadline, the drug gets pulled from the market; if the drug fails to prove effective in those studies, it also gets pulled.
Such a pathway exists in Canada. Beyond creating a strong incentive for the company to actually complete such a trial, it also might help convince patients to participate in that study — or risk losing access to a drug.
Ideally, that type of approach would be paired with a mechanism to ensure drugs allowed onto the market early are sold at a price that reflects the ambiguity over their value — and a way for companies to make more money if new data show they are effective.
There are no ideal solutions to this issue, but some progress needs to be made to at least strike a better balance between early access to drugs, good data on their benefits, and fair prices that reflect their value.
• The FDA Is Rushing a New and Unproven ALS Drug: Lisa Jarvis | 2022-10-03T13:33:09Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Amylyx’s New ALS Drug Costs $158,000 and Might Not Even Work - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/amylyxs-new-als-drug-costs-158000-and-might-not-even-work/2022/10/03/b7c5f6c8-4313-11ed-be17-89cbe6b8c0a5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/amylyxs-new-als-drug-costs-158000-and-might-not-even-work/2022/10/03/b7c5f6c8-4313-11ed-be17-89cbe6b8c0a5_story.html |
Police identify 22-year-old man fatally shot Sunday in Northwest D.C.
Antonio Waller, of Northwest D.C., died on the scene
A 22-year-old man was fatally shot Sunday in Northwest Washington, police said.
Authorities identified the man as Antonio Waller of Northwest D.C. He was killed in the 1200 block of North Capitol Street, NW.
The incident occurred around 11:55 a.m., when police responded to a report of a shooting, and found Waller suffering from gunshot wounds. Waller died on the scene, police said.
By Monday, police had not made an arrest in the incident. Their investigation was ongoing. | 2022-10-03T14:25:24Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Police identify 22-year-old man fatally shot Sunday in Northwest D.C. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/03/antonio-waller-northwest-dc-shooting/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/03/antonio-waller-northwest-dc-shooting/ |
By Francine Lacqua | Bloomberg
Tidjane Thiam, executive chairman of Freedom Acquisition Corp., speaks during a panel session at the Qatar Economic Forum (QEF) in Doha, Qatar, on Tuesday, June 21, 2022. The second annual Qatar Economic Forum convenes global business leaders and heads of state to tackle some of the world’s most pressing challenges, through the lens of the Middle East. (Bloomberg)
Tidjane Thiam’s blank check company has agreed to combine with solar company Complete Solaria, a rare recent deal of note for the troubled SPAC market. | 2022-10-03T15:04:47Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Ex-Credit Suisse CEO Thiam’s SPAC to Combine With Solar Firm Complete Solaria - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/on-small-business/ex-credit-suisse-ceo-thiams-spacto-combine-with-solar-firm-complete-solaria/2022/10/03/7fa4ac40-432b-11ed-be17-89cbe6b8c0a5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/on-small-business/ex-credit-suisse-ceo-thiams-spacto-combine-with-solar-firm-complete-solaria/2022/10/03/7fa4ac40-432b-11ed-be17-89cbe6b8c0a5_story.html |
Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s president, center, departs after casting a ballot at a polling station during the first round of presidential elections in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on Sunday, Oct. 2, 2022. Brazilians head to the polls to choose between re-electing Bolsonaro or returning former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva to office. (Bloomberg)
Officially, leftist former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva won the first round of Brazil’s tense presidential race on Sunday, with 48% of votes. In fact, current leader Jair Bolsonaro was the one who emerged victorious, beating the predictions of pollsters and boosted by the success of several key congressional and gubernatorial allies, who demonstrated the resilient support for his far-right platform. In absolute terms, he garnered more votes than four years ago, when he eventually triumphed as an unlikely outsider.
The unexpected success for Bolsonaro, a second wind, suggests the route to the runoff on October 30 will be bumpy. And even if he is defeated, as still seems likely given high rejection rates among voters, Bolsonarismo looks set to outlast him.
Lula, who led Brazil from 2003 through 2010, has been the protagonist of an incredible comeback story over the past months. Last week, polls suggested the possibility of an outright win in the first round for the former president, something that has happened only twice before. That outcome would have been particularly remarkable: Although the one-time metalworker can count on enduring popularity among poorer segments of the population, who associate him with a period of plenty, he is deeply disliked by others who blame him for dragging Brazil into a tangle of grimy graft investigations. (He served time in jail, though his convictions were later annulled.)
He didn’t, in the end, pull off the expected feat. Instead of widening, what Brazilian pollsters call the “alligator’s mouth” closed. Lula came within forecasters’ margins of error and out in front — still noteworthy for a country where no incumbent president has yet lost his reelection bid. He won Minas Gerais, the bellwether state that every ultimately successful candidate has taken. Yet the race between the two top contestants — a choice, for many, between undesirable choices — proved uncomfortably tight. The “voto envergonhado” or the hidden “embarrassed vote,” came out for Bolsonaro in populous regions like Sao Paulo, while minor candidates and low turnout nibbled away at Lula’s lead. Although voting in Brazil is mandatory, more than one in five eligible Brazilians didn’t vote, the highest abstention rate for this stage since 1998.
Now Lula goes into the final stretch of campaigning in front, but on the back foot. Bolsonaro’s ability to push the vote to a runoff in defiance of polls, by contrast, has given him an extra reason to question official forecasts. He has already claimed to have “defeated a lie” on Sunday. Thus empowered, he will do what he can to gain ground, stir up trouble, or both, especially if the second round result looks tight and security forces prove loyal to him.
This morning, it’s hard not to be anxious for the fate of Latin America’s largest democracy and the region’s heftiest economy.
Most obviously, Bolsonaro — a man who has struggled to deliver on promises of economic reform, badly mishandled a pandemic that resulted in nearly 690,000 deaths and sowed deep divisions with his unabashed authoritarian tendencies — is still in with a chance. Candidates do not tend to recover after losing the first round of voting. But this race is an unusual one, and he’ll seek to widen support by doubling down on corruption allegations.
Indeed the one certainty going into the next four weeks is that the bitter rhetoric, campaign violence and threats of defiance will worsen. Already late on Sunday, the incumbent president’s supporters were throwing around unsubstantiated accusations of fraud and wrongdoing on social media, while he himself reverted to hints of Lula’s supposed allegiance with the far left including Venezuela, a dog whistle to supporters. “I understand the desire for change,” the president said after the vote, proclaiming his confidence in a win. “But in this second round we will show (voters) that the change they are looking for might be for the worse.”
Then there’s the strong showing by Bolsonaro’s high-profile former ministers and populist allies in congress and at the state level, suggesting that his brand of conservative, Trumpian far-right politics will live on. It has displaced a more moderate right in Brazil, reducing the chances of the deep structural economic changes the country needs, impossible without a wide alliance. (This wasn’t altogether a repeat of 2018: Although son Eduardo Bolsonaro won re-election to the Chamber of Deputies, he went from more than 1.8 million votes, a record, to less than half that.) Even if Lula ultimately wins, the strong showing in congress for the president’s party will test his parliamentary mettle.
Perhaps the most worrying detail on Sunday, though, was the high level of apathy and discontent. Among those who did vote, more people cast blank or void ballots than backed the third-ranked candidate, Simone Tebet.
It’s easy to overdo the pessimism. Every election in Brazil since the advent of democracy has been a spectacular feat, as this vast nation votes and reports results within hours. For months, democratic institutions like the Supreme Court have proven bulwarks against presidential adventurism, and allies inside and outside Brazil have been reassuringly vocal. In the early hours after the vote, at least, candidates behaved with decorum.
But the real race starts now.
• Will Bolsonaro Really Leave If He Loses?: Clara Ferreira Marques | 2022-10-03T15:04:49Z | www.washingtonpost.com | With Bolsonaro Down and Not Out, Buckle Up - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/with-bolsonaro-down-and-not-out-buckle-up/2022/10/03/0056a86c-4321-11ed-be17-89cbe6b8c0a5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/with-bolsonaro-down-and-not-out-buckle-up/2022/10/03/0056a86c-4321-11ed-be17-89cbe6b8c0a5_story.html |
FILE - Sacheen Littlefeather, a Native American activist, tells the audience at the Academy Awards ceremony in Los Angeles, March 27, 1973, that Marlon Brando was declining to accept his Oscar as best actor for his role in “The Godfather.” Sacheen Littlefeather died Sunday, Oct. 2, 2022, at her home in Marin County, Calif. She was 75. (AP Photo/File) (Uncredited/AP) | 2022-10-03T15:05:16Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Sacheen Littlefeather, actor who declined Brando Oscar, dies - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/sacheen-littlefeather-actor-who-declined-brando-oscar-dies/2022/10/03/bb4e7446-4322-11ed-be17-89cbe6b8c0a5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/sacheen-littlefeather-actor-who-declined-brando-oscar-dies/2022/10/03/bb4e7446-4322-11ed-be17-89cbe6b8c0a5_story.html |
(Justin Poulter for The Washington Post)
The last time I handed out stars, in March 2020, there were two of them — a “good” rating — for a Nepalese restaurant called Everest Kitchen in Ashburn.
Since then, the words “unrated during the pandemic” have accompanied my weekly Dining column.
The pause felt like the right thing to do. Early in the pandemic, restaurants were struggling just to get food out the door in boxes and bags. Later, as dining rooms reopened, it still didn’t seem fair to grade a place where staffing remained an issue; since I introduced a zero-to-four, poor-to-superlative star system in 2003, ratings took into account service and ambiance as well as the quality of the food.
Washington Post food critic Tom Sietsema entertains your dining questions, rants and raves.
And now? I can count on one hand the number of readers who have told me they want stars back. Many more followers, chefs included, have told me an unrated review encourages them to read more of the column. “Thank you for your marvelous decision to suspend rating restaurants under your star system during the pandemic,” a handwritten note from an anonymous author read last year. “Please make it permanent. Writing and eating out are both art.”
The people have spoken, and I’ve done some thinking. It’s time to ditch stars.
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The reason I rolled out the rating system in the first place was because I thought stars, simple and direct, provided readers with an immediate take on a restaurant — and stars were as close as we got in this country to a universal grading system for dining establishments. (Before my tenure, the last time The Washington Post employed a graphic device to rate restaurants, the Sunday magazine was called Potomac and the symbols were smiley faces. Hey, it was 1976.) Two decades ago, I believed stars were a way to give my audience something extra. Early on, I encountered some challenges in the ratings; there was, for instance, a big gap between one star and two, “satisfactory” and “good,” respectively. In 2005, I tried to finesse the award system by adding half-stars to the equation. Half-stars seemed to put a finer point on my feelings about a place.
Since the pandemic, I’ve had plenty of time to ponder ratings. I’ve come to the conclusion that readers don’t need graphics to help them make decisions on where to eat out and that star ratings actually deterred some of my audience from going to some restaurants. Someone once told me, “I don’t read reviews less than three stars” — an “excellent” rating — and I couldn’t help but think of all the “good” restaurants he was missing just by glancing at stars. (Besides that, three-star reviews were few and far between, hard for restaurants to get. I didn’t want to be known as someone who handed out awards just for participating.) A friend suggested I switch to a numbered system, but her idea sounded complicated, yet another way to say “stars.”
Stars put restaurants in an unfortunate box. A place that’s memorable for, say, just a few dishes or great hospitality would be unlikely to get more than a couple of stars. But don’t a lot of us know places like that, where just a few dishes or extra attention are precisely the reasons we choose to return to a restaurant again and again? That kind of admiration — affection even — is hard to capture in points.
Especially now, given all the industry’s challenges, restaurants merit more than a symbol to sum them up. Words allow for nuance. Stars, not so much.
Ultimately, I’d like to think reading the review in full (a critic can dream!) is the best way to determine whether you and the restaurant will be a good fit.
Change can be good. The introduction of sound checks in 2008 gave readers news they could use about whether conversation was possible in the restaurants I reviewed. Stars are now history, but recent years have seen the introduction of details you’ve told me you want to see, including information about accessibility, outdoor dining and, most recently, pandemic protocols.
In 2019, Pineapple & Pearls on Capitol Hill was among a handful of establishments I rated four stars, a “superlative” dining experience. I considered announcing the end of ratings in my recent review of the reimagined restaurant, whose owner, chef Aaron Silverman, told me he wanted to “smash to the ground” the traditional fine-dining model. (Readers probably wondered how the new version compared with the original; hopefully my latest critique answered the question.) I decided to wait for the fall dining guide, my largest round-up of reviews every year, to announce my decision.
If chefs can smash things to the ground, so can critics. | 2022-10-03T15:05:28Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Why our food critic is dropping star ratings from his restaurant reviews - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2022/10/03/restaurant-reviews-star-ratings/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2022/10/03/restaurant-reviews-star-ratings/ |
In an image photographed and provided by the office of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is seen attending a graduation ceremony for cadets of armed forces in Tehran on Monday. (Office of Iran's Supreme Leader/AFP/Getty Images)
In his first public comments on protests sweeping Iran, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Monday characterized the unrest as “rioting” instigated by foreign powers, including the United States and Israel.
His comments, to police cadets at a graduation ceremony in the capital Tehran, appeared to dismiss the anger fueling the largest and most widespread protests in Iran in several years. They erupted two weeks ago after the death of 22-year old Mahsa Amini after she was arrested by members of Iran’s “morality police,” allegedly for violating the Islamic Republic’s conservative dress code.
Khamanei — a frequent target of derision in the protesters’ chants — said Amini’s death “broke our hearts” but called the reaction “unnatural,” according to the semiofficial Tasnim news agency. “How is it that some people do not see the foreign hand?” he was quoted as saying.
The protests, many led by women, are fueled by a litany of grievances: fury over Amini’s death, at the morality police who detained her and the mandatory strictures, like wearing the headscarf, that they enforce, as well as broader anger at the security services, the government and Iran’s clerical establishment. Gatherings to show solidarity with Iran’s protesters have attracted thousands of people in cities abroad.
A crackdown on the demonstrations has killed at least 52 people, according to Amnesty International, and has included the use of live fire by the security services and the throttling of internet service to prevent demonstrators from organizing. Last week, Iran carried out deadly cross-border attacks in northern Iraq, targeting the headquarters of three Iranian Kurdish opposition parties who support the demonstrations, in a sign of the Iranian government’s growing unease.
The protests began in Iran’s predominantly Kurdish west, where Amini was from, and which shares a border with Iraq’s semiautonomous Kurdish region. The cross-border attacks killed at least 13 people.
Khamanei’s comments Monday echoed those of other Iranian officials, including President Ebrahim Raisi, who have blamed foreign enemies for the protests. Iranian authorities said Friday that they had arrested nine European nationals for their alleged role in the protests, in a move likely to increase tensions with the west.
Despite the growing death toll, the unrest has shown little sign of waning. Protests continued on Sunday and Monday, including on university campuses in nearly half a dozen cities across the country, according to videos posted by 1500 Tasvir, an anti-government group that monitors the demonstrations. | 2022-10-03T15:07:14Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Iran’s supreme leader brushes anger aside, blames protests on foreigners - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/03/iran-protests-khamenei-hijab-mahsa/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/03/iran-protests-khamenei-hijab-mahsa/ |
How the false ‘Republicans are being hunted’ narrative took root
The danger of the rhetoric should be obvious.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) talks to reporters before former president Donald Trump speaks at a “Save America” rally in Warren, Mich. on Saturday. (Jeff Kowalsky/AFP/Getty Images)
It is useful, when considering a dubious claim made by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), to recall her lengthy history with such comments. This is the candidate who rose to national attention in 2020 for her embrace of QAnon, who has spread I-know-better-than-you claims about 9/11 and the 2012 mass shooting in Sandy Hook, Conn., and, perhaps most infamously, suggested that wildfires were caused intentionally by a space-based laser.
But just because Greene is demonstrably credulous (particularly when it’s useful for impugning her perceived opponents) does not mean that any new claims should be dismissed as unimportant. Her position as a member of Congress and her national profile adds both weight and distance to her commentary. More importantly, her assertions are generally things that she’s picked up from the right-wing information universe, meaning that she is, in fact, speaking for a large population of Americans when she says what she says, however obviously false.
As when, this weekend, she claimed that Democrats want to kill Republicans.
Greene was speaking at a rally in Michigan headlined by former president Donald Trump, itself a reflection of the extent to which her rhetoric has been empowered by her election to the House. She began by articulating now-familiar claims about the way in which the legal system had been deployed against the political right. Then she went further.
“I’m not going to mince words with you all,” Greene said. “Democrats want Republicans dead, and they’ve already started the killings."
She gave two purported examples. One was the young man run over and killed in North Dakota by, as she framed it, “a Democrat driver who confessed to killing the teenager simply because he was a Republican." The other was a woman in Michigan who was shot while “advocating for the unborn,” as Greene put it.
"Joe Biden has declared every freedom-loving American an enemy of the state,” she added.
If we quickly work backward, we see how poorly predicated all of this is.
In a speech last month, President Biden decried the views of Trump’s most fervent supporters — the ones who reject election results or downplay the threat posed by rioters at the Capitol on Jan. 6. People like Greene, in other words. But since it’s perpetually useful for members of the right’s political and media leadership to cast criticisms of a subset of the group as a criticism of whole group, Biden’s comments become an attack on “every freedom-loving American.”
The idea that these “enemies of the state," meanwhile, is pinned to the two acts of violence Greene cites — an appeal to anecdotes that should send up warning flags for any observer. Particularly when considering the actual cases.
The North Dakota incident has been a point of focus on the right for a week or two, given the intoxicated driver’s assertion that the teenager was a “Republican extremist.” Police and witnesses say there was no political argument prior to the incident.
The shooting in Michigan, meanwhile, is disputed. The shooter claims it was an accident. More to the point, though, voting records show only one person matching the shooter’s name and age in the county where it occurred; that person has consistently voted in Republican primaries since at least 2014. (Michigan doesn’t have registration by party.) Then there’s the detail that the victim wasn’t actually killed.
This isn’t much to hang a “Democrats want to kill us” message on, though, again, Greene has gone further with less. But what she’s doing is tapping into and amplifying the evolving sense of victimization on the right, one that’s regularly stoked within the right-wing universe.
When protests focused on racial justice erupted in the late spring of 2020, conservative media outlets repeatedly exaggerated the scale of vandalism and violence that occasionally followed. There’s a great deal of scoffing at the idea that most of those protests were peaceful, though they were. Outlets like Fox News recycled footage of riots and looting for weeks to suggest that wide-scale violence extended deep into the summer. There was an election looming, of course, and Trump was heavily invested in suggesting that Biden’s election would cause crime to escalate.
This was about the point at which right-wing cartoonist Scott Adams claimed that a Biden election would mean that “there’s a good chance you will be dead within the year."
“Republicans,” he continued, “will be hunted.” Again, Adams wasn’t driving concerns but reflecting them; there was a palpable sense on the right that the left was violent, uncontrolled and coming after them.
Part of this derives from a sense, particularly among Republicans, that White Christians face unusual levels of discrimination. Calls for the country to recognize systemic racism, to uproot often subtle forms of discrimination and to address ways in which race and class can provide advantage are seen as calls not to remove limits or elevate some people but instead as calls to diminish the group that’s long held the most power in the country. A series of massive protests focused on how Black people are treated by law enforcement is viewed as a threat to a status quo to which many on the right don’t object. Law enforcement is to be defended — until it is perceived as posing a risk to them.
Since Biden took office, we’ve seen this insecurity manifest in a number of ways. The idea that “cancel culture” or “wokeism” is somehow a form of fascism aimed at controlling the right. That encouraging people to vote when they might cast legal votes for Democrats is dangerous. That the riot at the Capitol was excusable in the context of the 2020 protests and that those arrested and detained are being targeted for their political views and not for their actions.
Biden has drawn attention to the threat posed by domestic extremists, a pool of people that often includes far-right actors. In fact, the government has been warning about this risk since the Trump administration, both in the abstract and focused on specific ideologies.
But this, again, is often wildly overblown. A Justice Department memo reiterating that federal law enforcement would address threats of violence or intimidation targeting school employees — a response, in part, to protests that centered on complaints about how race was being taught in schools — was conflated with a separate document to suggest that the government had called parents expressing concerns “terrorists.” Fox News made this claim hundreds of times, but it wasn’t true (as a federal judge recently made clear).
Scott Adams has sought to rationalize his “hunted” claims by, among other things, pointing to overheated anecdotes and obviously warranted investigations into right-wing figures. The idea that there’s an actual left-wing threat to Republicans is hard to justify based on anything more concrete than feelings — which, of course, is the jurisdiction from which the purported threat first emerged.
Much of this is rooted in the wide partisan gap that exists in the United States. Pew Research Center analysis shows that 6 in 10 Republicans have a “very unfavorable” view of the Democratic Party; just over half of Democrats’ view the GOP the same way. Republicans and Democrats see each other as dishonest and immoral, but Republicans add that Democrats are “lazy.” The divide is often literal, too. In 2020, Pew found that 4 in 10 supporters of Biden and Trump had no close friends supporting the other candidate. Three-quarters had, at most, “a few” who did.
Republicans like Greene feel as though they are under attack, in part because the United States is changing in ways that make them uncomfortable. The rhetoric around this change was conflated with physical danger in 2020 and proved potent. It’s been amplified since, despite the stark dearth of examples at hand. But since the partisan divide is so wide, it’s hard to counteract.
Consider, though, what happens when someone comes to believe that their political opponents literally want them dead. Consider how that might color their reaction to an incident in which they perceive a threat.
This is useful rhetoric for Trump and Greene and Fox News to get people engaged. It is also obviously and immediately dangerous itself. | 2022-10-03T15:26:34Z | www.washingtonpost.com | How the false ‘Republicans are being hunted’ narrative took root - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/03/republicans-greene-trump/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/03/republicans-greene-trump/ |
Goodbye, ‘Phantom’: A love letter to the O.G.
Emilie Kouatchou as Christine and Ben Crawford as The Phantom. (Matthew Murphy)
It’s not cool if you’re a normal person — that is, not an obsessive theater nerd. But it’s especially uncool if you are an obsessive theater nerd. Unlike Stephen Sondheim’s wry social commentary, or Rodgers and Hammerstein’s wholesome exuberance, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Phantom” is just … too much. Too melodramatic, too special-effects-driven. And definitely too ’80s. The synth. The smoke machine. The candelabras. The pyrotechnics. All those rhinestones!
“Phantom” was the first musical I ever saw, at age four. It was also the show that made me fall in love with theater.
But it wasn’t only the story I liked. I remember being lifted by the sumptuous score, the soprano’s florid high notes, that terrifying (to a four-year-old) chandelier crash, and all those characters swishing their beautiful skirts and flourishing heavy capes. Also, did I mention the rhinestones?
Opinion|Goodbye, ‘Phantom’: A love letter to the O.G. | 2022-10-03T16:05:52Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Goodbye, "Phantom of the Opera": A love letter to the O.G. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/03/phantom-broadway-show-closing-appreciation/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/03/phantom-broadway-show-closing-appreciation/ |
A case involving Google and an ISIS attack give high court a chance to review Section 230, the controversial law that shields websites from liability for users’ posts.
The Supreme Court will hear a case involving Section 230, a law that shields social media companies from much liability over what users post on their sites. (Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)
The nation’s top court on Monday said it will hear a case that tests the limits of Section 230, the U.S. legal provision that protects social media companies from liability for what third parties post to their sites.
Section 230 was passed created in 1996 and is credited with helping lay the groundwork for the internet as we now know it. It broadly immunizes websites and online platforms, including social media sites like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, from being held responsible in civil lawsuits for what their users post.
The court also said Monday it would consider a separate lawsuit involving Twitter. That case accused Twitter was filed by the widow of a military contractor who was killed in a terrorist attack in Jordan. Her claim accused Twitter of violating the Anti-Terrorism Act by allowing terrorist material to be posted to its site. | 2022-10-03T16:23:27Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Supreme Court will hear social media cases that test Section 230 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/10/03/scotus-section-230-supreme-court/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/10/03/scotus-section-230-supreme-court/ |
The storm is generating heavy rains and strong winds as well as a dangerous ocean surge
A cyclist rides along the coast in Mazatlan, Mexico, early Monday, Oct. 3, 2022, as Hurricane Orlene approaches. (Fernando Llano/AP)
Hurricane Orlene, a Category 1 hurricane, made landfall in southwestern Mexico on Monday morning, unleashing heavy rain and strong winds. The storm crossed the coast just north of the state borders of Nayarit and Sinaloa at 9:45 a.m. local time, according to the National Hurricane Center.
The storm packed maximum sustained winds of 85 mph as it made landfall. The Hurricane Center wrote that a gust of 81 mph was clocked at Marismas Nacionales near Felipe Angeles in state of Nayarit.
Orlene, the 15th named storm of the Eastern Pacific hurricane season, intensified into a tropical storm on Thursday. Orlene then rapidly intensified into a Category 4 hurricane on Sunday, with sustained wind speeds of 130 mph, becoming the strongest storm of the year in the eastern Pacific Ocean.
Hostile high-altitude winds helped to weaken the storm, but Orlene still poses a threat to southwestern Mexico as it slogs inland as a Category 1 with 75 mph winds.
Hurricane warnings are in effect for the archipelago of Islas Marias and the mainland Mexican coastline from the town of San Blas to the city of Mazatlán, a popular tourist destination. Tropical storm warnings stretch farther, from the towns of La Cruz in the north and Tomaltán in the south.
Orlene — a small storm with hurricane-force winds that extend just 15 miles from its center — is expected to rapidly weaken as it moves inland and toward mountainous terrain, dissipating within two days. Still, it is forecast to drop dangerous amounts of rainfall.
On Islas Marias, widespread rainfall of 6 to 10 inches is forecast to fall through Tuesday, with up to 14 inches possible. There, 20-foot waves or larger are possible as the storm churns offshore.
The Hurricane Center also warned that the storm would generate a dangerous surge, or rise in ocean water above normally dry land at the coast, through early Monday afternoon.
Oct 3rd - Hurricane #Orlene is approaching the coast of SW #Mexico with max winds of 85 kt and gusts to 105 kt. #Seas near the center are up to 24 ft. Seas 12 ft or greater within 60 nm of the center. More at https://t.co/26J6UnYRHO #marinewx #GOESWest #hurricaneseason #Pacific pic.twitter.com/DD6qogkDKH
In the Mexican states of Nayarit and southern parts of Sinaloa, rainfall of 3 to 6 inches is forecast, with localized 10-inch totals — enough to cause flooding and spark landslides.
A dangerous storm surge and high waves are also possible along the coast. In response, the state of Sinaloa opened several storm shelters for those who need to evacuate from the immediate shoreline.
According to Reuters, the hurricane has prompted the closure of ports in the coastal states of Nayarit, Jalisco and Colima.
It has been a relatively quiet year in Mexico, which is used to seeing strong hurricanes threaten its coastline. Hurricane Agatha, the first storm of the season, made landfall in Mexico in May. No other storms posed a real landfall threat until Hurricane Kay — which also brought impacts to parts of California and the Desert Southwest — made landfall in Baja California in late August.
Kay’s remnants bring flooding to Southwest, 76 mph wind gust to Phoenix
The Eastern Pacific hurricane season stretches from May 15 to Nov. 30 and is most active from July to early October, with activity quickly trailing off by the start of November. | 2022-10-03T16:36:52Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Hurricane Orlene is coming ashore in southwest Mexico - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/10/03/hurricane-orlene-mexico-mazatlan/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/10/03/hurricane-orlene-mexico-mazatlan/ |
How the world should help Pakistan with its never-ending flood disaster
By Hamid Mir
Citizens often walk through snake-infested and contaminated floodwaters to retrieve their belongings and get groceries as their homes are still submerged in water because the recent floods in Dadu, Sindh, Pakistan, on Sept. 12. (Saiyna Bashir for The Washington Post)
When will Pakistan’s climate catastrophe finally subside? Over the past few weeks, as I’ve traveled around our flood-stricken country, I’ve been haunted by that question. I recently experienced an extraordinary boat journey in the floodwaters of Sindh province when my head was touching the wires strung between electricity poles. I was floating at least 16 feet above the ground. This water level was horrific because only some rooftops and trees were visible in the area. The United Nations has warned that floodwaters are rising again.
A few days ago, I met a man named Munawar Sami, who had lost his son and two daughters when a truck ran over them at the side of the road. Pointing toward his destroyed village a few hundred meters away, he explained: “We escaped from the floodwaters, but death followed us on this dry road.” He and his family were sitting at the side of the road because they had no shelter — not even a tent. He had received no compensation from the government despite many promises made by high officials. Thousands of flood victims like him are living on the sides of roads without any shelter. Most of them are still waiting for help.
The failings of Pakistan’s government always shape the response to natural disasters here: lack of funds, corruption, incompetence. But the fact remains that the unprecedented scale of this latest catastrophe makes it an entirely different kind of challenge. Angelina Jolie, who visited the flood-hit areas, said simply: “I have never seen anything like this.” Jolie visited Pakistan after the 2010 flooding, but she, like many others, has recognized that the magnitude of this disaster is extraordinary. After meeting many flood victims, she warned the international community that “if enough aid doesn’t come, they won’t be here in the next few weeks.”
During his visit to the U.N. General Assembly last month, President Biden urged world leaders to help Pakistan. Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif met Biden in New York and thanked him for his appeal. Sharif held important meetings on the sidelines of the General Assembly to push for new thinking on climate change. One of the few leaders who was able to meet both Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin in recent weeks, Sharif is trying hard to get support for the flood victims of his country. He delivered an impassioned speech in New York, asking, “When the cameras leave, and the story just shifts away to conflicts like the Ukraine, my question is, will we be left alone to cope with a crisis we did not create?” He is focusing his efforts on the need for debt relief, an issue he also discussed with the heads of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank.
Why does Pakistan need debt relief? A recent U.N. Development Program policy paper explained that the disaster in Pakistan has affected more than 30 million people and caused damage estimated at $30 billion. Pakistan is not responsible for this historic catastrophe. Experts estimate that global warming exacerbated the severity of the flooding. The rich nations that have done the most to accelerate warming are morally obligated to help Pakistan. Economist Jeffrey D. Sachs has declared: “If there was a global climate court, Pakistan’s government would have a strong case against the U.S. and other high-income countries for failing to limit climate-changing greenhouse-gas emissions.” He demanded climate justice for Pakistan. The IMF gave debt relief to 25 countries in 2020. Pakistan would hardly be the first country to ask for such help.
Economists warn that Pakistan is heading toward a financial emergency and that Sharif is not in a position to provide relief to millions of people displaced in the flooding. Pakistan was already contending with a giant debt burden even before the catastrophe struck. Deferment of its bilateral debt would save $1.13 billion in loan repayments this fiscal year, providing urgently needed space to the government to help flood victims. Japan has already provided debt relief worth $160 million. Officials from the U.S. Agency for International Development told me they are planning more aid; the United States has also announced it is extending substantial debt relief to Islamabad. France will also host an international conference by the end of this year to help the flood victims.
A World Bank study published last year predicted extreme flooding in Pakistan by 2035. Pakistan is not the only country vulnerable to such disasters. Yale University’s Environmental Performance Index identified other South Asian countries facing the same threats. These countries must learn lessons from the floods in Pakistan. Climate change is becoming a serious threat not only for our country but for the whole world. One country cannot defeat this enemy. We need a global war against climate change.
Opinion|Pakistan didn’t contribute to climate change — but it’s paying the price | 2022-10-03T16:37:10Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | How the world should help Pakistan with its never-ending flood disaster - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/03/hamid-mir-pakistan-climate-justice-flooding/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/03/hamid-mir-pakistan-climate-justice-flooding/ |
Secretary Austin offers an unsettling diagnosis of Putin
Welcome to The Daily 202! Tell your friends to sign up here. On this day in 1863, President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed the last Thursday in November to be Thanksgiving Day.
About a week before Vladimir Putin expanded his war in Ukraine, The Daily 202 offered a kind of corrective to the common portrait of the Russian president as “the wily former KGB officer,” calculating and ruthless. He definitely is those things, we wrote, but he also believes a lot of weird stuff.
He once confronted President George W. Bush with a claim that America deliberately sent bad chicken exports to Russia. He accused Bush of firing CBS anchor Dan Rather. And there was the time he sensed a trap in President Barack Obama’s small talk about sports.
“We compared notes on President Putin’s expertise in judo and my declining skills in basketball,” Obama joked as they met in 2013 at a resort in Northern Ireland. “And we both agreed that as you get older it takes more time to recover.”
Putin, who reacted with a tense smile, responded: “The president wants to relax me with his statement of age.”
It’s a bedrock principle of international relations that nations act in their perceived self-interest. It matters very much that the perceiver-in-chief in the Kremlin is prone to believing conspiracy theories and trying to have people murdered on British soil with a military-grade nerve agent.
That’s one of the unsettling undercurrents of Western efforts to figure out whether Putin might risk using nuclear weapons as his military flees advancing Ukrainian forces. On Friday, he claimed America had set a “precedent” by dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
For the most part, President Biden’s administration has responded by warning Putin of “catastrophic” (but unspecified) consequences if he uses nuclear weapons, while saying the United States has not detected a shift in Russian posture that might be a prelude to the first nuclear bombing in 77 years.
But Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin added a wrinkle on Sunday to the public analysis of how far Putin may be willing to go.
“There are no checks on Mr. Putin. Just as he made the irresponsible decision to invade Ukraine, you know, he could make another decision,” Austin said on CNN’s “Fareed Zakaria GPS.”
(“To be clear, the guy who makes that decision, I mean, it’s one man,” Austin said. “But I don’t see anything right now that would lead me to believe that he has made such a decision.”)
It seems obvious: Putin badly miscalculated his odds of success in Ukraine, overestimating his military’s ability, underestimating Ukrainian forces as well as the will of America and its allies to help them. He could miscalculate elsewhere, too. Possibly with nuclear consequences.
The defense secretary also signaled Putin’s saber-rattling wouldn’t deter Washington from helping Ukraine retake territory captured by Russia.
“We can expect that the Ukrainians will continue to move forward and attempt to take back all of the territory within their sovereign borders here,” he said. “We will continue to support them in their efforts.”
Putin has dramatically escalated the conflict over the past week — and very little has gone his way.
He announced plans to call up an additional 300,000 soldiers, which has sparked protests in major Russian cities and sent thousands upon thousands of Russian men fleeing into neighboring countries.
He announced Russia was annexing four regions of Ukraine, and signaled he would be willing to use nuclear weapons to defend them, only to watch Ukrainian forces keep Russian troops on their heels and recapture key cities and significant territory.
The U.S. and its allies have yet to explicitly accuse Russia of sabotaging the Nord Stream pipelines in the Baltic Sea, but there appears to be little doubt in the West of where the blame lies.
Moscow’s poor conduct of the war has led to open recriminations in Russian media from “two powerful figures with their own armed forces fighting Ukraine,” my colleagues Missy Ryan, Robyn Dixon, and Serhiy Morgunov reported Sunday night.
“It began with Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov’s criticisms on Saturday of Russian military commanders, and his call to use tactical nuclear weapons against Ukraine,” they noted.
Then Russian oligarch Yevgeniy Prigozhin, founder of mercenary group Wagner had this to say, apparently in reference to top Russian commanders: “We should send all these bastards barefoot to the front with machine guns.”
Still, using nuclear weapons? Putin has many options before he gets there: Cyber disruptions, for instance, or strikes on the logistical hubs in places like Poland that handle shipments of weapons to Ukraine.
That would be scary enough — NATO could invoke its charter principle that an attack on one is an attack on all. It wasn’t long ago that Biden himself was describing that as a potential trigger for World War III.
“President Biden, during a trip Monday to see hurricane damage in Puerto Rico, plans to announce more than $60 million in federal funding to shore up levees, strengthen flood walls and create a new flood warning system to help the island better prepare for storms,” Matt Viser reports.
Openings begin in seditious conspiracy case
“Opening statements are underway in the trial of Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes and other members of the extremist group who face seditious conspiracy and other charges in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol,” Rachel Weiner, Tom Jackman and Spencer S. Hsu report.
Follow our live coverage of the trial here
“In his first public comments on protests sweeping Iran, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Monday characterized the unrest as ‘rioting’ instigated by foreign powers, including the United States and Israel,” Kareem Fahim reports.
“His comments, to police cadets at a graduation ceremony in the capital Tehran, appeared to dismiss the anger fueling the largest and most widespread protests in Iran in several years. They erupted two weeks ago after the death of 22-year old Mahsa Amini after she was arrested by members of Iran’s ‘morality police,’ allegedly for violating the Islamic Republic’s conservative dress code.”
“An investigation by The Associated Press and the PBS series ‘Frontline’ has found the Laodicea, [a bulk cargo ship] owned by Syria, is part of a sophisticated Russian-run smuggling operation that has used falsified manifests and seaborne subterfuge to steal Ukrainian grain worth at least $530 million — cash that has helped feed President Vladimir Putin’s war machine,” the AP's Michael Biesecker, Sarah El Deeb and Beatrice Dupuy report.
“[Carolyn Stewart] had been working in some of the country’s most challenging public schools for 52 years, but only in recent months had she begun to worry that the entire system of American education was at risk of failing. The United States had lost 370,000 teachers since the beginning of the pandemic, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Maine had started recruiting summer camp counselors into classrooms, Florida was relying on military veterans with no prior teaching experience, and Arizona had dropped its college-degree requirement, but Stewart was still struggling to find people willing to teach in a high-poverty district for a starting salary of $38,500 a year,” Eli Saslow reports.
“The most far-reaching of Mr. Trump’s ploys to overturn his defeat, the objections to the Electoral College results by so many House Republicans did more than any lawsuit, speech or rally to engrave in party orthodoxy the myth of a stolen election. Their actions that day legitimized Mr. Trump’s refusal to concede, gave new life to his claims of conspiracy and fraud and lent institutional weight to doubts about the central ritual of American democracy,” the New York Times' Steve Eder, David D. Kirkpatrick and Mike McIntire report.
“Mississippi introduced a failed bill early this year to ban gender-affirming care for anyone under 21. In Oklahoma, legislation with the same age limit fell through last year. Missouri tried and failed to pass a bill this year banning care for trans youth that included a vaguely written clause that could have affected adults: Legislators wrote that state health insurance plans renewed in 2023 would not be required to cover gender transition procedures without specifying any age requirements,” the 19th's Orion Rummler reports.
“It will be Biden’s first trip as president to Puerto Rico, and could provide a contrast from a memorable visit by President Donald Trump in 2017 when he tossed rolls of paper towels into a cheering crowd in San Juan, after the island was devastated by Hurricane Maria,” Matt Viser reports.
“It is unclear whether on his trip to Florida the president will meet with Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.), who has been a political adversary but also someone he has spoken to several times amid the storm.”
“Biden’s moves — inviting Summers into the Oval Office, then picking and choosing from his advice — reflect the broader White House strategy over the last year toward the influential economist and onetime Harvard president, whose support the administration covets but whose counsel it sometimes rejects,” Jeff Stein and Tyler Pager report.
“It was a balancing act for Harris. Japan and South Korea are strong allies that the United States considers pivotal to countering China’s growing aggressiveness, and she came to strengthen ties with the two countries, not alienate the men who lead them. But at seemingly every turn, the vice president sought to highlight the chasm that exists between genders here and provide living proof that a more equitable path exists,” Cleve R. Wootson Jr. and Michelle Ye Hee Lee report.
“President Joe Biden, a self-described ‘car guy,’ often promises to lead by example on climate change by moving swiftly to convert the sprawling U.S. government fleet to zero-emission electric vehicles. But efforts to eliminate gas-powered vehicles from the fleet have lagged,” the AP's Hope Yen, Matthew Daly and David Sharp report.
Where the D.C. snipers attacked 20 years ago, visualized
“In the course of three weeks, their indiscriminate sneak attacks would leave 10 dead and three injured in Maryland, D.C. and Virginia, crippling the terrified region and sparking a massive manhunt that was continually stymied and, in some ways, critically flawed,” Paul Duggan and Michael E. Ruane report.
“With a tough midterm election about six weeks away, many Democrats have largely settled on a campaign message, and it’s not one that simply emphasizes their accomplishments. Instead, it amounts to a stark warning: If Republicans take power, they will establish a dystopia that cripples democracy and eviscerates abortion rights and other freedoms,” Yasmeen Abutaleb reports.
“Nevada Democrats have held up their state as a national testing ground for how to win Latino voters in 2024,” NBC News' Natasha Korecki reports.
Biden is in Puerto Rico today.
At 2:30 p.m., he will get a briefing and deliver remarks.
The Bidens will visit Centro Sor Isolina Ferré Aguayo School at 3:30 p.m.
At 4:50 p.m., The Bidens will leave Puerto Rico for D.C. They will arrive at the White House at 8:55 p.m.
Post reporter sees ‘running of the Congress’ after votes end
Congressional reporter Paul Kane captured House lawmakers sprinting from the Capitol on Sept. 30 before traveling back to their districts to run for midterms.
Congressional reporter Paul Kane captured House lawmakers sprinting from the Capitol on Sept. 30 before traveling back to their districts to run for midterms. (Video: Casey Silvestri/The Washington Post) | 2022-10-03T16:37:22Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Secretary Austin offers an unsettling diagnosis of Putin - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/03/secretary-austin-offers-an-unsettling-diagnosis-putin/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/03/secretary-austin-offers-an-unsettling-diagnosis-putin/ |
‘It’s bigger than baseball’: Nelson Cruz is not ready to hang it up
Sidelined by left eye inflammation, Nelson Cruz is finishing one of the worst seasons of his career. (Katherine Frey/The Washington Post)
From the beginning, the numbers sagged and the aches piled up, making it fair to wonder if Nelson Cruz has finally reached his limit. The lack of power and production suggests as much. He turned 42 in July. In almost one full season with the Washington Nationals, he’s missed time with back tightness, shoulder soreness and a knee contusion, among other minor injuries, and is currently sidelined by left eye inflammation that can lead to blurry vision when he tries to hit.
His on-base-plus-slugging percentage, .651, is his lowest since his first extended chance with the Texas Rangers in 2006. Cruz is, in sum, a shell of the player Washington thought it signed to a one-year, $15 million deal in March, back when it seemed possible — no, likely — that he could be flipped for prospects at the trade deadline.
Many signs points toward retirement after 18 seasons. But Cruz isn’t ready to walk away.
“If I don’t feel like I am having fun, I will leave, you know?” Cruz said last week by his locker at Nationals Park. “Everybody is here for different reasons. I play to win, to get to the championship, to win a World Series. That’s the ultimate goal that we share. But it is not just my career. It is for everyone around me, too. A lot of people depend on if I play and how I play.”
Cruz repeats that all of this — his career, his stats, his decision to stop or keep going — is “bigger than baseball.” And when he’s asked about instilling this perspective in younger guys, his mouth breaks into a huge smile.
The story is from November 2021. Shortstop Wander Franco, then 20 years old, was about to sign an 11-year, $182 million contract with the Tampa Bay Rays. But before he agreed to it, he called Cruz, whom he played with for just two and a half months at the end of the previous season.
“Hey dad,” Cruz recalled Franco saying on the phone. “What do you think I should do?”
So after explaining the importance of financial security, Cruz delivered his real message. He and Franco are both from the Dominican Republic. If Franco took the deal, Cruz told him, it wasn’t only for the rookie and his immediate family. There would be playground teams in need of baseball equipment. There would be a community to lift, its kids watching most of Franco’s at-bats.
Las Matas de Santa Cruz, Cruz’s hometown, looks far different than it did when he debuted for the Rangers. There are hospitals, there’s a fire department, there are ambulances and more paved roads for them to drive on. This offseason, Cruz’s foundation plans to open a computer center to help plumbers and carpenters start their own businesses. He will juggle that project with serving as the DR’s general manager for the World Baseball Classic.
“Many people have benefited from it,” Cruz said of his work in the Dominican. “And I believe once I stop playing, that will be changed drastically. I won’t be able to provide like I used to. So there are different reasons that I keep pushing. But the most important one, I think, is just for the love of the game. When you love something this much, that doesn’t shut off so easily.”
If Cruz misses the Nationals’ final three games in New York, he will have logged 10 homers and a team-best 64 RBI on the season. Manager Dave Martinez felt Cruz’s timing was often off, making it hard to elevate contact and catch up with high velocity. His average launch angle of 7.2 was his lowest since Statcast began tracking it in 2015. He hit seven homers on fastballs after smacking 21 last year. He also whiffed on 41.5 percent of the breaking pitches he swung at.
Cruz doesn’t know what sort of market is waiting this coming winter. He is hopeful yet keeping his expectations in check. He is 41 homers from 500, a milestone he would like to reach but isn’t dead set on. Washington spent big on him to protect Juan Soto, influence an inexperienced clubhouse and potentially land a prospect or two in early August. It would seem, then, that Cruz’s best shot at another major league deal is with a club in a similar situation: young, rebuilding, able to spare a handful of at-bats in the designated hitter spot without worrying about immediate results.
“He has potential to go help and DH and put up some numbers again,” Martinez said. “But that’s totally up to him.” | 2022-10-03T16:37:54Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Why Nelson Cruz is not ready to retire - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/03/nelson-cruz-mlb-future/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/03/nelson-cruz-mlb-future/ |
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