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Seneca Valley adjusts to new coach; Herndon enjoys drastic turnaround
In his first year as Seneca Valley's coach Joseph Rankin has the Eagles at a 4-1 record. (Jonathan Newton/The Washington Post)
The final play of Seneca Valley’s 35-0 loss against No. 5 Quince Orchard on Friday was a short pass to the flat. The Eagles’ wide receiver was tackled quickly, and just after he hit the ground Coach Joseph Rankin burst off the sideline and asked his players for more.
“You have to block somebody!” he yelled.
His energy expelled, Rankin paused and looked up at the clock. Time was running out. That would be the last play of Seneca Valley’s first loss of the season. The 32-year-old briefly took off his hat off, rubbed the top of his head and then told his team to line up at midfield.
That moment of postgame disappointment is all part of the job for the young, passionate first-year coach of the Eagles.
Rankin graduated from Seneca Valley in 2009, having starred under coach Fred Kim. He went on to be a four-year starter at Morgan State and had a four-year professional career that included a stint with the Cleveland Browns.
After his playing career, Rankin spent three years as Seneca Valley’s defensive coordinator. He took over the top job in January 2022 after Justin Sickeri step down and into an offensive coordinator role after three years in the position.
Seneca Valley, once Maryland’s premier football program, tries to recapture its glory
“He’s been a great mentor, I’ve learned so much from him,” Rankin said of Sickeri. “As someone who wanted to go from a player to staying around the game as a coach, I was lucky to have such good mentors in that time of transition.”
Rankin is just the fifth head coach in Seneca Valley’s 47-year history, as all three of Sickeri’s predecessors had stayed in the role for more than 10 years. If that isn’t daunting enough, Seneca is one of the winningest programs in Maryland. It has won 12 state championships, most recently in 2002.
“There were no real big things I wanted to change when I took over,” Rankin said. “It was all about keeping the same winning tradition.”
Seneca is off to a promising start despite its shutout loss Friday. Its 4-1 record through five games is the program’s best mark since 2016.
Herndon enjoys drastic turnaround
Classmates would come up to Herndon senior Nana Appouh in the hallways. They would jokingly bet him $50 that his Hornets would lose, or they’d ask why he bothered wearing his football jersey, because the team was “Obviously going to take an ‘L’.”
Appouh and the seniors let the mockery sit in their stomachs. After all, the Hornets hadn’t won since 2018, when these seniors were still in middle school. The defense allowed 37.5 points per game during the 28-loss stretch, and the offense wasn’t much better. But a bar from Coach Bill Bachman stuck with the group.
“One day, you’re going to drop 40 on someone’s head and never look back,” Bachman said.
His words proved prophetic. After snapping the skid with a 49-0 victory over Osbourn Park on Sept. 16, the Hornets are on a three-game winning streak during which they have beaten teams a combined 135-8.
Senior center Owen Sheeran bawled. Bachman drove straight home, unable to find the words for a full postgame message. Only senior Liam Wilson, a Wake Forest baseball commit who played on the Hornets squad that reached the state finals in the spring, lacked the post-game euphoria. He scored five touchdowns against Osbourn Park.
“It felt really good, but in my opinion, it was a bit much,” Wilson said. “You’re supposed to win games and you’re supposed to do all that stuff. This is just the start.”
The Hornets’ defensive turnaround comes from an emphasis on speed, according to defensive coordinator Josh Richards. Defensive backs shifted to linebacker. Linebackers shifted to the line. They’ve gotten after the ball. And they’ve bought into the program.
“I always told the kids [in the hallway] that God has a plan for us,” Appouh said. “So they can keep talking.”
Da’Shawn Powell, Wilde Lake: The sophomore totaled three touchdowns, including one on the opening kickoff, in the Wildecats’ 28-14 win over Centennial.
Clay Ash, Independence: The junior two-way star scored three touchdowns, snagged an interception and eclipsed the 1,000-yard rushing mark for the year with 239 yards in a win over Potomac Falls.
Jacob Todd, Severn: The senior quarterback, best known as a four-star lacrosse recruit, accounted for 201 yards and four touchdowns in the Admirals’ 41-6 win over Saint John’s Catholic Prep.
Alijah Miller, High Point: The senior Swiss Army knife had a rushing touchdown, a tackle for loss, a sack, a forced fumble and two fumble recoveries in the Eagles’ 34-0 win over Northwestern.
DeMatha at Gonzaga, Friday, 6:30 p.m.
River Hill at Atholton, Friday, 7 p.m.
West Springfield at Robinson, Friday, 7 p.m.
CH Flowers at Wise, Saturday, 2 p.m.
Linebacker kick-started his career
When Ian Wall showed up for the first day of practice last year, his heart was set on being Jackson Reed’s kicking specialist
Wall, who has a background in lacrosse and soccer, felt that being a kicker would be the perfect way to integrate himself into a sport he had never played before. But as soon as Coach Minoso Rodgers saw Wall’s 6-foot-4, 210-pound frame, there was no way that he was just going to kick.
“When I saw him, I was kind of taken back,” Rodgers said of their first meeting. “Specifically at the high school level, you can look at a kid and tell that they are a great athlete. But because he’d never played before and was only interested in kicking, we didn’t know what he might be capable of or if he’d even be willing to try another position.”
After having him try a few different positions, Rodgers quickly realized Wall was a standout outside linebacker. After a few games, the entire D.C. Interscholastic Athletic Association realized it as well. Wall had 78 total tackles and five tackles for loss, which earned him an All-Met honorable mention.
Despite a slow start to the season for Jackson Reed (0-5) versus stiff competition, Wall has continued to shine in his second season. Through five games, the senior has more than 50 tackles and has eclipsed double-digit tackles for loss. Coupled with his 4.0-grade-point average, Wall has generated interest from most Ivy League programs.
“All of the offers and attention that I’ve received has been such a blessing,” Wall said. “ … Every day, I just go out there and try to give it everything that I’ve got for my teammates and the school that I love. Coach Rodgers and the rest of the staff invested their time in me and have done so much to help me be recruited; the least I can do is match their energy and pour everything I have into this game for them.”
Ireton wins after busy offseason
When Gary Wortham Sr. hopped into the passenger seat of assistant coach Endor Cooper’s truck July 31, Wortham’s right leg went numb.
Wortham, the head coach at Bishop Ireton, was supposed to lead a staff meeting to prepare for the start of practice the following day. Instead, he visited the hospital, where he learned he’d need spinal surgery to fix his herniated discs.
Cooper has added Wortham’s responsibilities in his absence, and on Thursday night the coaching pair and its players felt uplifted for the first time this season. After Ireton earned its first win, 29-0, over Saint John Paul the Great in Potomac Shores, Wortham, in a wheelchair, awarded Cooper the game ball.
“It’s a good feeling to get one,” said Wortham, 53. “I had been anticipating the day I could give Coach Endor Cooper our game ball. It was great for me to be able to give him the game ball and thank him publicly in front of our parents and our team.”
In 1998, Wortham met Cooper when they lived in the same housing complex in Woodbridge. They have coached across Northern Virginia together since 2008, including with Ireton (1-4) the past three years.
“He’s now become a master pretty much at putting our defense and things together,” Wortham said. “We call our defense the cookbook. Last week, all he kept talking about was, ‘We’re going to put the recipe together to not have JPG get on the board, coach.’ ” | 2022-10-03T16:38:00Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Seneca Valley adjusts to new coach; Herndon enjoys drastic turnaround - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/03/seneca-valley-adjusts-new-coach-herndon-enjoys-drastic-turnaround/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/03/seneca-valley-adjusts-new-coach-herndon-enjoys-drastic-turnaround/ |
In this handout photo released by Arctic Academy of Sciences, Valery Mitko, the former president of the Arctic Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg speaks during a meeting in St. Petersburg, Russia, Thursday, Nov. 13, 2014. Mitko, a renowned Russian polar scientist has died while being under house arrest on charges of treason. He was 81. Mitko died in St. Petersburg of an unspecified illness, according to the Pervyi Otdel human rights group that defended him in the criminal case. It said that Mitko just returned from a hospital and was unable to walk. (Arctic Academy of Sciences via AP) (Uncredited/Arctic Academy of Sciences) | 2022-10-03T16:38:28Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Mitko, Russian Arctic expert, dies at 81 under house arrest - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/mitko-russian-arctic-expert-dies-at-81-under-house-arrest/2022/10/03/5709be56-4335-11ed-be17-89cbe6b8c0a5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/mitko-russian-arctic-expert-dies-at-81-under-house-arrest/2022/10/03/5709be56-4335-11ed-be17-89cbe6b8c0a5_story.html |
U.S. Soccer ‘failed’ women players, report finds, as new abuse claims emerge
Former Racing Louisville FC head coach Christy Holly was accused of sexually abusing a player in an investigative report released Monday by Sally Q. Yates, the former acting attorney general. (Howard Smith/Howard Smith/isiphotos.com via Imagn)
The year-long probe by Sally Q. Yates, the former acting attorney general, found that some of the game’s top coaches were the subjects of numerous allegations of sexual misconduct, including some that have not been previously made public. The coaches also leaned on vicious coaching tactics, Yates found, including “relentless, degrading tirades; manipulation that was about power, not improving performance; and retaliation against those who attempted to come forward."
U.S. Soccer hired Yates to investigate last year amid reports in The Washington Post and The Athletic of widespread allegations of abuse against coaches in the National Women’s Soccer League.
Yates also found the sport’s powerbrokers repeatedly failed the players by ignoring red flags and dismissing complaints. Both the NWSL and U.S. Soccer “appear to have prioritized concerns of legal exposure to litigation by coaches …. over player safety and well-being," she wrote.
Rory Dames was accused of misconduct decades ago. He coached his way to prominence anyway.
“[T]hey also failed to institute basic measures to prevent and address it, even as some leaders privately acknowledged the need for workplace protections,” the report states. “As a result, abusive coaches moved from team to team, laundered by press releases thanking them for their service."
While several allegations of abuse and misconduct have been made public in media reports, Yates’s report opens with a previously undisclosed allegation involving Christy Holly, the male former head coach for Racing Louisville FC. According to the report, Holly requested a one-on-one film session with player Erin Simon in April 2021.
“She knew what to expect,” the report states. “When she arrived, she recalls Holly opened his laptop and began the game film.”
The coach told Simon that he intended to touch her for every bad pass, according to Yates’s report, and “pushed his hands down her pants and up her shirt.”
“She tried to tightly cross her legs and push him away, laughing to avoid angering him,” the report states. “The video ended, and she left. When her teammate picked her up to drive home, Simon broke down crying.”
According to the report, the Louisville organization declined to aid investigators with any information concerning Holly’s employment, pointing to nondisclosure and nondisparagement agreements signed with Holly. Louisville abruptly fired Holly on Aug. 30, 2021, but never disclosed the circumstances surrounding his dismissal. “As a result, Holly’s misconduct has remained largely unknown, including to anyone who might seek to employ him as a coach,” the report states.
“There are too many athletes who still suffer in silence because they are scared that no one will help them or hear them," Simon said in a statement Monday. “I know because that is how I felt.”
The report was based on interviews with more than 200 people, including more than 100 players, plus coaches, owners and front office staff from 11 current and former teams. But Yates’s team encountered several obstacles.
Louisville blocked both current and former employees from speaking with investigators about Holly, the report says. The Portland Thorns, whose coach, Paul Riley, has been accused of abusing players, “interfered with our access” to witnesses and “raised specious legal arguments in an attempt to impede our use of relevant documents,” according to the report. And the Chicago Red Stars, whose coach, Rory Dames, has been accused of mistreating pro and youth players, “unnecessarily delayed the production of relevant documents over the course of nearly nine months,” the report states. Some witnesses, such as Jeff Plush, the former NWSL commissioner, didn’t respond to investigators.
The report focuses largely on Holly, Riley and Dames, recounting allegations of sexual misconduct, abusive behavior and coercive tactics.
During his time as head coach of the Thorns, Riley “sexually pursued” player Meleana Shim for months, the report states, “and benched [her] after she declined his advances.” The team investigated, and the NWSL was aware of the allegations, but he was allowed to depart the team and take another coaching job in the league without the wrongdoing becoming public. The report also details a sexual relationship, first reported by The Athletic, that Riley is alleged to have had with another player, Sinead Farrelly, and noted that the NWSL failed to investigate a complaint she filed in 2021.
Both U.S. Soccer and the NWSL were aware of anonymous player surveys as far back as 2014 in which players said Riley was “verbally abusive,” “sexis[t],” and “destructive,” the report states. Neither organization acted on those complaints, according to the report, which calls Riley’s conduct — which allegedly included grooming behavior, late-night texts with players and flirtatious comments — an “open secret.”
Shim’s complaint was received in 2015, and U.S. Soccer received further warnings about Riley in 2018 and 2019, when he was under consideration for the U.S. women’s national team head coaching job.
Yates found that the NWSL received a series of four complaints about Riley in Spring 2021. “The League largely ignored the complaints, and instead, weeks before the publication of The Athletic article, NWSL Commissioner Lisa Baird was actively trying to keep Riley from resigning over his anger about the post-season schedule,” the report states.
Player surveys in 2014 and 2015 also included allegations that Dames was “abusive” and “unprofessional,” warning that players would not “be as honest out of fear,” according to the report. National team players complained to former U.S. Soccer President Sunil Gulati and Jill Ellis, the national team’s former head coach, that Dames “created a hostile environment for players.”
But when the feedback was shared with Arnim Whisler, the owner of the Red Stars, he said the national team players wanted “this league to shut down” and simply had an “axe to grind” with Dames," according to the report. Dames abruptly resigned from the Red Stars last November, two days after coaching in the NWSL title game, as The Post prepared to publish a story detailing players’ allegations against him. Dames never faced a background check, according to Yates’s report, despite having faced allegations of misconduct as a youth coach in the 1990s.
Holly was also allowed to pursue another coaching job despite past allegations of abuse. He was forced to leave Sky Blue Football Club midway through the 2016 season because of his “verbal abuse” and his “relationship with a player," according to the report. But the details never became public, and Holly went on to perform contract work for U.S. Soccer, coaching with the under-17 and under-23 teams.
That experience helped Holly land the coaching job in Louisville in 2020, where, according to Yates’s report, he “repeated the same pattern of misconduct.”
The report says he sent Simon explicit photos. He requested that she come to his house to review game film, “and showed her pornography instead, masturbating in front of her before she left," the report states.
“This investigation’s findings are heartbreaking and deeply troubling,” U.S. Soccer President Cindy Parlow Cone said in a statement. “The abuse described is inexcusable and has no place on any playing field, in any training facility or workplace."
The NWSL’s abuse scandal exploded into the public eye last year after the reports in The Post and The Athletic led players to demand action from soccer officials. Games were canceled, five of the league’s 10 coaches resigned or were fired and Baird, the NWSL’s former commissioner, resigned. In the aftermath, U.S. Soccer retained Yates and her law firm, King & Spalding, in October 2021 to investigate.
The NWSL and the players’ union have separately retained the law firm Covington and Burling to investigate. Early findings from that ongoing probe have already led to temporary suspensions for Houston Coach James Clarkson, Orlando Coach Amanda Cromwell and Orlando assistant coach Sam Greene.
Yates’s report notes numerous systemic issues that acted as barriers to players reporting abuse: The league didn’t have an anti-harassment policy until last year. Most teams lacked a human resources department. There wasn’t an independent, anonymous reporting line until last fall. And the league and U.S. Soccer didn’t have someone on staff responsible for player safety.
The report also highlighted cultural issues that remain prevalent in women's soccer, beginning at the youth level. The report states that players, coaches and staff were “conditioned to accept and respond to abusive coaching behaviors as youth players. By the time they reach the professional level, many do not recognize the conduct as abusive.”
Further, it noted that the league didn’t adopt an anti-fraternization policy until 2018, and intimate relationships between coaches and players “normalized.” It noted that coaches like Riley, Dames, and Holly all married former players.
The Yates report includes a series of recommendations, though it notes that U.S. Soccer has limited authority over league and team operations. The report urges teams to accurately disclose and explain misconduct to prevent other teams from hiring coaches and suggests U.S. Soccer have better engagement with its licensing process, which could help “weed out problematic coaches."
U.S. Soccer should require the NWSL to conduct timely investigations into allegations of misconduct, and league and team employees should be required to participate. The report also recommends training for players and coaches and roles dedicated to player safety at the team, league and federation levels.
The report did not make employment recommendations, noting that Riley, Dames and Holly are all out of the NWSL. But Yates did urge U.S. Soccer to take steps “to prevent their future participation in USSF landscape.”
Similarly, both U.S. Soccer and NWSL have new leadership teams in place, but the report notes that many team owners remain in power. “Consequently, we recommend that the NWSL, which has governing authority over NWSL teams, owners, and personnel, determine whether disciplinary action is appropriate for any of these owners or team executives, in light of our findings and the findings of the NWSL/NWSLPA Joint Investigation,” the report states.
An NWSL spokesperson did not immediately reply to a request for comment.
U.S. Soccer said it will immediately begin working on implementing Yates’ recommendations. The organization will establish an office of Participant Safety, will publicize records from SafeSport’s database and will mandate minimum standards for background checks from youth soccer through the sport’s highest levels. It will also establish a committee that will focus on implementing these recommendations, headed by Danielle Slaton, the former USWNT player, with an action plan due by the end of January 2023.
“U.S. Soccer and the entire soccer community have to do better,” said the USSF’s Cone, a former player with the U.S. women’s national team, “and I have faith that we can use this report and its recommendations as a critical turning point for every organization tasked with ensuring player safety. We have significant work to do, and we’re committed to doing that work and leading change across the entire soccer community.” | 2022-10-03T17:28:58Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Report finds NWSL abuses were more widespread than believed - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/03/nwsl-abuse-report-sally-yates/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/03/nwsl-abuse-report-sally-yates/ |
The county where Fort Myers is located bore the brunt of Ian’s landfall, after the storm had previously been projected to strike farther north. Because the forecast had been focused elsewhere in the state, Lee County officials declined to order evacuations until Tuesday morning, just a day before the storm hit. The New York Times detailed that decision Friday.
Because the area is difficult to evacuate, valid questions are being asked about whether an earlier order could have prevented deaths in the county. The toll officially stands at 42 — a majority of all deaths recorded in the state — and could climb significantly higher. (The county’s sheriff said Thursday that deaths could “definitely” be in the hundreds, though he later tempered that.)
Given all of that, it’s worth running through what we know about the situation, along with how officials are explaining it.
Over the weekend, the county’s decision not to evacuate earlier was defended not only by local officials and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), but also by the Biden administration’s Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) administrator, Deanne Criswell. Many of them keyed-on where the storm was predicted to go 72 hours before it made landfall.
“Just 72 hours before landfall, the Fort Myers and Lee County area were not even in the cone of the hurricane,” Criswell said on ABC’s “This Week.” “And as it continued to move south, the local officials immediately — as soon as they knew that they were in that threat zone — made the decisions to evacuate and get people to safety.”
Lee County Commission Chairman Cecil Pendergrass (R) added: “Seventy-two hours before the storm, we still were not in the cone. We were working off of data and went off that data.”
DeSantis repeatedly faced such questions, and he offered a similar argument, becoming combative with a CNN reporter who asked him about it.
“Where was your industry stationed when the storm hit? Were you guys in Lee County? No, you were in Tampa,” DeSantis told the reporter. “So that’s — you know, they were following the weather track, and they had to make decisions based on that. But you know, 72 hours they weren’t even in the cone, 48 hours they were on the periphery. So you’ve got to make decisions the best you can.”
DeSantis’s reelection campaign hailed his response to “the latest media spin.”
The “cone” refers to the storm’s projected path. And it’s worth noting that 72 hours before landfall, small portions of Lee County were in the National Hurricane Center’s five-day cone. That included the location where the storm would ultimately make landfall, the barrier island of Cayo Costa.
Its forecast from 11 a.m. the previous Sunday, about 76 hours before landfall, showed that the cone included Cayo Costa and another barrier island, Gasparilla, which straddles the border between Lee and Charlotte counties. It also included a sliver of Pine Island and North Captiva.
Here’s the graphic:
And here’s a zoomed-in still image from the accompanying interactive map at the time (Boca Grande is located on Gasparilla, while Cayo Costa is the island to the south):
And as Scott Dance and Amudalat Ajasa of The Washington Post’s Capital Weather Gang noted, being outside the cone doesn’t necessarily mean you’re outside the danger zone. Generally speaking, there’s about a 60 to 70 percent chance the storm will remain in the cone, “meaning in about one out of three cases, the storm will move outside of the cone.”
Some reports have noted that neighboring counties ordered evacuations earlier, and that’s true. But those neighboring counties, including Charlotte and Sarasota, are to the north and northwest, respectively. So they were more in the cone.
Another issue raised by the Times report and by others is Lee County’s own evacuation planning documents, which call for evacuations based on storm surges. The 2018 plan states that the entire coast — known as Zone A — should be evacuated if there is as little as a 10 percent chance of a six-foot storm surge. It also calls for evacuation if there is a 40 percent chance of a four-foot storm surge.
As of 11 p.m. Sunday, the National Weather Service warned of a potential storm surge of between 4 and 7 feet along the coast from Englewood to Bonita Beach — covering the entirety of Lee County’s coast. (The Times pointed to more granular forecasting that said Fort Myers Beach, specifically, stood a 40 percent chance of a six-foot-storm surge at the time.)
By 5 p.m. Monday, the National Hurricane Center included Fort Myers alongside Tampa as facing the highest risk of a “life-threatening storm surge.” It said a six-foot storm surge was likely for Fort Myers Beach. The following morning, Lee County officials announced a partial evacuation order but emphasized that it was limited, with the evacuations increasing and the warnings becoming more urgent as the day progressed.
But while the warnings increased Sunday and into late Monday, the Capital Weather Gang also notes that Lee County wasn’t included in the National Hurricane Center’s own hurricane warning until Tuesday morning — around the time evacuations were ordered:
That said, the Hurricane Center’s archive of Ian forecasts shows that, as its predictions of the storm’s path shifted, meteorologists did not begin to emphasize risks to the area around the eventual landfall point until about a day in advance.
It wasn’t until Tuesday morning, while Ian was passing over western Cuba, that the Hurricane Center extended a hurricane warning southward to cover the stretch of southwestern Florida coastline that would soon be devastated. Even then, the centerline for the predicted storm track passed through Tampa and wasn’t over Fort Myers until 11 p.m. that night.
At least one high-ranking official on Sunday wasn’t quite so eager to defend the decision in Lee County. Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), a former governor of the state, was asked repeatedly about it on CNN, and he repeatedly suggested the timing of the decision should be looked into.
“I think it’s something we have to look at to see why did it happen, because what you have to look at is how fast — even if you do it, how fast can you get people out of some of these places, because just the road structure and things like that?” Scott said.
The situation carries echoes of another one we wrote about last week, when officials in 1935 dithered on evacuating World War I veterans from work camps in south Florida ahead of what became known as the Labor Day Hurricane. The officials wanted to wait until they were sure the Florida Keys would be hit by the storm. Ultimately, the evacuation orders came too late, and an estimated 260 of them died, alongside more than 100 others. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration sought to constrain the fallout and was largely successful.
Nearly 90 years later, similar questions about the timing of evacuations — along with our ability to forecast hurricanes and contextualize those forecasts — are as valid as ever. | 2022-10-03T18:03:50Z | www.washingtonpost.com | DeSantis, FEMA defend Lee County evacuation amid growing questions - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/03/ian-evacuation-lee-county-desantis-fema/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/03/ian-evacuation-lee-county-desantis-fema/ |
By Tonya Russell
Skin lightening might not be a familiar topic to many Americans, but it is a popular subject globally and in some U.S. communities of color: The hashtag #whiteningcream has over 40 million views on TikTok, and products that are promised to bleach or lighten skin tone are readily available both online and at drugstores. According to market research firm StrategyR, estimated global sales of skin-lightening products will exceed $8 billion in 2022.
But some skin-lightening products on the market contain ingredients that are not approved for this use by the Food and Drug Administration and can be harmful. The FDA in April issued warning letters to 12 U.S. companies for selling over-the-counter (OTC) skin-lightening products that contain “unapproved drugs and are not generally recognized as safe and effective.” All the products in question contain hydroquinone.
The FDA says it has received reports of serious side effects from the use of products that contain hydroquinone, including rashes, facial swelling and skin discoloration that can be permanent. Although some of these products are still being sold in the United States, there are currently no FDA-approved OTC skin-lightening products. Skin-lightening products containing topical steroids and dangerous ingredients, such as mercury, may also be available for purchase online and promoted on social media sites such as Instagram and TikTok.
Dermatologists and other health-care experts are concerned over the pervasive use and abuse of skin-lightening products. “This is an issue that is embedded in many cultures globally,” says Amira Adawe, founder and executive director of the Beautywell Project, an organization working to end colorism, skin-lightening practices and related exposure to dangerous chemicals. “The practice of colorism is so embedded in many cultures globally because the idea that ‘whiteness is the best’ was introduced to many communities during colonization and slavery. The beauty standards of many cultures are measured by how white the person is.”
Adawe says that colorism leads many women to believe that the likelihood of finding a husband and even landing a job depends on their complexion. “In my research with many communities of color in the U.S. and globally, young girls have shared with me that the use of skin-lightening products is encouraged by their mothers and relatives. This can be very damaging to young girls because it impacts their self-esteem and overall health. Many women do not think that they are beautiful enough if they are not light-skinned.”
These beliefs often travel with immigrants to the United States. Adawe says skin lightening here is prevalent among immigrants of color, including Somalis, Congolese, Kenyans and other African immigrants, as well as in Latino and Asian communities. According to a 2021 Pew Research Center survey, a majority of U.S. Hispanic adults believe that having darker skin color hurts their ability to get ahead at least a little and that having lighter skin color helps them get ahead. These beliefs lead many people to turn to the internet for products that are promised to lighten skin but that are unapproved, ineffective or even dangerous.
Corey L. Hartman, a dermatologist in Birmingham, Ala., says using hydroquinone without a doctor’s supervision can have serious consequences, including permanent darkening of the skin. “While it’s a safe topical medication under the care of a dermatologist, unchecked use can lead to an unnatural skin lightening and ochronosis, where the skin paradoxically turns darker permanently,” he says.
Hartman also warns about glutathione, an antioxidant that is sold as an oral supplement and in injectable form as a skin lightener. He says that the injectable form in particular can have “serious systemic effects,” including abnormal liver function and kidney failure. “I tell my clients never to use it under any circumstances,” he says, adding that he also warns against using the oral version.
Dangerous skin bleaching has become a public health crisis. Corporate marketing lies behind it.
Hartman says safe alternatives to hydroquinone are available without a prescription for people who want to even their skin tone, rather than lighten it. “Cysteamine is the most groundbreaking topical ingredient to hit the market in the last few years,” he says. “It is nontoxic, can be used long-term and helps to provide a more natural-looking, even complexion.” Cysteamine can also treat hyperpigmentation and melasma, a condition that causes dark patches or spots, usually on the face.
Patients who want to lighten defined areas of hyperpigmentation rather than their entire complexion can consider laser treatments provided by dermatologists. These can cause short-term pain and reddening, but they improve the appearance of dark spots.
Despite the risks, skin lightening is still coveted by some in a world that props up white skin. “It’s important that we focus collectively to combat colorism,” Adawe says, noting that it will reduce risks to — and improve the overall health outcomes of — affected communities. | 2022-10-03T18:08:37Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Why some skin-lightening products should be avoided - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/10/03/dangerous-skin-lightening-products/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/10/03/dangerous-skin-lightening-products/ |
After Ian, Florida can’t rebuild the same way. It can be better.
Mobile homes at the Port Carlos Cove community across from Fort Myers Beach sustained significant damage from Hurricane Ian last week. (Octavio Jones/For The Washington Post)
These changes were underway, if not understood, when Cape Coral, Fla., was laid out in 1957. Developed on low-lying land across the Caloosahatchee River from Fort Myers, the city is crisscrossed by an intricate grid of canals that allow many homeowners to dock their boats just feet from their back doors and that provide habitat for manatees and other wildlife. That is a lovely amenity — and a design that made sense more than 70 years ago. But last Wednesday, those canals ushered floodwaters deep into a community of 200,000 people that has an average elevation of just three feet. In video shot Thursday, it was impossible to tell Cape Coral’s water-filled streets from its canals. | 2022-10-03T18:09:20Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | After Ian, Florida should rebuild for the future, not the past - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/03/ian-florida-sanibel-rebuild/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/03/ian-florida-sanibel-rebuild/ |
A man in Rio de Janeiro on Monday peruses newspapers showing the results of the first round of Brazil's presidential election. President Jair Bolsonaro and former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva are headed to a runoff on Oct. 30. (Buda Mendes/Getty Images)
RIO DE JANEIRO — For years, opponents have relied on a facile explanation for how a man such as Jair Bolsonaro — profane, homophobic, given to conspiracy theories — could have won the presidency of Latin America’s largest country.
It was a fluke.
The narrative held that an extraordinary and unusual sequence of events leading up to the 2018 election propelled the rise of the right-wing former army captain with an unusual fondness for Brazil’s military dictatorship. A sprawling corruption probe had tarred much of Brazil’s political class — but not Bolsonaro. Former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was jailed and barred from running for president. And finally, weeks before the vote, came a stabbing on the campaign trail. What didn’t kill him breathed new life into his outsider bid.
His presidency appeared to confirm the contention. The polls have consistently showed high disapproval ratings as he lurched from controversy to controversy and crisis to crisis. All of it seemed to point to a likely first-round loss for Bolsonaro on Sunday — a correction of what critics hoped was a historical aberration.
But Bolsonaro again defied expectations.
Not only did he outperform the polls Sunday, winning 43 percent of the vote and a second round against rival Lula, but his allies made unexpected gains across the country. His party is now the largest in both houses of Congress. Candidates endorsed by Bolsonaro gained 14 seats in the Senate, a chamber previously hostile to the president. Lula allies won only eight.
In the crucial states of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro — together, home to a quarter of the population — allies showed similar strength. In Rio, Governor Cláudio Castro won nearly 60 percent of the vote to defeat his leftist challenger. And in São Paulo, Lula’s home state, where former governor João Doria clashed frequently with Bolsonaro over his coronavirus response, the president’s candidate beat out Lula’s to gain the advantage heading into a second round.
“We already have what we need to liberate Brazil from authoritarianism, from the bribery and injustice that infuriates us,” Bolsonaro tweeted Monday. “A more profound change is already starting! It is the not people who should have fear.”
Instead of confirming Bolsonaro’s weakness, Sunday’s returns showcased his surprising strength. Brazil made clear that it isn’t racing back to the leftist policies and leaders that governed it before his rise to power.
“Bolsonarismo is strong and represents millions of Brazilians, rooting itself and spreading through Brazilian society,” said Federal University of São Paulo sociologist Esther Solano, who studies the president’s supporters. “Bolsonarismo has come to stay and could even go beyond Bolsonaro.”
The president still appears headed for defeat in the second round Oct. 30. Lula, who is seeking his third term as Brazilian president, beat Bolsonaro in the first round by more than 6 million votes, winning more than 48 percent of the electorate. He was only 2 million away from getting the 50 percent he needed to win outright in the first round. The polls, if they are to be believed, still project a second-round victory.
The country remains highly polarized, pulled between two political giants fired in part by personal and mutual enmity. But a majority of voters have consistently said they will not vote for Bolsonaro. His bellicose rhetoric, his dismissal of a pandemic that killed more than 686,000 Brazilians, his acts of political warfare on ideological opponents — all of it remains a handicap heading into the runoff.
But Lula’s movement and his supporters nonetheless sounded defeated as they reckoned with a Brazil they didn’t recognize and a result they hadn’t expected.
“I’ve already cried,” said Larissa Paglia, 28, on Avenida Paulista in São Paulo on Sunday night. “We weren’t expecting this result. Even if it is good for us, we weren’t expecting it.”
Historians were less surprised. Brazil has an international reputation for a certain libertine approach to life — Carnaval, thong bikinis, the Brazilian wax job — but in truth this is a deeply conservative country where right-wing movements have long found a strong following by appealing to Christian values.
The proponents of Bolsonarismo — with its appeal to individual liberties and its valorization of the country’s vast, conservative interior — reflect much of that discourse, said Pedro Doria, a journalist and historian. In much the same way that former president Donald Trump tapped into historic sources of resentment in the United States, Bolsonaro found his base by channeling latent grievances and fears.
“These ideas are deeply rooted in Brazil,” he said. “Sometimes we believe these ideas are gone, but political thought is not something abstract that intellectuals paint in universities, but the ideas that people pass onto their children for what they think society should look like.”
“This conservative way of thinking runs deep in Brazil; it was never dead.”
Now the movement is poised to shape events in the country for years to come. Seven of Bolsonaro’s former cabinet members, some of whom implemented some of his most controversial policy initiatives, were elected to Congress.
One was former environment minister Ricardo Salles, who oversaw the dismantling of institutions that safeguarded the Amazon. Another was Eduardo Pazuello, who carried out Bolsonaro’s contrarian coronavirus policies at the health ministry. One more was Damares Alves, his minister of women, family and human rights, who spent much of her time in the position waging culture war battles.
In Mato Grosso state, Luiz Henrique Mandetta — a health minister who clashed with Bolsonaro over the president recommending unproven medications to treat the coronavirus — was defeated by one of Bolsonaro’s former and loyal ministers.
“Even if Bolsonaro loses, the movement he has led thus far will remain a powerful force,” said political scientist Matias Spektor, a professor of international relations at the Getulio Vargas Foundation. “It would curb a Lula administration’s ambitions because it would be able to block and make any move more difficult.”
The Brazilian right is now dominated by Bolsonarismo. What remained of the moderate right, said political analyst and columnist Fábio Zanini, was “decimated” in Sunday’s vote. Bolsonaro is the undisputed standard-bearer.
“He was able to repeat some of what he did in 2018,” he said. “He’s the guy that conservative Brazilians now look to as their representative.”
Pessoa reported from São Paulo. Paulina Villegas contributed to this report from Brasília. | 2022-10-03T18:34:24Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Bolsonaro defies expectations again, heads to second round against Lula - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/03/bolsonaro-lula-brazil-election/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/03/bolsonaro-lula-brazil-election/ |
How Democrats quietly triumphed in one of their biggest fights
Former president Barack Obama during an event on the Affordable Care Act at the White House on April 5. (Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post)
In his 2019 book “Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment Is Killing America’s Heartland,” Jonathan M. Metzl tells the story of an uninsured Tennessee man he calls Trevor. Though he was dying of a number of ailments, Trevor emphatically supported the decision of his state’s Republicans to refuse the Affordable Care Act’s expansion of Medicaid.
“Ain’t no way I would ever support Obamacare or sign up for it,” he told Metzl. “I would rather die.”
Just a few years later, the idea that the ACA would inspire that degree of loathing seems almost surreal. In fact, judging by what’s happening on the campaign trail right now, this debate might be pretty much over, and therein lies a lesson about the risks and rewards of trying to solve big, complicated problems.
As NBC News’s Sahil Kapur reports, this is the first election since 2010, when the law passed, that the ACA isn’t an issue on the campaign trail. Republican candidates in key races aren’t promising to repeal it if they’re elected, and they don’t even want to bring it up.
“I think it’s probably here to stay,” says Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.). Partisan warriors including Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) don’t mention it by name anymore, offering only vague words about “choice” and “competition” in their policy agendas.
If Trevor is still alive, he might wonder if he got scammed, if the leaders who told him how much he should care about (and hate) the ACA never believed it themselves. Because the truth is they didn’t.
It’s long been obvious that for all their bluster over the ACA, health care was just never an issue that truly animated Republican politicos. They’d be relieved to put it behind them so they could stop pretending to care about preexisting conditions and Medicare reimbursement rates and other complex health-care policy details.
But they had no choice: President Barack Obama and the Democratic Congress he swept into office in 2008 made comprehensive health-care reform the centerpiece of his domestic agenda, so Republicans had to fight it. Once they convinced their supporters it was not a highly technocratic reform with strengths and shortcomings but a terrifying assault on freedom, they couldn’t exactly turn around and say, “Eh, never mind — we’ll live with it.”
Which means that the gamble Democrats made in 2010 paid off, even if it took longer than they hoped. That gamble was that even if the bill would be hard to explain, and even they’d take short-term political hits over it, voters would come to see its benefits, and that would keep it safe from attack.
That’s essentially what happened: For the past five years the law has had approval of a majority of the public, and though it’s a far too complicated set of programs and regulations for people to understand and embrace the way they do Medicare or Medicaid, when Republicans tried to repeal it in 2017 they suffered a harsh backlash, and they don’t want to go through that again.
But this experience is not going to make Democrats say, “Let’s keep swinging for the fences, because we’ll win in the end.” In fact, they may take just the opposite lesson.
By the time Obama was elected, the Democratic coalition was nearly unanimous that this was their chance to attempt sweeping heath-care reform — a chance they might not get again for a long time. It was possible because for a brief moment they had a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate.
But today they have only the barest majorities in both houses, which is part of the reason that the most ambitious plans proposed by Joe Biden in the 2020 campaign have been set aside. While Biden has had a surprising degree of legislative success, nothing in the bills he has signed was likely to generate sustained opposition or give Republicans a tool to organize their own base.
You can see that on the campaign trail right now. Republicans aren’t talking much about the Inflation Reduction Act or the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act or the Chips and Science Act; instead, they talk generally about “government spending,” and inflation and crime. Democrats might not be reaping huge benefits from those laws, but nobody’s all that mad about them either.
Which brings up another lesson of the ACA story: If you’re going to pass big laws, it had better be because you believe in what you’re doing. The tougher the problem you’re trying to solve, the more difficult the politics will be, which encourages lawmakers to continue nibbling around our biggest problems, looking for piecemeal reforms that minimize political risk.
And if voters are wondering whether the government can do big things anymore, the answer is: only now and again. Most of the time, it just seems too hard. After all, it took more than a decade for us to stop arguing about the ACA. | 2022-10-03T18:56:15Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Democrats' most excruciating victory is finally won - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/03/democrats-victory-affordable-care-act/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/03/democrats-victory-affordable-care-act/ |
It’s good to run into an optimist these days. A roomful of them is even better.
By Mitch Daniels
President Dwight D. Eisenhower receives a silver and walnut plaque from an Optimist International delegation in D.C. on March 2, 1959. From left: Theodore McKeldin, former governor of Maryland; Eisenhower; C. Lease Bussard of Frederick, Md., former Optimist president; J. Harold Wilkins of Memphis, Tenn., then-Optimist president, and Wilkins' wife Ambrette. (AP Photo/Harvey Georges)
It had been quite a while. For a decade such stops were a regular calendar item, but a recent speech at a small-town service club was the first such appearance I’d made in a similar number of years. I’d forgotten what I was missing, and, although they were tasty, it wasn’t the eggs or the biscuits and gravy.
I agreed to speak to the Warsaw Breakfast Optimist Club in Warsaw, Ind., as a favor to an old friend. My view now is that he did me the favor. First, in providing me a reassurance that essential virtues, values and voluntarism still thrive, at least in some places. Second, by fortifying my resolve to keep looking and hoping for the best in a nation beset with division and self-inflicted problems.
The Optimist Club national organization was founded in 1911 before going international a few years later. They now have more than 2,500 local clubs — there’s more than one in Warsaw — and can teach us a little about maintaining a bright outlook through dark times.
The meeting’s preliminaries included lightning-round reports on recent youth service activities, the charity golf tournament and, in a tone of regret, the first dues increase in many years. Such was the civility and community of this crowd that even the last report received a round of (tepid) applause.
To me, the highlight of the meeting came immediately after the invocation and Pledge of Allegiance when, without prompting, the 150 men and women present stood and recited from memory the 158-word Optimist Creed. A couple of passages can be read as inner-directed (“Forget the mistakes of the past and press on to the greater achievements of the future.” “Be so strong that nothing can disturb your peace of mind”).
But most point the person taking the pledge toward others: “Make all your friends feel that there is something in them.” “Be just as enthusiastic about the success of others as you are about your own.” “Give so much time to the improvement of yourself that you have no time to criticize others.” And, of special salience in this age of self-pity and freely spewed malice, “Be too large for worry, too noble for anger.” Peaceful people, with good will toward all. How countercultural.
Values like those produce practical results. Warsaw, population less than 16,000, through the ingenuity and work ethic of its people, became the orthopedic capital of the world. Globally renowned companies such as Zimmer, Biomet and DePuy grew up in Warsaw, and some 50 percent of all the world’s artificial joints come from there. If you or a loved one has benefited from the miracles of hip, knee or other joint replacement, odds are heavy that your new body part came from this modest-sized town.
Entrepreneurs such as Dane Miller, in the grand tradition of American tinkerers, invented and steadily improved these products. Miller, co-founder of Biomet, was an engineer who began his operations in a barn. To persuade skeptical surgeons of his insight that titanium would be a safe and superior material for orthopedic products, he had a rod implanted in his own arm and proved his theory correct. Forty years later, the company he founded employs about 20,000 people and, now merged with Zimmer, continues to improve lives all over the world.
Current unemployment in Warsaw is 2.5 percent. The mayor dropped by the meeting, and told me his biggest problem is attracting sufficient housing for the workers the town needs. An independent contractor named Charlie said his challenge is finding enough workers to keep up with the work.
An hour with the Optimists served as a partial antidote to the grim mood I’ve been warding off while reading Victor Davis Hanson’s “The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America.” Hanson’s diagnosis of our current social condition hits like a visit to an oncologist with a bad bedside manner. But, as always with his work, the scholarship is formidable and the documentation inarguable. One can reject his views of the previous presidency, but his alarming longer-run conclusions are hard to dismiss.
The falsification of U.S. history, the poisonous divisiveness of identity politics, the conflation of residence with citizenship and the usurpation of democracy by unelected bureaucrats, have plainly altered the conception of Americans’ responsibilities to the nation and to each other.
There are those who find these changes acceptable or even preferable. Hanson argues powerfully that they are destructive and potentially fatal to our country’s prosperity, but more important to our precious, historically unique experiment in self-government. Even an obstinate optimist comes away from the work in need of cheering up.
A trip to the Optimist Club helped. Warsaw is exactly the kind of place, filled with exactly the kind of citizens, whose disappearance Hanson foresees and laments. Here’s hoping that, despite his sharp insight and erudition, he’s wrong this time.
It happens that I have a major vocational change coming up, and no plans yet for what’s next. I’m thinking maybe I should start by looking for a nearby Optimist Club. | 2022-10-03T18:56:16Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | It’s good to run into an optimist these days. A roomful of them is even better. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/03/indiana-optimism-national-pessimism/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/03/indiana-optimism-national-pessimism/ |
The National Theatre marvels at some 200-year-old theater gossip
The first season of Washington's National Theatre was in 1835, though today the theater isn't in the same building as back then. Letters written by an actress in 1836 provide a taste of theater life. (Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post)
It is to our good fortune that J. Jones was an actress. Actors must be observant, and Jones certainly was in the letter she wrote on Dec. 11, 1836, to a friend in Philadelphia. They can also be a little catty.
Jones was in Washington. She explained that her boardinghouse was preferable to her previous accommodations — in Baltimore — which had left her “half starved and smothered in dirt.” Washington was superior, though the cost of her room — $14 a week — was pricey.
“Everything is very high,” Jones wrote. “They take every advantage during the session. It is their harvest and they make the most of it.”
In other words: Retailers jacked up the prices when Congress was in town.
Jones was in Washington to perform at the National Theatre, which was only a year old when she wrote to Mrs. Sarah Ritchards. Scans of that letter and another Jones wrote a month later were made available to the National after my August column on the theater’s archives. The letters are owned by a collector who wishes to remain anonymous.
“I was thrilled — and fascinated by the content,” David Kitto, the theater’s executive director, told me.
“This place is very gay at present,” Jones wrote. “We have the great folks of all nations assembled here. They ride a good deal. It is considered vulgar to walk. I sit at the window to see the carriages and four with their splendid liveries dash along the avenue. I am afraid I shall have to confine myself to the vulgar part of the community.”
Jones wrote that the National was “very handsome and comfortable but has not been so well attended as it ought.”
Every actor’s lament: Anything less than a full house is an insult.
Jones was appearing in a two-act farce called “Scan. Mag, or The Village Gossip,” by English playwright John Poole.
That odd title? “Scan. Mag” is short for “scandalum magnatum,” a Latin expression used in Britain to describe slander against politicians. Jones played the gossip, Mrs. Caudle.
I couldn’t find a review of the play in any contemporary newspapers, but on Dec. 14, 1836, the Alexandria Gazette praised the theater’s new company, writing “the company of last season has been purified by the discarding of those who were considered irremediably dull, and the adding of others who are nightly proving themselves to be good actors.”
Truly advice for any producer: Discard the irremediably dull!
“I have not been yet to visit the Capitol or the Presidents house but anticipate a great treat,” Jones wrote.
That sentiment sounded familiar to Kitto.
“I know that the artists who play here who haven’t been in D.C. before look forward to touring the city,” he said.
Jones wrote to Ritchards again on Jan. 22, 1837. She included some local entertainment news, tinged, as before, with disappointment: “Mr. James Howard and [his] wife are here. He gave two concerts, not well attended. The fact is there are so many private parties among the fashionables they have no time to devote to publick amusements.”
A celebrity was expected at the National Theatre for Saturday’s performance: Antonio López de Santa Anna, the president of Mexico.
Jones described him as a “cold-blooded murderer” but allowed that Santa Anna’s presence would guarantee a full house. “He will prove a very attractive Star,” she wrote.
I’d love to have met “Aunty Jones,” as she described herself in one letter, not only to talk with her about the Washington of the 1830s but to hear more about her friends. She mentions mutual acquaintances to Sarah, including a woman named Beck (short for Rebecca?).
Beck appeared to be a bit of a downer.
“The fact is, her letters are so filled with discontent and unhappiness that I gave her a blowing up in my last [letter], which I presume has given her offence,” Jones wrote. “I told her she had a kind and affectionate husband and it was her duty to render him comfortable and happy, and not annoy with her unhappy disposition, as he was doing every thing for the best and her welfare.”
And then there’s Lizy, who still isn’t married. “What is she about?” Jones wrote, apparently exasperated.
What indeed? The voice may be from nearly 200 years ago but it’s wonderfully familiar.
Said Kitto: “This is as close to the beginning of the theater as anything we’ve found to date, only one year off from the opening. I hope there’s more.” | 2022-10-03T19:13:43Z | www.washingtonpost.com | National Theatre: Letters from 1830s give a taste of a D.C. actress’s life - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/03/national-theatre-letters/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/03/national-theatre-letters/ |
Brian Robinson Jr. is medically cleared, will return to practice Wednesday
Washington Commanders running back Brian Robinson Jr. worked on the field before the game at FedEx Field on Sept. 25, 2022. Robinson is still recovering from gunshot wounds to his leg. (Katherine Frey/The Washington Post)
Washington Commanders running back Brian Robinson Jr. was medically cleared and will return to practice Wednesday, with the expectation he’ll be activated from the non-football injury list, Coach Ron Rivera said Monday. Robinson, who was shot twice during an armed robbery attempt in late August, missed the first four games of the season while recovering, and he could make his regular-season NFL debut as soon as Sunday, when the Commanders host the Tennessee Titans.
Once a player on the NFI list returns to practice, his team has three weeks to decide whether it will place him on the active roster or leave him on the NFI list for the remainder of the season. Robinson’s clock will start Wednesday, and his progress in recovery has pointed to a swift return once his mandated four weeks on the NFI list expired. But his reintroduction to ball work in practice and his football conditioning could determine how soon he’ll be available to play.
Blackistone: Brian Robinson Jr. should be okay. Don’t forget the victims who won’t.
The evening of Aug. 28, Robinson was shot twice, in the knee and hip area, during what D.C. police described as an armed robbery attempt by two male assailants. Robinson was taken to MedStar Washington Hospital Center, and he underwent surgery the following day.
According to Rivera, the bullet in Robinson’s knee avoided any ligaments, tendons or bones, allowing for a quicker recovery than if he had needed a more extensive repair.
Robinson was back at the team’s facility two days later, using the aid of crutches and holding a bag of Oreos for his fellow running backs.
And roughly two weeks later, he was riding a stationary bike and working with an athletic trainer to regain his strength and agility. On Sept. 25, less than a month after he was shot, Robinson ran routes during warm-ups ahead of Washington’s Week 3 meeting with the Philadelphia Eagles at FedEx Field.
A third-round pick out of Alabama, Robinson arrived in Washington as a potential boost to the running backs room that already featured Antonio Gibson and veteran J.D. McKissic. But Robinson quickly proved he could be much more throughout organized team activities and training camp. Before his injuries, he was in line to earn time as a starter, perhaps on a rotating basis with Gibson, depending on the weekly game plan.
Rivera envisioned having a dynamic set of rushers who could complement one another in skill set and size, much like the group he had in Carolina.
“When we get Brian Robinson back, there are some things that we can do that we want to feature his skill set and the skill set that not just he has, but [Gibson] and [McKissic have],” Rivera said. “I mean, those three guys are all quality backs, and they all have their special abilities. Once you have the full complement now, you can just grow it even more.”
The loss of Robinson just before the season opener was a blow to the team’s initial offensive plans. Washington kept veteran Jonathan Williams on the active roster to give it a back with a similar play style and size to the rookie. Robinson’s impending return leaves Williams’s spot uncertain, but a jolt to the offense could not come at a better time.
The Commanders are reeling from three consecutive losses, including two to divisional opponents. The offense that impressed in Week 1 fizzled in subsequent weeks and now leads the league in sacks (17) and has the lowest average yards per play (4.61).
If there’s a bright spot, it’s been Washington’s run game, which picked up 142 yards (5.3 per carry) against the Cowboys. Robinson’s delayed debut should only add to the team’s attack.
“You want as many playmakers as possible,” running backs coach Randy Jordan said last week. “I think the No. 1 thing that would be able to help us is … [Robinson’s] ability to make plays in the run game and in the pass game. And I think where I really feel like we kind of miss him, he brings an energy just like J.D. does, just like Antonio does, all those guys. We talk about strength in numbers.” | 2022-10-03T19:22:27Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Commanders RB Brian Robinson Jr. will return to practice Wednesday - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/03/brian-robinson-activated-commanders/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/03/brian-robinson-activated-commanders/ |
In this photo provided by The Great Pumpkin Farm, Emmett Andrusz, from left, Steve Andrusz and Scott Andrusz, pose with the record setting 2,554-pound pumpkin, in Clarence, N.Y., Saturday, Oct. 1, 2022. Scott Andrusz’s entry broke the previous record of 2,528 pounds. (The Great Pumpkin Farm via AP) (Uncredited/The Great Pumpkin Farm) | 2022-10-03T19:40:04Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Super squash: 2,554-pound pumpkin carves out new US record - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/super-squash-2554-pound-pumpkin-carves-out-new-us-record/2022/10/03/9c22508a-4348-11ed-be17-89cbe6b8c0a5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/super-squash-2554-pound-pumpkin-carves-out-new-us-record/2022/10/03/9c22508a-4348-11ed-be17-89cbe6b8c0a5_story.html |
Silicon wafers at a semiconductor manufacturing plant in Malta, N.Y., on June 10, 2021. (Cindy Schultz for The Washington Post)
The Biden administration is preparing new rules aimed at curbing China’s advanced computing and chip production capabilities — the U.S. government’s most significant effort to date to restrain China’s development of technologies critical for its military advancement.
The rules, scheduled to be announced as soon as this week, will sweep more broadly than a draconian export control previously applied to Chinese tech giant Huawei.
The use of the so-called foreign direct product rule will prevent companies anywhere in the world from selling certain advanced computing chips to Chinese buyers without a U.S. government license if the companies use American technology to make the chips, according to several people briefed on the measure, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the still-unannounced plans.
The rule would apply to chips, also known as semiconductors, destined for use in supercomputers and certain artificial intelligence applications.
US threatens use of novel export control if Russia invades Ukraine
Additionally the administration is restricting the export to China of chip-making tools needed to make advanced semiconductors with transistors that are 14 nanometers or smaller. And it is planning to place more Chinese organizations on an export blacklist called the Entity List.
Reuters earlier reported on some of these measures, but not on the plans to use the foreign direct product rule, or FDPR.
The administration has signaled its intention to use more of its powers to curb Beijing’s efforts to harness technology to gain a global advantage militarily and economically.
“On export controls, we have to revisit the long-standing premise of maintaining ‘relative’ advantages over competitors in certain key technologies,” national security adviser Jake Sullivan said in a speech last month, alluding to China.
The approach of staying only “a couple of generations ahead” is no longer tenable, he said.
The foreign direct product rule is a particularly harsh trade measure because it applies to sellers beyond U.S. borders.
The rule imposes restrictions not just on chipmakers located in the United States, but on any company or factory anywhere in the world that relies on American equipment or software to make chips. There is hardly a semiconductor on the planet today that is not made with American tools or designed with software that originated in the United States.
When the United States used FDPR to deprive Huawei of semiconductors, it crippled Huawei’s production and sales.
After Russia invaded Ukraine, the United States also used FDPR to block companies around the world from selling certain semiconductors to buyers in Russia, a ban that U.S. officials say is depriving Russia’s military of vital components.
A White House spokeswoman declined to comment. | 2022-10-03T19:40:47Z | www.washingtonpost.com | U.S. to use FDPR rule on Chinese buyers of AI and supercomputing chips - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/10/03/us-fdpr-china-chips/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/10/03/us-fdpr-china-chips/ |
Darrell Brooks appears in a Waukesha County Circuit Court before jury selection in Waukesha, Wis. on Monday, Oct. 3, 2022. Brooks, who is representing himself during the trial, is charged with driving into the Waukesha Christmas Parade last year killing six people and injuring dozens more. He faces six counts of first-degree intentional homicide and 71 other counts. (Mike De Sisti/Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel via AP) (Mike De Sisti / The Milwaukee Jo/Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel) | 2022-10-03T19:41:32Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Wisconsin parade suspect delays jury picks with disruptions - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/wisconsin-parade-suspect-delays-jury-picks-with-disruptions/2022/10/03/18cbddbe-434d-11ed-be17-89cbe6b8c0a5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/wisconsin-parade-suspect-delays-jury-picks-with-disruptions/2022/10/03/18cbddbe-434d-11ed-be17-89cbe6b8c0a5_story.html |
Brazil’s polls massively underestimated populist appeal. Sound familiar?
Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro speaks at the Alvorada Palace in Brasilia after the results of the first round of his country's presidential election Sunday. (Ueslei Marcelino/Reuters)
Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s surprisingly strong showing in Sunday’s election was yet another example of polls underestimating a populist, right-wing candidate. The results, which trigger a runoff election later this month, show that national populism is alive and well in Brazil, even if Bolsonaro ultimately loses.
Pre-election polls in Brazil had predicted Bolsonaro’s defeat. They did not overestimate the strength of his main opponent, former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, projecting that the leftist candidate would come close to the 48.4 percent he ultimately received. But they were massively off on Bolsonaro’s 43.2 percent level of support, instead often pegging him in the low-30s.
This comes on the heels of polling errors in last month’s Swedish elections, whose exit polls wrongly predicted a narrow win for the center-left. That suggests a systemic shortcoming in polls involving national populist movements.
Bolsonarismo, the philosophy championed by the right-wing leader, also performed strongly in Brazil’s congressional elections. Bolsonaro’s Liberal Party gained 66 seats in the proportionally elected Chamber of Deputies, becoming the nation’s largest party. Other right-wing parties often aligned with Bolsonaro won about 150 seats combined, while Lula’s Brazil of Hope alliance won only 80 seats.
This right-wing trend was even more pronounced in the Senate, where candidates are elected in each state on an U.S.-style first-past-the-post system. Liberal Party candidates won eight of the 27 races while other right-wingers won another 10. That means two-thirds of Brazil’s states elected right-leaning senators, more than the 13 states that Bolsonaro carried.
Brazil’s parties often cut deals with the nation’s president to obtain favors, so this doesn’t necessarily mean that Lula would be stymied if he wins the runoff. But any leftist agenda would likely have to be significantly curtailed to avoid an open confrontation with the right-leaning congress.
The results also mean that Bolsonaro has a shot at winning the runoff despite his international unpopularity. The third-place candidate, Simone Tebet, was a centrist who performed best in Bolsonaro’s strong states. This implies many of her voters will prefer Bolsonaro to Lula. Adding her 4 percent to the incumbent’s 43 percent gets him within the range of victory — if he can persuade some of Lula’s first-round voters to switch sides.
Regardless, Bolsonaro and his ideas are likely to remain strong. Much as Donald Trump remains a force despite his 3.4-point loss in 2020, Bolsonaro could easily remain on the national stage if he keeps the margin close. Even if he does not, someone else will surely pick up his banner, much as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) is vying to become Trump’s less-unlikable successor.
National populism’s continued appeal worldwide should force global elites to rethink their tired approaches to problems. It is clear that anathematizing populists and ignoring their views does not snuff out their movements. On the contrary, trying to cordon off political sentiments seems only to throw fuel on the populist fires. Assuming the blaze continues to grow, populists will eventually come to power in free and fair elections. That’s what’s happened in Sweden and Italy and is likely to happen elsewhere in the next few years.
National populism doesn’t have to be on the right. Ireland’s polls show that Sinn Fein, a party that combines Irish nationalism with left-wing economics, is winning nearly as many votes as the two parties that have dominated Irish politics since independence — Fianna Fail and Fine Gael — combined. France’s Jean Luc Melenchon has transformed his country’s left by creating La France Insoumise (France Unbowed). The Scottish National Party, Canada’s Bloc Quebecois and two Catalonian pro-independence parties also combine nationalism and leftist economics. Decades of denunciation have not dented these parties’ appeal.
National populists of all stripes share two common themes: a fair distribution of economic power and the preservation of identity. The modern political economy favored by elites tends to denigrate both sentiments. If regions are depressed, elites argue, it is either the sad byproduct of immutable economic laws or the failure of that region’s residents. And efforts to maintain some communal values — whether national or religious — are frowned upon, if not outright dismissed. Populists on both the left and right argue that those values are crucial to human flourishing and must be respected through law.
Global elites had hoped that populism would be decisively rejected in elections this year. Instead — in Sweden, Italy and now Brazil — they have continued to show strong appeal. The United States may follow suit in its midterms. Let those who have ears hear. | 2022-10-03T19:41:38Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Populism in Brazil was massively underestimated. Sound familiar? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/03/brazil-election-bolsonaro-lula-populism-polls/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/03/brazil-election-bolsonaro-lula-populism-polls/ |
Viktor Orban, the prime minister of Hungary, waves at the audience during the Aug. 4 general session at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Dallas. (Go Nakamura/Reuters)
One of the rare points of general consensus in the United States at the moment is that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was bad and Russian President Vladimir Putin is reprehensible. These are not universally held positions, certainly; some TV hosts have repeatedly sided implicitly with Russia, even in recent weeks. But as a general rule, Russia’s position on the subject is not the one that’s carrying the day in the U.S. political conversation.
Which is one reason a tweet from the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) over the weekend sparked an outcry.
“Vladimir Putin announces the annexation of 4 Ukrainian-occupied territories,” it read. “Biden and the Dems continue to send Ukraine billions of taxpayer dollars. Meanwhile, we are under attack at our southern border. When will Democrats put #AmericaFirst and end the gift-giving to Ukraine?”
An animated Russian flag fluttered gently underneath.
It’s not even really clear what the point was. That the illegal annexation — a function of obviously contrived “refendums” in the contested regions — should be recognized as legitimate? That Ukraine doesn’t deserve military support (that “gift-giving”) as it staves off the invaders? Matt Schlapp, husband of a former official in President Donald Trump’s administration and head of the organization that runs CPAC, disavowed the tweet, blaming it on his not having had a chance to vet it.
But why wouldn’t someone at CPAC think this comported with organization policy? The group has been hyping autocrats and autocrat-aspirants for years now. The mistake was just in picking the wrong one.
At the outset of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, Republicans viewed Putin about as unfavorably as they did various Democratic elected officials. Since early 2017, Republicans have been consistently less likely than Americans overall to describe Russia as an enemy of the United States (as opposed to an ally). But when the invasion happened, that changed. Now, Republicans are about as skeptical of Russia as Democrats or Americans are overall. Putin ruined his image.
For years, Russia held a special appeal to the American right. When it seized Crimea in 2014, there was a segment of the GOP that contrasted Putin favorably with the Democratic president at the time, Barack Obama. When Russian actors sought to bolster Trump’s 2016 candidacy, 2014’s enemy-of-my-enemy position evolved in some ways to a friend-of-my-friend one.
But an undercurrent was an appreciation for Putin’s perceived toughness, how he wielded power. Russians, conservative media personality Megyn Kelly once said, “don’t want this whole Brooklyn, pumpkin-spice-latte-drinking man that they are creating here.” And, she added: “I don’t want that, either.”
Trump himself made his predilections in this regard very explicit. His relationships with autocrats — Putin, Hungary’s Viktor Orban, Chinese President Xi Jinping — were generally more positive than his ties to America’s geopolitical allies. He himself appealed to the right’s desire for leadership with an iron fist, a heavy hand that would set aside election results and crush the opposition.
Beyond Trump, no leader has benefited more from this instinct among the American right than Orban. On the heels of a speech in Europe in which he warned of the specter of that continent “becom[ing] peoples of mixed race,” he addressed a CPAC gathering in Dallas. In doing so, he largely echoed Trump — understandable, given that the two share a broad philosophy. (When Orban ran for reelection this year, Trump eagerly endorsed him.)
Orban is the head of Hungary’s Fidesz party. It, like the Republican Party in the United States, has seen a rise in anti-pluralist sentiment over the past two decades, according to analysis from the V-Dem Institute at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. In other words, both parties are moving away from a system in which different parties contest equally for power. Orban’s has done so explicitly.
(Putin’s party, United Russia, has long been deeply anti-pluralist, of course.)
Among the opponents of pluralism whom CPAC has supported is Trump himself. Over the weekend, he spoke at a rally in Michigan in which he declared that no future election results could be trusted. This has been a centerpiece of his rhetoric since 2020 for obvious reasons: Getting people to think election results are suspect is a key part of getting them to think that he didn’t lose.
The effect within his party, though, has been widespread. Most Republicans still say they think the 2020 election was stolen. Polling from Yahoo News conducted by YouGov shows that less than half of Americans think that candidates should commit to accepting the results in their elections. Nearly 4 in 10 of those who voted for Trump in 2020 say that losing candidates should continue to challenge the results.
Appearing on “Morning Joe” on Monday, political strategist Frank Luntz expressed deep pessimism about those numbers.
“When you lose faith and trust in elections itself, you’ve lost your democracy,” he said. “And we are so close to the edge.”
Luntz is not a leftist. He’s a longtime Republican consultant, someone with close ties to House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.). And his assessment is that the sort of skepticism about elections espoused by Trump and embraced by Republicans as the party moves away from pluralistic democracy is a significant danger.
CPAC eventually deleted that tweet. In a statement, the organization acknowledged that the message “belittled the plight of the innocent Ukrainian people” and that “[w]e must oppose Putin.”
The space Putin carved for himself on the American right has all but evaporated. At this point, he can’t serve the right well as a useful foil in criticizing the left. CPAC’s admitted error wasn’t in siding with an autocratic foreign power against the American president. It’s just the power they chose to side with.
Analysis: CPAC accidentally hyped the wrong autocracy | 2022-10-03T19:41:50Z | www.washingtonpost.com | CPAC accidentally hyped the wrong autocrat - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/03/conservatives-orban-putin-russia-ukraine/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/03/conservatives-orban-putin-russia-ukraine/ |
New ad shows Louisiana congressional candidate giving birth
If you watch until the end of this campaign ad, you’ll see a candidate giving birth.
Katie Darling, a Democrat and business executive challenging House Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.), is out with a spot that documents the arrival of “someone else who’s going to be joining us” on the family farm.
Darling narrates the ad, in which she relays her concerns about climate change, underperforming public schools and her state’s abortion ban. “Louisiana deserves better than the path we’re on,” Darling says, conveying that’s something she wants for her newborn son.
In a tweet accompanying her ad, Darling writes: “Louisiana ranks 50th in crime, 48th in education, and 46th in health care. I’m running for Congress to stop this race to the bottom because our children deserve better.”
The first images in the ad show a pregnant Darling on her family farm in St. Tammany parish with her husband, John, and daughter, Remy, as well as the farm’s chickens. In a voiceover, Darling talks about Louisiana’s abortion ban, which prohibits nearly all abortions and is one of the strictest in the nation.
In several images, the candidate is seen in labor at a hospital; the final image is of Darling after delivering a son. On her campaign website, Darling says Ollie was born in September.
Darling is considered a long-shot candidate in the strongly Republican seat. | 2022-10-03T19:41:56Z | www.washingtonpost.com | New ad shows Louisiana congressional candidate giving birth - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/03/louisiana-female-candidate-birth/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/03/louisiana-female-candidate-birth/ |
Several conservative justices expressed concern about the law’s broad reach. The court’s liberals seemed focused on finding a compromise.
Environmentalists gather outside as the Supreme Court on Monday as the justices heard arguments in Sackett vs. EPA, which could limit the scope of the Clean Water Act of 1972. (Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)
The Supreme Court on Monday struggled with how to resolve a high-stakes case that could narrow the government’s power to protect wetlands and waterways.
Several of the court’s conservative justices expressed concern about the unpredictability and broad reach of the landmark Clean Water Act for property owners seeking to develop their land, while the court’s liberals seemed to seek a compromise that would retain the government’s authority to regulate wetlands adjacent to lakes, rivers and other waterways.
The justices agreed in January to look again at a case involving an Idaho couple who previously prevailed at the Supreme Court in their effort to build a home near Priest Lake, one of the state’s largest. The Environmental Protection Agency says there are wetlands on the couple’s 0.63-acre lot, which makes it subject to the Clean Water Act.
At issue is how courts should determine what counts as “waters of the United States,” protected by the nearly 50-year-old environmental law. If the court sides with the Idaho property owners, environmental advocates say about half of all wetlands and roughly 60 percent of streams would no longer be federally protected.
“This case is going to be important for wetlands throughout the country, and we have to get it right,” Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh said during the nearly two-hour argument on the Opening Day of the court’s new term.
The case comes after the court’s conservative majority last term restricted the EPA’s authority to curb emissions from power plants.
The Idaho couple, Michael and Chantell Sackett, are represented by the conservative Pacific Legal Foundation and backed by a long list of business organizations, home builders and agricultural groups that say the government’s regulations are muddled, time-consuming and costly to follow.
Justices Neil M. Gorsuch and Samuel A. Alito Jr. expressed the most skepticism about how broadly the government defines wetlands subject to regulation, offering pointed questions for the government’s lawyer, Brian H. Fletcher.
Gorsuch asked, “How does any reasonable person know whether or not their land” is covered? Is the property subject to regulation if it is located three miles or two miles from waters subject to federal jurisdiction, he pressed Fletcher. “So, if the federal government doesn’t know, how is a person subject to criminal time in federal prison supposed to know?”
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, sitting for her first oral argument, was an active questioner and pushed back against suggestions that the regulations are unfair to property owners or would likely result in criminal penalties.
“Shouldn’t they have gathered information prior to purchasing?” Jackson asked the Sacketts’ attorney.
Fifteen years ago, the couple obtained a local building permit to begin construction on their land about 300 feet from the lake, a plot bounded on two sides by roads and separated by a row of lakefront homes. The EPAgency put those plans on hold.
The agency said the property contains sensitive wetlands, which are among the “waters of the United States” and subject to permitting requirements. The government threatened fines of more than $40,000 per day if the couple did not stop construction. The couple went to court to block the EPA order and now wants the justices to narrow the definition of “waters of the United States” so that their land is not covered by the Clean Water Act.
The Biden administration and environmental groups say narrowing the reach of the law would undermine the government’s ability to protect wetlands that are separated from a river, for instance, by a small dune but still affect a river’s chemical, physical and biological integrity.
Supreme Court allows Idaho couple to challenge EPA on wetlands ruling
In 2012, the justices unanimously sided with the Sacketts, allowing them to immediately challenge the EPA order before the agency took enforcement action. Alito noted in a concurring opinion that the scope of the law is “notoriously unclear” and expressed sympathy for the homeowners.
“Any piece of land that is wet at least part of the year is in danger of being classified by EPA employees as wetlands covered by the act, and according to the federal government, if property owners begin to construct a home on a lot that the agency thinks possesses the requisite wetness, the property owners are at the agency’s mercy.”
The justices are now reviewing a 2021 ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, which sided with the EPA. The appeals court said the record shows that water from the wetlands, which filter out pollutants, makes its way into the lake via a tributary and creek. The opinion quotes an EPA memo, which found the wetlands “especially important in maintaining the high quality of Priest Lake’s water, fish, and wildlife.”
A key question for the justices is how to determine how far from the water’s edge the Clean Water Act applies. The court’s three liberal justices along with Kavanaugh emphasized in their questions Monday that Congress clearly intended to regulate wetlands “adjacent” to regulated waters.
Kavanaugh noted in questioning the Sacketts’ attorney that presidents in both political parties had interpreted the law to cover neighboring wetlands.
The court failed to reach consensus in a 2006 case Rapanos v. United States. The 9th Circuit relied on the test put forward by retired Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who provided the deciding vote in that case and said the wetland must have a “significant nexus” to regulated waters.
The Sacketts’ attorney Damien M. Schiff asked the court to embrace the narrow interpretation proposed by the late conservative Justice Antonin Scalia and joined then by three other justices. Scalia’s definition limits regulation to wetlands with a direct “continuous surface connection” to “navigable waters.”
Paul Clement, a former solicitor general, said during a Heritage Foundation term preview last week that when the justices agree to take a case for the second time the court is inclined to “finish the job that it started the first time around.”
Because “a lot of the current justices think pretty highly of Scalia” and there was previously “some sympathy for the homeowner, this sets up pretty well for the Sacketts.”
Analysis: Why places with the most chain restaurants tend to vote for Trump | 2022-10-03T19:42:02Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Supreme Court debates narrowing Clean Water Act - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/03/supreme-court-clean-water-act/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/03/supreme-court-clean-water-act/ |
RICHMOND, Va. — Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin called Monday for expanding nuclear power generation in Virginia, reevaluating a recent clean energy law celebrated by environmentalists, and restoring greater authority to state regulators who oversee the state’s powerful utilities.
“The only way to confidently move towards a reliable, affordable and clean energy future is to go all in — all in — on innovation, and not abandon prematurely the reliable network that we currently have in place,” Youngkin said at the event. “I mean, think through this: innovation in nuclear, in carbon capture, in hydrogen, along with building on our leadership in offshore wind and solar. They all should be part of the solution.”
Virginia, in recent years when the state government was under full Democratic control, implemented a series of energy and environmental policy reforms intended to address the threat of climate change by reducing carbon emissions in the power and transportation sectors. The state moved toward adopting California’s strict vehicle emissions standards, joined a multistate carbon cap-and-trade program and in 2020 implemented a major green energy mandate that sets out a path toward 100% renewable generation.
Youngkin has made the case that many of those reforms go too far or will put an undue burden on consumers. He is already seeking to leave the carbon cap-and-trade program and decouple Virginia from California’s emissions standards. And while the plan doesn’t call for a full repeal of the Virginia Clean Economy Act, it says the law should be “reevaluated” and reauthorized in the next legislative session, and every five years thereafter.
Environmental groups and some Democratic state lawmakers were broadly critical of Youngkin’s agenda and vowed Monday to push back against attempts to undo the recent reforms.
Town said his group would work with the Democrat-controlled Senate to block Youngkin’s administration “every step of the way as they work to undermine our progress.”
The plan also says state agencies should “expedite approval of critical infrastructure projects,” noting the administration’s support for the in-progress Mountain Valley and other natural gas pipelines.
“I think that climate change is a threat,” Youngkin, who is increasingly viewed as a possible contender for national political office, said in an interview with The Associated Press ahead of the plan’s rollout. “I believe we are seeing climate change.”
Dominion Energy has backed much of the recent legislation that has restrained the commission’s oversight. Craig Carper, a spokesperson for the company, said it looks forward to “reviewing the plan in more detail and working with the administration and other policymakers to continue our long record of providing our customers reliable, affordable and clean electricity as well as economic development.”
A spokesperson for Appalachian Power, Teresa Hall, said it likewise was assessing the plan and any impacts to the company’s operations.
Youngkin said that’s something he thinks should apply to both “moms and dads in their own home” who might want to install solar, to “all the way through to independent power producers.” | 2022-10-03T19:42:09Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Youngkin plan calls for reevaluating major clean energy law - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/youngkin-plan-calls-for-reevaluating-major-clean-energy-law/2022/10/03/d8dd619c-4350-11ed-be17-89cbe6b8c0a5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/youngkin-plan-calls-for-reevaluating-major-clean-energy-law/2022/10/03/d8dd619c-4350-11ed-be17-89cbe6b8c0a5_story.html |
Transcript: The Path Forward: Private Space Travel with Jared Isaacman
MR. DAVENPORT: Good morning, and welcome to Washington Post Live. My name is Christian Davenport. I’m a reporter at The Post covering NASA and the spaceflight industry, and I am thrilled to be joined this morning by Jared Isaacman, the founder and CEO of Shift4 Payments, who is also an astronaut who flew last year in a SpaceX capsule in orbit circling the Earth three times in what was the first all‑private astronaut mission to space. Since then, he has commissioned three more flights from SpaceX and is going back in what he calls the Polaris Program, which seeks to open up a new frontier in commercial space.
Jared Isaacman, welcome. It's so great to have you here.
MR. ISAACMAN: Well, thanks for having me, Christian.
MR. DAVENPORT: Sure thing.
And thanks to our audience for joining us. We want you to join the conversation as well. You can tweet your questions to us @PostLive, and we'll try to get to as many of them as possible.
But, in the meantime, Jared, I wanted to ask you. So you went to space last year for the Inspiration4 mission, and frankly, I think we thought, you know, that was going to be it, it was going to be a one‑off. I mean, how can you top that? It was a big surprise and a lot of news when you decided like, hey, that you were going to go back to space with Polaris. So I wonder if you could just talk a little bit about how this upcoming mission, the first of these Polaris missions, which is going to launch in March, is different from what you did last year.
MR. ISAACMAN: Sure. Really good question. So I didn't think I was going back either. So Inspiration4, I think we accomplished every objective we set out to achieve. That mission itself, you know, our goal was to show it could be done, show it could be done, send‑‑you know, the first time you're sending nongovernment astronauts up into orbit. We were in orbit for three days, trying to maximize our time in orbit, get a lot of science and research done. We went farther than the International Space Station, farther into space than Hubble, so kind of a milestone towards where we all want to go someday, which is back to the Moon and Mars.
A number of firsts, first Black female pilot of a spacecraft, youngest American to go into orbit with Hayley Arceneaux, first pediatric cancer survivor to go into space with a prosthesis as well, and we raised over $250 million for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital showing, you know, we can work really hard to build the exciting world we want to live in for tomorrow without ignoring the responsibilities of today.
And, mostly, really just if we get this right, imagine all the exciting missions to follow, and we did get it all right. And now Polaris is here, and this is an example of all those exciting missions to follow.
So the Polaris Program picks up where we left off with Inspiration4. We're still raising a lot of money for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. We got $250 million before. That's not enough. Big believers in the St. Jude vision that no child should die in the dawn of life, so we will continue to raise funds and awareness for St. Jude throughout the Polaris Program.
But we're also on to those exciting missions to follow, which with Polaris is a series of tech demonstration missions. It's doing things that either have never been done before or haven't been done in over 50 years, and the idea is to build upon these things. So we continue to open up space for others to get back to the Moon and get to Mars and beyond.
So Polaris Dawn, which is set to launch now no earlier than March 1st, will go set a new Earth orbit altitude record, so over 1,400 kilometers. That was last established by the Gemini 11 mission. In doing so, we're at that altitude. We're going to get exposed to the Van Allen radiation belt. That can inform vehicle design architecture so that you don't maybe necessarily need to harden the vehicles much for radiation. It's going to tell us a lot about human physiology and exposure to‑‑you know, with radiation exposure that we expect will be common for long‑duration spaceflight missions. It will inform about 40 different science and research experiments.
We're going to do an EVA. That's a spacewalk. So it's a first commercial space walk, but I think what's most important is like it's a brand‑new EVA suit design and a new operations for conducting the space walk.
When we get back to the Moon and we get to Mars someday, it won't be just, you know, two people at a time. You envision a potential colony on Mars at some point, a permanent presence on the Moon, in which case you need a lot of space suits, and they can't cost hundreds of millions of dollars. You need a mass‑produced, low‑cost EVA space suit so you can get outside in the safety of a habitat and vehicle and do work, you know, on the surface of that planet or celestial body or even in space on the way. So EVA is very important for us.
And then the third objective is we're going to communicate over Starlink. So laser‑based communication, that will be imperative for sending messages back home from Mars, and it will certainly be utilized from the Moon as well and, again, about 40 different science and research experiments during our five days in orbit.
MR. DAVENPORT: Yeah. And let's just note real quick that Starlink is SpaceX's internet satellite‑based communications system, and I know that science is big to you.
But, when you go for this, these are really ambitious flights, and it's a really ambitious program going to space. One of the things that I've noticed is how seriously you take that. I wonder if you can talk a little bit of the training. I thankfully got a taste of that with you, got to fly in the back of a MiG‑29 fighter jet with you, but your training is really rigorous. And I wonder if you can walk us through how you prepare yourself and your crew to get ready for these missions.
MR. DAVENPORT: Well, you're totally correct. We do take this very, very seriously. I mean, we're working towards a world where you could potentially open up space for everyone. The last of the Polaris missions, the third mission, is Starship, and Starship could be the 737 for human spaceflight, where you could potentially be taking a hundred people per Starship up into orbit, whether it's for point‑to‑point travel or eventually Moon and Mars. And SpaceX isn't building one Starship. They're going to build hundreds of Starships.
So everything, you know, we accomplish right now ultimately de‑risks that important evolution of human spaceflight. So that is why we want to push the boundaries now. We're not going to just go to the International Space Station, you know, forever. We're opening up space with rapidly reusable rocket technology that's going to be just a total game changer.
So, for us to learn things now that have been exclusive to kind of the government super powers for a long time like undertaking a spacewalk, like going farther than the International Space Station will all inform future missions to come.
And we got to get it right, because if we do get it wrong, this timeline gets reset in the big way. It was the same way for Inspiration4. If that went wrong, they'd say, "We told you it shouldn't be done this way. Let's just keep it to government astronauts forever," and it can't be like that. Space should be opened up for everyone. There's a lot to learn out there. There's a lot to accomplish.
So, just like with Inspiration4, we got to get it right with Polaris. We really pulled together a heck of a crew to do it, but we are training a lot, to your point. So Inspiration4's training timeline was about six months. We're looking at probably eight to nine months with Polaris Dawn. So EVA training is a big part of it. We're doing scuba diving. We have these suspensions systems we're working with. We fly fighter jets, as what you were exposed to. That's a very fast environment where things happen quickly. It's a dynamic environment. You got to make good decisions fast or there's consequences, and you don't have that when you're in a simulator. So it builds crew resource management, radio work. We can do a lot of operations that have parallels over to human spaceflight, and again, it's a high‑consequence environment.
We do mountain climbing for team building. You know, a lot of these things that we do draw upon, you know, 60 years of human spaceflight experience from NASA, and then we spend a lot of time in the classroom. We spend a lot of time in the simulator as well.
MR. DAVENPORT: Yeah. I mean, that was great flying with you, and following the program and what strikes me is how you're, you know, building upon it. Inspiration4 leads to Polaris Dawn. You do the space walk. But we didn't know what the second flight in the Polaris Program was going to be, and now we have an idea because NASA and SpaceX recently announced that they're going to study the feasibility of having a commercial flight, a commercial crew boost the Hubble Space Telescope, take it to a higher orbit, and then potentially extend its life. And if that study says this is feasible, that would likely be your second mission. I wonder if you could just talk about that a little bit, what's the significance of that, and some of the logistical challenges that you'll have to overcome.
MR. ISAACMAN: Yeah, for sure. Really exciting news this past week for sure with the press conference with NASA, SpaceX, and Polaris talking about what could be, to your point, the second Polaris mission.
Now, the whole idea when we announced Polaris Dawn as the first Polaris mission and then the third mission being Starship was that second mission. We're going to learn a lot from now until then and build upon the first mission, you know, which de‑risks the third mission.
So, if you think about it, we're doing an EVA on this mission on Polaris Dawn. That doesn't mean we'll do an EVA on Hubble, but if that mission ultimately comes to be, then any experience you can gain prior to actually, you know, working on what is a national treasure and maybe one of the most important scientific instruments of all time is beneficial.
But we have been building in this direction. So you think about it, Dragon is a spacecraft and even Shuttle before it. Predominantly, the missions over its latter portion of life were just going to the Space Station. Inspiration4 went past the Space Station. It went past Hubble. So you unlock some additional performance capabilities or at least expanded the envelope of the vehicle. Now we're going to 1,400 kilometers. I mean, you're talking about nearly three times the altitude of the current Hubble spacecraft. So you know we have the ability through the performance of the vehicle to boost Hubble, and if we can do that and we can bring it above the current Starlink constellation and maybe put some enhancements along the way, then you're talking about this great scientific instrument, this explorer that helps us look back into the history of the universe.
And now coupled with James Webb Telescope, it has even more to offer science. If we can do that for 20 more years, that's a great gift to the scientific community all around the world.
So it's just a study for now, but you can certainly say that with the efforts we did with Inspiration4 and certainly with Polaris Dawn's objectives, it does set us up for the possibility of executing on that mission should the studies support it.
MR. DAVENPORT: You know, it was interesting, Jared. On Twitter the other day, somebody said something to the effect of "And, of course, on the Hubble boost mission, there are going to be professional astronauts accompanying you," and your response, I thought, was really interesting. You said maybe, maybe not, but that the focus should be on whether the commercial space sector can complete this mission and not on, you know, the color of the person's uniform completing it. I thought that was fascinating, and I wonder if you can elaborate on that a little bit more.
MR. ISAACMAN: Sure. I mean, I think in‑‑this has certainly been a different time in human spaceflight over the last couple years, right, as you see commercial industry come about, and you have, you know, organizations investing a lot of private funds into advancing human spaceflight technology that can serve a lot of other purposes too‑‑cargo, payload, satellites‑‑you know, ultimately trying to bring down the cost to access orbit for the benefit of everybody, for a much more exciting future. And you have Blue Origin doing it, and you have, you know, Virgin Galactic. You have a number of companies. Firefly Aerospace just achieved orbit a few days ago. This is awesome. This is such a great thing for keeping a competitive environment, which drives progress, brings down costs, but in doing so, it creates a natural confusion of, you know, well, they're the only people that are going to be able to operate in space. Are they going to be the blue‑suit astronauts from the right stuff? And they're amazing, and we are truly standing on the shoulders of giants to get to this point, but it won't stay government astronauts forever. There's just too much space and too much to accomplish out there. There's going to be commercial astronauts for a reason. That's why there's even a designation for it.
So, in my opinion, you know, people that are drawing a little bit too much on the right stuff in the past are not really in the present right now, and the present is we potentially have the means available to us to save an important scientific instrument like Hubble, raise its altitude, enhance its capabilities to deliver science for decades in the future. And it may come at little to no cost to the taxpayers, thanks to private space/commercial space funding. That's all that should matter right now.
I think it's kind of like a little bit too in the weeds and missing the point to think through who is a more capable human being to be undertaking the mission. Does the reward substantially outweigh the risk? And I certainly think so.
And I also‑‑you know, I don't mind any personal shots. I know I'm‑‑I put myself out there, and it‑‑you know, it's part of the game. But, you know, I have an incredible crew for the Polaris Dawn mission. I had an incredible crew for Inspiration4.
Polaris Dawn, we've got two senior SpaceX engineers, lead mission controller‑‑or mission director so oversees all of mission control, you know, in Anna Menon. I have the SpaceX lead astronaut trainer, trained every NASA crew that's gone into orbit today in Sarah Gillis. These are incredibly educated, talented engineers. So, to be essentially prejudging any of their kind of capabilities based on a black flight suit versus a blue flight suit, I just think is shortsighted. It's missing the point, which is we should focus on delivering Hubble for decades and into the future, and ideally, if we can do it at no cost, man, that's a touchdown for scientists all over the world.
MR. DAVENPORT: So, just to follow up on that, have you given any thought as to who would accompany you on the Hubble mission, if you could tell us who that is? And then, also, if you're not able to do the Hubble mission, if NASA comes back and says, "You know what? This should be done robotically or shouldn't be done at all," have you‑‑what would your second flight be? Have you given any thought to that, how you would push the envelope then with that second flight?
MR. ISAACMAN: Yeah. Sorry. You're going to have to remind me the first part of the question‑‑oh, oh. [Unclear], now I got it.
MR. DAVENPORT: Crew.
MR. ISAACMAN: So, for me, the thing about crew is just‑‑or even the name of the program is just now is not the appropriate time. We've got Polaris Dawn coming up, and to your point earlier, there are a lot of ambitious objectives associated with that. We've got to execute really well on Polaris Dawn or there won't even be a second Polaris mission. So that is the immediate focus now.
There's a study going on. The study even has broader implications than just Hubble. I mean, the idea that you could use a proven vehicle like Dragon for servicing or other missions in low‑Earth orbit, even beyond Hubble, is just awesome. So let's just let them do their thing and get the study going. Yeah. I think that's a‑‑I think it's prior and‑‑yeah, I think that's correct, so‑‑
MR. DAVENPORT: That's fair enough.
You've talked a lot about sort of the broader scope, the context of all this, the commercial space sector, and you come from the business world. So I wonder, Jared, if you can talk a little bit about will there be a self‑sustaining space economy at some point, do you think? Because right now, you know, there's so much is reliant on NASA and on the government, but at what point do we get to that point where there is a self‑sustaining space economy, you know, like‑‑and people are doing more frequently the kinds of things that you're doing right now?
MR. ISAACMAN: Yeah. It's so incredible to think about. First of all, I'm 100 percent convinced there will be. I just can't exactly point to you in any one specific direction right now because it's so early days. I mean, literally, for 60 years of human spaceflight history, the first time that you didn't have a world super powers' presence in orbit was just last year with Inspiration4 going up. So that was the first step where it became slightly more affordable that you could open up space to potentially commercial industry.
It still has, obviously, a long way to come down, but the thing is it will. You have a lot of competition right now. You have a lot of groundbreaking technology with rapidly reusable rockets, and that's going to progress into something like Starship. And from that point, when you're able to lower the cost to accelerate mass to orbit to such an extent that I think we're heading to, anything is possible.
I mean, the best, you know, analogy I can make to this is the early days of cell phones. I mean, it was on Wall Street that you had the rich guys with their car phones, and it looked super obnoxious driving down the road, and now you've got like 13‑year‑olds all over the world with cell phones and all sorts of apps. And it's completely‑‑I mean, you have how any billion‑dollar businesses right now, hundred billion‑dollar businesses that were created predominantly on mobile applications that nobody could have ever imagined in the 1980s when you had‑‑when you had car phones.
And think about all the good it's done for the world right now. I mean, you've got unrest all over the world. You have real humanitarian crises. You have natural disasters where people are capturing these things on their cell phones, making it available to the world. It's bringing help. It's bringing attention to some of these issues. It's probably saving lives. It's certainly saving lives.
So where we are today is just the very beginning. It is like the very beginning of the second Space Age right now, and where we go 5, 10, 15 years from now, especially when, you know, total game‑changing technology like Starship comes online is hard to predict. But it will be something. There's just too much we don't understand out there. We've really just begun in space. Like, we've just touched a toe in the water of something that's like many times the size of the ocean. I mean, it's incredible when you think about it.
MR. DAVENPORT: Well, let's talk about Starship for a minute because I want to make sure our audience understands what Starship is. I mean, we've got SpaceX flying the Falcon 9 and the Dragon that takes NASA's astronauts and private citizens like you to orbit or the International Space Station. Starship is this next‑generation rocket that Elon Musk has been working on for quite a while that would be fully reusable, and NASA has invested in it, awarding SpaceX a contract to use Starship to land its astronauts on the Moon. And, Jared, you are going to be on the first human spaceflight mission of Starship, which is amazing to think, but in some ways, it may be not so much. Can you talk a little bit about how that came about and what you think it represents?
MR. ISAACMAN: Sure. So, to help explain it a little bit, Starship is bigger and has twice as much thrust in its current form‑‑and obviously, it will only get better‑‑as the Saturn V rocket that landed human beings on the Moon, you know, 50 years ago. So think about that giant Saturn V that we've all probably seen some pictures or video of to ultimately put two human beings on the Moon. That entire rocket got thrown away. There wasn't a component of it that was really reused for any subsequent missions.
Now you're talking about something that is much larger, it has twice as much thrust, and the whole thing is reusable, the entirety of it. The first‑stage booster and the actual Starship that's on top of it itself can be reused, and instead of putting potentially two people on the Moon, the capacity of this thing could be upwards of a hundred people.
The actual nose cone portion of Starship has more habitable volume in it than the entirety of the International Space Station that we've been building for the last 20‑some‑odd years that probably was over $100 billion and I don't even know how many launches in order to assemble it.
Now, if you look to even modern technology like Falcon and Dragon that I rode on‑‑so the first‑stage booster, which it still blows all our minds today, comes back to Earth, lands on a ship, and then it makes like a one‑to‑two‑week journey, you know, back to port, back to its refurbishment center before it potentially can be launched again. The second stage gets burned up in the atmosphere after it delivers its payload or its Dragon capsule into orbit, and then the Dragon capsule will come back, and after a couple months, it can be refurbished and flown again.
Now, you compare that to Starship where the first‑stage booster goes up and then it immediately comes back and lands on the launchpad, so it doesn't have a multiweek transition from landing on a boat, back to land and refurbishment, and Starship comes and it also essentially comes either right next to the launchpad or maybe someday gets caught by it as well. So this cuts down the turnaround time for launches, and its capacity that it can bring in terms of mass to orbit is like orders of magnitude greater than what we're dealing with today. So that's fundamentally how you're going to bring costs down in a material way that could transform and ultimately create a space economy, but it's also what's going to put human beings back on the Moon in the form of HLS, which NASA intends to use, and it's certainly going to be the vehicle that will‑‑or an iteration of it that will take humans the first time to another planet, which would be Mars.
MR. DAVENPORT: So talking about that space economy, I mean, what do you think the biggest areas of growth are going to be when we have vehicles like Starship? Is it these constellations of satellites that we were talking about like Starlink? Is it exploration? Is it mining celestial bodies? I mean, where do you‑‑what interests you?
MR. ISAACMAN: Well, I think just the potential that it can do all of the above. So, you know, you think about the DART mission recently, so, you know, the space vehicle that essentially crashed into an asteroid to determine‑‑you know, to learn from it as a potential defense mechanism for a future asteroid impact or potential impact into Earth. And then I think about, well, what if you had essentially 500 Starships? Because they're building factories in Texas and Florida to mass produce these things in a very, like, simple, reliable way. You wouldn't have to spend hundreds of millions or billions of dollars building one‑offs of anything, a one‑off, you know, asteroid interceptor, a one‑off telescope, a one‑off spaceship designs. Like, you literally could put a giant telescope in a Starship. You could put a system into a Starship to attack an incoming asteroid. It's like almost like a prefab, low‑cost, highly reusable structure that can do almost anything in low‑Earth orbit.
You want to put out, you know, a hundred potential cube satellites that build a constellation that does something that makes Earth a better place, you totally can do it. I mean, you already have that now with Starlink, over 3,000 satellites in low‑Earth orbit that is bringing connectivity to disconnected communities all over the world. Well, you're not going to run fiber lines across rainforests and deserts, but you still got to bring access to information to these parts of the world. Starlink can do that in an incredibly low‑cost way. And when you connect the world, think of how many problems you can solve.
You know, St. Jude Children's Research Hospital is a very important part of the Polaris program. It goes right back to that focus of trying to solve problems here on Earth while building a better future, you know, for a better future for tomorrow. The childhood cancer survival rate in the U.S. has gone up threefold since St. Jude opened its doors 60 years ago. The rest of the world has not caught up. I mean, the number one factor in childhood cancer survival rates is where you're born in the world.
Now, imagine with Starlink technology and you can connect some of these really remote places. You're going to find families that didn't even know they need the help of an organization like St. Jude in the form of telemedicine, and you're going to raise childhood cancer survival rates around the world. That's just a start. There's education, right? I mean, this is foundational to solving a lot of the world's problems, and it's only achievable with rapid, reusable rocket technology that brings costs down.
Now multiply that times‑‑I don't know‑‑100 when Starship comes online. The world is going to be a better place. You just can't point your finger on exactly which one it will be.
MR. DAVENPORT: And now, like, space is cool again, right? I mean, SpaceX is going its thing, Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic, flights like Inspiration4 and the Polaris mission, and one of the things you're seeing now is all of this money, this investment money, pouring into the space sector, which was considered not that long ago a very risky sector. I wonder what you make of that and all these companies that are going public through SPACs and all these startups that are popping up. How many of those do you think are actually going to make it, and is there enough of a market to support all of this?
MR. ISAACMAN: Well, I think‑‑so there's a lot of, kind of things to address there. One, I think space is cool again for some people, and I think that, you know, there's a very passionate part of the community that overlooks the benefits that space can give us, I mean, overlooks the fact that a lot of what we know about climate change and natural disasters come from assets we have in space. A lot of the reasons we're able to avoid conflict in the world is based on information that we can gather from space and information we can transmit from it.
But despite all that, there's, I think, definitely a portion of the population that believes that, you know, we have to stop the world from burning today, and that any bit of time where energy or resources we spend in space comes at the consequence of, you know, rainforests being destroyed or, you know, other, you know, horrific circumstances that we have on our planet we have to address. I wish more people would look at it as you can do both. You can‑‑you always should strive for progress to make the world better for tomorrow, and we have the resources and means to try and address some of the problems we have here today.
So I think space is cool again for some. I wish it was more for others that could‑‑you know, could look at both sides of the argument a little bit and find a compromise. But, hey, we've got that problem through a number of issues in society.
In terms of like the money that's flowed into the space industry, look, it‑‑we've just come off 15 years of a near‑zero interest‑rate environment that encouraged risk taking, and a lot of industries and a lot of companies were formed that in more challenging times would never have been able to survive. That's not exclusive to space.
But for sure, the space industry received a lot of capital, and I definitely am concerned they won't continue to receive it. You know, you have a lot of businesses that are trying to solve problems that other organizations can do at affordable rates, and they're losing a lot of money on the way.
So that's not to say that the world will just be SpaceX. I don't think that's the case. I think there's a couple really good space companies that have been smart on their capital allocation. They've bought other businesses. They've diversified revenue streams. They're more vertically integrated. I think they'll succeed, but a lot will go away, just like I think across tech and other industries, you're going to see a lot of business failures as interest rates now are, you know, essentially going through the roof. And in that environment, just, you know, you have to pick your battles and where you deploy capital from like an investor's perspective, and the bar is very, very high right now. And I think a lot of the space industry won't be able to cut it.
MR. DAVENPORT: Yeah, for sure. So we're almost running out of time. Last question, a prediction question, and often I get asked this question, and people say, what do you think is going to happen in space 40 or 50 years from now which is sort of pointless? Let's narrow the horizon. Ten years out, what's realistic, what's feasible from your point of view?
MR. ISAACMAN: Well, I think, you know, you won't be measuring the number of people in orbit at one time in the single digits or even the double digits. I think you'll have hundreds, if not thousands of people at least in low‑Earth orbit and probably lunar orbit within 10 years.
But I also think you have human beings walking on Mars, and I don't know if people really appreciate‑‑I mean, you know, if you can get to the Moon, which we will certainly do‑‑and Starship is definitely capable of doing it‑‑the amount of additional velocity to get to Mars is negligible. I mean, at that point, it's about habitability for a six‑to‑nine‑month journey, and it's about a means of getting back home. And I don't think these are, you know, obstacles that can't be overcome.
So my prediction, you've got hundreds at the same time, if not a thousand or so people that are in low‑Earth orbit, lunar orbit within 10 years, and I think you definitely have people, you know, walking around on Mars. And that's pretty exciting, and I think Starlink will probably be the driving‑‑or I'm sorry‑‑SpaceX will be the leading organization in making it possible, and Starship is probably the vehicle that's doing it.
MR. DAVENPORT: Well, that will certainly give me and all my fellow space reporters a lot to write about, so thanks.
Unfortunately, that's all the time we have. Jared Isaacman, thank you so much for spending some time with us today.
MR. ISAACMAN: Thank you so much.
MR. DAVENPORT: And thanks to all of you for joining us. To check out all the interviews that are coming up and information on all the programs, please login and register at WashingtonPostLive.com.
I'm Christian Davenport. Thanks so much for joining us. | 2022-10-03T19:43:38Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Transcript: The Path Forward: Private Space Travel with Jared Isaacman - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2022/10/03/transcript-path-forward-private-space-travel-with-jared-isaacman/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2022/10/03/transcript-path-forward-private-space-travel-with-jared-isaacman/ |
Trump’s origins in a New York world of con men, mobsters and hustlers
Review by Sean Wilentz
Former president Donald Trump speaks at a rally at Macomb Community College in Warren, Mich., on Saturday. In “Confidence Man,” Maggie Haberman argues that Trump's rise to the White House was fed by a cultural, media and moral breakdown in New York City beginning in the 1970s. (Sarah Rice for The Washington Post)
Maggie Haberman hails from a New York City very different from Donald Trump’s dominion of glitz and criminality, but she knows that dominion well. Raised in the household of a traditional shoe-leather New York Times reporter and a well-connected publicist, and now herself ensconced at the digitized Times, Haberman’s earliest assignments involved covering City Hall and its satellite ethical sinkholes for the New York Post and the Daily News. That singular education in New York corruption has stuck with her and sets her apart from her peers reporting on the Trump presidency and its seditious aftermath. It now distinguishes “Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America” as a uniquely illuminating portrait of our would-be maximum leader.
With a sharp eye for the backstory, Haberman places special emphasis on Trump’s ascent in a late 1970s and 1980s New York demimonde of hustlers, mobsters, political bosses, compliant prosecutors and tabloid scandalmongers. This bygone Manhattan that Tom Wolfe could only satirize in “The Bonfire of the Vanities” is the fundament to any understanding of what makes Trump tick. “The dynamics that defined New York City in the 1980s,” Haberman observes, “stayed with Trump for decades; he often seemed frozen there.” Zombielike, he swaggers and struts and cons on the world’s largest stage, much as he did when gossip columnists fawned over him as The Donald; and he will continue his night of the living dead, with menacing success, until someone finally drives a metaphorical stake through his metaphorical heart.
The rote rap on Trump is that he was a bumptious, hyper-ambitious real estate developer from Queens who never earned the respect of the Manhattan society pooh-bahs and who vowed to beat them at their own game — a vow that eventually led him to the Oval Office, astonishing even Trump. That storyline appears in “Confidence Man,” but Haberman knows it is superficial.
For one thing, there were countless other outer-borough operators on the make in 1980s New York, one of whom Haberman astutely calls Trump’s “mirror image” despite their obvious differences: the Rev. Al Sharpton of Brooklyn, both men shameless headline grabbers who smeared opponents and basked in newfound glamour; they were slightly clownish intruders who refused, she writes, “to be thrown out of their new ring” by a disdainful city establishment.
Inside that cauldron of fakery, Trump, no rugged individualist, and padded with his father’s millions, gravitated to a specific milieu of arrivistes whom he equated with supreme power, class and ruthlessness. He held in especially high regard the bully George Steinbrenner, from the outer outer borough of Cleveland, and became a constant presence in the Boss’s Yankee Stadium box. (I’d not known until reading Haberman that Trump, a wimp when it came to sacking underlings, found his tag line for “The Apprentice” by impersonating Steinbrenner barking “You’re fired,” over and over, not least at the Yankees’ oft-discharged manager Billy Martin.)
Off to one side there was the raffish schemer Roger Stone, a well-digger’s son from Norwalk, Conn., who got his start as one of the political saboteurs for Richard Nixon’s 1972 reelection campaign, and whose Washington lobbying mega-firm (with Paul Manafort as one of his co-partners) came to represent the Trump Organization’s interests. From the outermost borough of Adelaide, Australia, there was the unscrupulous media mogul Rupert Murdoch, who had already turned the liberal tabloid New York Post into a right-wing scandal sheet and who in 1985 completed the acquisition of 20th Century Fox that would eventually give the world Fox News, commanded by another member of the New York gang, Roger Ailes. There was also the high-profile, media-savvy U.S. Attorney Rudy Giuliani, from Brooklyn like Sharpton, and he and Trump would circle each other until they seriously hooked up some years later.
Trump’s chief mentor, and a consigliere to most of the big shots named above, was the legendary underworld and overworld fixer Roy Cohn. The pampered son of a kingpin in Bronx Democratic politics, long notorious for his McCarthyite Red Scare grandstanding, Cohn, as Haberman details, connected Trump with Stone as well as with organized crime while giving him master classes in high-stakes con-man strategy and tactics. Whenever Trump today intimidates the press with threats of retaliation, whenever he defends his aggressions by claiming to be the victim, whenever he calls his accusers (especially if they represent the federal government) life-destroying, treasonous “scum,” he is channeling his mentor, Cohn.
Haberman offers plenty of material about how these men did it all with virtual impunity. Of course, there would be the occasional fines and sealed judgments — and Cohn was disbarred weeks before he died of AIDS, abandoned by Trump, who knew the score on being heartless. But as Haberman describes, Trump went to great lengths to square himself with a paragon of the city’s power elite, the longtime Manhattan district attorney Robert Morgenthau, including making generous donations to Morgenthau’s pet charity, the New York Police Athletic League, the one charity commitment, Morgenthau would joke warmly, that Trump could be counted on honoring. Not until Cyrus Vance Jr., who had a fine pedigree but was no crusader, succeeded Morgenthau in 2010 did Trump and his properties, after Vance backed off for years, finally face serious investigation by the D.A.’s office — and even then, prosecutors on the case quit in protest when Vance’s successor suddenly seemed to drop it.
“Confidence Man” likewise enlightens about the massive oversights by the press and the broader world of publishing, especially in New York, not simply in failing to expose the corruption that Haberman catalogues but in creating and then abetting Trump’s celebrity. There were certainly exceptional naysaying reporters, notably Jack Newfield’s protege at the Village Voice, Wayne Barrett, who, at Newfield’s urging, dug deep into Trump’s shady dealings. Barrett’s and the Voice’s condemnations sparked a brief aborted federal investigation, but they weren’t about to shake the inertia at the most influential outlets, topped by the New York Times. Neither did the late lamented Spy magazine’s bull’s eye satirical shots at the “short-fingered vulgarian” provoke inquiries, although they did provoke Trump to threaten lawsuits and are said to anger him to this day.
Indeed, the higher- as well as the lower-end media became Trump’s vehicles, sometimes absurdly. Haberman relates, for example, how in 1984 Cohn, the grand wizard of press manipulation, placed a profile story in The Washington Post’s Style section, followed up independently by another piece in a magazine called Manhattan, Inc., that — though skeptical and even arch about Trump — fed impressions that the brash young dealmaker might seriously serve President Ronald Reagan in top-level arms-control negotiations. Much later, in 1997, when Trump had fallen into one of his disastrous business troughs, a New Yorker profile, though as unguarded as any such piece was likely to be, helped advance his latest comeback. More famously, the queens of tabloid gossip, Cindy Adams and Liz Smith, aided by the New York Post’s garish Page Six, rendered Trump an epic figure. Long before “The Apprentice” completed his makeover as America’s fantasy mogul, driving the phony image to the credulous beyond the Hudson, the publishers, editors and scribes of the Manhattan press, forgoing the facts, had crowned him the king of New York.
Some of the episodes in Haberman’s later chapters on Trump’s presidency have already stirred controversy. Beneath the buzz, though, many of the richest storylines from the Trump White House, as reported in “Confidence Man” and elsewhere, have a distinctly New York ring. “Where’s my Roy Cohn?” Trump snapped in 2018, in anger at his attorney general, Jeff Sessions, the very conservative former senator from Alabama, who had recused himself from the Justice Department’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election and whom Trump eventually ousted.
Before he was twice impeached, Trump found his man, yet another New York mouthpiece, William Barr, who as attorney general happily did Trump’s bidding in, among other things, lying about the damning Mueller report on the Russian interference — until Trump lost reelection and Barr, well-schooled in transactional loyalty and with his reputation as a supposed “institutionalist” tarnished, declined recruitment into Trump’s coup and at the last minute jumped from the sinking ship. The manic and often antic crimes of Stone, pardoned and unpardoned, add another layer of continuity, a louche link with the old Cohn-centered netherworld.
Haberman’s contribution in “Confidence Man,” though, is much larger than its arresting anecdotes. Later generations of historians will puzzle over Trump’s rise to national power. The best of them will have learned from Haberman’s book that none of it would have been possible but for a social, cultural, political, media and moral breakdown that overtook New York beginning in the 1970s, a fiasco of trusted institutions that, having allowed the Trumpian virus to grow, failed at every step to contain its spread, then profited from, aided and even cheered its devastation.
“It’s up to you, New York, New York,” runs the song that became a city anthem in these years, and so it truly was up to sophisticated, cosmopolitan New York with respect to checking Trump. But New York blew it on every level — and alas, even with “Confidence Man” in hand as a guidebook to that failure, it may be too late to start spreadin’ the news, with American democracy now at stake.
Sean Wilentz, a professor of history at Princeton, is the author, most recently, of “No Property in Man: Slavery and Antislavery at the Nation’s Founding.”
The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America
Penguin Press. 597 pp. $32 | 2022-10-03T20:10:32Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Book review of Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America by Maggie Haberman - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2022/10/03/confidence-man-maggie-haberman-review-trump/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2022/10/03/confidence-man-maggie-haberman-review-trump/ |
People take photos of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s investiture ceremony at the Supreme Court on Friday. (Sarah Silbiger for The Washington Post)
The 2022 election is a little more than a month away. And increasingly, it’s looking like the outcome of a close battle for both the House and Senate could hinge on which timely issues Americans vote on more: the economy and inflation, or abortion rights and concerns about democracy/political extremism. The GOP holds double-digit edges on the former issues, while Democrats benefit from keeping focused on the latter.
Figuring out which will actually matter more is much more difficult.
On its surface, the former — and by extension, Republicans — would seem to be winning out.
A new Monmouth University poll released Monday asked people what would be more important to their votes: the economy and the cost of living, or fundamental rights and the democratic process. The former won by 54 percent-to-38 percent. Similarly, the poll showed many more people said inflation (82 percent) and jobs and unemployment (68 percent) were very important to them than said the same of abortion (56 percent).
The numbers echo a Washington Post/ABC News poll last week which showed 62 percent said the abortion issue was very important to them — behind both the economy and inflation.
Fox News has repeatedly cited such polls to suggest that Americans just aren’t as focused on the Democrats’ supposed ace on the hole issue of abortion rights.
But figuring out just how these issues cut isn’t so simple. While there is perhaps reason to believe the abortion issue won’t be as fruitful an issue for Democrats as it was more immediately after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, it’s worth digging a little deeper.
That’s a contrast to, say, inflation, which Republicans emphasize more, but three-fourths of Democrats say is very important. Indeed, Republicans got what they wanted on abortion and in all likelihood won’t be getting a national abortion ban, so it’s just not an immediate issue for most of them. Which means this issue is more motivating for Democrats.
That’s really the benefit of the issue for the left. To the extent people say this issue is very important to them, they’re by and large the people who might be voting accordingly — or be more likely to vote at all because of what the Supreme Court did.
And if you focus on that, you see that this issue could rank high when it comes to base mobilization. In fact, 46 percent of Democrats say the issue is “extremely” important to them — which is the same as the percentage of Republicans who say that about inflation. If you had told Democrats six months ago that they’d have an issue that would be about as mobilizing for their side as historic inflation is for the other side, they’d have snapped your hand off.
It’s less obvious that the other pillar of Democrats’ 2022 argument — extremism and Jan. 6 — will accrue as much to Democrats’ advantage. But again we have a situation in which more than 8 in 10 Democrats say “elections and voting” is at least very important to their vote and 43 percent say it’s “extremely” important. Republicans are up there, too, with about 7 in 10 saying it’s very important.
Most of them are undoubtedly coming at this from a different position — wrongly believing the 2020 election was stolen — but there are a fair number of Republicans who don’t buy into their party’s voter-fraud conspiracy theories, too.
These issues are very difficult things to poll — especially if you’re trying to glean clues about the coming election. Most polls will ask people what their most important issue is, but finding out that 22 percent of people (or whatever) say the economy is No. 1 doesn’t really tell us a whole lot or about how people weigh the issues on a relative bases.
Asking people to rate issues individually gets closer to the mark, but you still have to consider how people emphasizing an issue will translate to actual votes, if at all. You also need to figure out whether an issue is just broadly important or important in the moment, particularly whether voters are being presented with an actionable choice.
All of that said, it seems quite possible abortion could fade as an issue of importance, at least somewhat and potentially decisively (given how close things are looking). It pretty evidently helped Democrats over-perform in a series of special elections conducted after the Supreme Court’s decision — results that were hard to fathom when Republicans were demonstrating momentum in the spring — and Democrats gained on the generic ballot.
But those over-performances will be difficult to translate to a general election, when more casual voters turn out. What’s more, the New York Times’s Nate Cohn pointed to declining Google search interest in abortion and Jan. 6, among other things, as potentially spelling some trouble for Democrats. It seems possible that owes to less big, timely news on those subjects. But it’s also difficult to make people stay focused on an issue for months at a time.
And sometimes, it’s not just your issues losing their salience; it’s others surpassing them. Democrats seemed to be gaining not just as abortion rights became timely, but as gas prices were falling and inflation was slowing. Suddenly, gas prices seem to be inching up again, and the most recent inflation data spooked the markets.
If that continues, whatever people feel about the Supreme Court’s decision and Jan. 6 could suddenly become less important to them — and less of a boon to Democrats. What’s evident is that the two sides are focused on very different things, and convincing voters those are the most important things will be paramount. | 2022-10-03T20:28:01Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The issue choice that could decide the 2022 election - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/03/midterms-issues-choices/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/03/midterms-issues-choices/ |
D.C. Council member Kenyan R. McDuffie (D-Ward 5) at a news conference in Northeast Washington in April 2021. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
The District is so heavily Democratic, general elections can seem like an afterthought. Not so this year. On the ballot Nov. 8 are spirited contests for seats on the D.C. Council and the state board of education, and the stakes are high. The coronavirus pandemic’s still-lingering impacts pose big challenges for the city: how to revive a dormant downtown, how to combat a spike in crime, how to make up for student learning loss. Despite these challenges, the council’s members have in recent years appeared more interested in advancing ideological goals than in providing pragmatic solutions.
In the contest for two at-large seats on the council — the races attracting the most attention with a field of eight candidates — we endorse independent candidates, D.C. Council member Kenyan R. McDuffie and Graham McLaughlin.
Mr. McLaughlin, a first-time candidate who would bring to the council the best promise of change, is our first choice. An executive at a global health services organization, Mr. McLaughlin has a rich history of community involvement, including opening his home to recently released offenders. He uses data to attack problems, and his experience incubating small businesses has schooled him in how to scale up successful programs and pull the plug on those that don’t work — abilities in short supply on the council.
Of the three incumbents seeking a return to the council, Mr. McDuffie is the clear choice. Anita Bonds (D-At Large) has had a lackluster tenure on the council; Elissa Silverman (I-At Large) has helped to lead the council’s ideological tilt. Mr. McDuffie has ably represented Ward 5 since 2012. He declined to seek reelection from the ward in an effort to run for D.C. attorney general, which failed when the board of elections ruled him ineligible. He can still serve the city with his balanced approach to lawmaking in which he listens to all sides and carefully weighs issues. Of particular note has been his focus on small businesses as a way to grow the local economy.
Of the other council seats on the ballot — the chairman’s and those representing Wards 1, 3, 5 and 6 — only the race in Ward 3 has turned into a real contest. As the Democratic nominee, Matthew Frumin is likely to win, and there is much to recommend him. Long active in the community, Mr. Frumin knows its needs, and he strives to bring people together. But he leans left, and that’s not the direction the council — or city — needs. Republican opponent David Krucoff is a centrist who argues for lower taxes, better support for the police and continuing mayoral control of schools. These are the right positions, and one-party rule has been unhealthy for D.C., so we endorse Mr. Krucoff and urge Ward 3 voters to give him a close look.
For the state board of education, we endorse Eric Goulet in Ward 3, Carisa Stanley Beatty in Ward 5 and Brandon Best in Ward 6. Mr. Goulet is a former city budget director whose encyclopedic knowledge will help the board as it undertakes a much-needed study of pupil funding. Ms. Beatty created a program that provides financial assistance to those seeking to own their own homes, and she is the parent of a child in D.C. schools, so she is familiar with families’ everyday concerns. Mr. Best has 18 years of experience as an educator and school administrator and smart ideas on how to improve parental engagement.
Also on the ballot but facing token opposition are Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D), D.C. Council Chairman Phil Mendelson (D) and Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton (D), all of whom we endorsed in the primary and continue to support. | 2022-10-03T20:49:50Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | The Post's endorsements for D.C. Council and state education board - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/03/dc-council-school-board-election-endorsements-2022/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/03/dc-council-school-board-election-endorsements-2022/ |
‘No evidence’ might just mean ‘I don’t know’
(Melina Mara/The Washington Post)
Regarding the Sept. 28 news article “Women said covid shots affected periods. A new study shows they’re right.”:
Women felt they weren’t listened to about their period symptoms after receiving a coronavirus vaccination. They think it’s because they’re women. That might be true, but there’s a more general problem here.
As pointed out in the Naomi Oreskes op-ed in the November 2020 Scientific American, doctors often conflate absence of evidence with evidence.
Many doctors wouldn’t believe that the virus was airborne without controlled double-blind studies, even though colds and the flu were known to be. This delayed mask introduction for many months, costing lives and leading to useless hand-washing.
Many doctors wouldn’t believe, without multiple studies, that animals could transmit the virus, even though the virus was believed to have jumped from animals to people in the first place. Many doctors wouldn’t believe that children could transmit the virus, until it was proved in a controlled double-blind study, even though there has never been a virus that was contagious in adults but not kids. Many doctors still don’t believe the virus can enter the body through the eyes, because there hasn’t been a controlled double-blind study proving it, even though there’s widespread experience in emergency rooms that people without eye protection are more likely to catch it.
The phrase “there’s no evidence that” is code. It really means “I don’t know.” That’s interpreted to mean that the assertion isn’t true. People discussing public health should be more honest.
Anne Barschall, Tarrytown, N.Y.
Opinion|Dr. Leana Wen: The updated booster shot is a reset for how to manage covid | 2022-10-03T20:49:52Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | ‘No evidence’ might just mean ‘I don’t know’ - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/03/no-evidence-might-just-mean-i-dont-know/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/03/no-evidence-might-just-mean-i-dont-know/ |
The Ukrainians can’t wait for patience
Olya Yemelyanskaya stands in her bombed house in Izyum, Ukraine, on Sept. 18. (Wojciech Grzedzinski for The Washington Post)
Though I certainly agree with much of what David Ignatius wrote in his Sept. 30 op-ed, “Putin keeps gambling and losing. The West can wait him out.,” he failed to address a major cost to that patience. Every day, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s army is committing vast war crimes: murder, rape, pillage. The West should do everything possible to bring a quick defeat to Russia in Ukraine to stop the carnage — and then quickly establish war crime trials. Mr. Putin and his bloodthirsty henchmen should be brought to justice, either by the West or by their own people.
Richard Dine, Silver Spring
Opinion|Why a negotiated peace with Putin is the safest way out | 2022-10-03T20:50:10Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | The Ukrainians can’t wait for patience - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/03/ukrainians-cant-wait-patience/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/03/ukrainians-cant-wait-patience/ |
Federal employee health-care premiums to rise 8.7 percent on average
By Eric Yoder
Premiums in the health-care program for federal employees and retirees will increase by 8.7 percent on average for 2023 — the largest increase in more than a decade, the government announced Friday.
That change in Federal Employees Health Benefits Program premiums is significantly larger than the 3.8 percent average increase for 2022, although closer to the 5-7 percent range of most other recent years.
The cost increase is a reflection of rising prices for some drugs and higher uses of professional services and outpatient treatments, said the Office of Personnel Management. “This is consistent with the larger market and reflects the impact of the COVID pandemic,” OPM said.
The program is open to nearly all federal employees and retirees who were covered continuously for five years before leaving the job; it has more than 4 million enrollees and about an equal number of covered spouses and children under 26, making it the nation’s largest employer-sponsored health insurance program.
“These premium increases may be similar to those expected by other large employers in the private sector, but they will still cause sticker shock for federal employees,” said National Treasury Employees Union President Tony Reardon.
The FEHBP will have 271 participating plans in 2023, about the same as currently, with the large majority available only regionally.
For 2023, there will be expanded benefits for maternal care, medical foods, anti-obesity medications, assisted reproductive technology and gender-affirming care and services, OPM said. The program will also continue pandemic-related changes including expanded telehealth services and coverage of vaccines, tests and therapeutics.
About two-thirds of federal health-care enrollees are in one of three nationwide plans offered by Blue Cross Blue Shield. In the largest of those, the “Basic” plan, the employee cost is increasing by $6.49 biweekly to $86.67 for self-only coverage; by $21.77 to $217.90 for self plus-one; and by $25.62 to $237.91 for family coverage. Retirees pay the same rates but on a monthly basis rather than biweekly.
During open enrollment season, Nov. 14 to Dec. 12, enrollees will be able to change plans. Also, employees not currently enrolled can join the programs, but retirees cannot newly enroll.
Organizations representing federal employees and retirees decried the increases and urged enrollees to use the opportunity to comparison shop for their coverage in 2023.
“This will be the highest increase in FEHB premiums since 2011, and it comes as enrollees must deal with high inflation across the board,” National Active and Retired Federal Employees Association President Ken Thomas said in a statement.
Everett Kelley, president of American Federation of Government Employees, added, “If the government continues to squeeze federal employees in a vice with low pay on one side and out-of-control health care costs on the other, we will continue to see widespread staffing crises and the attendant complications as government struggles to recruit and retain talented employees who can get a better deal in the private sector.”
Federal employees are in line for a January raise averaging 4.6 percent, with some difference by location. Federal retirees are to receive a cost-of-living adjustment that is yet to be determined but probably will be in the range of the FEHBP premium increase since it reflects overall inflation trends.
OPM, meanwhile, announced that premiums will be little changed in a separate program, the Federal Employees Dental and Vision Insurance Program, where enrollees pay the full cost. | 2022-10-03T21:12:50Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Federal employee health-care premiums to rise 8.7 percent on average - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/03/federal-employee-health-care-premiums-2023/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/03/federal-employee-health-care-premiums-2023/ |
With nearly every aspect of our modern lives increasingly digitized, cybersecurity has surged in importance as a business, policy and national security priority. On Thursday Oct. 13 at 9:00 a.m. ET, Rep. John Katko (R-N.Y.), the ranking member of the House Homeland Security Committee, Jeanette Manfra, the Global Director of Risk & Compliance at Google Cloud and other influential leaders from the private and public sectors join Washington Post Live for conversations about one of the defining issues of our time.
Rep. John Katko (R-N.Y.)
Ranking Member, House Homeland Security Committee
Jeanette Manfra
Global Director, Risk & Compliance, Google Cloud
Deputy Assistant to the President & Deputy National Security Advisor for Cyber and Emerging Technology
Content from CrowdStrike
Strengthening Cybersecurity: An All-Hands Effort
In a segment presented by CrowdStrike, Adam Meyers, Senior Vice President of Intelligence, and a senior Department of Defense (DoD) cybersecurity official will discuss emerging cybersecurity threats, DoD enterprise security efforts, and defense industrial base cybersecurity.
The duo’s conversation will survey key cybersecurity issues and considerations for 2023 and beyond.
Adam Meyers
Senior Vice President of Intelligence, CrowdStrike | 2022-10-03T21:14:29Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Public officials and business leaders on the global cybersecurity landscape - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2022/10/13/public-officials-business-leaders-global-cybersecurity-landscape/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2022/10/13/public-officials-business-leaders-global-cybersecurity-landscape/ |
Russian President Vladimir Putin at a meeting in Moscow on Monday. (Gavriil Grigorov/Sputnik/AP)
Twice recently, Russian President Vladimir Putin has raised the prospect of using nuclear weapons in the war he launched to destroy Ukraine. With Russian forces retreating in Ukraine’s Donbas region, Mr. Putin’s threats amount to desperate saber-rattling intended to frighten all. But his threats must not be brushed off completely, given Mr. Putin’s record of folly and recklessness.
What weapons are we talking about? Not the nuclear warheads carried by continent-spanning intercontinental ballistic missiles, capable of city-busting strikes with limited warning, which defined the Cold War. Rather, according to the authoritative Nuclear Notebook in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, by Hans M. Kristensen and Matt Korda, Russia possesses 1,912 nonstrategic or tactical nuclear weapons, designed to be launched from ground-based missiles, airplanes or naval vessels. This total might include warheads that are retired or awaiting dismantlement, so the actual deployable force might be smaller. No treaty has ever limited these weapons, although in 1991 President George H.W. Bush and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev agreed to voluntarily pull many of them back to warehouses.
The Russian warheads are kept in storage under the custody of the defense ministry’s 12th Main Directorate. If Mr. Putin were to deploy them, his order would be transmitted to units. Then the weapons would be released from storage onto transport by trucks or helicopters. Once deployed on delivery vehicles — say, missiles or airplanes — Mr. Putin would have to issue a direct order to use them. Each step might be detected and provide the United States and its allies time to react. Early warning would — and should — trigger intense diplomatic and other pressure on Mr. Putin to stop before setting off a nuclear catastrophe. Preparing to exploit this warning is the best defense against disaster. No doubt, Mr. Putin might want to play out such a deployment to ratchet up the pressure. But in so doing, he would escalate the risk of error or miscalculation. Nuclear gamesmanship toys with existential danger.
A nuclear blast in Ukraine, even low-yield, would kill civilians as well as soldiers and contaminate Russia, Ukraine and beyond. President Biden has properly warned of severe consequences, and Mr. Putin would be wise to listen. Former CIA director and retired Gen. David H. Petraeus suggested incautiously on Sunday that NATO should launch a massive conventional — that is, nonnuclear — military response, including sinking Russia’s Black Sea fleet, if the Kremlin used a tactical nuclear weapon in Ukraine. This appears to be a recipe for wider war with Russia. Far better to stop Mr. Putin before the cataclysm.
In 1962, the world stood at the brink when the Soviet Union deployed nuclear warheads on missiles in Cuba, then stood down and took them home. Mr. Putin is getting closer to the peril of those momentous days. He flirts with a dance of death. The only sane thing to do is stand down and end this needless war. | 2022-10-03T21:29:07Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Putin threatens nuclear war. The West must deter disaster. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/03/putin-nuclear-war-ukraine-deter/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/03/putin-nuclear-war-ukraine-deter/ |
Sorry, Elon Musk. You don’t have the formula to end the Ukraine war.
Elon Musk has a “super bad feeling.” (Win McNamee/Photographer: Win McNamee/Getty)
Elon Musk has had wondrous success in building electric vehicles and launching rockets. But just because you’re the world’s richest person doesn’t mean you can solve every problem in the world.
Musk proved that with his sophomoric tweet on Monday afternoon laying out his own personal peace plan for Ukraine:
There is so much ignorance and delusion to unpack here that it will keep Twitter busy for days to come. Indeed, both Ukraine’s president and foreign minister have already weighed in with tweets objecting to Musk’s facile attempt to give away part of their country. It is hard to top the reaction of a parody account: “Elon Musk weighing in on Russia/Ukraine since he is an expert in failed takeover attempts.”
At the risk of feeding Musk’s insatiable love for attention — which is, ultimately, what this is all about — it is worth pointing out that what he proposes is neither practical nor moral. Russia invaded Ukraine and under international law is not allowed to hold referendums on which country Ukrainians would like to be part of, whether the election is supervised by the United Nations or not. That would be like Putin invading Alaska and demanding a referendum on whether Alaskans would like to be part of Russia again.
Given how many people have been either killed or deported in the regions that Russia occupies, it is not clear who would even constitute the electorate: Would Ukrainians who have fled the Russian onslaught be allowed to vote? Ukrainians have already made clear their preference: More than 90 percent voted for independence in 1991 and well more than 90 percent support the war effort today. We don’t need a referendum to know which county Ukrainians would like to be part of: They are showing it by fighting for their freedom at great cost.
Oddly enough, given how much Musk is doing to aid Ukraine with his Starlink satellite terminals, his half-baked tweet shows the insidious influence of Russian propaganda. Was it, indeed, a mistake for Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev to transfer Crimea, once a part of the Russian Empire, to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1954? That’s certainly what Russian dictator Vladimir Putin thinks, but even in 1991, a majority of Crimeans voted to be part of an independent Ukraine. Admittedly, support for independence was much lower in Crimea (54 percent) than in the rest of the country because of the large number of ethnic Russians, but that referendum had infinitely more legitimacy than the sham vote that Putin staged in 2014 to justify his annexation of Crimea. The European Union and the United States do not recognize Russia’s annexation of Crimea — why should Musk?
As for the final part of the Musk peace plan: Ukraine has always been neutral, insofar as NATO would not accept it as a member. That did not prevent Putin from invading it in 2014 or again in 2022. Why would a Ukrainian commitment to neutrality prevent further Russian aggression in the future? In March, Kyiv actually offered to stay neutral if it would bring peace — but it didn’t work.
I am only scratching the surface, of course, of the problems with Musk’s proposal, which ignores the fact that Putin just annexed four regions of Ukraine where his troops are rapidly losing ground. On Friday, the Russian dictator said, “The people living in Luhansk and Donetsk, in Kherson and Zaporozhye have become our citizens, forever.” What makes Musk think that Putin would go back on that pledge simply because the people of those regions voted to remain part of Ukraine? Putin has never respected the outcome of democracy in Russia, Ukraine, or anywhere else. (In fact, his Friday speech included a long-winded complaint about how awful democracy is.)
While Musk evidently knows little about Ukraine, I give him credit for good intentions: It is painful to watch the war grind on, at great cost to human life, and it is frightening to listen to Putin’s threats to use nuclear weapons. This can lead to a natural impulse to try to “solve” the problem — to try to figure out some magical formula that would satisfy both sides and bring peace. But if that formula existed, it would already have been implemented.
War occurs when at least one side does not think that there is a peaceful way to redress its demands. In this case, there is a fundamental disagreement between Putin and the people of Ukraine: The Ukrainians think they are entitled to be an independent nation state with friendly relations with the West. Putin does not; as he has often made clear, he views Ukraine as a wayward province of Russia that needs to be reunited with the Motherland by force.
The war would end today if Putin would simply give up his imperial dreams. But until he does, the fighting will continue — and offering peace plans that cater to Putin’s imaginary grievances does nothing to bring peace any closer.
Opinion|The Ukrainians can’t wait for patience | 2022-10-03T22:08:25Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Elon Musk Ukraine tweet has the wrong plan - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/03/elon-musk-misguided-ukraine-peace-proposal/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/03/elon-musk-misguided-ukraine-peace-proposal/ |
A U.S. Capitol police officer stands outside the Capitol on Sept. 28. (Mary F. Calvert/Reuters)
A recent New York Times report detailed a rise in recorded threats against members of Congress and an accompanying trend of disturbing in-person confrontations. Political violence has occurred throughout the U.S. history, but what is new in modern times — and alarming — is its journey from the fringes to center stage, thanks largely to the dangerous rhetoric of former president Donald Trump. According to the Times, in the five years after Mr. Trump was elected in 2016, following a campaign marked by his virulent discourse, the number of threats recorded by the Capitol Police against members of Congress increased more than tenfold, to 9,625 in 2021; the first quarter of 2022 saw 1,820 cases opened.
The increasing threats — along with disturbing incidents of members of Congress being personally confronted and harassed — have caused many members to hire their own security protection, using their official or campaign accounts. The Times analysis showed they spent more than $6 million on security since the start of last year, and that’s in addition to what the Capitol Police spent.
The threats — and the feeling of danger some members of Congress still feel after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol by Trump supporters — has changed the way some lawmakers approach their job. Rep. G.K. Butterfield (D-N.C.) told the Hill that he took the congressional license tags off his car because he didn’t want to be identified publicly and become the target of an attack. There are other insidious effects: creating more distance between elected representatives and those they serve, discouraging some people from entering public service, encouraging those who see politics as blood sport and use violent rhetoric to mobilize their base.
Which, of course, leads back to Mr. Trump and his latest, reckless attack on Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) “He has a DEATH WISH,” Mr. Trump wrote on his social media website, Truth Social, attacking Mr. McConnell for failing to oppose Democrats with enough intensity. Republicans at every level should have condemned not only Mr. Trump’s apparent incitement to violence but also a racist swipe against Elaine Chao, Mr. McConnell’s wife, which the former president added to his poisonous statement. Instead, apologists such as Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) made excuses about what he really meant to say. Make no mistake: Mr. Trump’s message came across loud and clear. | 2022-10-03T22:08:31Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Threats and intimidation against members of Congress harm us all - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/03/threats-violence-members-congress-intimidation/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/03/threats-violence-members-congress-intimidation/ |
Prosecutors say they found ‘insufficient evidence’ the two officers used excessive force in the shooting of Gordon Casey outside the Peruvian ambassador’s home
Ilmiya Yarullina shows a passport photo of her son Gordon Casey, 19, in May. (Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post)
Federal prosecutors in the U.S. attorney’s office in D.C. said Monday they would not file charges against two Secret Service officers who fatally shot a Germantown, Md., man who authorities said tried to enter the home of the Peruvian ambassador while wielding a metal pole.
Prosecutors determined that there was “insufficient evidence” to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the officers used excessive force in the fatal April 20 shooting of 19-year-old Gordon Casey, authorities said in a statement.
Ilmiya Yarullina, Casey’s mother, said Monday she was frustrated by how the decision was communicated — she said she was told about it by a detective over the phone rather than having a meeting with anyone from the U.S. attorney’s office.
“This is outrageous. I was ignored throughout this entire process,” Yarullina said. “I am disgusted and destroyed as a human.”
A mother’s desperate bid to save her anguished teen ends in gunfire
According to authorities, shortly before 8 a.m. on April 20, U.S. Secret Service officers were dispatched to the ambassador’s residence in the 3000 block of Garrison Street NW after a report of a burglary in progress. Staffers at the residence informed authorities that they had seen Casey breaking windows and attempting to enter the building. Staff members had attempted to stop Casey but were unable to do so because he had armed himself with a metal pole, according to a statement from the U.S. attorney’s office.
But Casey began advancing toward the officers, swinging the pole at them, according to prosecutors. Two of the officers then shot Casey twice, and he died at the scene, according to the statement by prosecutors.
Yarullina had previously told The Washington Post that her son had had a drug relapse and that she had kicked him out of their home after years of struggles with various schools, psychologists, psychiatrists and drug treatment facilities. She said she blamed herself for what happened to her son but that she was also hampered by an underfunded and uneven mental health system. | 2022-10-03T22:21:31Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Charges declined for 2 Secret Service officers who shot 19-year-old - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/03/charges-declined-secret-service-shooting/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/03/charges-declined-secret-service-shooting/ |
D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D). (Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post)
Over the summer, D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser convened a group of local advocates and city officials and tasked them with an ambitious directive: come up with suggestions to increase the number of Black residents who own houses in the District, which has experienced a net loss of Black homeowners in the past decade.
On Monday, the Black Homeownership Strike Force helped Bowser’s administration set a new long-term goal to create 20,000 new Black homeowners in the District by 2030. Members of the strike force said that goal, and the 10 recommendations they put forth to help the city reach it, will help the city overcome decades of historical, discriminatory housing policies once common throughout the United States that continue to fuel inequitable homeownership rates today.
About 34 percent of Black D.C. residents own their homes — a decrease from 46 percent in 2005, according to American Community Survey data cited in the report. Meanwhile, White homeownership in the city increased from 47 percent to 49 percent between 1990 and 2019.
“It’s not that folks aren’t mortgage-ready, it’s about the roadblocks that are in people’s way that prevent them from getting the mortgage,” said Hagler, who is a senior minister of Plymouth Congregational United Church of Christ. “We needed to figure out how to tear down that wall so that people are able to really get in there and focus on everyday working families and poor folks in our city, and how they can get in the fray and be able to compete.”
Racial covenants and disparities in mortgage lending, through tactics like redlining, have presented barriers for Black homeowners and fueled inequity in homeownership in the District, according to the strike force’s 28-page report.
The city’s Black population has declined to less than 50 percent in the past decade, falling from about 70 percent in 1970, according to the report. Data from the American Community Survey cited in the report estimates a net loss of 5,000 Black homeowners from 2010 to 2020.
“Ten million dollars was a great commitment, but we knew not necessarily enough to accomplish the goals we were after,” Hagler said. Bowser agreed with his sentiment, telling reporters later that the strike force’s recommendations include “practical, needed things,” and that her administration’s first task will be to determine whether the proposals are “exhaustive enough.”
Bowser announces $10 million effort to support D.C.’s Black homeowners
Bowser said she will also determine how much the recommendations cost — and their legality — before incorporating them into the budget she presents to the D.C. Council next year. (Bowser, who is up for reelection this year and won the Democratic primary in June, is widely expected to win).
Their ideas, she says, will likely build upon some of the city’s other programs to help residents stay in the city — most notably the Home Purchase Assistance Program, which expanded on Oct. 1 to offer first-time home buyers a benefit of up to $202,000, up from $80,000. Another District initiative provides D.C. government employees with interest-free loans and matching funds for down payments and closing costs related to their first home purchase.
But Bowser said she was particularly interested in exploring more ways that the city can help potential homeowners compete for properties with the region’s many wealthy investors, a dilemma raised repeatedly by strike force members during Monday’s conversation.
“I think we need to find some other ways to attack that,” she added. | 2022-10-03T22:21:37Z | www.washingtonpost.com | D.C. Mayor Bowser’s latest goal: 20,000 new Black homeowners by 2030 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/03/dc-bowser-black-homeownership-strike-force/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/03/dc-bowser-black-homeownership-strike-force/ |
Bangladesh's Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina speaks during an interview at a hotel in New York on Sept. 22. (Ed Jones/AFP/Getty Images)
“I wanted her to see the prime minister,” said Abdullah Niami, who took his daughter, Zoya, out of her first grade class in Northern Virginia last week to witness a sight America won’t see anytime soon — a female head of state.
Sheikh Hasina, the prime minister of Bangladesh, was staying at the Ritz in Northern Virginia — the low-key part of a tour that included the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II in London and an address to the U.N. General Assembly in New York, where she appealed to “the conscience of the world community” to “build peace.”
Besides being the longest-serving female head of state in the world, leading a nation with more people than Russia and surviving at least 20 assassination attempts — including an especially bloody attack of hand grenades thrown into the crowds around her — Hasina is a grandmother. So on her 75th birthday, she celebrated with her son and her 16-year-old granddaughter, who live in a suburb just outside the nation’s capital.
It is a complex, roiling nation that she leads — and she is a complex leader. At the U.N., Hasina asked for help with more than a million Rohingya refugees that have fled the violence in Myanmar and settled in camps in Bangladesh.
Her nation’s migrant situation cannot compare to America’s, she said, when I asked her that question.
Bangladesh ranks number eight in world for population with more than 171 million people. “But we are small,” she reminded me. Her chief of staff, who has obviously addressed this before, jumped in: “We are the size of Wisconsin.” | 2022-10-03T22:21:43Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Bangladesh's Prime Minister had her own feminist meme: #despitebeingawoman - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/03/dvorak-bangladesh-prime-minister-interview/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/03/dvorak-bangladesh-prime-minister-interview/ |
Jury finds D.C. man guilty of killing girlfriend, whose body was never found
Prosecutors argued that Darnell Sterling killed Olga Ooro in her D.C. apartment in 2020, then cleaned the crime scene and disposed of her body
Olga Ooro. (Metropolitan Police Department)
Prosecutors never showed jurors photos of a bloody crime scene, or presented a murder weapon. They never called anyone to testify about witnessing 34-year-old Olga Ooro get killed.
But on Monday, after less than a full day of deliberations, a D.C. Superior Court jury found Darnell Sterling, 57, guilty of second-degree murder in the case, apparently believing prosecutors’ assertion that Sterling had killed Ooro inside her apartment, then went to great lengths to dispose of her body.
Ooro went missing on July 16, 2020, sometime after she, her 7-year-old son and Sterling went to dinner at a Navy Yard restaurant. Prosecutors played security video that captured the three entering the elevator of Ooro’s Northwest D.C. apartment building, after Ooro appeared to wave Sterling inside.
She would not be seen again. Two days later, her son was found wandering the floor outside their apartment, stopping and asking an unknown neighbor, “Have you seen my mommy?”
Prosecutors say he killed his girlfriend. They haven’t found her body.
Dozens of Ooro’s family and friends testified about how they have not heard from Ooro in two years, and how there was no way Ooro would leave her son alone for hours, let alone days. Assistant U.S. Attorneys Michael Liebman and Kristian Hinson called bank and phone company officials to testify that there was no evidence that Ooro’s credit cards or cellphone had been used since her disappearance.
“No one has seen or heard from Olga Ooro. And that’s because she’s dead. She’s dead because of Darnell Sterling,” Liebman told the jury during his closing argument Friday.
Murder trials where a victim’s body has not been found — sometimes referred to as “no body” cases — are rare but not unheard of. Prosecutors must first convince jurors that the victim is dead, and then try to tie the death to a particular suspect.
Liebman, a veteran homicide prosecutor in the U.S. attorney’s office, conceded that the prosecutors’ case was based on indirect, circumstantial evidence. But, he said, evidence pointed to Sterling, asserting that he had killed Ooro by “throwing her against the wall.”
Sterling’s attorney, Howard McEachern, said there was no evidence to support that assertion. Prosecutors pointed only to a drop of blood found on a wall in Ooro’s apartment, about six feet above the floor.
McEachern argued early in the proceedings that there was no evidence Ooro was dead. But by the end of the two-week trial, the defense attorney seemed to focus on raising doubt with jurors that Sterling was responsible.
Prosecutors argued that Sterling hid Ooro’s body in the apartment for seven hours as he scrubbed the crime scene. He then carted her body off in a dolly to his car and drove through the night to Ocean City, Md., prosecutors said. At some point along the way, he dumped her body, they said.
But McEachern told jurors that prosecutors had offered no evidence that Ooro’s son — who was in the two-bedroom apartment at the time prosecutors say Sterling killed his mom — heard or saw anything unusual, nor had any other witnesses.
“We heard nothing from witnesses in the apartment. If all of that actually did happen, you would have expected [Ooro’s son] would have told somebody,” he argued.
Prosecutors noted that Sterling was arrested and charged with assaulting Ooro less than a week before she went missing. In exchange for being released from secure detention, a judge ordered him to stay away from Ooro and to show up at his next hearing. He agreed to do both. That next hearing was scheduled for two days after Ooro’s disappearance.
Prosecutors relied heavily on security-camera footage in Ooro’s apartment to piece together a timeline. The footage showed a man prosecutors identified as Sterling coming and going, using a handcart to drag a large object under a blanket through the garage doors. Prosecutors showed jurors video of the man struggling to get the large object on the cart and through the garage doors, which he opened with Ooro’s key fob.
McEachern said the man using the cart in the video was not Sterling. At one point, McEachern said Ooro’s ex-boyfriend, her son’s father, was a more likely suspect because the two often argued about their son’s joint-custody arrangement. Sterling did not testify, but he scribbled notes during the proceedings.
Highway cameras captured Sterling’s vehicle coming and going from Ocean City in the wee hours. Sterling later told police that he spent the weekend in Ocean City, although video cameras showed he returned to Ooro’s apartment a night earlier — to finish cleaning the crime scene, prosecutors argued.
Judge Maribeth Raffinan is scheduled to sentence Sterling on Feb. 3. | 2022-10-03T22:21:49Z | www.washingtonpost.com | D.C. man convicted of killing girlfriend, whose body was never found - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/03/olga-ooro-murder-no-body/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/03/olga-ooro-murder-no-body/ |
Officials announced the evening curfew for juveniles following one of the deadliest months in county history.
The empty parking lot outside of Lanham Skate Center on the first weekend of curfew enforcement in Prince George's County. (Eric Lee/For the Washington Post)
In the three weeks since Prince George’s started enforcing its curfew for juveniles following a spate of violence, police have issued only three written warnings to teens who have violated the rule.
Two cases involved teens suspected in a traffic violation or gunfire, but in a third case, police investigating a car break-in stopped a teen who officers later learned wasn’t involved in the incident at all, officials said.
The first curfew violation was on Sept. 12 when officers stopped a driver “committing multiple traffic violations” at about 10:35 p.m. in the 5700 block of Cypress Creek Drive in the Chillum area, Christina Cotterman, a spokesperson for the county police department, said in a statement. The driver was a 16-year-old girl, who was taken home and a first offense curfew warning letter was issued to her guardians. A 17-year-old passenger in the car was arrested on a gun charge, Cotterman said.
FAQ: What to know about the Prince George’s County juvenile curfew
A few days later, on Sept. 17 shortly after midnight, police found a 15-year-old boy with a gunshot wound to the foot in the 800 block of Largo Center Drive, Cotterman said. After an investigation, police said the boy told them he and a friend were playing with a gun when it went off.
And on Friday, police stopped a 16-year-old boy who “matched the provided suspect description” in the area of a car break-in in Laurel at about 1:40 a.m., Prince George’s County Executive Angela Alsobrooks said in a tweet.
“Officers determined the teen was not responsible for the car break-in, but he was violating the curfew,” Alsobrooks said. A parent came to get the teen and a first offense curfew violation was issued.
Alsobrooks announced the curfew enforcement for children under 17 at a news conference on Labor Day following one of the deadliest months in the county’s history. The 30-day curfew enforcement began Sept. 9. From Sunday through Thursday, its hours are from 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. and Friday and Saturday from 11:59 p.m. to 5 a.m.
In the weeks since announcing the curfew, which was met with skepticism and support across the county, Alsobrooks has been making radio appearances, issuing newsletters and visiting homeowners association and civic association meetings explaining her reasoning for the effort to bring the county together to protect youth and hold parents accountable.
“We want to sincerely thank our village for continuing to come together to care for and protect our children,” Alsobrooks said in a tweet Monday.
In the first 18 days of curfew enforcement between Sept. 9 to 26, the county reported zero homicides during curfew hours, compared to three in the 18 days before enforcement took effect Aug. 22 to Sept. 8. Carjackings during curfew hours also went from eight to four. But according to police data, citizen robberies outside of curfew hours have increased by three from 13 to 16.
Prince George’s curfew aimed at curbing violence draws fans and skeptics
It is not immediately clear whether the drop in violent crime directly results from the ongoing curfew, though county officials have touted its success.
“Correlation doesn’t imply causation, and studies show that certain infractions increase in the summer and decline as the season changes. What we must always keep in mind is that we are talking about children and children have rights, too,” said Yanet Amanuel, public policy director for the ACLU of Maryland, in a statement.
Gina Ford, communications director for Alsobrooks said in a statement that the curfew has led to police encountering fewer children on the streets and that families are taking action. In one case, Ford said, a mother called the police on her child who was attempting to leave the home after curfew hours the first weekend of its enforcement.
“The mother told the child they could not leave, and officers were able to come, defuse the situation, provide education, and that child remained at home,” Ford said. “We have also heard from many citizens in the community expressing support for the curfew.”
Alsobrooks is “actively discussing next steps following the 30-day period,” said Ford.
Some community members still have mixed reactions.
The curfew seems like a “short-term, stopgap measure that really kind of begs for a long-term solution,” said Rufus Little, director of the Hyattsville Landover Kappa League.
“It begs the question: What are we doing as a community to make sure we have the programs in place like midnight basketball that give young people more productive things to be doing if they’re going to be out,” Little said. “Are we making sure that we have the job and career development and workforce together, especially those who are not college bound?”
The Prince George’s County Department of Parks & Recreation expanded hours and activities at some community centers throughout the county, but reports “no increase in attendance at community centers during the evening leading up to curfew hours,” Ford said.
Though Little has questions about the fleeting impact of the curfew, he does support it in part.
“I do feel safer with the curfew,” the Upper Marlboro resident said, especially on nights where he has to be out late. “I do feel a little bit better having to be out at a gas station at 10 or 11 with a lower likelihood there’s going to be some potential of crime.” | 2022-10-03T22:21:56Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Three citations issued for Prince George's curfew - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/03/prince-georges-curfew-citations-juvenile/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/03/prince-georges-curfew-citations-juvenile/ |
PM Update: More chilly rain is on the way through Tuesday
Another inch or two may fall in most of the area before the rain ends
After waking up in the 40s, we were able to crawl our way only to the 50s for highs. The 49 for a low in Washington meant we got into the 40s in the city for the first time since May 10. Morning dryness gave way to increased rain this afternoon. It seems we’ll be in and out of the rain again for another day or two as a pesky nor’easter refuses to get on its way. If you’re getting tired of it all, just know you’re not alone (looks at self in mirror).
Through Tonight: Rain is with us in varying intensities through much of the night as the offshore nor’easter wiggles around aimlessly. Temperatures fall back into the mid- and upper 40s in most spots for lows. Winds are out of the north around 10 mph and gusts around 20 mph. We could see as much as a half-inch to an inch by sunrise, with the heaviest totals likely falling east of the city.
Tomorrow (Tuesday): If anything, rain tends to be more prolonged than today. It could go from morning until night in some form, with a period of heavier rain possible in the midday. Temperatures are a lot like today’s, with highs mainly in the low and mid-50s. Winds are out of the north around 15 mph, with gusts as high as 35 or 40 mph. Another half-inch to an inch or so of rain is possible, heaviest east.
Brrr: We’re in the midst of a very cool start to October, largely thanks to clouds and rain. Highs in the low and mid-50s are more common of late November in the city. While also chilly, the low of 49 this morning was about on time for our first low in the 40s for a fall. Over the past 30 years, it averaged Oct. 5. In 2021, the first morning in the 40s came on Oct. 18. | 2022-10-03T22:22:15Z | www.washingtonpost.com | PM Update: More chilly rain is on the way through Tuesday - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2022/10/03/dc-area-forecast-forever-rainy/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2022/10/03/dc-area-forecast-forever-rainy/ |
A Trump lawyer refused Trump’s request to say all documents returned
An undated photo of documents allegedly seized at Mar-a-Lago. (U.S. Department of Justice/AFP/Getty Images)
Alex Cannon, an attorney for Trump, had facilitated the January transfer of 15 boxes of presidential records from Mar-a-Lago to the National Archives, after archives officials agitated for more than a year to get “all original presidential records” back, as they are required by law to do. Following months of stonewalling by Trump’s representatives, archives officials threatened to get the Justice Department or Congress involved.
Trump himself eventually packed the boxes that were returned in January, people familiar with the matter said. The former president seemed determined in February to declare that “everything” sought by the archives had been handed over, said the people familiar, who like others interviewed for this article spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal conversations.
Deep inside busy Mar-a-Lago, a storage room where secrets were kept
Around the same time The Washington Post reported that the archives had to retrieve documents from Mar-a-Lago, the people said, Trump asked his team to release a statement he had dictated. The statement said Trump had returned “everything” the archives had requested, and asked Cannon to send a similar message to archives officials, the people said. The former president also told his aides that the documents in the boxes were “newspaper clippings” and not relevant to the archives, two of these people said, and complained that the agency charged with tracking government records was being so persnickety about securing the materials from his Florida club.
The lengthy Feb. 7 statement was dictated by Trump but never released, people familiar with the matter said, over concerns by some of his team that it was not accurate. A different statement issued three days later said Trump had given boxes of materials to the archives in a “friendly” manner. It did not say that all of the materials were handed over.
“The papers were given easily and without conflict and on a very friendly basis, which is different from the accounts being drawn up by the Fake News Media,” he said in the Feb. 10 statement, which came on the same day The Washington Post reported that classified material was found in the 15 boxes.
Attempts to get Trump’s representatives to falsely state he no had presidential records in his possession could serve as evidence that he was intentionally and knowingly withholding documents. And if Trump continued to pressure aides to make false statements even after learning the Justice Department was involved in retrieving the documents, authorities could see those efforts as an attempt to obstruct their investigation.
Even as Trump was seeking to convey that he had complied fully with the archives’s request, Cannon appears to have been communicating a different message to officials at the agency.
Months earlier, in late 2021, when the archives was seeking the return of certain missing presidential documents, Cannon had told Stern there could be more documents in Trump’s possession than what he was transmitting to the agency, but that he did not know one way or the other. Cannon also told Stern in conversations that he was not sure where all the documents were located, or what the documents were, according to people familiar with the conversations.
Cannon’s refusal to declare everything had been returned soured his relationship with Trump, people familiar with the matter said. Cannon, who had worked for the Trump Organization since 2015, was soon cut out of the documents-related discussions, some of the people familiar with the matter said, as Trump relied on more pugilistic advisers.
Trump's legal team divided over how to handle Mar-a-Lago probe
Rosalind S. Helderman and Carol D. Leonnig contributed to this report. | 2022-10-03T22:34:36Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Trump lawyer Alex Cannon declined in February to say all documents returned - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/10/03/trump-alex-cannon-documents/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/10/03/trump-alex-cannon-documents/ |
DETROIT — U.S. new vehicle sales fell slightly in the third quarter, even with improvement in September. But there are warning signs consumers’ appetite for expensive new cars, trucks and SUVs may be waning. Edmunds.com says sales fell 0.9% from July through September. Multiple companies reported sales declines for the quarter on Monday, with General Motors a notable exception. However, many said sales rose in September as shortages of computer chips and other parts started to ease and auto factories were able to produce more. That increased vehicle supplies. But any monthly gain may be short lived due to high prices and rising interest rates.
NEW YORK — Incidents of fraud and scams are occurring more often on the popular peer-to-peer payment service Zelle, according to a report issued Monday by the office of Sen. Elizabeth Warren, giving the public its first glimpse into the growing problems at Zelle. The report also found that the large banks who partly own Zelle have been reluctant to compensate customers who have been victims of fraud or scams. For instance, less than half of the money customers reported being sent via Zelle without authorization was being reimbursed. The company that operates Zelle has said previously that 99.9% of all transactions on the network happen without complaints of fraud or scams.
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court says it won’t intervene in a lawsuit in which Dominion Voting Systems accused MyPillow chief executive Mike Lindell of defamation for falsely accusing the company of rigging the 2020 presidential election against former President Donald Trump. As is typical, the high court did not say anything Monday about the case in rejecting it. Monday is the first day the high court is hearing arguments after taking a summer break. Lindell is part of a case in which Dominion also accused Trump allies Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani of defamation for falsely claiming that the election was “stolen.” The Denver, Colorado-based Dominion has sought $1.3 billion in damages from the trio. | 2022-10-03T22:43:26Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Business Highlights: Kardashian crypto fine; Car sales fall - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/business-highlights-kardashian-crypto-fine-car-sales-fall/2022/10/03/05f502d0-4369-11ed-be17-89cbe6b8c0a5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/business-highlights-kardashian-crypto-fine-car-sales-fall/2022/10/03/05f502d0-4369-11ed-be17-89cbe6b8c0a5_story.html |
Migrants who were sent from Texas by bus and dropped off outside the U.S. Naval Observatory in D.C. wait for transportation last month. (Marat Sadana/Reuters)
For months, Republican leaders have been escalating a campaign against President Biden’s border security policies by transporting migrants from their states to Democratic-led areas, without providing a plan for what happens when they arrive.
In a high-profile case in September, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis flew dozens of asylum seekers from Texas up to Martha’s Vineyard, a Massachusetts island. It prompted a legal backlash that alleged the plan was “fraudulent and discriminatory.”
Beyond Martha’s Vineyard, thousands of migrants have been transported in a similar manner from Arizona and Texas to Washington, D.C., and other Democratic-majority cities. And those liberal areas are now struggling to accommodate them. In today’s episode, we hear from several people about their experience, as well as from reporter Antonio Olivo about what’s behind these broader actions.
How our bodies changed during the pandemic
Today on “Post Reports,” a show about how our bodies have changed during the pandemic. We hear from our listeners about how their bodies have surprised, delighted and worried them after these past two years. | 2022-10-03T22:44:34Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The migrants caught in a political ploy - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/podcasts/post-reports/the-migrants-caught-in-a-political-ploy/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/podcasts/post-reports/the-migrants-caught-in-a-political-ploy/ |
The Capitals' Aliaksei Protas has shined in the preseason. (Matt Slocum/AP)
Washington Capitals forward Aliaksei Protas has not only surprised onlookers with his improved play this preseason — he has surprised himself, too. He has been the most noticeable prospect on the ice during training camp, using his improved skating skills to try to earn a roster spot in a veteran-heavy lineup.
“I actually surprise myself every game out there, so it is pretty good,” Protas said Monday. “I got to keep working. I am happy to be here and enjoy staying with the other guys, so now I need to prove what I can do on the ice.”
Protas, 21, has played in all four of Washington’s preseason matchups and is expected to get at least one more game before the Capitals make their final roster decisions. He’s challenging more experienced players for spots — and is exactly where he wants to be.
“He’s working to make noise,” Coach Peter Laviolette said.
Protas has played all three forward spots — left wing, center and right wing — in the preseason as Washington’s coaching staff looks to see how versatile he can be. So far, he has passed the test. But where does Protas want to play?
“You want me to be honest? I don’t care. Just don’t care,” he said. “Where Coach wants me to play, I will play there. It doesn’t matter. I used to play everywhere.”
Protas’s skating is strides better than it was when he was drafted in the third round in 2019. He attributed that to work he has done over the past two summers, when he skated with Dmitry Astapenko, the development coach for Kontinental Hockey League squad Dinamo Minsk.
Protas said he worked with Astapenko for several days this summer, meeting up three times per day as he tried to bolster his skating. As Protas trained with his hometown team in Belarus, he would send Astapenko videos of himself so the coach could evaluate his stride. Last summer, Astapenko said they focused on Protas’s puck battles and on enhancing his natural skating motion.
The work is paying off.
“One hundred percent, in games right now, I realize I got better and I got so much work left,” Protas said. “I just got to keep it going right now. … [With the improvements to my skating] I feel like I get better on forecheck and I can get closer to the d-man.”
Protas’s skating has improved in part because he has gotten stronger. He has gained 10 pounds since last season and is 35 pounds heavier than he was on draft day.
All the muscle Protas has gained is good for his game. Last year, he said he was getting tired physically and mentally after 10 to 12 minutes of ice time. Now, he feels more equipped to handle more minutes.
“To get more speed, I got to get stronger, got to get my lower body stronger to be faster,” Protas said. “I can’t have some fast hard strides because I’m tall, so I need to get stronger to get more speed. That’s what I was focusing on more in the summer.”
Protas was not in the main group for Monday’s practice and instead skated with other prospects earlier in the morning. Laviolette said not too much should be read into who was on the ice with the “taxi squad.” Roster spots, Laviolette said, are still up for grabs, and having more than four forward lines during one practice group isn’t efficient.
The other players skating in the smaller group were Brett Leason, Axel Jonsson-Fjallby, Joe Snively and Henrik Borgstrom. Protas is the only one in that group who is exempt from waivers.
Off to Hershey
Forwards Beck Malenstyn and Garrett Pilon; defensemen Gabriel Carlsson, Bobby Nardella and Dylan McIlrath; and goalie Zach Fucale cleared waivers and were loaned to Hershey, the Capitals’ American Hockey League affiliate. The Bears’ training camp started Monday. | 2022-10-03T22:44:59Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Aliaksei Protas looks improved for Capitals this preseason - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/03/aliaksei-protas-capitals-preseason/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/03/aliaksei-protas-capitals-preseason/ |
Residents are marooned after the bridge to mainland Florida collapsed in the hurricane
The single bridge to Pine Island in Florida, seen on Oct. 2, collapsed during Hurricane Ian, leaving residents with few options to get to their homes. (Octavio Jones for The Washington Post)
ST. JAMES CITY, Fla. — Tim Awad jammed damp stuffed animals and clothing that might be salvageable into a garbage bag in his saturated mobile home. Storm surge from Hurricane Ian had swamped the trailer he and his pregnant wife saved up for and bought six months ago, he said, and he was only beginning to grapple with the reality.
“We’ll rebuild if we have a chance. But I feel like it’s basically a total loss,” said Awad, 38, his eyes watery with emotion in his musty, muddy living room. “Financially, I could never recover from this.”
Awad, a handyman with a bushy beard, and other residents on Pine Island are only beginning to make sense of Ian’s assault on their quiet, beloved paradise — and wondering if the outside world has taken notice.
The island is the largest off Florida’s Gulf Coast, a working-class sanctuary known for its fishing, easygoing atmosphere and tightknit community. But Pine Island has neither the sandy resorts of Fort Myers Beach nor the celebrity homes on Sanibel Island, two wealthier island communities also devastated by the storm.
“We need to get people talking about Pine Island right now,” said Andrew Hill, a New Hampshire native who moved to the island three years ago from Clearwater, Fla. “That’s the most important thing.”
The community — which fluctuates between about 4,000 and 8,000 people, depending on the season — suffered a devastating blow from the Category 4 storm, with winds above 100 mph for hours. The southern end, closer to Sanibel and Fort Myers Beach, saw boats tossed around by the surf like toys, the destruction of dozens of homes and harrowing stories of survival by residents who chose to stay. Residents on the northern end of the island described living through one of the scariest days of their lives, too, though storm surge was lower there.
Like neighboring islands, Pine Island’s bridge to mainland Florida collapsed in the storm. The span offered passage to the neighboring fishing village of Matlacha and then to the mainland city of Cape Coral.
Over the weekend, an effort to help residents through an increasingly desperate situation expanded, bolstered at sea by private boat owners and the U.S. Coast Guard and by air by the Florida National Guard.
On the sandy shores behind the Gulf Coast Kayak rental shop in Matlacha, residents filed aboard small vessels and shuttled to and from the island past a handful of devastated shops and bars. Coast Guard members, clad in navy blue uniforms, orange life vests and helmets, observed in rubber Zodiac boats nearby.
Jeff Wilson, the general manager of Safe Harbor Pineland on the island, watched the water from aboard a 32-foot catamaran on Sunday as the vessel, the Island Princess, picked up another round of evacuees. His home on the southern end of the island was “pretty much destroyed,” he said, and he rode out the storm at a friend’s larger home on the island’s northern side.
“I watched houses float by,” Wilson said. “It was crazy.”
The majority of the evacuees using the vessel have been elderly, he said, many marooned on the island for days. Coast Guard members carried luggage and other possessions for them — and, in some cases, people on a wooden dining chair to get over the uneven, sandy terrain leading to and from the docks.
“A lot of people are just quiet,” he said of his passengers. “They’re in shock.”
On the other side of the water, residents shuttled on and off the island through the dock at Yucatan Waterfront Bar and Grill, a shuttered eatery that under normal circumstances would be serving tropical drinks and seafood. Coast Guard members and firefighters teamed Sunday to carry five-gallon cans of gas, cleaning supplies, nonperishable food and crates of water to a fire station three miles away where residents gathered.
Rep. Byron Donalds (R.-Fla.), whose district includes Pine Island, said Sunday that he’ll be pressing the Federal Emergency Management Agency to provide more fuel and other resources to speed recovery.
“Look, we have a population here and they have a can-do spirit,” Donalds said. “Their attitude is: Just get us help, and we’ll fix a lot of our own issues.”
A short walk away, celebrity chef José Andrés and workers from his nonprofit, World Central Kitchen, were spooning out a fresh meal of chili pasta with beef, corn and peas topped with cheddar and bacon bits and a side of coleslaw.
Andrés said in an interview that his team has been serving meals in several locations in southwest Florida since Thursday, a day after the storm hit. Fort Myers Beach and Pine Island “have two different universes,” he said, with more full-time residents on Pine Island.
“If you stay here six hours, you’ll see people popping up, popping up, popping up,” Andrés said.
Local residents have sought to help the chef by bringing produce they grew. He accepted it but said he usually pays for the food he cooks and wants to on Pine Island.
“Everyone wants to help,” he said.
In line waiting for food was Deborah Gallo, a Kansas transplant to Florida who lives in a trailer on Bokeelia on the northern side of the island. She said she knew God was alive and well when she and her “old man” made it through the storm, and compared it to the swirling tempest depicted in “The Wizard of Oz.”
“A hurricane sounds like demons screaming. That’s what it sounds like,” she said. “A tornado sounds likes like a freight train. And I heard a freight train.”
Gallo said that with phone service still down on part of the island, rumors have proliferated that residents would be thrown off the island after FEMA took over — and she sought confirmation that was not the case.
“I just wanted to hear what is happening from somebody real, you know?” she said. “The National Guard is over there, and the Coast Guard is over there. I feel a lot better about things.”
Gallo said she was told that a temporary bridge could be constructed this month to allow residents to drive off the island. They plan to leave but only then, once they can take their black, storm-battered Nissan Xterra and Harley Davidson motorcycle with them.
Robert and Mary Yager, another couple that came to get food from Andrés, had a similar plan: They’ll leave when they are able to drive off the island with some of their most important possessions. But they acknowledged that staying has become increasingly difficult, as fuel they stored runs low and gas stations on the island remain closed.
Mary Yager said people have been siphoning gasoline out of boats that are not theirs to get by. “I ain’t stealing somebody’s gas,” she said, but the couple still needs some for their pickup truck that survived the storm.
The Yagers live on the southern end of the island. They weren’t sure they’d make it through the storm alive, Mary Yager said, tears running down her cheeks. Their home is 15 feet above sea level, and storm surge came right up to their front door before receding.
“It was lapping at the front door while the roof was caving in on one side of the house,” Mary Yager said. “And we had nowhere to go.”
On the southern end of the island, Hill drove a pickup truck past downed telephone poles blocking one lane of traffic on Stringfellow Road, the main artery running north and south. He turned right into Flamingo Bay, another residential area populated mainly by mobile homes, and marveled at the destruction.
Hill evacuated to Boca Raton ahead of the storm, he said, and his wife, daughter and dog are now with family in his home state of New Hampshire. Still, he said, he understands why other people refuse to evacuate.
“Think about it. You lose everything. All you’ve got left are a car, a few … things and a pet,” he said. “People don’t want to leave with uncertainties.”
Signs have popped up around the island warning looters away, and Hill said they should be taken seriously.
“I wouldn’t want to mess with the people on this island,” he said.
One of the houses that Hill spotted on his drive was Awad’s. Hung with white, corrugated sheet metal, the modest structure held a sopping living room with a TV mounted to the wall and a shelf stacked with diapers for his future daughter.
He first made it back to the island Saturday, he said, after evacuating to nearby Cape Coral when the severity of the storm became clear. He offered someone $1,000 to take him across the water, he said, but the person told him it was free of charge when he reached Pine Island.
Nearby, the front side of another mobile home stood ripped open, with no roof in sight and one wall on the ground. Tools remained hung on the walls inside in a workshop. The owner, Jack Sharp, said that he rode out the storm inside and that his right hand was sliced open when his glass doors were pushed in and shattered by the wind.
Sharp, who said he served a tour in Vietnam in the Army, pointed out a water line on the inside of his mobile home that was about a foot high. Storm surge flushed in as the back half of the eyewall roared overhead and debris crashed into his home, punching a hole in a bedroom wall and damaging the headboard inside.
Sharp grabbed his laptop and went to a friend’s nearby after. Another neighbor’s home down the street caught fire after the storm was gone, he said, but he wasn’t thinking of leaving.
“I’m going to hold out here,” he said, “as long as we can.” | 2022-10-04T00:01:55Z | www.washingtonpost.com | After Ian, Florida's Pine Island braces for uncertain future, looting - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/10/03/hurricane-ian-florida-pine-island/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/10/03/hurricane-ian-florida-pine-island/ |
Tim Craig
Residents of a mobile home park in Fort Myers, Fla., decide whether to rebuild or leave after Hurricane Ian destroyed a large portion of their community. (Video: Alice Li, James Cornsilk/The Washington Post)
ESTERO, Fla. — The billions of dollars in damage caused by Hurricane Ian has exacerbated an already urgent housing crisis for Florida, with thousands of displaced residents unsure where they’ll live in one of the country’s most expensive states.
On Monday, about 1,700 people remained in emergency shelters, many of them evacuated before their homes were either leveled by the 150 mph winds or rendered uninhabitable by a storm surge that flooded large portions of the state — leaving nearly 850,000 residents still without power five days after the hurricane made landfall. Others were living temporarily with family or friends, while some with few options remained in squalid conditions inside damaged houses.
In a state of luxury high-rise condominium developments and multimillion-dollar homes with stunning views of the surrounding waterfront, the hardest hit will be residents on fixed incomes and working poor families who make up the backbone of Florida’s economy, affordable housing advocates said.
“It’s a tragedy for them and it’s also a tragedy for the entire community, which has already been suffering from not having people able to live where they work,” said Jamie Ross, president and CEO of the Florida Housing Coalition, which earlier this year estimated that there is a statewide deficit of 500,000 homes that are affordable to lower- and middle-income families.
“We were already in a crisis before Ian came along,” she said.
A family of five camped out near one of the beer stands while more huddled near a chrome statue of a hockey player brandishing his stick. Everywhere were the sounds of barking dogs or babies crying — mixed with the heavy odor of a crowd of people who had not bathed since Ian leveled their communities last week.
“$169 a night!? I can’t afford that,” Delaney said out loud while scrolling through Airbnb options on her iPad.
She arrived to the arena Friday after being rescued from the condominium in Fort Myers she and a friend bought in June. On Wednesday, during the storm, she watched as three feet of water seeped into her unit — enough to upend her refrigerator and an antique dresser.
She’s waiting to learn whether her homeowner’s insurance will cover the damage to the condominium, and whether the flood insurance claim she filed with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) that morning will lead to temporary housing.
“They said that within 20 days they may be able to put me up somewhere,” Delaney said, about FEMA. “I’m hoping prices come down so I can buy something, but I’m afraid we won’t get money out of our condo now.”
Pausing, she added: “I haven’t been able to cry until I got here.”
Out in the lobby, Oscar Garcia stared at nothing in particular while sitting on his inflatable mattress. His wife, Irene Garcia, swept away some trash near their three children — ages 2, 10 and 15.
“I’ve called everyone I could think of for help,” he said, about their housing options. “You can only make so many calls.”
Jeannette Morris, 70, had a different problem. She was already homeless when Ian struck, a situation that began in June after the rent for the single-wide trailer she’d been staying in increased to $1,000 per month from $728. Now, as she saw it, everyone around her was more competition for the limited low-income housing options she’s been applying for.
While living on Social Security for several years, Morris said, “I was terrified of being homeless and now look at me.”
“But I’m not alone now,” she added with a rueful laugh while gesturing to the displaced families around her. “I’ve got lots of company. Lots and lots of company.”
Even people not sucked into the storm’s wreckage will in some way be affected, said Chelsea Plaisance, lead organizer for Lee Interfaith for Empowerment, an affordable housing advocacy group in the Fort Myers area, which suffered the heaviest toll in hurricane damage.
“Anyone in the rental market is going to see prices go up because of all the other people who will now be entering the rental market,” Plaisance said. “It’s going to push out an entire group of people who were already marginalized.”
Kristen Santero, 50, doesn’t consider herself in that category. But after five feet of water flooded into the beachfront home in the Island Park area of Fort Myers that she and her boyfriend David DiGiacomo had just renovated after buying it in April, Santero also wasn’t sure what their options were.
They moved in with some friends just before the storm hit. But with three cats, a dog and five kids between them, they weren’t sure how long that situation would last.
“Honestly, I don’t have a super positive outlook on being able to find something,” said Santero, who was expecting a battle for insurance money after filing a flood insurance claim earlier in the week. “You’re looking at thousands of people who are trying to find displacement housing. I think it’s going to be very difficult.”
That was the case inside the Orange Harbor Mobile Home and RV Park, a “55 plus community” in Fort Myers Shores with 365 trailers — 90 percent of which were either damaged or destroyed when the nearby Caloosahatchee River flooded the area.
The water, and a foul-smelling black mud that washed in with it, tipped over refrigerators, chewed through wooden floors and inundated electrical outlets. The storm also compromised the park’s water supply and sanitary system.
Located on a spit of land between the Caloosahatchee and the Orange River, Orange Harbor had given many of its residents a life that they say they probably won’t be able to replicate elsewhere.
Many properties had docks, and it was just an hour-long boat ride to the Gulf of Mexico. During winter, manatees migrate to the mangrove forest that surrounds the community. Orange Harbor is also within 1 mile of Interstate 75, western Florida’s biggest north-south route, and many residents said they located there to be closer to family members who live throughout Florida.
“There are a lot of nice places in the central part of the state, around Orlando,” said Timothy Paul, 77. “And it’s probably cheaper — Fort Myers has gotten very expensive through the years, and it’s kind of the point, for people, you just can’t live here.”
Some said they plan to walk away from their property, forgoing a dream to retire without debt. Other residents continue to live in their trailers, choosing to endure the lack of a functioning sanitary system because, they say, they don’t think they can start over again in Florida’s unforgiving housing market.
Now, with river mud clinging to most of her belongings, she’s ready for someone to haul her trailer away and go back to renting, she said.
“But rent is sky high, so I just don’t know,” Stagner said. “Maybe I will just go back to working five days a week.”
Partially paralyzed after he fractured his vertebrae during a fall, he said he has $13,000 in savings, which isn’t enough to start over.
“My plan is to stay because I like the river, and I go down in my cart and watch the sunset,” he said. “If I went back to Philadelphia, I think that cold would kill me.”
As his wife bathed him in a bucket in front of their trailer, Charlie Dupont couldn’t get over how quickly Ian changed his life.
Three days before the storm made landfall, Dupont, 84, and his wife, Mary Ellen, 71, were ready to close on a $147,000 offer someone made to buy the trailer they’d spent three years fixing up, a ticket to the bigger home they often fantasized about.
The couple appeared torn about where they’d live next. She wants to stay in Florida, saying “Good, bad or indifferent, you will never get me to leave.”
He said he’s open to the idea of trying their luck somewhere else.
“If it had sold, it would have been perfect for us,” Dupont said about the trailer, as his wife attempted to scrape his back clean of the sticky mud that seemed to be everywhere. “But then whammo! And now I don’t know why God hates us so much.” | 2022-10-04T00:15:33Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Hurricane Ian destroyed homes, worsening housing crisis for thousands - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/10/03/hurricane-ian-housing/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/10/03/hurricane-ian-housing/ |
UNITED NATIONS — The head of the U.N. peacekeeping mission in Congo, which was the target of deadly protests during the summer, said the United Nations is “ready and willing” to work closely with the government to step up the pace of withdrawal of the U.N. force that has over 14,000 troops and police. | 2022-10-04T00:15:51Z | www.washingtonpost.com | UN says it's ready to work with Congo on peacekeeper pullout - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/correction-united-nations-congo-story/2022/10/03/1366f622-436d-11ed-be17-89cbe6b8c0a5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/correction-united-nations-congo-story/2022/10/03/1366f622-436d-11ed-be17-89cbe6b8c0a5_story.html |
“I was hired to provide positive, difference-making leadership and support,” Tony La Russa said in a statement Monday. “Our record is proof. I did not do my job.” (Nam Y. Huh/AP)
Tony La Russa, a Hall of Famer who had not managed in a decade when the Chicago White Sox hired him to steer them into contention before the 2021 season, will not return as Chicago’s manager in 2023. The team confirmed the decision Monday after weeks of speculation about how a health issue that kept La Russa away from the White Sox since the end of August would affect his future.
“It has become obvious that the length of the treatment and recovery process for this second health issue makes it impossible for me to be the White Sox manager in 2023,” La Russa said in a statement issued before a news conference Monday afternoon. “The timing of this announcement now enables the front office to include filling the manager position with their other offseason priorities.”
La Russa, who turns 78 on Tuesday, said in that statement that health issues did not affect his ability to manage this year and called Chicago’s season “an unacceptable disappointment.” The White Sox hired La Russa in place of less-experienced predecessor Rick Renteria in the hopes of turning a team that looked built for a few years of contention into a bona fide winner.
But they did not make that leap under La Russa, who oversaw a loss in the American League Division Series in 2021 before watching the White Sox sputter out of contention by mid-September this year, despite their place in the relatively weak AL Central.
MLB’s new postseason format and wild-card races, explained
“In the Major Leagues, you either do or you don’t. Explanations come across as excuses,” La Russa said in his statement. “Respect and trust demand accountability, and during my managerial career, I understood that the ultimate responsibility for each minus belongs to the manager. I was hired to provide positive, difference-making leadership and support. Our record is proof. I did not do my job.”
LaRussa goes on to say his team’s record this year was “an unacceptable disappointment.” Full statement here: pic.twitter.com/FTtIemYU1Y
— Chelsea Janes (@chelsea_janes) October 3, 2022
That the White Sox and their hands-on owner, Jerry Reinsdorf, gave La Russa that job in the first place was not exactly a surprise, given that La Russa had managed the team for eight seasons from 1979 to 1986 and had history with the old-school owner. But the hiring was controversial, even ridiculed around the sport: Not only had analytics totally changed the way games are managed and managers interact with front offices in the decade since La Russa had retired, but social norms and clubhouse conduct had transformed, too.
From the archives: Baseball has changed since the last time Tony La Russa was a manager. Can he change with it?
In the years between his managerial departure in 2011 and his return in 2021, La Russa made several public comments that seemed to suggest his old-school, no-nonsense baseball mores could alienate younger players less willing to curtail celebration and flair for the sake of outdated and often racially biased taboos. He was critical of NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s protest, suggesting that he would tell a player who wanted to protest during the national anthem to stay in the clubhouse instead.
So when La Russa inherited a team that featured one of the game’s most vocal Black stars, Tim Anderson, he seemed like an unnecessarily tense fit for a roster that had yet to coalesce into a stable winner. La Russa eventually earned praise from Anderson and concerns that he might try to, well, tamp down fun, went unrealized.
From the archives: Tim Anderson did not read the rules
But what did come into question, particularly this season, was his ability to handle the strategic operations of a team hindered by injuries and crippled by inconsistency. The most prominent questions about his competence emerged after he issued two intentional walks to opposing hitters who had two strikes on them. Fans on Chicago’s South Side more than once chanted “Fire Tony!” this summer — something that was not lost on the veteran manager.
“At no time have I been disappointed or upset with White Sox fans, including those who at times chanted ‘Fire Tony.’ They come to games with passion for our team and a strong desire to win. Loud and excited when we win, they rightly are upset when we play poorly,” La Russa said in his statement.
The White Sox are on the verge of an organizational reckoning after another injury-riddled season not only saw them take no steps forward but take a step back. They began the season with the seventh-highest payroll in the majors. The Cleveland Guardians, who began the season 27th on that list, claimed the division title instead.
The San Diego Padres have yet to see the best of Juan Soto | 2022-10-04T00:16:09Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Tony La Russa steps down as Chicago White Sox manager - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/03/tony-la-russa-white-sox-manager-steps-down/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/03/tony-la-russa-white-sox-manager-steps-down/ |
Labor board says Activision withheld raises from union activists
(istock and activision blizzard/Washington Post illustration)
The National Labor Relations Board has investigated and found that video game titan Activision Blizzard withheld raises from quality assurance testers at its subsidiary Raven Software, and that it attributed the withholding to the testers’ union activity. Activision Blizzard is currently in union bargaining negotiations with quality assurance testers who voted to unionize earlier this year at Raven, which works on Call of Duty titles in Madison, Wis.
Following the NLRB’s findings, Activision Blizzard and Raven Software quality assurance testers will continue negotiations around a collective bargaining agreement. If the workers and the company can’t agree on terms, the NLRB could issue a complaint or, in the more unlikely case that the company refuses to settle, the board could prosecute the case before a federal judge.
“It’s a very preliminary win for the union at this point. It gives them a little bit of leverage,” said Wilma Liebman, former chairman of the NLRB under former president Barack Obama, who said that unions often file unfair labor complaints in conjunction with bargaining efforts. “It’s part of their tactics, you know, hit them wherever they can, to put pressure on the company in order to reach an agreement with them and to stop violating the law.”
A statement from Activision Blizzard spokesperson Rich George said: “Due to legal obligations under the [National Labor Relations Act] requiring employers not to grant wage increases while an election was pending, we could not institute new pay initiatives at Raven because they would be brand new kinds of compensation changes, which had not been planned beforehand. This rule that employers should not grant these kinds of wage increases has been the law for many years.”
A June labor complaint filed to the NLRB claimed that Activision Blizzard discriminated and retaliated against current and former quality assurance testers for their union activity in various ways, including laying off 12 quality assurance testers, reorganizing the studio to remove the quality assurance department, withholding benefits and soliciting grievances. The NLRB also found that the company asked workers to air grievances while they were awaiting a union vote back in May. It is still investigating other parts of the complaint.
On Monday evening, the Communications Workers of America filed an amended version of the complaint it initially made in June, alleging that the company continues to violate labor laws by keeping the studio reorganized without a quality assurance department. It added that the company withheld raises from the Raven workers and announced the withholding was due to the union activity.
In May, a group of 28 Raven quality assurance testers won its bid for a union at the studio. The workers, who have organized as the Game Workers Alliance, told The Washington Post they hope others in the video game industry follow suit. Before the May election win, Activision Blizzard’s president and chief operating officer, Daniel Alegre, had tried to meet with union bargaining members in Wisconsin. This meeting attempt was uncovered during the NLRB’s testimony process.
George, the Activision Blizzard spokesperson, told The Washington Post in a statement, “This is not an accurate portrayal of events. Although Raven QA was offered a non-mandatory opportunity to meet with Activision Blizzard leadership during an on-site visit, because some of the QA testers had previously requested a discussion with management, at no point was this framed as an opportunity to specifically address grievances. Furthermore, the offer was never taken, and no meeting ever occurred.”
In April, quality assurance testers at Activision Blizzard outside of Raven were offered raises that bumped up their pay to $20 per hour. Raven testers did not receive the same offer, which the NLRB has now found to be evidence of withholding benefits in retaliation for union activity. Quality assurance testers at Raven make approximately $27,000 to $69,000, and are among the lowest paid workers at the studio, according to pay documents the company shared during labor relation hearings in February.
Blizzard Albany, formerly Vicarious Visions, announces unionization bid
“The company’s anti-union messaging has been disappointingly effective, and I think the bigger victory for us than getting the pay increase would be having Activision admit that what they did was unlawful,” said a current Raven Software employee, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.
George said the company looked forward to defending its position during the NLRB’s litigation process, and “if necessary” the appeals court process.
“We just want the company to bargain in good faith, bargain a fair contract, and move past all this cheap and illegal behavior,” said Sara Steffens, Communications Workers of America secretary-treasurer, who is part of the union helping Raven workers organize.
Activision Blizzard is awaiting approval from international regulators of a deal to be acquired by Microsoft for nearly $69 billion. The Xbox and Windows maker previously said in June it would respect the rights of Activision Blizzard workers to join a union. | 2022-10-04T00:17:17Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Labor board says Activision withheld raises from Raven union activists - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2022/10/03/activision-raven-union-raises-nlrb/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2022/10/03/activision-raven-union-raises-nlrb/ |
North Korea fires ballistic missile over Japan, Tokyo says
A TV displays a news program on North Korea's missile launch in Tokyo in March. (Eugene Hoshiko/AP)
TOKYO — North Korea on Tuesday launched a suspected intermediate-range ballistic missile over Japan, Japanese and South Korean officials said. The missile, which was the first North Korean projectile to pass through Japanese airspace since 2017, landed in the Pacific Ocean.
The Japanese government issued a rare evacuation order Tuesday morning, urging residents in the Aomori and Hokkaido prefectures in the northern region to take shelter. Japanese officials said the missile flew outside of the country’s exclusive economic zone but warned about falling debris.
North Korea has tested an unprecedented number of missiles this year as it diversifies and expands its weapons arsenal as part of leader Kim Jong Un’s five-year plan. North Korea has conducted five rounds of ballistic missile tests since Sept. 24, ahead of Vice President Harris’s visit to the region.
In recent weeks, the U.S., Japanese and South Korean governments have all conducted military exercises designed to demonstrate the allies’ readiness to work together in the event of a conflict. The latest launch came as the United States and South Korea wrap up their joint military exercises involving the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan.
The drills have long been an irritant for Kim’s regime, which views them as hostile and uses them to justify its weapons development and nuclear program. There are signs that a new cycle of escalation is already taking shape, with North Korea rejecting overtures and possibly preparing for a seventh nuclear test amid a diplomatic deadlock with Washington and shifting security dynamics in the region.
Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida convened a meeting of the National Security Council in response and condemned the launch as an act of “very violent behavior” by North Korea.
Min Joo Kim in Seoul contributed to this report. This is a developing story and will be updated. | 2022-10-04T00:17:35Z | www.washingtonpost.com | North Korea fires ballistic missile over Japan, Tokyo says - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/03/north-korea-missile-japan-tokyo/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/03/north-korea-missile-japan-tokyo/ |
FILE - This photo provided by the North Korean government shows North Korean leader Kim Jong Un delivers a speech during a parliament in Pyongyang, North Korea on Sept. 8, 2022. Independent journalists were not given access to cover the event depicted in this image distributed by the North Korean government. The content of this image is as provided and cannot be independently verified. North Korea on Tuesday, Oct. 4, 2022 fired a ballistic missile over Japan, its neighbors said, escalating tests of weapons designed to strike key targets in regional U.S. allies amid stalled nuclear diplomacy. (Korean Central News Agency/Korea News Service via AP, File) (Uncredited/KCNA via KNS) | 2022-10-04T00:17:41Z | www.washingtonpost.com | N. Korea fires ballistic missile that flew over Japan - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/seoul-n-korea-fires-ballistic-missile-toward-sea/2022/10/03/f52b0592-436f-11ed-be17-89cbe6b8c0a5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/seoul-n-korea-fires-ballistic-missile-toward-sea/2022/10/03/f52b0592-436f-11ed-be17-89cbe6b8c0a5_story.html |
Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who is running for reelection, speaks at the Alvorada Palace in Brasilia on Sunday. (Ueslei Marcelino/Reuters)
Brazil’s right-wing incumbent president, Jair Bolsonaro, failed to win the first round of the country’s general election on Sunday. But he did do something important for many on the global right: He beat the polls.
For weeks, many of Brazil’s major polling companies showed Bolsonaro trailing far behind his left-wing challenger, former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. One widely reported poll gave Lula a 14-point lead and even suggested he could win in the first round of voting — something that has not happened in more than three decades of Brazilian democracy.
Lula did win a plurality of votes, 48.4 percent, but he did not win a majority needed to secure a first-round victory. Bolsonaro, who in some polls was predicted to win a dismal 34 percent of the vote, ended up with 43.2 percent.
To many inside and outside Brazil, Bolsonaro’s surprise showing is about more than just one election: It’s evidence that the far right is undervalued by polls globally, echoing claims in other parts of the world.
“Polls are broken. They are undercounting right-wing support. And it’s vital this be fixed to maintain credibility,” the Brazil-based journalist Glenn Greenwald, a firm critic of Bolsonaro, tweeted on Monday.
“THE SILENT MAJORITY IS BACK!!!” former president Donald Trump wrote on the right-wing social network Truth Social on Sunday evening. He later wrote that Bolsonaro had beaten “inaccurate early Fake News Media polls.”
Besting the work of professional pollsters has long been a badge of honor for the former U.S. president. In 2016, before he was elected, Trump dubbed himself “Mr. Brexit” — an apparent reference to not only the incendiary politics surrounding the British referendum to leave the European Union but also the widespread idea that polls had missed the outcome of that vote.
Trump did indeed beat the pollsters in 2016 — and again in 2020. He lost the latter election but it still prompted something of a reckoning in the polling industry. One industry panel later said the surveys ahead of the 2020 presidential election were the most inaccurate in 40 years.
But with his post on Sunday about a “silent majority,” Trump was referring to a common theory among U.S. conservatives that right-wing ideas are actually more popular than they appear to be in polls.
In Britain, pollsters have also spoken of the “shy Tory” factor that suggests right-wing voters are less likely to admit their preferences to pollsters. Other theories have suggested that right-wing voters may be harder to pick up in mainstream polls, as they are more likely to be rural and less likely to use the internet, among other factors.
The full picture, however, is more complicated. Brexit may have been a political earthquake, but for some, it was a widely expected one. For weeks ahead of the vote, polls showed that support for leaving the E.U. was gaining among British voters.
More recently, electoral wins for the far right in Sweden and Italy have largely tracked with pre-election polls. And in France, the far-right leader Marine Le Pen underperformed her polls.
Even in Brazil, Lula, the left-wing candidate, actually overperformed his polling average by 2 percent. (Although Bolsanaro outperformed his by 8 percent).
For practical reasons, polls are conducted with small sample sizes that represent only a slice of the entire population — with complicated equations on how to use this survey data to represent the national mood accurately. If those equations are off, so are the final results.
In 2018, a study published by the social and natural sciences journal, Nature Human Behaviour, looked at more than 30,000 national polls from 351 elections in 45 countries between 1942 and 2017. The study found that there did not appear to be any systematic decline in accuracy over that time period — and that there was “no evidence to support the claims of a crisis in the accuracy of polling.”
But Christopher Wlezien, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin and co-author of the study, said in an interview that he had not analyzed more recent data to see if the conclusion still stood up.
In 2015, Israeli polling firms failed to see that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was on a path to reelection (notably, the polling errors were so significant that even exit polls, conducted after the vote, were off).
Brian Winter, editor in chief of Americas Quarterly, noted on Twitter on Monday that there had been a noteworthy number of polling missteps recently, with major polls off in the United States, Argentina and Chile.
For Brazilians, polling has now become a political issue in itself. CNN Brasil reported Monday that Bolsonaro’s allies were now seeking a “broad investigation” into the work of polling companies ahead of the election to see if there is criminal liability.
If so, it would be just the latest round of attacks by Bolsonaro on Brazil’s election process. He has already claimed without evidence that the country’s electronic voting system is compromised. In the event of an electoral loss, Bolsonaro is widely expected to refuse to accept the results. It would be similar to what Trump did after his own 2020 electoral defeat — but this time it might work.
But concern about the polls won’t be limited to Bolsonaro and his supporters.
Winter tweeted that he no longer planned to share or discuss Brazilian polls ahead of the next election. “It’s clear the models are broken, respondents not being truthful, or some other problem,” Winter wrote. Other political analysts say that the polling companies need to take action before the controversy consumes them.
“It is very serious because the institutes are under attack and they are unfounded attacks. Because there are a lot of serious people in the institutes trying to do their best, but they were wrong,” Pablo Ortellado, a professor of public policy at the University of São Paulo, said in an interview with BBC News Brasil.
Brazilian polling firms will soon have another chance to prove themselves. Ahead of the second and final round of the election in four weeks, there will be more polls and more scrutiny. But companies will try to learn from their mistakes and tweak their methods to ensure higher accuracy.
It could be something easy to fix. But some polling inaccuracies have stumped top experts. Many, including Wlezien, heavily scrutinized the polling misses during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. In response, firms updated their methodologies and weighting — only for the polls to be off again in 2020.
“I don’t understand how it could hurt them,” Wlezien said of the idea that far-right parties overperformed their polls. “And the sense is that the people running these polls don’t have a strong interest in getting it wrong — in any direction.” | 2022-10-04T00:45:35Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Why Brazil's Bolsonaro and the global right love to hate on polling - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/03/bolsonaro-brazil-polls-trump/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/03/bolsonaro-brazil-polls-trump/ |
After working as a journalist at Time magazine and the Legal Times, he became a spokesman and adviser for Republican politicians including Dan Quayle
Journalist and political operative David C. Beckwith, left, on vacation in Hong Kong in 2013 with journalists Tom DeFrank and Owen Ullmann, his longtime friends. (Courtesy Owen Ullmann)
“No decision in the court’s history, not even those outlawing public school segregation and capital punishment, has evoked the intensity of emotion that will surely follow this ruling,” Mr. Beckwith wrote in a magazine story headlined “Abortion on Demand,” which revealed that a majority of the justices had concluded that the Constitution ensured a right to an abortion, founded on a fundamental right to privacy.
The article was supposed to hit newsstands after the Roe decision. But the ruling was delayed by several days and Time went ahead with publication, leading Mr. Beckwith to scoop the court on its own decision — a precursor to the recent leak of Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr.’s draft majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned the right to an abortion. The court officially ruled on the Dobbs case in June, more than a month after Politico published the draft and Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. ordered an internal investigation.
“In my little incident, no one had any mal-intent,” Mr. Beckwith told the New Yorker in May, recalling the origins of his Roe scoop. He quipped, “They just had the bad judgment to trust me.”
A tall, slender journalist known for his booming laugh and fiery intensity, Mr. Beckwith went on to serve as the founding editor of the Legal Times, a weekly newspaper covering white-shoe firms, government regulations and other legal affairs in Washington. He later turned to Republican politics, serving as the press secretary for Vice President Dan Quayle and as an aide or adviser for several senators from Texas, including Kay Bailey Hutchison, John Cornyn and (unofficially) Ted Cruz.
Mr. Beckwith was 79 when he died Oct. 2 at his home in Austin. The cause was lung cancer, said his longtime friend Tom DeFrank, a contributing editor at National Journal and the president of the Gridiron Club.
Although Mr. Beckwith’s story on the Roe case was not widely heralded at the time, it received renewed attention earlier this year as journalists and historians pointed out that Politico’s Supreme Court scoop was not entirely unprecedented.
As Mr. Beckwith told it, his interest in the case was piqued by what he called “one of the strangest stories I’d ever seen,” an unbylined article that ran on the front page of The Washington Post on July 4, 1972. The story said that there was “a dramatic last-minute struggle” over abortion rulings at the Supreme Court, with a majority of justices supporting a constitutional right to the procedure. Chief Justice Warren E. Burger dissented and sought to delay a ruling on Roe until President Richard M. Nixon could fill two vacancies on the court and potentially alter the case’s outcome.
Digging into the story, Mr. Beckwith interviewed more than a dozen people, including justices and their clerks. He told the New Yorker that he was aided by an anonymous source who requested that he hold the story until after Jan. 17, 1973, when the ruling was expected to be announced. That date was delayed by Burger — Mr. Beckwith suspected that the chief justice wanted to postpone the announcement until after Nixon’s second inauguration, for fear of displeasing the president — and led to the timing of Mr. Beckwith’s scoop.
The same issue of Time magazine featured another dramatic article by Mr. Beckwith, who had scored an interview with ex-CIA officer and Watergate break-in organizer E. Howard Hunt. His story linked two Nixon advisers to the burglary, Charles W. Colson and former attorney general John N. Mitchell, and infuriated Nixon, who ordered “a complete embargo on Time,” saying that no one at the White House could speak to the magazine without his permission, according to an account by lawyer James Robenalt, the author of “January 1973: Watergate, Roe v. Wade, Vietnam, and the Month That Changed America Forever.”
Mr. Beckwith’s reporting on the Roe case similarly angered Burger, who visited Time’s Washington bureau with “a loose-leaf binder, three inches thick, detailing all the reporting I’d done,” Mr. Beckwith recalled in an interview this year with Time. “He feared that the integrity of the court was being jeopardized, and he wanted me to be fired or to be ordered not to spy on the court. He thought [the story] was the equivalent of espionage.”
Time’s editors disagreed, and Mr. Beckwith remained at the magazine until 1978, when he was hired by the husband-and-wife duo of Stephen and Lynn Glasser to serve as the inaugural editor of their new publication, then called Legal Times of Washington.
“Before the Legal Times, there had never been a general interest, independent commercial publication that promised an objective outside look at lawyers, particularly the big firms operating in major cities,” Mr. Beckwith said in an email last month, after Stephen Glasser’s death at 79. Mr. Beckwith recalled that “the first issues hit Washington’s legal world like a bombshell,” as corporate clients suddenly had access to second opinions on legal tactics and strategy, and “competing firms suddenly had a window into their rivals’ business practices.”
Mr. Beckwith returned to Time magazine in 1981 and covered law, economics, the Reagan White House and the presidential campaign trail before being hired as Quayle’s press secretary after the 1988 election. The transition from journalism to politics was a turbulent one: Over the next four years, Mr. Beckwith often found himself discussing his boss’s missteps and controversies, including a slip-up at a children’s spelling bee (Quayle made a student add an unnecessary “e” to the word “potato”) and his criticism of the single-mother title character on TV’s “Murphy Brown.”
“David Beckwith has a tough job, some would say the toughest in town: trying to turn around the image of the most ridiculed public figure in Washington,” Washington Post journalist Lois Romano wrote in a 1990 profile. The article noted that Mr. Beckwith could be aggressive — overly so, in the eyes of some journalists — in confronting reporters and their editors about unflattering coverage of the vice president.
“His passion was legendary,” said his friend DeFrank, who was then working as a White House correspondent for Newsweek. “He was so angry at the way the press treated Quayle that at one point he threatened to fire himself as best man [at my wedding] because he was so angry at the way Newsweek had treated Quayle. Happily, his wife and my fiancee got together and basically said, ‘Go stand in the corner.’ ”
The older of two sons, David Cameron Beckwith was born in Seattle on Oct. 30, 1942. His father was a typesetter, his mother a homemaker. After graduating from high school in the Chicago suburbs, he studied history at Carleton College in Northfield, Minn., receiving a bachelor’s degree in 1964. He completed a master’s in journalism the next year from Columbia University, and worked for the Minneapolis Star and Houston Chronicle before receiving a law degree from the University of Texas in 1971.
Mr. Beckwith was no supporter of the Roe decision. When Alito’s draft opinion was published earlier this year, he called it “a tour de force” while also worrying that the leak may have been intended to improperly influence the court’s decision-making, since justices could change their mind in response to public opinion. “But I’m still enough of a reporter to say the more information out there, the better,” he told the New Yorker. “Good for the guys who got the story.” | 2022-10-04T00:45:41Z | www.washingtonpost.com | David Beckwith, who scooped Supreme Court on Roe v. Wade, dies at 79 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/10/03/david-beckwith-dead-supreme-court/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/10/03/david-beckwith-dead-supreme-court/ |
The federal appeals court judge was celebrated among conservatives as a constant if sometimes provocative exponent of judicial restraint
Judge Laurence H. Silberman receives the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country's highest civilian honor, from President George W. Bush in 2008.
Laurence H. Silberman, one of the most influential conservative judges on the federal appellate bench, whose opinions on Second Amendment rights, the separation of powers, and the limits of press freedom resonated in the decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court and across American jurisprudence, died Oct. 2 at his home in Washington. He was 86.
His son Robert Silberman confirmed his death and said the cause was an undiagnosed infection.
Mr. Silberman was named to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit by President Ronald Reagan in 1985. He remained in full-time service on that bench — widely considered the second-most important judicial body in the country after the Supreme Court — until taking senior status in 2000. He continued hearing cases until shortly before his death and was celebrated among conservatives as a constant if sometimes provocative exponent of judicial restraint, the notion that judges must limit the exercise of their power to the analysis of the legal questions that come immediately before them.
Mr. Silberman’s decades on the D.C. appeals court capped a government career that dated to the administration of Richard M. Nixon, one of several Republican presidents he served. Under Nixon, Mr. Silberman was solicitor of labor, the Labor Department’s top lawyer, and deputy attorney general. Under President Gerald Ford, Mr. Silberman served as U.S. ambassador to Yugoslavia from 1975 to 1976.
Three decades later, Mr. Silberman paused his judicial duties when President George W. Bush named him and Chuck S. Robb, a Democrat who served as U.S. senator and governor of Virginia, as co-chairmen of a presidential commission that issued a scathing report on the intelligence failures leading to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Bush later awarded Mr. Silberman the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, calling him “a stalwart guardian of the Constitution” whose “work to strengthen our national security institutions has made Americans safer.”
But Mr. Silberman was best known as a jurist, and for the rigorous, sometimes tartly worded opinions he issued elucidating his legal worldview.
“It has always seemed rather simple to me that in a democracy federal judges appointed for life may not allow themselves, or should not allow themselves, to make policy judgments,” he once said in an oral history for the Historical Society of the District of Columbia Circuit.” Rather, he said, they “should do their very best to interpret the policy judgments Congress makes and turns into legislation as well as the policy judgments that are embodied” in the Constitution.
That position, “didn’t please everyone — or anyone all of the time,” Paul Clement, a former clerk to the judge who became U.S. solicitor general, wrote in the Wall Street Journal. “But disappointing those who view judicial decisions through a political lens was part of the job.”
Mr. Silberman “wrote important opinions and spotted lurking jurisdictional defects,” Clement observed, “as he strived to model his vision of judicial restraint.”
Mr. Silberman issued one of his most important opinions in Parker v. District of Columbia, authoring the 2-1 decision in 2007 that found a District gun control measure in violation of Second Amendment protections of the right to bear arms.
The case proceeded as District of Columbia v. Heller to the Supreme Court, which voted 5-4 the following year to strike down the D.C. law. In one of his most consequential opinions, Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for the majority, echoed Mr. Silberman’s view that Second Amendment protections apply not only to militia members, but also to individuals.
Mr. Silberman wrote a majority opinion in 1988 that would have invalidated the law that created an independent counsel to investigate government officials, including the president, accused of certain federal crimes. The judge saw the law as a violation of the separation of powers.
The case advanced to the Supreme Court as Morrison v. Olson, in which the court voted to uphold the independent counsel law. It was, Mr. Silberman said, “my greatest disappointment as a judge.” Scalia wrote a noted dissent — of which Mr. Silberman’s earlier opinion had “formed the first draft,” according to Clement — and the law was allowed to expire in 1999.
Mr. Silberman occasionally surprised court-watchers, including when he voted to uphold the 2010 Affordable Care Act, one of President Barack Obama’s signature policy achievements, against Republican challenges. He disliked the law but argued that it was supported by the “commerce clause” of the Constitution allowing Congress to regulate commerce between the states.
Mr. Silberman was frequently floated as a contender for a seat on the Supreme Court, including when Justice William Brennan Jr. resigned in 1990. Around that time, Mr. Silberman ruled in favor of Oliver L. North, the National Security Council aide who had appealed his convictions in connection with the Iran-contra affair. (The charges against him were eventually dropped.) According to The Washington Post, Mr. Silberman’s decision in that case was seen as possibly costing him the Supreme Court nomination, which ultimately went to David Souter.
One of Mr. Silberman’s most controversial opinions was a dissent in a 2021 libel case, in which he argued that the unanimous 1964 Supreme Court decision in New York Times v. Sullivan, a foundational case in media law that protects journalists from libel suits from public figures, should be reevaluated.
“Two of the three most influential papers (at least historically), The New York Times and The Washington Post, are virtually Democratic Party broadsheets. And the news section of The Wall Street Journal leans in the same direction,” he wrote. “Nearly all television — network and cable — is a Democratic Party trumpet.”
“I recognize how difficult it will be to persuade the Supreme Court to overrule such a ‘landmark’ decision,” he conceded. “After all, doing so would incur the wrath of press and media. … But new considerations have arisen over the last 50 years that make the New York Times decision (which I believe I have faithfully applied in my dissent) a threat to American Democracy. It must go.”
Mr. Silberman’s opinion caused an uproar among journalists and advocates for press freedom. It was sharply criticized by J. Michael Luttig, a former federal appeals court judge appointed by President George H.W. Bush, as “dangerous” and “chilling.” To his admirers, the decision represented Mr. Silberman’s ability to shape legal conversations in the country even when he was not in the majority.
“Judge Silberman had a powerful legal mind, enormous energy, and a passion for freedom,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said in a statement after Mr. Silberman’s death. “Our country benefited greatly from that combination. And there was never a dull moment when he was in the room.”
Encouraged into law
Laurence Hirsch Silberman was born in York, Pa., on Oct. 12, 1935. His paternal grandfather made a fortune in the steel industry, and he described his father as “spoiled and pretty much a ne’er-do-well who lost a great deal of money in various ventures financed by my grandfather.”
Mr. Silberman was a baby when his 5-year-old brother was fatally struck by a car. His parents soon relocated Philadelphia and then to New Jersey, where Mr. Silberman grew up. His parents divorced when he was 9, and his mother later worked in real estate and remarried. He said that his mother, his grandfather and an uncle who was a lawyer all encouraged him to enter the legal field.
At the Labor Department, Mr. Silberman once threatened to resign when the Nixon administration attempted to block the nomination of an African American labor scholar. He was deeply affected by an episode in 1975, when, as a top Justice Department official, he was tasked with reviewing the secret files of J. Edgar Hoover, the powerful FBI director who had died three years earlier.
“It was the single worst experience of my long governmental service,” Mr. Silberman wrote years later in the Journal. “I intend to take to my grave nasty bits of information on various political figures — some still active.”
“As bad as the dirt collection business was, perhaps even worse was the evidence that he had allowed — even offered — the bureau to be used by presidents for nakedly political purposes,” Mr. Silberman continued. “I have always thought that the most heinous act in which a democratic government can engage is to use its law enforcement machinery for political ends.”
Mr. Silberman was married for 49 years to Rosalie Gaull “Ricky” Silberman, who co-founded the Independent Women’s Forum, an advocacy organization representing conservative women. She was a vocal supporter of Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas during his 1991 confirmation process, which was bitterly contested over allegations that he had sexually harassed Anita Hill, a former colleague at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, where Mr. Silberman’s wife also had worked. Thomas was ultimately confirmed to the high court.
In 2008, Mr. Silberman married Patricia Winn. Besides his wife, of Washington, survivors include three children from his first marriage, Robert Silberman of Potomac, Md., Katherine Fischer of Washington and Annie Otis of Hartford, Conn.; a sister; eight grandchildren; and a great-granddaughter. | 2022-10-04T00:54:18Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Laurence Silberman, titan of conservative jurisprudence, dies at 86 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/10/03/laurence-silberman-federal-appeals-judge/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/10/03/laurence-silberman-federal-appeals-judge/ |
Last summer Karen filed for divorce and moved back home. She was devastated, and so were her father and I.
We did our best to counsel her and get her back on her feet. Karen has had many days of insecurity, anger, grief and sadness. Thankfully they had no children.
We are beside ourselves with disappointment, and her father is outraged. He feels that Karen is no better than her former husband. He has condemned Karen’s actions, telling her that she is morally wrong (I don’t disagree) and that the man she is with is a lying, cheating lowlife.
Now this man and his wife have announced that they are expecting a baby, further outraging my husband. I am acquainted with the wife’s family. We won’t ever be able to look at them without feeling guilty. Karen claims that they have something special. He obviously is still in his marriage, and yet Karen defends him.
Why would our smart and talented daughter settle for sloppy seconds and have an affair with a married man whose wife is pregnant? Why would she hurt another person the very same way she was hurt (and now a baby is involved)?
Ashamed: You’ve already judged your daughter. Your husband has expressed his disgust loudly and repeatedly. Now the way for you to cope is to buck up and realize that you did not raise a saint.
If her own drama is only a year old and she has been seeing this other man for several months, she seems to have leaped headlong from one mess into another. Your daughter has been hurt and she is now consciously hurting someone else.
She should be meeting with a counselor. Discussing dubious choices with a neutral therapist is much more productive than trying to defend indefensible behavior to your furious parents.
Unhappy: You should be honest with your family member, outlining everything you have mentioned here. Tell her that for the cat’s sake you believe that she needs to be rehomed, and let her know that you will do your utmost to find the best possible situation for the cat.
Jealous: Several readers expressed similar sardonic responses. | 2022-10-04T04:36:55Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Ask Amy: We are ashamed of our daughter’s relationship with a married man - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/10/04/ask-amy-daughter-affair-married-man/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/10/04/ask-amy-daughter-affair-married-man/ |
Dear Miss Manners: What do you think about entertainers, celebrities and “common folks” onstage and TV, especially on game shows, applauding themselves?
Yes, self-aggrandizement is rampant, and not just on social media.
People often tell Miss Manners that etiquette is just a matter of making other people feel comfortable. Well, often, yes. But there are times to make people uncomfortable enough that they stop discomforting others. This is one of them.
Unfortunately, that is not license to be rude yourself. Miss Manners suggests a pleasant, “You're mistaken about me. How far along are you?”
Presuming that this person is not someone to whom you said “I’ll be right back” 45 minutes ago, Miss Manners is as puzzled as you.
Many people kindly inquire about his well-being, but far too many follow up with questions about his likely life expectancy. I find this to be thoughtless and upsetting, and I feel certain that such things would never be asked about family members that get about on two legs rather than four.
“Life is always so uncertain. But I hope you are doing well?” | 2022-10-04T04:37:07Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Miss Manners: Why are people applauding themselves onstage? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/10/04/miss-manners-applauding-themsef-onstage/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/10/04/miss-manners-applauding-themsef-onstage/ |
Talking fetus in ‘Blonde’ adds to ‘antiabortion propaganda,’ critics say
This image released by Netflix shows Ana de Armas as Marilyn Monroe in a scene from Blonde. (Netflix via AP) (2022 © Netflix/AP)
Netflix’s fictionalized Marilyn Monroe biopic, “Blonde,” has been widely criticized for its exploitative depiction of Monroe’s character. Now, some also say the film mishandled a major theme: abortion.
The movie shows Monroe have two illegal abortions, both times against her will. She also exchanges dialogue with a computer-animated fetus that she later miscarries.
“You won’t hurt me this time, will you?” the fetus asks Monroe, who is played by Ana de Armas.
Abortion rights activists say the scenes, based on a 2000 novel by Joyce Carol Oates, contribute to “anti-abortion propaganda.”
“Medically inaccurate descriptions of fetuses and pregnancy” contribute to abortion stigma, Caren Spruch, national director of arts and entertainment engagement at the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, told The Washington Post in a statement.
The film bolsters antiabortion advocates’ message “with a CGI-talking fetus, depicted to look like a fully-formed baby,” she added in the statement, which was first reported by the Hollywood Reporter.
The release of “Blonde,” and the ensuing criticism, comes about three months after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, which for nearly five decades protected abortion access in the United States. The decision prompted bans in a slew of states that have left about a third of American women without access to abortions where they live.
1 in 3 American women have already lost abortion access. More restrictive laws are coming.
Andrew Dominik, the film’s director, told USA Today that the criticism is a result of “happenstance.”
“It’s just people looking at the film through the lens of their own particular prejudices or whatever agenda that they want to advance,” he told the paper. “I don’t think it has anything to say about Roe v. Wade.”
“If the film would have come out in 2008, no one would be talking about that,” he added. “And if (it) were to come out in 10 years (from now), no one is going to care about it either. People are reacting to this idea that freedoms are being taken away.”
Steph Herold, who researches reproductive health at the University of California at San Francisco, studies abortion depiction in films and television shows. Herold told The Post she has seen many of the roughly 500 on-screen portrayals of abortion produced over the last century.
The last decade has seen an increasing number of abortion depictions in films and shows, she said, and they’ve been mixed in how accurately the procedure is portrayed.
“Blonde” is not the worst representation of abortion she’s seen, she said, though she still found its portrayals problematic and inaccurate. In the scene in which Monroe receives her first abortion, the character lies on a surgical table in a sterile room, which reinforces the notion that abortion is a “serious surgical event,” Herold said. Today, abortions typically take place at outpatient clinics. Abortion pills were used in more than half of U.S. abortions in 2020, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive rights organization.
Herold also said the scene in which Monroe’s character speaks to the fetus, which has the voice of a child, “personifies” it, while the close-up image of the unrealistically developed fetus removes the focus from Monroe as a pregnant person, Herold added.
“It totally infantilized her in ways that I’ve only seen in antiabortion propaganda-type movies,” Herold said. “I was pretty shocked by it, especially given the platform and the mainstream quality of this movie.”
It’s unclear if Monroe even had abortions, Herold said. Michelle Vogel, who authored the book “Marilyn Monroe: Her Films, Her Life,” told USA Today that while Monroe’s miscarriages were well-documented, there is no evidence the actress had abortions, much less forced procedures.
“Any talk of pregnancy termination is an assumption on our part,” Vogel told the paper. “Marilyn loved children and she was desperate to be a mother. Sadly, she never carried a baby to term.”
María Luisa Paúl contributed to this report. | 2022-10-04T06:08:55Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Talking fetus in ‘Blonde’ adds to ‘antiabortion propaganda,’ critics say - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/10/04/blonde-planned-parenthood-abortion/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/10/04/blonde-planned-parenthood-abortion/ |
A 26-year-old from the city of Mandalay in Myanmar delivers tea to customers at the “Freedom” tea shop near the Thai-Myanmar border. (Chalinee Thirasupa for The Washington Post)
NEAR THE THAI-MYANMAR BORDER — At a newly opened tea shop named “Freedom,” the tea is brewed strong, then stirred with evaporated and condensed milk by a revolutionary on the lam.
Food is cooked over a gas stove by a 53-year-old woman wanted by police for sheltering rebel soldiers, and served by teenage waiters considered by the Myanmar military to be enemies of the state. Customers pay at a counter staffed by a young woman with long hair and a sweet smile — a former kindergarten teacher hunted by soldiers for refusing to work under the generals who seized power in Myanmar early last year.
“I’ll be a saint in the time of the Buddha,” reads a Burmese poem scribbled with marker onto an outdoor fridge. “I’ll revolt in the time of the dictator.”
As Myanmar spirals deeper into civil war, this tea shop along the country’s border with Thailand has become a haven for rebels on the run. Six days a week, opposition politicians and youth activists filter through the metal gate of this converted semidetached house, settling on wooden crates that serve as tables and chairs. Burmese folk songs play from speakers placed on the floor, and the woody smell of cheroot cigars hangs heavy in humid air. Over cups of tea, customers and staff talk about what they’ve heard about the fighting back home and the latest person they know in hiding, in jail or dead.
“Did you hear about the barn?” a customer asked a friend one recent afternoon, referring to an empty farm building along the border where Myanmar villagers fleeing military airstrikes had been sheltering.
“Blocked off,” he continued. “You can bring supplies in but they’re not letting anyone out.”
More than 176,000 Myanmar nationals have crossed into Thailand since the military takeover, according to the International Organization for Migration. Thousands more are arriving through the jungles every month, desperate to escape the junta’s brutal crackdown on opposition. Past the border, the lucky ones get picked up by humanitarian organizations that house them in hotels and help to file their applications seeking refuge or asylum. But far more rely on informal networks of support.
Rebel soldiers break bread with military defectors in 20-square-foot rooms rented out by resistance leaders and activists. Doctors, factory workers, farmers and orchestra players crowd into empty safe houses, sharing mats to sleep on.
“We’re trying to stand together,” said Thet Swewin, who leads the crew behind Freedom tea shop. “It’s the only thing we can do.”
Tall, with waist-long hair and a toothy smile, Thet Swewin, 36, arrived in Thailand six months after the coup, carrying just his laptop and a family longyi, a traditional sarong-like garment. He ran a nonprofit in Yangon and was well-connected to the dissident community, so he quickly became involved in the effort to support new arrivals, he said.
Initially, getting people shelter and keeping them out of jail took up most of his time, he added. But as fighting in Myanmar worsened and the prospect of returning to the country narrowed, he realized that people in the border region also needed jobs.
Thet Swewin, who also goes by Thet, pulled together $6,700 in savings and rented the two-story building on a dusty street six miles from the border. He recruited a ragtag group of new exiles, then came up with a plan: The first floor, which had an open-air space of 200 square meters (about 2,150 square feet), would be a restaurant serving tea and simple food like kyay oh — noodles with pork and egg — and mohinga, a fish soup. The second floor would be a free venue for people to hold activities for the diaspora.
Half of the profits from the tea shop would go toward sustaining the people who worked there, Thet decided. The other half would be sent back into Myanmar to help fund resistance efforts.
The rebels set up scaffolding by the side of the house for an outdoor kitchen. Then, on Aug. 1, they opened for business.
“A traditional tea shop,” Thet said one recent afternoon, beaming as he walked past tables packed with people. “You can eat, smoke, talk. All the things that matter to Burmese.”
Waves of Myanmar exiles have come to Thailand before. In the 1980s, for example, when military persecution drove tens of thousands of ethnic Karen refugees to flee Myanmar, Thailand allowed international agencies to set up camps that provided food and shelter. This time, advocates say, the Thai government hasn’t given official recognition to the influx of people, making it difficult for humanitarian agencies to provide aid.
“There’s nothing now to welcome the newcomer,” said Aung Moe Zaw, 55, a Myanmar politician and activist who lives along the border. “For our survival, at least, we have to support one other.”
Thet said he learns of new arrivals nearly every day, often through calls from the local jail. In mid-August, he came across a gym trainer from the city of Mandalay who fled after being targeted by the military for attending protests. He was unshaven and told Thet that he’d lost 50 pounds since he got to Thailand. By the following week, the gym trainer had joined the tea shop as a dishwasher. He cleaned up his beard and put on some weight.
A mural of the Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara stretches across a wide wall, visible to passersby. The receipts are printed with the Burmese words for “freedom.” And the tables are labeled, with torn-up pieces of cardboard, with the names of cities in Myanmar that have seen the deadliest fighting: Mindat in the mountains of western Chin state; Pauk in central Magway; Myaung in next-door Sagaing. The effect is such that when waiters call out orders, it sounds sometimes like they’re paying homage to the fallen — “drinks for Mindat!”
They’re not looking to be caught, Thet said, breaking into a slight smile. But they’re not looking to hide either. Even though most of the employees have spent time in detention or had their homes raided by the military, they still want to be part of the resistance. So they can’t share their names, he said, but they’ll share their stories.
Take for example the cook, Thet said, standing by the kitchen door and gesturing at a middle-aged woman in an apron and a hair net, sweating over a wok. She used to run a thriving bus company in Bago, a city of 250,000 northeast of Yangon, and when her son became a rebel soldier in the People’s Defense Force, she helped to ferry and shelter members of his platoon.
Or meet the manager, Thet continued, turning his head to look at a petite woman with a round face and dark hair going over accounts by a table near the cash register. In Yangon, she was a private banker, he explained, married with two kids to a man who worked for the central bank. When her husband joined the civil disobedience movement and refused to work, a warrant was issued for his arrest.
“Masks, please,” the manager said, eyeing the kitchen staff.
She raised her brow as a stocky man with sharp, almond-shaped eyes exited the kitchen. He was taking a break, he said impishly. With a towel draped over his shoulder, he walked over to the cash register, smiling at the cashier.
“Oh, don’t get me started on this big guy,” Thet said loud enough for him to hear. “Our teamaker.”
He was 29, gregarious, a civil engineer from Bago. He’d been an activist at university, and when the coup happened, he led students and alumni in mass protests.
Part of him begrudged the idea that he’d spent so many years poring over physics problems only to spend his days stirring tea, he said. But he’d been trying, of late, to focus on what he was grateful for. He wasn’t in prison. And when he got to Thailand, he’d met a girl at one of the safe houses — a former kindergarten teacher with the sweetest smile.
“He’s a fighter,” the cashier said, giggling at her fiance. “That’s what I like about him.”
One recent Tuesday evening, as customers trickled out, the gym trainer picked up a guitar. Leaning against a motorcycle, he picked at a few strings, trying to remember the chords of popular music that played in Myanmar cities before the coup. Setting down washcloths and brooms, others in the shop gravitated toward him.
With the guitar playing, they brewed tea. Then they let themselves talk, smoke and sing as the sky turned deep orange.
Aung Naing Soe contributed to this report. | 2022-10-04T06:12:57Z | www.washingtonpost.com | After Myanmar's military coup, rebels and exiles find haven at frontier tea shop - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/04/myanmar-military-coup-rebels-exile/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/04/myanmar-military-coup-rebels-exile/ |
How Kim Jong Un Keeps Advancing His Nuclear Program
Analysis by Jon Herskovitz | Bloomberg
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has shown no interest in resuming talks with the U.S. after agreeing in 2018 to work toward “complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.” Instead, he has been busy making his nuclear-equipped arsenal bigger, deadlier and better able to strike South Korea, Japan, American forces in Asia -- and the U.S. mainland.
1. What is Kim working on?
An array of ballistic missiles of various ranges as well as cruise missiles said to be able to hit Japan. (Ballistic missiles fly in an arched trajectory and are unpowered on descent. Cruise missiles can fly at low altitudes and are maneuverable, making them harder to detect and intercept.)
• Kim has rolled out new solid-fuel ballistic missiles that are easier to move, hide and fire than many liquid-fuel versions. He’s launched more about 60 since May 2019, including nuclear-capable, super-fast KN-23 missiles that can strike all of South Korea -- and U.S. forces stationed there -- within a matter of minutes. He has also launched KN-25 short-range missiles designed to be fired in rapid succession from a single launcher to overwhelm interceptors.
• The new ballistic Pukguksong-3 missile is designed to be fired from a submarine and has an estimated range of 1,900 kilometers, or 1,200 miles. (As of late 2021, North Korea had deployed one submarine that is capable of firing missiles. A second one has been under construction for more than a year.)
• It tested hypersonic missiles in September 2021 and again in January 2022, which are designed to deploy a high-speed glide vehicle that can carry a warhead and maneuver past interceptors.
• In October 2022, it fired its first missile over Japan in about five years, launching what appeared to be a Hwasong-12 intermediate-range rocket. It splashed into the Western Pacific after reaching an altitude of 970 kilometers -- more than twice as high as the International Space Station.
• The country also showed off last year, and again in January, what it said was a new delivery system to fire missiles off a train, making them harder for prying eyes to track.
2. Could Kim really hit the U.S.?
He appears to have acquired that capability after successfully testing an intercontinental ballistic missile in November 2017, the Hwasong-15. A newer, larger ICBM, the Hwasong-17, was displayed at a military parade in October 2020 to mark the 75th anniversary of the ruling Workers’ Party. It may have exploded shortly after launch in a failed test in mid-March 2022. Eight days after that failure, North Korea fired off an ICBM that South Korea believes was the Hwasong-15. Weapons experts say the likely purpose of the Hwasong-17 is to deliver a multiple nuclear warhead payload that could overwhelm U.S. defenses, or a single, high-yield weapon. North Korea is also said to be developing an ICBM that uses solid-fuel technology, potentially giving the U.S. less warning of an imminent launch. Still, it’s unclear whether the country’s ICBMs could beat antimissile systems and are refined enough to strike their intended targets, as well as whether the warheads could survive reentry into the atmosphere.
3. How many nuclear devices does North Korea have?
Experts estimate that North Korea has assembled 40 to 50 nuclear warheads, the fewest among the nine nations with nuclear weapons. However, one estimate, from a 2021 study by the RAND Corp. and Asan Institute, put the number as high as 116. The country has conducted six atomic tests, with Kim responsible for the last four. The US, Japan and South Korea have all said Pyongyang could soon conduct another test. The first detonation in 2006 measured less than one kiloton, leaving experts wondering whether it had been a partial failure. (A kiloton is equal to the force of 1,000 metric tons [1,102 tons] of TNT). In the most recent test, in September 2017, the estimated yield of 120 to 250 kilotons dwarfed the 15 to 20 kiloton U.S. bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. North Korea probably has developed miniaturized nuclear devices to fit into its ballistic missile warheads, according to the assessment of “several” countries cited in a 2020 United Nations report.
4. Where does Kim’s military get its fissile material?
It has been self-sufficient for decades in fissile material, the main ingredient to create a nuclear chain reaction and explosion. The program today relies largely on enriched uranium and, according to weapons experts, produces enough annually for about six bombs. In addition, North Korea appeared in mid-2021 to have resumed plutonium-producing operations -- another means of creating fissile material -- at a nuclear reactor in its antiquated Yongbyon complex.
5. What other surprises might be out there?
North Korea may be working on ICBMs that carry multiple warheads and in-flight countermeasures to throw interceptors off the trail, according to Datayo, an open-source weapons research site. Kim has pushed to develop his fleet of submarines and is looking to deploy a new vessel soon that experts say could fire missiles. He may even try to revive the country’s satellite program, arguing that North Korea has the right as a sovereign state to develop a space program. North Korea said it held an “important” test for a reconnaissance satellite in February. Weapons experts say satellite launches could be used by North Korea to advance missile technology.
6. How can the country afford all this?
The money needed is not huge in global terms. North Korea spent around $4 billion annually on its military, including one of the world’s largest armies, between 2007 and 2017, according to a 2019 CIA assessment. That’s roughly equivalent to two days’ U.S. military spending. Since North Korea is one of the world’s poorest countries, the outlay of around 23% of gross domestic product ranks among the highest globally, if not the most. Although international sanctions have hit the economy hard, North Korea evades some through methods such as clandestine transfers at sea of banned goods such as oil, and it generates cash by means that include ransomware attacks. Kim’s decade-old regime has already taken in as much as $2.3 billion through cybercrimes and is geared to rake in even more, U.S. and United Nations investigators have said.
7. Wasn’t Trump going to fix this?
Former President Donald Trump’s talks with Kim, beginning with Singapore in June 2018, turned the duo from insult-throwing enemies into dialogue partners. But their three meetings didn’t produce any noticeable change, and North Korea has become what three decades of diplomacy had tried to prevent -- a state capable of developing, projecting and detonating atomic bombs. Kim has shown no interest in the President Joe Biden’s call for him to return to nuclear talks.
(Updates details on missile tests in section 1) | 2022-10-04T06:21:53Z | www.washingtonpost.com | How Kim Jong Un Keeps Advancing His Nuclear Program - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/how-kim-jong-un-keeps-advancing-his-nuclear-program/2022/10/04/a992196e-43a5-11ed-be17-89cbe6b8c0a5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/how-kim-jong-un-keeps-advancing-his-nuclear-program/2022/10/04/a992196e-43a5-11ed-be17-89cbe6b8c0a5_story.html |
Truss’s U-Turn Is Welcome, But It’s Only a First Step
Kwasi Kwarteng, UK chancellor of the exchequer, left, and Liz Truss, UK prime minister, attend the Conservative Party’s annual autumn conference in Birmingham, UK, on Sunday, Oct. 2, 2022. Truss acknowledged her UK government mishandled the announcement on unfunded tax cuts which triggered a week of turmoil in financial markets, while insisting her approach is the correct one. (Photographer: Bloomberg/Bloomberg)
After days of insisting there’d be no backtracking on a mini-budget that sank the pound and caused panic in financial markets, the UK government has duly reversed itself. Prime Minister Liz Truss and Finance Minister Kwasi Kwarteng confirmed on Monday that the promised cut in the top rate of income tax from 45% to 40% would be canceled. “We get it, and we have listened,” said Kwarteng.
Give the two a particle of credit for choosing not to dig in regardless of the consequences. That wasn’t a given. Truss takes inspiration from Margaret Thatcher, who famously once said, “To those waiting with bated breath for that favorite media catchphrase, the U-turn, I have only one thing to say. ‘You turn if you want to. The lady’s not for turning.’” For Truss, this celebrated line is now an indelible rebuke.
In truth, she had little choice but to pivot. The financial turmoil induced by the budget had her own party threatening rebellion. Parliament looked ready to vote the proposal down, putting her survival in office at risk. For the moment, anyway, the reversal restores some semblance of control. The pound has recovered its recent losses and long-term interest rates have subsided.
On a narrow reading of the fiscal arithmetic, investors’ reaction to the U-turn might seem almost as exaggerated as their initial reaction to the budget. Reversing the cut in the top rate of tax raises relatively little revenue set against the £45 billion ($51 billion) cost of the plan. But what drove the panic was not so much whether the plans were affordable as whether Truss and Kwarteng could be trusted to execute them responsibly. The top-rate cut was recklessly provocative. Indeed, until Monday, every signal from the Tories’ new leader seemed calculated to undermine confidence.
The sudden reversal could give the new government a second chance, so long as Truss offers further assurances that she’ll be prudent. Among other things, this means patching things up with the European Union; taking advice from the Office for Budget Responsibility (the independent fiscal watchdog) on Treasury plans for taxes and spending; and consulting the Bank of England on the interaction of fiscal and monetary policy, while avoiding any suspicion that she’s aiming to override the central bank’s judgments.
That last point is one other governments should ponder as well. Fiscal and monetary policy have to work in harness. The UK is not alone in having to press down on high inflation while also managing the supply-side shocks induced first by the coronavirus and then by Russia’s war on Ukraine. The more fiscal policy is loosened to cushion economies against these pressures, the harder it is for central banks to tighten monetary policy and bring inflation down.
Last week’s debacle in the UK highlighted the problem in the starkest way — by obliging the central bank to buy government bonds (which eases financial conditions) just as it was planning to start selling its own holdings. Other governments can expect to face similar difficulties if they let fiscal and monetary policy move out of alignment. The challenge for Europe is especially acute. Its supply-side disruptions are severe, calling for added fiscal support; yet many of its economies are already carrying high levels of public debt, putting financial stability at risk as long-term interest rates rise.
There are no easy answers. Macroeconomic policy has rarely been as challenging as it is right now. But that’s no excuse for compounding the problem with outright incompetence.
• As UK Crisis Mounts, Truss Needs to Show Competence: Editorial | 2022-10-04T06:22:17Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Truss’s U-Turn Is Welcome, But It’s Only a First Step - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/trusss-u-turn-is-welcome-but-its-only-a-first-step/2022/10/04/388f3e0c-43a2-11ed-be17-89cbe6b8c0a5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/trusss-u-turn-is-welcome-but-its-only-a-first-step/2022/10/04/388f3e0c-43a2-11ed-be17-89cbe6b8c0a5_story.html |
His denial came after the Daily Beast published a detailed account from an unnamed former girlfriend who said Walker encouraged her to have an abortion after she became pregnant while they were dating
Herschel Walker, the GOP nominee for U.S. Senate in Georgia, participates in his Unite Georgia Bus Tour on Sept. 28 in Forsyth, Ga. (Erik S. Lesser/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)
Herschel Walker, the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate in Georgia, on Monday denied a claim that he paid for a girlfriend’s abortion in 2009, saying in a televised interview on Fox News Channel that the account published in the Daily Beast is a “flat-out lie.”
Walker’s denial came after the Daily Beast published a detailed description from an unnamed former girlfriend who said that Walker encouraged her to have an abortion after she became pregnant while they were dating, wrote her a $700 check to pay for the procedure and then sent her a subsequent “get well” card.
When asked by Fox News’s Sean Hannity about the reported $700 check, Walker, who has voiced opposition to abortion rights, said he frequently gives money to others. “I send money to a lot of people,” Walker said. “I believe in being generous.”
The Washington Post has not independently verified the reporting in the Daily Beast. Walker did not respond to a text message from The Post seeking comment.
The Republican Senate candidate issued a written statement posted on Twitter referencing the Daily Beast story. “I deny this in the strongest possible terms,” he said. In that statement, Walker also said he planned to “sue the Daily Beast.”
Walker is challenging Democratic Sen. Raphael G. Warnock in one of the most closely watched Senate contests of the year. The outcome of race, which polls show is competitive, is expected to help determine which party controls the Senate for the next two years.
Shortly after the Daily Beast story published, one of Walker’s children turned to social media to criticize his father, accusing Walker of lying and saying that the former football star threatened him and his mother with violence that forced them to move multiple times.
“I know my mom and I would really appreciate if my father Herschel Walker stopped lying and making a mockery of us,” wrote Christian Walker.
Christian Walker has offered support for his father in the past, tweeting a video last December in which he hugged his father. “Had the honor of introducing my dad, @HerschelWalker, last night at Mar a Lago,” Christian Walker wrote. The younger Walker has also used his Twitter account to promote conservative ideas.
On Monday evening, Christian Walker alleged that his father “threatened to kill us” and caused him and his mother to move six times in six months “running from your violence.”
Christian Walker’s mother, Cindy Grossman, was married to Herschel Walker for nearly two decades and has recounted violent episodes in the past. Speaking to CNN, she detailed a time when he “held the gun to my temple and said he was gonna blow my brains out.”
Walker has faced criticism for false claims, as well as allegations of stalking and violent threats. He has said that he has battled dissociative identity disorder throughout his life.
Christian Walker also said that other family members discouraged his father from running for office “because we all knew (some of) his past.”
“He decided to give us the middle finger and air out all of his dirty laundry in public, while simultaneously lying about it. I’m done,” Christian Walker wrote. He did not immediately respond to an email or direct message seeking additional comment.
Asked for comment on Christian Walker’s postings, the Herschel Walker campaign pointed to a tweet from the candidate.
“I LOVE my son no matter what,” Herschel Walker wrote on Twitter shortly after his son’s messages posted.
Walker, 60, one of the most well-known figures in Georgia football history, won the Republican primary by a wide margin in May. He ran with former president Donald Trump’s endorsement and the name recognition of a national championship-winning Heisman Trophy winner. | 2022-10-04T06:22:35Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Herschel Walker denies report that he paid for girlfriend’s abortion - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/04/walker-senate-abortion-claim/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/04/walker-senate-abortion-claim/ |
Donald Trump during a 2015 Republican primary debate hosted by CNN. (Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty Images)
The 29-page lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, alleges that CNN took part in a “campaign of dissuasion in the form of libel and slander” that “escalated in recent months” because the network feared Trump would again run for president. The lawsuit took issue with CNN’s use of the words “racist” and “insurrectionist,” as well as associations made between the former president and Adolf Hitler.
Trump has a history of being highly litigious against critics in the media, though these legal challenges have had little success. In 2020, his campaign separately sued The Washington Post and the New York Times for libel over opinion pieces that linked the campaign to Russian electoral interference. (The suit against the Times was dismissed, while the legal challenge against The Post is still pending.) Trump’s campaign also filed a libel suit against CNN over an op-ed in 2020, which was later dismissed.
Jessica Levinson, a law professor at Loyola Marymount University, who reviewed the latest suit, said she sees “no legal path forward” for Trump.
“I see no false statements of fact that were made with actual malice,” she said, adding that an “enormous amount” of the CNN comments described as defamatory in the lawsuit appeared to be opinions.
In the suit, Trump’s lawyers cite numerous clips and articles from CNN, including a 2019 interview with the singer Linda Ronstadt, who compared aspects of his presidency to Nazi rule in Germany. The attorneys argued that Ronstadt “is a singer, not a historian,” and called the interview a “pretext to repeat CNN’s message under the guise of real ‘reporting.’”
Trump’s lawyers argue in the suit that CNN labeled Trump in ways that are “neither hyperbolic nor opinion,” and that the channel acted with “real animosity” to cause him “true harm.”
Levinson said the most probable outcome of Trump’s legal challenge is that it would be thrown out once CNN filed a motion to dismiss the suit. If the case goes to trial, both sides would be able to request evidence from each other to discuss the degree of truth behind CNN’s statements. That ultimately could be disadvantageous for Trump, she said, particularly if the statements are found to be true.
“I think it’s really about trying to chill speech against the former president,” she said. “It’s a warning shot to media outlets that he intends to make good on threats of suing for defamation. And for some outlets, that could ultimately put them out of business.” | 2022-10-04T07:53:32Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Donald Trump sues CNN for defamation, seeks $475 million - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/media/2022/10/04/donald-trump-sues-cnn-defamation-lawsuit/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/media/2022/10/04/donald-trump-sues-cnn-defamation-lawsuit/ |
SANTA CLARA, Calif. — Deebo Samuel turned a short catch into an electric 57-yard touchdown, Talanoa Hufanga returned an interception for a score and the San Francisco 49ers beat the Los Angeles Rams 24-9.
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court rejected Oakland’s last-ditch effort to revive an antitrust lawsuit against the National Football League over the Raiders’ move to Las Vegas in 2020.
PITTSBURGH — Albert Pujols hit his 703rd home run, breaking a tie with Babe Ruth for second place in career RBIs, but the St. Louis Cardinals lost to Pittsburgh 3-2 when the Pirates drew four consecutive walks in the ninth inning to force home the winning run.
PORTLAND, Ore. — An independent investigation into the scandals that erupted in the National Women’s Soccer League last season found emotional abuse and sexual misconduct were systemic in the sport, impacting multiple teams, coaches and players, according to a report released Monday. | 2022-10-04T07:53:44Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Monday's Sports In Brief - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/mondays-sports-in-brief/2022/10/04/f58e9300-43b5-11ed-be17-89cbe6b8c0a5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/mondays-sports-in-brief/2022/10/04/f58e9300-43b5-11ed-be17-89cbe6b8c0a5_story.html |
Peace of Mind Dog Rescue helps older canines and their elderly owners with free walks and fostering
Peace of Mind Dog Rescue founders Carie Broecker, left, and Monica Rua with some of the senior dogs their nonprofit group has taken in. (Peace of Mind Dog Rescue )
The miniature pinschers slept with her, played fetch and cuddled with her on the sofa for more than eight years, said Noel’s daughter, Debra Owens, 60.
When Noel died of cancer in August at age 79, Owens was stunned to learn the facility was full and couldn’t take in Ernesto and Roger.
“I couldn’t leave town immediately to get them, and my mom’s neighbors were complaining that the dogs were barking,” said Owens, who lives in Missouri. “Somebody was coming in to feed them, but they were alone all day.”
“My mom’s wish was for this shelter to take her dogs and get them adopted,” she said. “I had this helpless feeling. I didn’t know what to do.”
Then somebody at the shelter mentioned she should reach out to Peace of Mind Dog Rescue in Pacific Grove on California’s Central Coast. Owens called and immediately arranged for the dogs to be picked up from her mom’s apartment and placed in foster care until they could be adopted, she said.
“It was such a relief during a heartbreaking time,” she said, noting that the dogs are still in foster care.
Broecker, 56, said she came up with the idea of helping vulnerable dogs and their elderly owners while she was caring for a friend’s dog 13 years ago.
“The woman’s name was Alice, and she had emphysema that put her in and out of the hospital,” Broecker recalled.
“When doctors told Alice she had only a few weeks to live, she was moved into hospice care and I took her dog, Savannah, to visit,” she said. “She was anguished about what would happen with Savvy, because she had no friends or family to care for her.”
Alice didn’t want her dog to be placed in a shelter, and was devastated at the thought of her dog possibly being put down, Broecker said.
“I told her, ‘No, don’t worry — I’ll make sure she’s okay,’ ” said Broecker, who adopted the dog.
“You grow attached to them and it’s hard to let them go when they’re adopted,” said Day, 34, who lives in Pacific Grove.
“Senior dogs are so loving, and it’s rewarding to know you’re helping them because they’re often so overlooked,” she added, noting that older dogs make good pets because they’re usually mellow and have already been trained.
“Caring for a senior dog teaches you to be present and live in the moment,” Day added. “They’ve helped me to feel grounded and appreciative of each day.”
Tami Sojka, a Peace of Mind dog walker for about two years, was one of several volunteers who pitched in to walk Jean Haskell’s dog twice a day after she had back surgery last year and needed six months to recover.
“He is such a sweet little dog and it made me feel good to walk him around the neighborhood and help Jean out,” she said.
“He loves to go for his walks and strut his stuff,” she said.
The rescue group also puts dogs into temporary foster care if an owner is hospitalized and can’t be at home.
“For so many of us living alone, it’s just a fabulous idea,” said Sheila Williams, 76, of Monterey, Calif. She was in the hospital for two weeks in April after gall bladder surgery.
“Carie [Broecker] took my dogs Chex, Tater Tot and Acey Ducey to live with her while I recovered,” Williams said. “I can’t live my life without my dogs. They’re my everything.”
“When I was in the hospital, I missed them tremendously, but I took comfort in knowing they were in good hands,” she added.
“They deserve dignity, compassion and love,” she said. “They deserve every kindness.” | 2022-10-04T10:26:25Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Peace of Mind dog rescue helps older dogs and their senior owners - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/10/04/old-dogs-rescue-peace-mind/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/10/04/old-dogs-rescue-peace-mind/ |
One man braved Hurricane Ian’s wrath to rescue a boatload of strangers
Kevin Ott, 53, plucked about a dozen people from floodwaters as the storm pounded Fort Myers, Fla.
Kevin Ott, right, prepares to transfer the people he rescued in Fort Myers, Fla., to the bed of his pickup as Hurricane Ian pounds the area on Sept. 28. (Kevin Ott)
Floodwaters were rising fast Wednesday, forcing Kevin Ott to commandeer a pontoon boat to save his children’s grandmother. As Hurricane Ian unleashed punishing winds and lashing rains on the Florida Gulf Coast, Ott got a text from her while racing to her home in Fort Myers, Fla.
“Hurry up and get here, because we’re going to die,” she wrote.
Ott did his best to move quickly, he told The Washington Post. But as he and three of his children navigated the boat over submerged cars, around downed power lines and between rooftops, they came across a man whose boat had broken down. Ott had intended to head straight to the children’s grandmother, Mary Ann Dineen. Instead, he decided to help the man, who said he had been on his way to save some of his neighbors. Could Ott help them, too?
Over several hours that afternoon, Ott and his children ended up rescuing about a dozen people as Ian made landfall in Cayo Costa and tore through the Fort Myers area. Ian, a Category 4 storm that tied for the fifth-strongest hurricane on record to hit the United States, has caused billions of dollars in damage, killed more than 90 people at last count and scattered some 1,700 others into emergency shelters, all while leaving nearly 850,000 residents without power as of Monday.
Ott, a lifelong resident of southwest Florida, knew he was going to ride out Ian, as he’d done with many hurricanes over the decades. The 53-year-old repairs and maintains boats for a living. As with previous storms, Ott knew he’d be busy once Ian blew through town.
“We got to stay here because there’s going to be people that need us,” Ott said.
On Wednesday morning — less than six hours before Ian made landfall — Ott and one of his sons went to Fort Myers Beach to check out conditions. Water started rushing in, two to three inches in a minute, forcing a retreat to Ott’s home to San Carlos Park, about five miles east of Fort Myers Beach. On the way, he called his children’s maternal grandmother, Dineen, who’s in her 60s and lives about a 10-minute car ride up the road. He told her that things were “looking pretty bad down here” and asked if she wanted him to come help her.
No, Dineen told him. She had a generator, water and a bunch of food — “everything she needed to ride this thing out.” She had put two cars in the garage to protect them, and things were fine at her place. In fact, Dineen was eating breakfast with her daughter and her daughter’s boyfriend, who had come to weather the storm with her.
They hung up.
A little while later, the power went out, which unnerved Ott. He decided to drive five miles south to his boat shop, where he’s ridden out past storms, including Irma in 2017. He described it as “hurricane proof.”
After they got there, Dineen started calling.
Things were getting bad, she told him. She started to lose cellphone service while they were talking. She had to call back repeatedly to tell him she had changed her mind.
“I think you need to come down here,” she told him.
The call dropped, this time for good. From there on out, they would only be able to communicate through text.
Ott hopped in his Nissan 4x4 pickup with three of his kids and started driving the roughly 12 miles to Dineen’s house. Floodwaters forced them to head back to the boat shop. That’s where Ott commandeered his buddy’s pontoon boat, which he hitched to the back of his pickup. He towed the boat toward Dineen’s place and got as close as he could. They’d have to go the final 1½ miles by boat.
“Relentless” winds had bent trees sideways and knocked down power lines. Floodwaters had overtaken cars and trucks. Big, derelict boats were floating by. Ott and his children held whatever they could — trees, rooftop eaves — to stabilize the boat as they threaded their way between houses amid hurricane-force winds.
Meanwhile, Dineen was blowing up Ott’s phone, sending texts that they were in “deep trouble,” Ott said. He told her they were in a boat and on their way.
Then they encountered the guy in the broken-down boat. He had been trying to rescue his neighbors when his boat gave out and he got stuck in a tree, he told them. Together, they found the distressed neighbors, one of whom was an old man “just about on his last breath.”
“He was scared to death,” Ott said.
They kept going. More waving hands, more desperate people. Ott was about to tell a man and woman that he couldn’t take them, but as he looked closer, he saw the mother was holding a toddler wearing a life jacket. “I’m like, ‘We cannot leave these people,’ ” said Ott, whose rescue efforts were first reported by the Daily Beast.
Ott finally got to Dineen’s. As he sent one of the young men he had just saved onto her roof to scout things out, he got one final text from her: “We’re going to die in here.”
He immediately fired one back: “No, you won’t.”
The scout spotted Dineen, her daughter and the daughter’s boyfriend inside the house, floating in a canoe. Part of Ott’s newly formed crew kicked down Dineen’s front door, allowing the vessel to float out.
“The water was just rushing. I mean, it was unbelievable. Like a river, basically,” Ott said.
On their way back, they picked up three more people — a woman who was treading water and her parents, who were on oxygen.
They went down a thoroughfare-turned-canal until they reached Ott’s pickup. After loading everyone into the bed, one of his sons dropped everyone off at a hotel.
Ott had wanted to go back to save more people, but it was getting dark. They packed it in and went back to his boat shop.
Nearly a week after Ian, Ott is one of the many still without power. He has no internet, and cell service was spotty for days until it came back in full force on Monday. He’s still holed up at his boat shop with his son and two daughters, cooking on a generator-powered griddle. Work has been nonstop and shows no signs of letting up.
So he doesn’t have a lot of time to dwell, but when he does, he’s haunted by the people he couldn’t save. His son told him he saw six or seven as they were leaving.
Ott, fearing additional weight would capsize the boat, said he had to pass them by.
“It was horrible. I still can’t sleep at night, because —”
That’s when Ott’s voice failed him. He choked up and had to wait several seconds before it came back.
“I just wonder if some of the people we’d seen we could have saved,” he said. “And I just hope it wasn’t them that died.” | 2022-10-04T10:30:53Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Florida man braves Hurricane Ian to rescue strangers on pontoon boat - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/10/04/pontoon-boat-ian-rescue-florida/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/10/04/pontoon-boat-ian-rescue-florida/ |
What’s lost when successful Black coaches get overlooked
Without enforcement, the Rooney Rule failed to create equitable opportunities for Black coaches. Then it spread to corporate America and fell short there, too.
In 2020, as protests raged after the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, corporate leaders scrambled to show that they, too, were on the side of racial equity.
Video game company Activision Blizzard told players on a loading screen that the Call of Duty series and developer Infinity Ward “stand for equality and inclusion.” JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon took a knee with bank employees. Hundreds of brands posted black squares on Instagram.
And companies across the country flocked to a diversity salve known to be handy during a public relations crisis: the Rooney Rule.
The rule, named for a revered Pittsburgh Steelers owner, had been adopted by the NFL 17 years earlier in response to an outcry — and a legal threat — over the glaring dearth of Black head coaches in a league where nearly 70 percent of the players were Black.
The Rooney Rule is named for the Pittsburgh Steelers' Dan Rooney, pictured shaking hands with wide receiver Hines Ward in 2006. (Keith Srakocic/AP)
The rule required teams to interview at least one minority candidate for every head coach opening. Billed as brilliant in its simplicity, it quickly became popular with corporate America, a trend that culminated shortly after Floyd’s death.
But even as the Rooney Rule was endorsed by some of the most powerful entities in the country, from President Barack Obama to the nation’s biggest banks to the New York Police Department, the NFL appeared to be coming to terms with an uncomfortable reality.
The Rooney Rule had failed.
After apparent success initially, including a Super Bowl matching two Black head coaches and a 2011 season with seven Black men at the helm, racial equity on football sidelines has plunged, with once-encouraging news about the NFL’s diversity revival giving way to a bleakly repetitive news cycle: Black coaches are fired, qualified Black candidates are passed over, and teams are accused of gaming the interview requirement with no fear of consequences.
NFL officials have repeatedly distanced themselves from those failures by pointing out that the league has no control over its teams’ hiring decisions. That shifts the onus to team owners, the predominantly White and male financial titans who tend to exert fierce control over their corporate fiefdoms.
Robert Kraft has owned the New England Patriots since 1994. (Doug Murray/AP)
Jerry Jones purchased the Dallas Cowboys in 1989 and also serves as team president and general manager. (Josie Lepe/AP)
LEFT: Robert Kraft has owned the New England Patriots since 1994. (Doug Murray/AP) RIGHT: Jerry Jones purchased the Dallas Cowboys in 1989 and also serves as team president and general manager. (Josie Lepe/AP)
But an investigation by The Washington Post of the rule’s origins and spread — including interviews with insiders to its history and corporate diversity experts, as well as a review of previously unreported documents — suggests the league for years did too little to exert the influence it did have over its 32 teams. Instead, it clung to a policy that repeatedly proved fallible.
A similar pattern played out as the policy spread to corporate America. Long promoted as a model policy by the NFL, Wall Street’s interest in the rule skyrocketed after Floyd’s death, The Post found in an analysis of corporate filings. In hundreds of mentions of the policy since 2020, it is touted by companies ranging from Regions Bank to Lyft, which said its “Rooney Rule 2.0” accompanied “difficult yet necessary conversations to align and inspire our entire organization.”
But The Post found the Rooney Rule’s broader adoption over the past decade-plus, by entities ranging from Wells Fargo to the state of Oregon to the legal community, has been plagued by familiar flaws: allegations of sham interviews, a lack of enforcement and illusory results. Once considered cutting-edge, the rule now runs counter to more recent scholarship suggesting that corporate diversity is achieved through incentives and culture-building rather than mandates.
“These rules — all the research points in the same direction,” said Frank Dobbin, co-author of “Getting to Diversity: What Works and What Doesn’t” and a sociology professor at Harvard University. “They backfire, or they cause things to get worse.”
Other experts said the early spike in Black head coaches in the NFL was evidence that the policy could be effective if steered correctly. But every expert in diversity policy consulted by The Post agreed on a point that seemed to evade the NFL for years: Such a rule, by itself, is not enough.
Steelers owner Art Rooney II, chair of the NFL’s workplace diversity committee and son of Dan Rooney, for whom the rule is named, concurred.
“I certainly would agree that the Rooney Rule by itself is not an effective diversity policy,” he said, adding that the league’s changes in recent years, including turning to concepts it previously rejected, reflected its shifting views on how to address the problem. “You could make that argument that we thought maybe we solved the issue by just requiring a certain number of interviews. And, obviously, by itself that wasn’t enough.”
The NFL declined to make Commissioner Roger Goodell available for an interview and did not respond directly to requests for comment for this article.
In an interview with The Post on the broader subject of the dearth of Black head coaches, NFL officials emphasized a variety of initiatives that the league has implemented, especially since 2020, that have made it less singularly reliant on the Rooney Rule. “We have not been an organization, certainly over the last three years, that has said, ‘We’re going to put these in place, and that’s it, and it’s good enough,’ ” said Dasha Smith, the NFL’s chief administrative officer.
Attorney Cyrus Mehri's work with Johnnie Cochran Jr. led to the adoption of the Rooney Rule in 2003. (Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post)
A ‘very chilly’ meeting
It started with a bluff.
The news conference that spawned the Rooney Rule was held Sept. 30, 2002, in a side room of a Shula’s Steak House, with a media turnout unobtrusive to the early-bird diners on a Monday afternoon.
Television crews were conspicuously absent. Some of the newspapers with the biggest national reach, including The Post, did not send anyone to cover it.
“Nothing new there, really,” the Chicago Sun-Times mused. “From time to time, a prominent person or group takes up this cause and gets some publicity. Then the issue fades away.”
There were two Black head coaches in the NFL at the time. Between 1990 — the year after the Los Angeles Raiders made Art Shell the first Black head coach in modern NFL history — and 2002, just six of the league’s 91 new head coach hires were Black. There had never been more than three Black head coaches at a time. The recent firings of two well-respected Black coaches, Tampa Bay’s Tony Dungy and Minnesota’s Dennis Green, only reinforced the inequity.
Cyrus Mehri, one of the attorneys staging the news conference, didn’t expect to make history. The event was the culmination of a pro bono passion project for a group of lawyers, academics and activists. Mehri had put on enough press events to know even the most successful of them typically lead to a few articles before being largely forgotten.
“This could’ve easily been a one-week story,” Mehri said.
And it might have been — if not for an off-the-cuff threat uttered by Mehri’s partner in the effort.
Johnnie Cochran Jr. made an impact during a 2002 news conference in Baltimore. (Roberto Borea/AP)
Some in the group had warned Johnnie Cochran Jr. against threatening to sue the NFL for discrimination. After all, he and Mehri didn’t even have an ingredient that’s essential for a lawsuit: a client.
But Cochran believed the NFL would never right itself unless it was forced. He was also the most famous defense attorney on the planet, his successful work for O.J. Simpson having ensured his catchy legal rhymes would not be underestimated again.
“You only litigate,” Cochran proclaimed that day in Baltimore, “after you’ve done everything you can to negotiate.”
Mehri and Cochran handed out copies of a 78-page report titled “Black Coaches in the National Football League: Superior Performance, Inferior Opportunities.” It was based largely on the research of Janice Madden, a labor economist at the University of Pennsylvania.
“I didn’t know anything about football,” Madden said recently, and she had never spoken at a news conference. But she knew corporate inequity. Mehri and Cochran were familiar with her work that showed women in the financial sector were losing out on commissions despite outperforming men, so they asked her whether a similar phenomenon could be studied as it pertained to Black head coaches in the NFL.
Madden compared the performance of the five Black head coaches of the modern era — Shell, Dungy, Green, Ray Rhodes and Herm Edwards — with the performance of the league’s other head coaches over the previous 15 years. She found the Black coaches outperformed their White counterparts by more than a full win per season, including in seasons after which they were fired. The findings were similar to what The Post would discover two decades later, in its data analysis for this project, including that, since 1990, Black head coaches whose teams had won at least nine games were roughly as likely to be fired, on average, as White coaches whose teams had won at least six.
Art Shell coached the Los Angeles Raiders from 1989 to 1994. (Reed Saxon/AP)
“Black coaches are being held to a higher standard,” Cochran said. “Now is the time for the NFL to step up and make a change.”
Initially, it was unclear how seriously the NFL would take that demand. Cleveland Browns owner Art Modell groused that if he listened to Cochran, “he’d have O.J. Simpson coaching my team.”
But the next month, the NFL invited Mehri and Cochran to a meeting at league headquarters in Manhattan. Harold Henderson, then the league’s executive vice president for labor relations, said recently that it wasn’t the threat of litigation that got the league’s attention.
“There was something of a PR concern,” said Henderson, who is Black, referring to the lawyers’ media blitz. “The look, the appearance, the whole notion of it was distasteful and unpleasant.”
Cochran was unavailable, so Mehri was accompanied by Richard Lapchick, a professor and author who regularly clashed with the NFL over the poor grades it earned on his “Racial and Gender Report Card.” The reception from the assembled NFL executives was “very chilly,” Lapchick recalled. “They were obviously not happy to have us there.”
When they got to the topic of how to address the problem, the meeting only got chillier. Mehri pointed to the “fair competition resolution” on the report’s final page. Among the ideas: require a “racially diverse final candidate slate” for teams hiring head coaches and their top assistants and coordinators.
Mehri and Cochran also proposed that the league force teams that bypass the diversity requirement to forfeit draft picks and that then-Commissioner Paul Tagliabue could award additional picks to teams that showed the greatest progress toward diversity.
As Mehri recalls it, that’s when Henderson started “pounding the table [and] getting visceral,” booming that the involvement of draft picks, the sport’s treasured currency for divvying up young talent, was a non-starter.
Henderson recently said he doubted that he banged on the table. “Intimidation is not my style,” he said. But he did remember the league shooting down the involvement of “football capital,” such as draft picks, in any diversity push.
“I recall it as having no traction at all, just no support,” Henderson said. “It was just an idea: ‘Yeah, well, that’s nice, but that probably wouldn’t work.’ ”
The NFL, Henderson said, didn’t consider the meeting an open forum.
“Those guys were there to give us information and make their arguments,” Henderson said of Mehri’s team. “But they didn’t have a seat and a vote and a voice. We weren’t there to argue with them. ... It was: ‘Thank you very much for bringing us this information and bringing this to our attention. And we agree that something needs to be done. And we’re working on it.’ ”
Dan Rooney chaired the NFL committee that developed the diversity hiring guidelines. (Gene J. Puskar/AP)
That job fell to the newly created NFL committee on workplace diversity, chaired by Steelers owner Dan Rooney. It included four other owners, all of them White men, and a “working group” of five club executives, two of whom were Black.
In December 2002, two months after the meeting between Mehri and the NFL, the committee emerged with what the NFL billed as a “comprehensive program to promote diversity in [the] coaching and front office ranks.”
But the program included only one notable requirement, which would soon be dubbed the Rooney Rule. “[Team] owners strongly agreed on the principle,” the NFL’s news release read, “that any club seeking to hire a head coach will interview one or more minority applicants for the position.”
It was a stripped-down version of a concept already gaining traction in business circles — the “diverse slate” of candidates, typically for management positions. Companies including fast-food giant Yum! Brands, Goldman Sachs and the supply chain wing of Starbucks adopted similar policies, corporate and court records show.
Even baseball had a version. In 1999, then-MLB Commissioner Bud Selig told teams that they had to furnish him with a diverse list of job candidates when filling key leadership roles: manager, general manager, assistant general manager and directors of player development and scouting. Selig threatened to discipline clubs that did not “aggressively pursue equal opportunities and initiatives.”
But football’s version focused on only one role and did not refer to any potential enforcement. Gone were forfeited draft picks and any focus on other leadership positions, replaced by a single clause worded more like a gentlemen’s agreement than a contract.
DeMaurice Smith, executive director of the NFL Players Association, calls it the “Rooney suggestion,” dreamed up by billionaire owners he said would be loath to hold themselves accountable. “You really have to ask yourself: Was it designed to work in the first place?” Smith said.
Smith suggested the NFL and its team owners saw through the lawyers’ posturing and “created a public relations feel-good moment” that didn’t result in any modifications to the NFL constitution and spelled out no penalties.
“When you agree to call something a rule knowing that there isn’t an enforcement mechanism, who got bluffed?” Smith said.
But to John Wooten, who played 10 seasons in the NFL before working in front offices, the new policy seemed to have struck a balance that couldn’t be accomplished with a stricter rule such as a hiring mandate.
“This is a thin line that we walk,” said Wooten, who became chairman of the Fritz Pollard Alliance, a nonprofit that served as a watchdog on the NFL’s diversity efforts, and which involved Mehri in various capacities. “I would not want for me to be hired because I was Black. ... And that’s why we stand with the very simple principle: Give me the opportunity to show you what I can do to help your football team.”
To Mehri, getting 32 teams to sign off on the initiative was a miracle that could be improved upon later — if they were sincere about the effort.
“The key is the implementation and carrying it out with a full commitment,” Mehri said at the time.
The Cincinnati Bengals' Marvin Lewis was the first Black coach hired after the Rooney Rule was formulated. (Kirk Irwin/Getty Images)
‘Football mentality’
That the Rooney Rule could be undermined with sham interviews was known from the beginning to be a possibility — or, given the personalities of the men who run football, perhaps a likelihood.
“ ‘If I can find a way to circumvent the rule and have it my own way, then I should do that,’ ” said Henderson, the former NFL executive, in describing a mind-set prevalent in the league. “That’s what I call a football mentality.”
Then-Atlanta Falcons vice president Ray Anderson, who was on the working group that helped come up with the Rooney Rule, said recently that he warned the group that it could become a “check-the-box exercise.”
“We’ve got to make sure and really promise each other that it’s not going to be used as a tokenism tool,” he recalled saying.
Within months of the rule’s passage, the league’s owners and executives began showing how seriously they took that promise.
Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, right, hired Bill Parcells just days after the Rooney Rule was created. He satisfied the requirement with a phone interview. (Tony Gutierrez/AP)
Less than two weeks after the rule’s passage, Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones hired a new coach. He met with Bill Parcells, who is White, for five hours in a jet on a New Jersey tarmac. Jones satisfied the new rule by interviewing Green over the phone.
That same offseason, Detroit Lions President Matt Millen hired Steve Mariucci without interviewing any minority candidates. None would interview, Millen explained, because they knew he was going to hire Mariucci.
Tagliabue gave Jones a pass, explaining that “everyone is satisfied that there was a bona fide interest there,” but he fined Millen $200,000. Almost two decades later, that remains the only fine the NFL has levied in connection with the Rooney Rule.
Several Black coaches said, during interviews for this project or in legal documents, that since the implementation of the Rooney Rule, suspected sham interviews were a constant presence during their time in the NFL.
Former Los Angeles Chargers coach Anthony Lynn, who interviewed with six teams before being hired, said the phenomenon was so persistent that he turned down meetings with teams that hadn’t interviewed a minority candidate “because I did not want to be a token interview.”
But the NFL proudly touted the rule as the number of Black coaches climbed following its implementation. Robert Gulliver, a former human resources head at Citi and Wells Fargo, was hired in 2010 as the league’s first chief diversity officer and quickly became a full-throated ambassador for the Rooney Rule.
He was a regular at business symposiums — holding court with a PNC bank executive in Pittsburgh and a chamber of commerce in Cleveland — where he described the policy as a best practice for diversity inside and outside of football. At the Board Leadership Forum in New York, Gulliver described the Rooney Rule as “the NFL’s most significant export besides the game itself.”
Football’s faith in the rule received the highest possible affirmation — that of the president of the United States — in 2015. As part of an initiative to diversify start-ups and the tech industry, Obama’s administration touted that companies including Facebook, Box, Intel, Xerox and Pinterest had committed to variations of the Rooney Rule, which the White House deemed among “effective methods” for achieving corporate diversity.
Anthony Lynn passed on what he considered “token” interviews before the Los Angeles Chargers hired him in 2017. (Harry How/Getty Images)
The NFL continued to stand by its rule even as its own numbers dropped. Other than expanding the rule to apply to general managers in 2009, the league resisted significantly modifying or overhauling its signature policy.
In 2013, none of the eight open coaching spots went to a minority, and the number of Black head coaches dropped to three. That year, the Fritz Pollard Alliance pointed out to the NFL what is now a well-known phenomenon — that a leaguewide trend of hiring offensive-oriented coaches was further tilting the odds in favor of White candidates. The group attempted to get the NFL to address the lack of Black coaches in the offensive pipeline by expanding the Rooney Rule to include coordinators, according to a letter obtained by The Post.
The NFL declined, with the apparent objection that the modification would interfere with incoming head coaches assembling their staffs. The following year, the alliance tried again, this time with a condition to address that concern: The Rooney Rule would only apply to coordinators when such a spot becomes vacant for teams with an incumbent head coach.
“We strongly believe this modification is in the long term best interest of the League, particularly with offensive minded and quarterback guru coaches being in such high demand for head coaching positions,” Mehri, then counsel for the Fritz Pollard Alliance, wrote to Gulliver in January 2014.
But the league rejected the idea.
“Year after year, the attitude was, ‘Well, let’s wait and see and collect more data,’ ” Mehri said.
Meanwhile, research piled up that suggested the NFL’s implementation of the policy was obsolete — including a 2016 study that suggested such rules could work against minority or female candidates when there was only one of them.
Protests of racial inequality and police brutality, inspired by former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick, caught the ire of President Donald Trump, who used the term “son of a bitch” to describe players who knelt during the national anthem. Most NFL fans said they disapproved of the protests, and television ratings fell, all of it contributing to a perceived risk of alienating White fans.
Amid this scrutiny, the NFL declined to punish one of its teams for a hiring that some felt spelled the end of the Rooney Rule as a serious measure. In 2018, after Oakland Raiders owner Mark Davis suggested he had decided to hire Jon Gruden before interviewing any minority candidates, Commissioner Roger Goodell found that the team hadn’t violated the policy.
“Clubs divine from that: ‘The league is not serious about the rule. Let’s just get this over with and get who we want,’ ” said Jeremi Duru, a professor of law at American University who has represented the Fritz Pollard Alliance.
Troy Vincent, the NFL’s executive vice president of football operations, acknowledged in a recent interview that the league stumbled during that period. “I think we hit a snag — actually, in 2018, I think the whole world hit a snag ... in particular after the ‘son of a bitch’ comment,” Vincent said. “That snag in 2017, 2018, we just haven’t recovered from it.”
Marvin Lewis was fired at the end of 2018 after 16 seasons as the Cincinnati Bengals' coach. (Frank Victores/AP)
Hue Jackson had coaching stints with the Oakland Raiders and Cleveland Browns. (David Richard/AP)
Todd Bowles was let go after four seasons with the New York Jets. (Rey Del Rio/Getty Images)
Vance Joseph was given two seasons to lead the Denver Broncos. (Justin Edmonds/Getty Images)
Steve Wilks was ousted after just one season with Arizona Cardinals. (Ross D. Franklin/AP)
Marvin Lewis was fired at the end of 2018 after 16 seasons as the Cincinnati Bengals' coach. (Frank Victores/AP) Hue Jackson had coaching stints with the Oakland Raiders and Cleveland Browns. (David Richard/AP) Todd Bowles was let go after four seasons with the New York Jets. (Rey Del Rio/Getty Images) Vance Joseph was given two seasons to lead the Denver Broncos. (Justin Edmonds/Getty Images) Steve Wilks was ousted after just one season with Arizona Cardinals. (Ross D. Franklin/AP)
Anderson, the former Falcons executive who helped craft the rule, said team owners doomed the policy. He has called for the rule to be renamed out of respect for Dan Rooney.
“I don’t think there was enough good faith and enough deliberateness on the part of the owners who were making these hires,” said Anderson, now the athletic director at Arizona State University. “The numbers have gotten so embarrassingly low that I think Mr. Rooney would say, ‘Well, if we’re not going to be serious about the efforts that we talked about, then don’t use my name anymore.’ ”
Art Rooney II's Steelers have been coached by Mike Tomlin since 2007. (Gene J. Puskar/AP)
The honeymoon ends
Across football, officials struggle to explain why the Rooney Rule stalled out, citing everything from Trump-era politics to Dan Rooney’s 2017 death to team owners’ recent obsession with offensive-minded “whiz kids.”
“It’s hard to explain,” Art Rooney II said.
But for some attorneys and researchers in the field of corporate diversity, the explanation is simple, if brutal: The Rooney Rule and initiatives like it don’t work — at least not without more effective methods propping them up.
Attorney Linda Friedman, who has filed racial discrimination lawsuits against major financial firms, said companies in those legal crosshairs often go on a diversity hiring spree without tending to the culture that led to the crisis in the first place.
“We call it the honeymoon period,” Friedman said. “But we don’t see any increase in representation across the board because, even where the hiring spikes, people don’t survive if they’re placed in an environment that doesn’t want them.”
Among her clients is Lance Slaughter, a Black financial adviser who had 20 years of experience when he was hired by Wells Fargo in 2005. Slaughter had hopes for upward mobility at the company. But once he got there, he said, he saw no Black faces in management and discovered there was an even more insidious impediment to success. Black employees, he said, were rarely if ever recruited to teams of brokers who pool clients — a lucrative arrangement he said would typically guarantee success for those involved.
Slaughter said Wells Fargo refused to make sure the teams were racially equitable, one of several ways he alleged that the company set up Black employees to fail — even as it touted hiring them as a win for diversity. “So guys will figure it out: ‘Okay, I hire these folks, and I meet my objective,’ ” Slaughter, who still works for Wells Fargo, said of the mind-set of his supervisors. “ ‘And whether or not it’s successful, it doesn’t matter.’ ”
Slaughter’s colleague Erika Williams was recruited to Wells Fargo in 2012. She said she was “treated as a hollow diversity hire,” echoing Slaughter’s allegation that Black advisers were shut out of opportunities and forced to work harder for less.
“We had to find our own everything,” Williams said. “If you don’t get out and get it, you will starve. We just weren’t privy to any of the successes. We had to do everything on our own.”
“We had to find our own everything,” Erika Williams said of her time working for Wells Fargo. (Sandy Huffaker for The Washington Post)
Lance Slaughter filed a class-action lawsuit that ended with a settlement in 2017. (Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post)
LEFT: “We had to find our own everything,” Erika Williams said of her time working for Wells Fargo. (Sandy Huffaker for The Washington Post) RIGHT: Lance Slaughter filed a class-action lawsuit that ended with a settlement in 2017. (Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post)
In 2013, Slaughter filed a class-action lawsuit against Wells Fargo; Williams and more than 300 other Black employees soon joined the suit. In 2017, the company, which denied wrongdoing, settled for $35.5 million.
Amid the legal fight, in 2016, Wells Fargo adopted a policy aimed at increasing diversity for senior leadership. Then-CEO Timothy Sloan touted that policy during testimony to Congress in 2019 when being questioned about the company’s role in several consumer scandals.
“I instituted the Wells Fargo equivalent of the Rooney Rule,” Sloan said, adding that the company has “made progress both in terms of the number of women and diverse leaders.”
In June, Wells Fargo temporarily suspended the policy after the New York Times reported it had resulted in sham interviews of Black candidates. A Wells Fargo spokesperson told The Post that it “paused to reevaluate” the program, which it has since reactivated, but stood by its results, saying diverse hires were up nearly 30 percent since 2020.
But allegations of sham efforts and toothless enforcement have dogged other corollaries to the Rooney Rule, all of which received favorable press when they were implemented. Among them is MLB’s approach: Though roughly half of major league players are non-White, only five of the 30 managers are — and there is an even more pronounced dearth of people of color in front-office positions.
Dave Stewart, a former all-star pitcher and general manager, said that from the early days of the Selig Rule, he believed he was subjected to sham interviews. The situation has only become more hopeless, he said.
“My interviews, I felt, were just for the sake of doing the interviews,” Stewart said. “It’s just gotten to a point in baseball where, as a minority, your expectation of achieving those positions is almost zero.”
Last year, MLB changed its policy in an apparent attempt to reduce potential sham interviews, allowing internal promotions of “non-diverse” candidates but with the “expectation” that they be replaced by a person of color or a woman.
One state’s effort to diversify the university coaching ranks was met, on at least a few occasions, with a familiar lack of enforcement. In 2009, activist Sam Sachs succeeded in getting Oregon legislators to pass a law requiring state universities to interview at least one minority candidate when hiring coaches and athletic directors. But the law had no penalty attached if schools disregarded it, which they promptly did.
In 2013, Oregon State University hired a softball coach without interviewing a minority candidate. An OSU spokesperson said at the time: “We did not follow the state law regarding the hiring of head coaches, which was an oversight on our part.”
Sachs said the law he helped forge has been ignored at least three times, though he pointed to the repeated hiring of minority candidates to top athletic positions as evidence of the law’s effectiveness. Sachs has been involved in successful efforts to have similar rules implemented by the governments of Portland and the surrounding county.
Sam Sachs compelled Oregon lawmakers to require state universities to seek minority candidates for coaching and athletic director positions. (Don Ryan/AP)
“I think its bulls--- when people say the Rooney Rule doesn’t work,” Sachs said. “We’ve shown here in Oregon ... that it works, but you have to be committed to it.”
But such rules are often credited with progress that would’ve occurred regardless, said Paola Cecchi DiMeglio, a data scientist at Harvard Law School who studied a policy known as the legal community’s answer to the Rooney Rule.
The Mansfield Rule, adopted by major law firms since 2017, measures whether firms have considered at least 30 percent people of color, women or those from underrepresented groups when filling high-level positions. It has been credited with improving firms’ diversity, but Cecchi DiMeglio said the rule “has had no effect.” The improved numbers, she found, were tied to shifting national demographics. She called the Mansfield Rule an “easy solution avoiding the hard work of modifying the real root cause” of racial inequity.
In an analysis that could apply to the NFL as easily as the law firms she studied, Cecchi DiMeglio said the key for companies implementing such rules is for them to “be quick in seeing if they have the effect you are intending to have, and to otherwise quickly shift. … Because otherwise, you keep creating over and over the same loop.”
Diversity Lab, the company that certifies law firms based on their compliance with the Mansfield Rule, denounced Cecchi DiMeglio’s “flawed research” when contacted by The Post and distanced its rule from that of the NFL. “The only similarity between the Rooney Rule and the Mansfield Rule is the word ‘rule,’ ” CEO Caren Ulrich Stacy wrote.
That’s a new distinction. Diversity Lab previously said its policy was “inspired” by the “revolutionary” NFL policy and boasted that the Mansfield Rule was “the next generation of the Rooney Rule.” It removed references to the Rooney Rule from its website in 2020, The Post found.
When asked about that shift, Ulrich Stacy said Diversity Lab reworked the Mansfield Rule after observing “that approach wasn’t working as hoped in the NFL.”
In 2018, a debate over the effectiveness of the Rooney Rule boiled over between shareholders and employees at one of the world’s largest companies. A group of shareholders asked Amazon — which at the time had an all-White 10-person board of directors, three of whom were women — to “implement a ‘Rooney Rule’ ” in subsequent searches. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)
The company resisted, saying the rule would just formalize a practice already in place. In internal communications, a representative for the company reportedly argued the Rooney Rule risked a “check the box” approach, citing the study that shows having only one minority or female candidate has negative results. One of the study’s authors, Stefanie K. Johnson, then wrote that Amazon was misinterpreting her results. The company relented and implemented a version of the Rooney Rule. The company soon added two women of color to its board.
Johnson, a professor at the University of Colorado’s Leeds School of Business, said the Rooney Rule could deserve credit for helping to diversify Amazon’s top ranks but that it would be “really naive” to believe it was the only factor — and Amazon itself has said it “had long been in discussions with both candidates” before the implementation of the policy.
“Maybe the thing that changed is the pressure from activist investors or the public spotlight about it,” Johnson said. “Or I think it really takes commitment from top-level leaders to say, ‘Okay, fine, we’re going to do something.’ ”
Frank Dobbin, the Harvard professor, said a similar phenomenon may have explained the policy’s initial apparent success in the NFL.
“One possibility is it never really had any effect,” he said. “You just had this focus on the problem getting owners to pay more attention, and then once that went away, they just went back and started doing things the way they always had.”
Friedman, the lawyer who represented Slaughter and Williams in the Wells Fargo lawsuit, said that, when it comes to the financial industry and the NFL, she believes the Rooney Rule failed because it was no match for institutions with a long history of entrenched bias.
“It’s not the idea that failed — it’s the rollout,” she said. “If you’re going to roll it out to an institution that has no interest in changing, it doesn’t matter what you roll out. It’s not going to stick.”
Mike McDaniel, who identifies as biracial, was hired as the Miami Dolphins' head coach this offseason. (Megan Briggs/Getty Images)
The old playbook
In 2020, the NFL appeared to be coming to terms with the shortcomings of its implementation of the Rooney Rule.
In May of that year — before Floyd’s death — the league expanded the rule to include other coaching positions, including coordinators, six years after rejecting that idea from the Fritz Pollard Alliance. The NFL announced that it would require multiple minority interviews instead of just one in head coaching searches, also years after research showed that greatly increased the probability of minority hiring.
That November, in the most significant departure from previous policies, the league then said it would award draft picks to teams for developing minority coaches and executives hired away by other teams. That policy came into play this offseason when the Miami Dolphins hired Mike McDaniel, the biracial offensive coordinator of the San Francisco 49ers. The 49ers received two third-round picks.
Troy Vincent, the NFL executive, recently described the league’s current mind-set toward its diversity initiatives. “The Rooney Rule’s a tool,” he said. “Has the tool worked? To some degree yes, but it’s a tool. It complements all of the other things.”
But as the NFL moved away from its singular reliance on the Rooney Rule, Wall Street shareholders touted it like never before.
Regulatory filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission provide a window into the buzzwords of corporate life. They consist of documents in which companies boast of policies or shareholders demand them.
Mentions of the Rooney Rule
in SEC filings by year
George Floyd’s death
In the decades following the NFL’s adoption of the Rooney Rule, those filings — annual reports, prospectus materials, proxy statements and other forms — showed a small but growing number of mentions of the policy in documents concerning publicly traded companies.
In 2020, before Floyd’s murder May 25, there were 27 mentions, an uptick in part tied to New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer filing shareholder proposals for companies to adopt the policy.
After Floyd’s murder, the mentions stayed roughly at that pace through the end of the year as pressure ramped up on corporations to introduce racial equity measures.
In November 2020, Wall Street research firm Glass Lewis announced it would include in its reports “whether the board has adopted a policy requiring women and minorities to be included in the initial pool of candidates when selecting new director nominees (aka ‘Rooney Rule’).”
The following January, the country’s five biggest banks — JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo and U.S. Bancorp — publicly committed to versions of the Rooney Rule in response to proposals from the American Federation of Labor, the country’s largest labor group.
From the day of Floyd’s murder through this September, the Rooney Rule has been mentioned 268 times in regulatory filings.
Among the companies that touted their adoption of the Rooney Rule for the first time in filings following Floyd’s murder: Valero Energy, Avis Budget, Dollar General and Groupon.
In 2021, Activision Blizzard said it was committing to the Rooney Rule for all director and CEO searches — while still rejecting as an “unworkable encroachment” a shareholder proposal that the gaming company apply the policy to all open positions. Despite having previously adopted the rule for its board of directors, Amazon also rejected a proposal to take the policy companywide.
More than corporations turned to the rule in the wake of Floyd’s murder. In March 2021, then-Mayor Bill de Blasio decreed via executive order that the New York Police Department had to interview at least one applicant of color when filling positions higher than captain.
“That approach in professional sports has proven to be effective,” de Blasio said at a news conference. “There’s always more to do, but it’s really helped.”
Then-mayoral candidate Eric Adams, a former NYPD captain, derided the order at the time as one of “symbolic appearances, where worthy candidates merely get a ‘look.’ ” But with Adams now serving as mayor, the NYPD said it “continues to comply” with the order.
Cyrus Mehri still believes in the effectiveness of the policy he and Johnnie Cochran Jr. helped to create — if it’s not set up to fail.
He was both heartened and dismayed when, 18 years after he was told the league would never involve “football capital” in a diversity push, the NFL overhauled its policy to more closely resemble the ideas they pitched.
“You got to give them credit for what they did, but they missed opportunities to do more and do better,” Mehri said. “Now you’re kind of making up for two decades of lost time.”
Two decades after Cyrus Mehri and Johnnie Cochran Jr. pushed the NFL to change, it remains slow to arrive. (Amy Sancetta/AP)
Additional reporting by Alice Crites and Emily Giambalvo. Editing by Joe Tone. Copy editing by Michael Petre. Photo editing by Toni L. Sandys. Video editing by Jayne Orenstein, Joshua Carroll, Jorge Ribas and Justin Scuiletti. Design and development by Brianna Schroer and Joe Fox. Design editing by Virginia Singarayar and Matt Callahan. Logo design by Chloe Meister. Project management by Wendy Galietta.
Gus Garcia-Roberts is an investigative reporter in the Sports Department. He joined The Washington Post in April 2021. Twitter Twitter | 2022-10-04T10:30:59Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The Rooney Rule failed. Then it spread. - Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/interactive/2022/rooney-rule-nfl-black-coaches/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/interactive/2022/rooney-rule-nfl-black-coaches/ |
The city has yet to reach about half of those on its “People of Promise” list, and a top official graded the program as a C-plus.
Keith L. Alexander
The 1200 block of North Capitol Street NW, where Jahmeze Williams was shot and killed earlier this year. (Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post)
A month after the D.C. government set out to do whatever it took to save Jahmeze Williams, the 20-year-old slumped over in the back seat of a car, a bullet lodged in his right arm.
He died within half an hour, shot inches above a tattoo of his mother’s name.
His life wasn’t supposed to end this way. Williams was one of about 230 D.C. residents the city had dubbed “People of Promise,” a diplomatic way of referring to a list of those considered most at risk of committing violence — or becoming a victim of violence themselves. The initiative, a key pillar of D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser’s effort to combat crime as homicides continue at a pace that could reach a two decade high, was designed to bring intense government services to those on the list, assigning a cabinet-level official to supervise each person’s case.
But about five months after the city formally launched the program, two people, including Williams, have been killed, at least eight others on the list have been shot, and more than a dozen have been charged in connection with nonfatal shootings, carjackings and unlawful possession of firearms, according to city officials and a review of the list by The Washington Post against court and other public records.
City officials said they enlisted a wide swath of agencies to implement the program — including behavioral health, public works and transportation. But they acknowledged missteps in the process, and they conceded they have yet to even make contact with about half of those they want to protect. Asked to grade the initiative, Deputy Mayor for Public Safety and Justice Christopher Geldart said he would give it a “C-plus.”
Critics said the city was too slow in rolling out the program after identifying the names of people they wanted to target. They worry that the city’s decision to show the list to front-line workers who mediate street conflicts — which officials hoped would help them find people — allowed the list to circulate too broadly. Some at-risk residents who have heard about the document view it as a sort of “hit list” that police will use to target people for arrest, and are therefore more reluctant to embrace the city’s offers of help, according to front-line workers.
Officials, including Geldart and D.C. Director of Gun Violence Prevention Linda Harllee Harper, insisted that someone on the list being shot or killed does not represent a failure, since each person was selected precisely because of the high risk that they would become victims of crime. The officials said they had to take their time to ensure the new program benefited the right people in the most effective way, and that challenges are to be expected for a group selected in part for their aversion to authorities.
The Washington Post reviewed a copy of the list of People of Promise, which the city declined to provide. The document includes dozens of repeat offenders, multiple members of families linked to generations of violence in D.C., and people charged in some of the most high-profile shootings in the region.
Draft shows Bowser’s latest strategy to curb violence as election nears
Those on the list appear to be men between 15 and 64 years old, with the majority between 18 and 35. Most people are affiliated with a known gang or crew and have previous charges ranging from low-level drug offenses to first-degree murder.
City officials said they offered Williams resources, and that his slaying demonstrates how difficult it is to reach someone who is not fully ready to change their lifestyle. But his mom, Aleathea Cumbo, said she had no idea Williams had been dubbed a Person of Promise, and did not believe he received enough help from the government.
“If that were the case,” she said, “my son would be here.”
‘We are not waiting’
On a Monday afternoon in April, D.C.'s mayor stood at a restaurant in Northeast D.C. and rolled out her latest initiative to prevent crime.
“We are not waiting,” Bowser said, introducing People of Promise. “We need to stop the gun violence that we are seeing in our city before anyone else is killed.”
At that point, 52 people had been slain in the District since January. Over the next five months, that number about tripled.
Jahmeze Williams was shot and killed in May, 13 days after city records show the government last contacted him. (Video: Joy Yi/The Washington Post, Photo: Aleathea Cumbo/The Washington Post)
Some cities across the country have struggled with rising numbers of killings since 2020, a trend that experts attribute to disruptions caused by the pandemic, petty disputes turning deadly because of the proliferation of guns and a breakdown of trust between police and communities. Homicides have dropped this year in major cities like Chicago and New York. But by late September in D.C., the number of slayings was about even compared to the same time in 2021 — when there were more than 200 killings in a year for the first time in almost two decades.
One of the latest homicide victims was Jamal Gibson, a 23-year-old fatally shot in Northeast Washington the afternoon of Sept. 26. He had just been released from prison in August, after he was convicted of brandishing a firearm and threatening to shoot his girlfriend. Gibson was on the People of Promise list. Geldart said Gibson had been enrolled in barber school and scheduled through a city agency to record a rap song with positive themes. Efforts to reach his relatives were unsuccessful.
Bowser has said she can bring gun violence down by 90 percent by focusing on “the people and places where most of the crime is happening.”
Some of her initiatives have been widely praised, such as a transitional employment program called Pathways that targets 20- to 35-year-olds susceptible to gun violence. But her public safety team has struggled to explain how its roster of programs fit together and keep residents safe.
Over the last two fiscal years, the city spent $139 million on efforts outside of policing to combat gun violence. It is unclear what subset of that funding went directly into People of Promise, since the program is meant to streamline an array of services from multiple agencies, rather than offer new ones.
People of Promise grew out of an analysis performed by David Muhammad, executive director of the National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform, on shootings in 2019 and 2020. The District government paid him $65,000 over two years for a process that included identifying the 230 or so people most at risk of committing gun violence, or being victimized by it. His work began in fiscal year 2021, according to Muhammad and his agreement provided by the city.
To come up with that list in D.C., Muhammad, who has created similar systems to mitigate crime in cities across the country, said he and his staff interviewed police, violence interrupters and other leaders in the community and government. He also looked at people’s criminal histories, affiliation with crews or gangs and connection to shootings in the last year. He focused in particular on Black men between the ages of 18 and 35, who he said are statistically most vulnerable to crime.
Mayor’s crime-fighting initiative, Building Blocks DC, is shifting its structure
Williams was one of the people who made Muhammad’s final list, which he said he formally handed over to the city in January.
By that time, two people on the list had been charged with killing two others on the list, according to The Washington Post’s review of the names against court records. In total, at least 12 people were already slain, The Post’s review found. Multiple others were serving years-long prison sentences — though they were kept on the list by design, so officials could work with them upon release.
Over the next three months, as the D.C. government refined the list and prepared to formally deploy the program, a 13th person on it was killed, and another was charged with homicide, according to The Post’s review of the list against court records. Then, in April, Bowser announced the program.
The boy with the big smile
Before he became a Person of Promise, Williams was a scrawny kid who liked cartoons and dancing with his sisters.
With big brown eyes and a sharp sense of humor, it seemed for the first decade of his life that Williams had all the natural abilities he needed to make it out of a community where poverty and violence were central to every day life, his mom said. Addition and subtraction came easy, friends flocked to him, and he showed surprising agility and strength for an elementary-schooler. His mom pictured herself standing on the sidelines, cheering on her son as he won the Super Bowl or the NBA Finals.
But then his family moved from another neighborhood in Southeast D.C. to a house on Alabama Avenue, one of the only locations in the city where they could afford a place big enough for the family of four. It was in that neighborhood, known to many residents as “The Z,” where the boy with the big smile changed.
The years that followed revealed the challenges of trying to save someone like Williams. Government officials decided to help him long before they launched People of Promise, but even with extra attention and resources, he struggled.
By eighth grade, Williams’s mom said his grades had fallen. Police started to pay attention to his movement around the neighborhood, and he was arrested multiple times for petty crimes, according to a Department and Youth Rehabilitation Services report obtained by The Post that detailed his juvenile record and other aspects of his life. His mom said she reduced her work hours so she could watch her son more closely — even joining him on street corners if she sensed that tensions were brewing.
At the age of 15, prosecutors alleged Williams fatally shot another teenager near a playground and then stole the Nike Air Jordans off his feet. Williams was convicted in juvenile court, committed to the Department of Youth Rehabilitative Services and placed in New Beginnings, the youth detention center, while he appealed the case.
Throughout the years he was under court-ordered supervision, Williams received government services like group therapy and vocational training. When he was released to home detention at 17 years old, similar programs followed him, offering internships and mental health services, according to a timeline compiled by the city and obtained by The Washington Post.
His stepfather, Antoine Rice, noticed a change in Williams when he first arrived home from New Beginnings. He got up each morning to take his sisters to school and talked often about his determination to find a job and take care of his family, which included his now 4-year-old son, also named Jahmeze. But that progress began to unravel, Rice said, as he watched his stepson spend more and more time back in the streets.
In September 2020, Williams was arrested after his GPS monitor put him close to a shooting in his neighborhood. About eight months later, he was shot and injured, though he survived.
“The system, they can do a lot of things, but it’s up to you,” Rice said. “I can’t blame the city because my kid got killed from gun violence.”
But Williams’s mom said D.C. is largely responsible for her son’s struggles. She had long believed Williams was wrongly convicted in the murder. In September 2021, she got some measure of vindication when a judge overturned the conviction, ruling prosecutors withheld information the defense could have used to impeach key witnesses during the trial.
“He was hurt because he was locked up for something he didn’t do,” said Cumbo. “It ruined my son’s life.”
‘A freaking list’
On a Thursday in May, Jawanna Hardy, whose nonprofit Guns Down Friday works to reduce gun violence, said she joined about a dozen other community members for a roundtable discussion with Muhammad’s group about the city’s new gun violence prevention strategy. That is where she first heard of the People of Promise list.
“I want nothing to do with it,” Hardy recalled saying to the room, though she acknowledged there were parts of the program that could be useful if officials dedicated more resources to the people involved. “In our community, you don’t want to be associated with any type of list.”
Hardy, who said she later saw the list and recognized names on it from her work in neighborhoods, worried about privacy — what would happen, for example, if an employer got ahold of the document — and how community members would react if they learned they were among the 230 people the government had their eye on.
Other front-line workers tasked with mediating street conflict similarly said the list has made it harder for them to do their jobs. These violence interrupters can only mediate turf wars, they say, if they can earn trust with key players in neighborhoods — and that involves intentionally distinguishing themselves from police. Any association with the list, some violence interrupters said, could make it seem like they are conspiring with law enforcement.
Lashonia Thompson-El, who runs an academy for hundreds of people who mediate street conflict, said front-line workers tend to know who they need to reach simply by existing in the neighborhoods they serve. A list, she said, could have helped fill in any gaps in information — but only if the city had adequately trained violence interrupters on how to use it.
“You can’t just go walking up to people and say they are on the list. That could damage their reputation in the community,” she said. “It was reckless and thoughtless.”
Harllee Harper conceded that the list is “taking on sort of this life of its own,” and might at least have to be renamed.
“I think it’s really important to not frame People of Promise as a targeted list by the government,” she said. “It’s that you’ve made yourself known to the government, and we want to intervene and help.”
D.C. officials said they appointed 20 of their top front-line workers to act as a bridge between the government and the people on the list. Two of those employees, interviewed by The Washington Post after being made available by the D.C. government, praised the program. They spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing safety concerns.
“We have a red carpet service,” one mentor said, noting those dubbed People of Promise jump ahead of others in line for assistance. She said having a direct line to a member of the mayor’s cabinet enables her to quickly follow through on promises. Sometimes help means finding a safe place to live. Sometimes it’s a bus pass. Or a new pair of jeans.
One of the People of Promise assigned to her, also interviewed on the condition of anonymity to protect his safety, said he is in a job training program. But he said what really helped was the city providing a place to stay away from areas where he had been caught with guns and once shot.
The young man said he was initially skeptical of yet another intervention program, but the workers behind People of Promise had “proved that they were trying to help.”
Harllee Harper, who had met Williams personally, said losing a Person of Promise to violence or prison does not mean the program is failing but instead that “we weren’t able to catch them and convince them to change their minds in time.”
She said she tells at risk people that their choices are stark: “If you continue the way you’re going, you’re going to die or be in prison. … We’re working very hard to prevent it, but it’s a fact.”
‘It took my son to die for them to help me’
City officials hoped Williams would not be such a case.
Williams was identified as a Person of Promise by November, when Muhammad was finalizing a version of the list. By the time the program formally launched five months later, Muhammad said the city should have already developed an outreach plan tailored around the then 20-year-old.
“To be effective in successfully implementing an initiative like this really requires strong and tight management,” he said. “So I hope that is happening in the District.”
As of mid-September, Geldart said the city had made contact with 122 people on the list of about 230 — about 40 of whom are currently incarcerated. He said government workers had been able to “actively engage” about 94 of the people they reached. That, he said, means they did something like providing employment or mental health services, or successfully conducted safety check-ins.
Twelve people were receiving emergency housing services, five people were enrolled in Pathways, and 13 people were receiving mental health support as of Sept. 16, according to data provided by Geldart.
When Williams’s case was overturned, he lost access to some court-ordered services provided by the city. Through People of Promise, D.C. was able to extend his eligibility for program that allowed him to work with a mentor toward his high school diploma and goal of becoming a firefighter.
“They continued efforts to engage, particularly around education and workforce development,” Geldart said. “They were able to locate and work with him regularly.”
Geldart stressed that the program was in its inaugural year, and that officials were already discussing “lessons learned” to improve it. He said the city hopes to have a second, updated and refined list completed by next April with more input from community members.
Williams’s mom said support for her son was unreliable, and that what her family really needed was a new and safer place to live. City officials said they tried to relocate her. Cumbo and one of her social workers dispute that claim.
City records show the government’s last contact with Williams was May 11. He was killed 13 days later.
By late September, police had not made an arrest in his slaying.
Magda Jean-Louis contributed to this report. | 2022-10-04T10:43:32Z | www.washingtonpost.com | D.C. wants to save at-risk people. Violence, missteps marred the effort. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/04/people-promise-list-missteps-violence/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/04/people-promise-list-missteps-violence/ |
As the midterm election approaches, tensions rise between the White House and oil companies
In California, where there are at least eight hotly contested House seats, the average price of gas is $6.38 per gallon, an increase of 62 cents in the past week. Above, a station in Mill Valley, Calif. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
“The 99-day streak is over, but it is still a month before the election,” said Kevin Book, managing director at ClearView Energy Partners, a research firm. “After this president has taken an unusually active role in telling American drivers his administration is going to try to keep prices low, the fact that they are rising creates political jeopardy.”
The price hikes are substantial in several pivotal states. In California, where there are at least eight hotly contested House seats, the average price of gas is $6.38 per gallon, an increase of 62 cents in the past week. During the same period, it jumped nearly 40 cents in the swing state of Arizona, where polling averages reflect an extremely tight race for governor.
Gas prices may surge again ahead of midterm elections
Nevada, Washington, Oregon and Alaska have all seen prices jump by at least 40 cents per gallon in the past week. Throughout the swing states of the Midwest, the increase has been less severe, but large enough for drivers to feel the pain.
The prices are going up for a variety of reasons: a refinery fire in the Midwest, signals from the OPEC consortium that it plans to cut production significantly when it meets this week, facility maintenance on the West Coast that has pushed inventories down to record lows. A looming European ban on Russian oil, to take effect in December, is also pushing prices up.
But oil companies are still posting eye-popping profits throughout these challenges, giving an opening for top administration officials and their allies to charge that corporate greed is a key factor. They have taken every opportunity to do so.
After ExxonMobil wrote a letter to the administration last week chafing at the pressure it is applying on oil companies to redirect some of their energy from exporting fuel around the world to shoring up inventories at home, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm issued a blistering statement.
“This week’s letter from a company that made nearly $200 million in profit every single day last quarter misreads the moment we are in,” she said on Friday. “These companies need to focus less on taking every last dollar off the table, and more on passing through savings to their customers.”
Company officials did not respond to a request for comment. But the American Petroleum Institute and the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers issued a statement accusing the administration of “contradictory energy policies and rhetoric.”
“The focus of this administration should not be on trapping product in the United States or diverting fuel away from retail sales and into storage, but rather, on how to better produce and more affordably move U.S. product within the United States,” the statement said.
The complaints about the industry from the Biden administration have been relentless, including the president’s warning to oil companies last week not to engage in price gouging in hurricane-ravaged areas of the Southeast. Days before that, Biden scolded the companies at a meeting of the White House Competition Council. “Bring down the prices you’re charging at the pump to reflect the cost you pay for the product,” he said. “Do it now. Do it now. Not a month from now — do it now.”
Yet the administration has sent mixed signals over how aggressively it may intervene in oil markets. While attacking oil companies is politically popular, using emergency powers over them could backfire. Granholm has said the administration has no plans at the moment to force oil companies to curb their exports, but she has also been clear the option is very much on the table.
It came up as recently as Friday, during a call Granholm and National Economic Council director Brian Deese held with oil company executives. During the conversation, according to people involved, administration officials accused the industry of prioritizing profits from the sale of oil abroad over sheltering consumers from price spikes by rebuilding inventories at home.
The Biden administration has taken an uncommonly active role in the gas price debate, an issue presidents have generally distanced themselves from in the past because prices are largely guided by market factors out of their control.
“The tools at their disposal are pretty limited,” said Mark Finley, an energy fellow at the Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice University in Texas. Oil and gasoline prices, he said, are driven by the global market, and interfering in that market can lead other nations to do the same, tightening supplies further and causing prices to go up.
Finley also noted that the same oil companies that are making big profits now suffered considerable losses a couple of years ago. Penalizing them in boom times, he said, would likely erode the investments they make in securing the energy supply.
There is also another concern with some of the intervention the administration is threatening, said Ben Cahill, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies: it could quickly drive oil prices up. Forcing companies to replenish inventories of refined gasoline and diesel, he said, would lower available fuel on the global marketplace, pushing prices up for American consumers who rely on imported oil and gas.
“I think the move would backfire,” Cahill said. “It could lead to shortages on the global market and drive prices higher on the East Coast and elsewhere in the U.S.”
Yet the nuances of oil economics are hardly front and center in this heated political debate. Biden is just one of many Democrats unleashing on the oil industry as prices at the pump go up and the election nears.
“Oil companies are ripping you off,” California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) said in a video address to voters on Friday, during which he called for a windfall tax on their earnings. “Their record profits are coming at your expense at the pump.” | 2022-10-04T10:56:50Z | www.washingtonpost.com | As gas prices rise, Biden administration puts oil companies on notice - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/10/04/gas-prices-oil-biden-midterm/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/10/04/gas-prices-oil-biden-midterm/ |
History offers a guide to winning our growing ‘chip war’ with China
Lawmakers are trying to boost the crucially important American semiconductor industry, but trying to pick winners won’t work.
Perspective by Chris Miller
Chris Miller is author of "Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology," Jeane Kirkpatrick fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and author of the recent report “Rewire: Semiconductors and Industrial Policy,” published by the Center for a New American Security.
President Biden at the groundbreaking for a new Intel semiconductor plant on Sept. 9 in Johnstown, Ohio. (Andrew Spear/Getty Images)
Amid a semiconductor shortage that has caused hundreds of billions of dollars in economic damage, and an accelerating “chip war” between the United States and China over the future of semiconductor technology, the U.S. government is trying to boost support for the semiconductor industry through legislation like the recently passed CHIPS Act.
But for this effort to succeed, it needs to heed the lessons of history. Today’s effort to help chipmakers isn’t the first time governments have devoted money toward semiconductor development. And the history of earlier efforts indicates that focusing on funding scientific research and development, providing a market for speculative technology, and ensuring academics and start-ups have access to funds and manufacturing equipment to test new products will be far more effective than trying to support specific firms or technologies. These are the strategies that propelled the American chip industry in the past, whereas more heavy-handed interventions often produced disappointing results.
The chip industry emerged out of the Cold War arms race in the 1950s, as the Defense Department sought miniaturized computing power for missile guidance computers. Even when it was the biggest customer, however, the U.S. government struggled to predict where commercial and technological trends were headed. Many agencies were more optimistic about an alternative model called “molecular electronics,” which quickly sputtered out, while not seeing the promise in the integration of tiny circuits that led to today’s chips. In 1959, just as small firms like Fairchild Semiconductors and Texas Instruments (TI) were fabricating the first integrated circuits, a U.S. military study visited 15 companies and research labs, including TI and Fairchild, but found no evidence that these two firms were on the brink of pioneering a new industry.
Though the industry’s most crucial early innovations all responded to defense demand, many occurred outside of government-funded programs. Neither of the two engineers credited with simultaneously inventing chips in the late 1950s while working at Fairchild and TI were conducting research on government contracts, for example.
Government procurement helped not by dictating development of specific technologies but by setting priorities — miniaturizing computing power — and making clear that the government was willing to buy almost anything that addressed this need. The first two major orders for chips in the early 1960s were for guidance computers in the Apollo spacecraft and the Minuteman II missile. Unlike civilian customers, NASA and the Pentagon were willing to pay high prices for small-volume production runs, which sped development of the chip industry.
Crucially, NASA and the Pentagon also staged an open competition to procure integrated circuits — one which included both technological giants and start-ups such as Fairchild. The existing electronics firms routinely performed worse, delivering chips behind schedule or not at all. The decision to guide the Apollo spacecraft to the moon using Fairchild’s integrated circuits — an untested product produced by an unknown firm — reflected how the government relied not on heavy-handed policy but rather on clear performance targets, market competition and a willingness to invest a vast budget to build more accurate rockets.
The chip industry grew beyond its start as a niche defense business primarily due to market forces. Start-ups like Fairchild were fixated on bringing their chips to consumer markets because they had no other way to grow. The military’s demand for guidance computers was finite, but consumers’ demand for computing power was already beginning to grow exponentially in the 1960s.
Fairchild founder Robert Noyce had started his career working on a defense contract at Philco — a major radio producer — during which time he concluded that military research contracts stifled the type of innovation needed to develop consumer products. Thus, though its Apollo Program contract helped get Fairchild off the ground, Noyce immediately tacked toward consumer markets. By 1968, 75 percent of chips sold went to produce civilian goods, from corporate computers to hearing aids.
Though chips were invented in the United States, by the late 1970s, Silicon Valley faced new competition from Japanese rivals, sparking calls for government help. Japanese firms like Toshiba and NEC had learned to produce memory chips as advanced as Silicon Valley’s, but with lower prices and far lower defect rates. One study found that Japanese chipmakers averaged one-tenth as many defects as one big American firm.
As U.S. firms lost market share, many analysts credited Japan’s industrial policy for its success. American debate fixated on the Japanese government’s support for corporate research and development (R&D) efforts, like the VLSI Program, which pooled R&D funds from the government and several leading Japanese firms. The total spending on the VLSI program was small — about the same as the R&D budget of a major U.S. chipmaker like TI. Nevertheless, the program loomed large in U.S. thinking and eventually induced the U.S. government to set up a comparable government-backed research consortium called Sematech in 1987.
The government recruited Noyce, who had founded both Fairchild and Intel, to lead Sematech. He focused the organization on supporting U.S. semiconductor manufacturing equipment companies against Japanese rivals. Around half of Sematech’s budget during the late 1980s was directed toward the production of advanced lithography machinery, a crucial type of chipmaking tool that had been pioneered in the United States but by the late 1980s was mostly produced by three firms in Japan and the Netherlands. Noyce saw saving U.S. lithography firms as the primary metric by which Sematech would be judged.
Yet his efforts didn’t prevent the main U.S. firms in the sphere from either going bankrupt or being bought out by foreign rivals because without effective business models and sales capabilities, no amount of government support could rescue them.
Sematech’s other efforts to boost the production of chipmaking tools had mixed results. For example, former executives at Applied Materials, the biggest semiconductor tool manufacturer, argue that Sematech had hardly any impact on their business.
Sematech’s biggest success came in coordinating “road maps,” whereby major chipmakers, tool makers, chip design software firms and other companies that produced products needed to make chips could align their plans to ensure that each new generation of chipmaking technology had the tools and software needed for mass production. This reflected the types of government programs that had the greatest positive impact on the semiconductor industry: not heavy-handed industrial policy but programs marked by public-private partnership to identify technological challenges, followed by an agreement to let private firms find commercially viable ways to address them.
The Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency (DARPA) offered another example of this approach. Rather than trying to help the commercial industry, DARPA projects provided an opportunity for new ideas to be turned into prototype products, tackling the technical challenges that all chip firms confronted. For example, in the late 1970s, DARPA identified that the increasing complexity of chips would soon make them impossible to design by hand. Having identified this bottleneck, it funded university research programs in automated design processes. Start-ups that spun out of these research programs eventually developed into the three companies that dominate chip design software today.
Similarly, DARPA also realized that the growing cost of chip fabrication was making it more difficult for academics to test new ideas, because the cost of each test chip was increasing. DARPA therefore supported a program to let researchers use commercial chipmaking facilities to fabricate chips, increasing the quantity of research and prototyping. These efforts guaranteed that, even as cost pressures and foreign government subsidies attracted new semiconductor manufacturing facilities offshore, the designs, software and machine tools needed to produce chips are still largely produced in the United States.
As the federal and state governments pour funds into the chip industry anew, this history of industrial policy can serve as a guide for what would be most — and least — effective. Funding workforce development, basic science and pathways for turning ideas into prototypes are all policies that helped build the U.S. chip industry in the past. Heavier-handed efforts to rescue specific firms or to bet on specific types of commercial technology, by contrast, haven’t worked in the past, and won’t help America win the chip war today. | 2022-10-04T10:57:33Z | www.washingtonpost.com | History offers a guide to winning our growing ‘chip war’ with China - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/made-by-history/2022/10/04/history-offers-guide-winning-our-growing-chip-war-with-china/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/made-by-history/2022/10/04/history-offers-guide-winning-our-growing-chip-war-with-china/ |
The historical development of Southwest Florida made Hurricane Ian worse
Seventy-five years of developing wetlands to chase profits left the region more susceptible to superstorms
Perspective by Zeke Baker
Zeke Baker is a sociologist and postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oklahoma (Cooperative Institute for Mesoscale Meteorological Studies) who studies the historical and ongoing relationship between atmospheric sciences and government.
The destroyed road between Matlacha and Pine Island on Sunday after Hurricane Ian caused widespread destruction in Southwest Florida. (Marco Bello/Reuters)
Hurricane Ian devastated parts of Southwest Florida, with Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) labeling the damage as “indescribable” before the storm barreled into South Carolina. The hurricane washed away homes, decimated Sanibel Island, closed parts of Interstate 75 and left Lee County — home to Fort Myers — without water. At least 100 deaths have been reported, and officials promised that the death toll would keep rising in the coming days.
While some see catastrophic hurricanes such as Ian as an act of nature — blaming bad luck for the damage — scientists cite climate change for the rise in “super hurricanes” of at least Category 4 or higher reaching U.S. shores.
But another factor played into the havoc wreaked by Ian: the unique development of Southwest Florida over the past century, which was driven by the idea that humans could control nature through brute force of engineering, wetland reclamation and private property development. This belief has left people and property more vulnerable, with fewer natural buffers to help reduce hurricanes’ impacts.
The area of Cape Coral, also in Lee County — one of the places hardest hit by Ian — was initially coastal marshland and wetland. Under the Swamp Land Act of 1850, the U.S. government nominally granted Florida access to more than 20 million acres of roughly charted wetlands — far more than any other state. As in other places, like California’s Bay-Delta Area and the Mississippi Delta, reclamation of wetlands was encouraged and supported, giving a green light to whatever productive enterprises could be launched to tame the soggy wilderness.
In the 1940s, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and other entities changed the hydrology of the Everglades, constructing the levees, pumps and channels of the Central and Southern Florida Project for flood control purposes. These massive infrastructural projects permitted agriculture, the expansion of roads and the building of towns on what had been inland marshes.
Even so, coastal Southwest Florida remained largely inaccessible to transportation and basically undeveloped into the 1950s, save for some timber and cattle operations.
But this infrastructure set in motion the idea that the region’s vast landscapes could be reconfigured into lucrative planned, Levittown-style subdivisions. Housing demand was high among veterans, retirees and middle-class workers who now had cash, due to the Serviceman’s Readjustment Act — the vaunted GI Bill — which subsidized education and home-buying for a rising, predominantly White, middle class.
Warm, waterfront dreams awaited.
Baltimore-based visionary land developers Leonard and Julius “Jack” Rosen soon sprang into action. As Leonard Rosen recalled, he knew “as much about development as a six-month-old baby” when he first saw the area he would later name Cape Coral from the window of a small airplane in early 1957. Within several months, however, he and his brother had formed an investment firm and purchased the land from private owners for $678,000 with the goal of building a coastal city. They founded the Gulf American Corporation (GAC), based in Miami, and got to work engineering Cape Coral and facilitating the migration of homeowners to Florida.
Commentators have emphasized the slick marketing ploys and installment-type sales structure that successfully sold the dream of Cape Coral. The remaking of the landscape is equally important.
With the land treated as wasteland by government officials, the GAC faced minimal regulatory barriers in its reclamation pursuits. When assessing the impacts of such projects, Florida did not begin to incorporate the ecological value of wetlands (or the costs of their destruction) until the late 1960s. As historian David Dodrill summarized, “Virtually any project that would add to the tax assessor’s rolls was approved” on Southwest Florida’s coastal wetlands. Rosen and his brother received building permits easily and hired a Miami-based engineering firm, Rader and Associates, to prepare the land for subdivided residential use.
In the Rosens’ eyes, ubiquitous marshes and tidewater at sea level were no longer problems but opportunities. And in an era that celebrated landscape transformation, experts were available to do the work. For example, Thomas Weber, who oversaw the engineering of Cape Coral, had gained experience with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers on major development projects in Brazil. He used explosives to blast coral shelves and cleared entire tidal mangrove forests with large earth-moving tractors. Within five years, 168 miles of canals graced the landscape.
The GAC marketed their invented city as a “waterfront wonderland.” In 1958 — even before the Cape Coral subdivisions were accessible by roadway — the company flew prospective buyers in to hear a sales pitch and enjoy Florida orange juice. Advertising campaigns were relentless, and business boomed.
Land sales topped $9 million by the end of the year. While building on wetlands wasn’t new, the scale of the project was unprecedented.
Conservation and environmental regulation eventually hampered some of the Rosens’ ambitions for further expansion in the region, but the local damage in Cape Coral was complete. The GAC had managed to accrue 589,738 acres of land and, at its peak in 1967, conduct $144 million in total annual sales.
The money made and the swamp tamed, the ensuing decades made it all too clear that the hasty “improvement” of the landscape was part dream and part lie. Poor planning led to flooding, ongoing challenges meeting water demand, trouble maintaining basic infrastructure and sprawl.
Across Florida, the land drainage, dredging and development that preceded migration to wetland areas indelibly changed the landscape — and fueled a population explosion. Between 1936 and 1995, the state’s population increased from 1.7 to 14.1 million. That period witnessed a sixfold increase in urban land use and a 50 percent reduction of wetland areas.
Despite conservation efforts beginning in the late 1960s, oversight by the Environmental Protection Agency and the establishment of protected areas and ecological reserves, wetland areas have remained in decline. In Lee County, the period from 1996 to 2016 witnessed a 21 percent increase in total developed land and an 11 percent reduction of total wetland. Cape Coral remains among the riskiest places in America for flooding, even as local real estate companies still tout the wonderland dream of a city with “more canals than Venice.”
On par with state population growth projections, Lee County is projected to increase about 25 percent in the next two decades. The pressure to continue transforming wetlands therefore remains strong.
And there’s no guarantee that future development will adequately consider the risks of destroying wetlands. Fraught political battles to guide this development are ongoing in Florida, marked by efforts to minimize federal authority and grant the state greater autonomy to manage permitting and regulate development in floodplains.
Nor is this pattern of “coastal capitalism” unique to Florida. South Carolina, which felt Ian’s second landfall, now faces significant damage from storm surge inundation. Lawmakers and regulators in neighboring North Carolina have not taken sea level rise seriously, and have instead contested established science to advance pro-growth land use policies.
Driven by revenue needs, governments want to develop land and attract lucrative businesses. Like Leonard Rosen imagining what would become Cape Coral from an airplane window, those with capital will find the places and opportunities, as well as the easiest regulatory paths, to make a profit. Yet, as in Southwest Florida, this logic sells the dream of development while devaluing natural environments.
Now, caught between coastal capitalism and climate change, these developments lack functioning marsh ecosystems that can mitigate the impacts of coastal storms. Intact wetlands provide protection from the storm surge and flooding that make hurricanes so disastrous. Property damage from hurricanes is dramatically increasing — nowhere more so than in Florida.
Bigger, wetter hurricanes battering unprotected coasts is probably what lies ahead. Failing to understand this reality contributed to the devastation wrought by Hurricane Ian. And if we continue to pursue development paths that ignore the need for marsh ecosystems and wetlands, we’ll continue to see massive storms destroy our coastline to a far greater degree than they might otherwise. | 2022-10-04T10:57:39Z | www.washingtonpost.com | 75 years of development made Hurricane Ian worse in Southwest Florida - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/made-by-history/2022/10/04/hurricane-ian-development-southwest-florida/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/made-by-history/2022/10/04/hurricane-ian-development-southwest-florida/ |
In El Salvador and elsewhere, leaders find ways to break term limits
When leaders bend the rules to stay in power, it’s a red flag for democracy
Analysis by Erica Frantz
Andrea Kendall-Taylor
Joseph Wright
President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador addresses the nation on Sept. 16. (Casa Presidencial de El Salvador/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)
Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele announced last month that he would run for a second consecutive term. The announcement follows last year’s ruling by the Salvadoran Supreme Court that abolished the country’s one-term constitutional limit for the presidency.
Bukele’s move mirrors successful efforts by other democratically elected leaders to extend their terms — including Bolivia’s Evo Morales in 2017 and Colombia’s Alvaro Uribe in 2005. Many observers criticized his reelection bid, claiming a second term would entrench Bukele’s control over the country and push El Salvador back on a path of authoritarian rule. El Salvador’s previous authoritarian period ended in 1994 after years of civil war.
Are critics correct in worrying about El Salvador’s democracy? In new research, we show that personalist party leaders like Bukele are more likely to try to expand executive power — including attempts to alter term limit rules — putting democratic governance at risk.
Term limits help curb executive power
Limits to executive time in office help ensure regular, institutionalized rotation of leadership. Term limit extensions, by contrast, can be a red flag for democracy, suggesting a leader’s intention to stay in office by subverting rules established to curb executive power.
It’s not just a Putin problem. ‘Personalists’ like him are behind much of the world’s bad behavior.
In such instances, leaders may try to ensure their continued hold on power by abolishing term limits altogether — or more subtly, attempt to alter the number of terms they may serve. They pursue such efforts in a variety of ways, including putting matters to a popular vote via referendum, pursuing new legislation or amending the constitution.
Not all efforts to extend a leader’s term are successful, even if the vast majority of such efforts succeed. Malawian President Bakili Muluzi, for instance, failed to convince enough legislators (including members of his own party) to amend the constitution in 2003 to allow himself a third term as president.
A rise in personalist parties is fueling term limit changes
The rise in efforts to revoke term limits takes place amid a growing trend worldwide in what we call “personalist” parties — organizations that primarily serve to further their leaders’ election and political careers, rather than to advance a clear policy agenda. Examples include Hugo Chávez’s Fifth Republic Movement (MVR) in Venezuela, Alpha Condé’s Rally of the Guinean People (RPG) party in Guinea, Viktor Orban’s Fidesz coalition in Hungary and Vladimir Putin’s United Russia.
Why Hungary’s democracy gets a failing grade
For years, personalism was more prevalent in autocracies. Leaders could more easily concentrate power in their own hands, freed from having to compete in free and fair elections — and there was less likelihood of an independent institution reliably enforcing the rules. Personalism today is no longer confined to autocracies, as personalist parties have become increasingly prevalent in democratic-leaning countries. In personalist parties, party elites often do little to block their leader’s ambitions, since their own careers are so closely linked to the leader’s. What’s more, such elites typically lack the capacity to challenge the leader, who typically controls the party’s financial resources and nominations.
These leaders are more likely to try to quash term limits
Most leaders, most of the time, do not consider changing term limit rules, probably because they know they will fail. More often, parties discourage their leaders from changing established rules, diminishing efforts to alter term limits. But when a pliant, personalist party backs the leader, we see more attempts to change the rules.
To study this relationship, we use term limit data from political scientist Kristin McKie. Because term limit rules apply to presidential systems with a directly elected chief executive, we limit our analysis to presidential systems; the analysis examines 234 leaders in 57 countries between 1993 and 2018. Thus, the geographic coverage encompasses regions where democracies typically feature presidential governments, with most cases coming from the Americas (46 percent) and Africa (26 percent) and fewer from Asia (17 percent) and Europe (11 percent).
The data include leaders’ attempts to abolish term limit rules, as well as to extend their terms in office. To count as an “attempt,” we look for concrete markers, such as proposed legislation or a referendum on a constitutional change. The data do not capture leaders’ “floating” the idea — like when Donald Trump teased reporters about seeking a third presidential term in a conversation before his election defeat in 2020. We don’t include this type of remark, because it never resulted in a concrete proposal to change term limit rules.
Our research shows that personalist parties are clearly responsible for the bulk of efforts to curb term limits over the past quarter-century. Splitting the sample into ruling parties with low personalism scores (below average personalism) and those with high personalism scores (above average), we find that high party personalism is associated with leaders who attempt to change term limit rules in about 3.8 percent of years, which is more than three times as often as where party personalism is low (1.1 percent of years).
These results hold even after considering a variety of factors, such as cross-country differences, levels of democratic consolidation (which we measure as the age of democracy as well as the initial level of democracy when a leader is first elected to chief executive), the popularity of leaders and their legislative support, and whether the leader’s party is populist (measured using the Varieties of Parties data).
Our research helps make sense of what’s happening in El Salvador. Bukele created his party, New Ideas, just before the 2019 race to launch his ascension to the presidency. As such, it is the quintessential personalist party. With few constraints on Bukele’s ambitions from party elite, passing term limit extensions was a breeze. And that move makes it more likely that Bukele will further entrench his rule in the years to come.
Erica Frantz is an associate professor of political science at Michigan State University.
Andrea Kendall-Taylor is senior fellow and director of the Transatlantic Security Program at the Center for a New American Security.
Joseph Wright is a professor of political science at Pennsylvania State University.
The authors are writing a book entitled “The Origins of Elected Strongmen: How Personalist Parties Destroy Democracy.” | 2022-10-04T10:57:45Z | www.washingtonpost.com | What happens when ‘personalist’ leaders lose their popularity? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/04/el-salvador-bukele-term-limits/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/04/el-salvador-bukele-term-limits/ |
(FILES) In this file photo taken on September 16, 2021 Nobel medals are displayed at the laboratory of Alfred Nobel, where powder trials and experiments with artificial rubber and synthetic threads were carried out, in Karlskoga, Sweden on September 16, 2021. - Next week the world will celebrate peace and mankind's do-gooders when the winners of the Nobel prizes are revealed in a string of daily announcements -- as war rages in Ukraine.The highlight of the week's announcements, the Nobel Peace Prize, will be announced on October 7, 2022 in Oslo and will hold special significance this year, experts say. (Jonathan NACKSTRAND / AFP) (Jonathan Nackstrand/AFP via Getty Images)
The 2022 Nobel Prize in physics has been awarded to three physicists for experimental work on “entangled photons," with repercussions in the burgeoning field of quantum information science.
The announcement at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm laureated Alain Aspect of Université Paris-Saclay and École Polytechnique, in Palaiseau, France; John F. Clauser of J.F. Clauser & Assoc., Walnut Creek, Calif., and Anton Zeilinger of the University of Vienna, Austria.
In a press release, the Academy explained the experiments that led to the prize: “What happens to one particle in an entangled pair determines what happens to the other, even if they are really too far apart to affect each other. The laureates’ development of experimental tools has laid the foundation for a new era of quantum technology.” | 2022-10-04T10:58:03Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Nobel Prize in physics awarded for breakthroughs in quantum mechanics - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2022/10/04/nobel-prize-physics/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2022/10/04/nobel-prize-physics/ |
Ron Rivera's Commanders fell to 1-3 with Sunday's loss to the Dallas Cowboys. (John McDonnell/The Washington Post)
The reason Ron Rivera can sound so casual and relaxed after a never-really-in-doubt 25-10 handling at the hands of a division rival — as Rivera did Sunday in saying, “I think there are some really positive things that can be taken from what happened out there” against the Dallas Cowboys and backup quarterback Cooper Rush — is that he has been here before. And before that. And before that.
Rivera is in his 12th season as an NFL head coach. His Washington Commanders are 1-3 and facing more questions than a week’s worth of “Jeopardy!” contestants can spit back at the host. A straw poll would show him at his low ebb in public approval. So he can draw on his past. He must draw on his past. You know why? His teams have been 1-3 to start a season five previous times. That doesn’t count the other fragile seasons when they were 0-2 or 2-6 or 3-8-1.
This is a pattern, and there are patterns within it, and they all lead to some serious concern about whether Rivera has the ability — as an identifier of talent, a collector of personnel, a motivator of men and a game strategist, all hats he wears — to take this 1-3 outfit and make it into something better. Not just this week against Tennessee, but in 2023 and beyond.
At least by Monday, he seemed to sense the — how to put it? — outright disgust in certain segments of what remains of the fan base.
“I understand everybody’s frustration, especially how proud this organization is,” Rivera said during his day-after-the-game video call with reporters. “S---, this organization’s got five championships. Are you f---ing kidding me? I get it. I understand how important it is to win. Okay?
“But I got to be realistic with what we have and what we’re going to do. Now, some of it we can improve on as coaches and get better at. We have to. There is a sense of urgency that these things have to happen. But they’re not going to happen until everything is in place and is ready to happen.”
Rivera reiterated Monday that “it’s not going to happen overnight.” Well, when he said that, it had been 1,006 nights since he was hired. There has been time to trend in the right direction. His team is not.
Some context, not just from the Dallas game, but how this looks and feels on a week-to-week basis: The Commanders never trailed the Cowboys by 20 or more points. Remarkably, that’s a measure of progress. They were down a combined 46-0 to Detroit and Philadelphia the previous two weeks. In fact, as my colleagues Scott Allen and Neil Greenberg pointed out last week, Rivera’s Washington teams have trailed by at least 20 points seven times in his 37 games here.
To be clear what that means: Roughly once every five times out, Washington finds itself down three touchdowns. Since 2020, that’s more than any other team in the league. Washington has allowed the opponent to score first 26 times in Rivera’s 37 games. It has trailed at halftime in 23 of those 37 games.
The Commanders chase the game and chase the season. It’s a hard way to live. It’s an impossible way to thrive. It’s admirable that Rivera gets his teams to stick with it. It’s inexcusable that it keeps happening.
In the midst of it all, Rivera is carrying a crystal tea set on a greased tightrope — trying to balance the idea that his team can make a significant step in his third year while simultaneously cautioning about what’s realistic given various injuries and scheduling quirks. But whatever the surrounding circumstances, the reality is ugly — the losses, sure, but the way they play out as well.
In four games, the Commanders have been outscored by 34 points, worst in the NFL. They average 4.6 yards per play, worst in the NFL. They score on 21.6 percent of their drives, worst in the NFL. Carson Wentz, Rivera’s handpicked choice at quarterback — which, really? — has been sacked 17 times, more than anyone else in the league, and thrown five interceptions, tied for second most in the league. The Commanders have responded by forcing one turnover, fewest in the league.
“I’ve said it before,” Rivera said Monday. “Figures lie, and liars figure.”
Yeah, well, count me as a liar doing some figuring over here then. Those numbers are truthful. They are meaningful statistics used to outline how bad this is. The Commanders are 1-3. The rest of the NFC East is 10-2. Stay the course?
Speaking of the neighborhood: The Eagles went from 4-11-1 in Rivera’s first season in Washington to 9-8 a year ago under a new coach to 4-0 and perhaps the NFC’s sturdiest team right now. The Giants are 3-1 and at least temporarily revitalized under new coach Brian Daboll. The Cowboys went from 6-10 in Mike McCarthy’s first season of 2020 to 12-5 and a division title last year to 3-1 despite playing three games without quarterback Dak Prescott this fall. Yet to hear Rivera tell it, an injury to starting center Chase Roullier has sabotaged Washington’s season.
When Rivera arrived here, his appealing traits were so easily and almost inevitably highlighted because of what the franchise needed at the time, which was any modicum of decency and professionalism. He has brought those. In his eight full seasons with Carolina, his teams gained four playoff berths, reached the Super Bowl with a dynamo of a 15-1 squad and won at least 11 games three times — something Washington hasn’t done since (ahem) Joe Gibbs stalked the sideline the first time around.
Rivera also had no abject disasters. He never won fewer than six games in a full season, never let a slow start slide into a team that quit. We have seen that here, and it’s not pretty. So this, in so many ways, was a keep-it-between-the-ditches hire.
In the nooks and crannies around all that buttery goodness is a lot of, well, blah. Total winning seasons in his 11 previous campaigns: three. Record and winning percentage in Washington: 15-22 for .405. Jay Gruden, the man Rivera was hired to replace, had a .418 winning percentage — and was fired five games into his sixth season.
So excuse us if, by now, little things that Rivera does or doesn’t do grow tiresome or even maddening. In the fourth quarter Sunday, Wentz was — surprise — sacked to bring up fourth and 15. The Commanders trailed 22-10. Two scores were needed, so seconds mattered. Yet nearly 35 of them ticked off the clock before Rivera called a timeout with 8:02 remaining.
The difference in the game? No. Wentz threw incomplete on the next play anyway. A reason people sit around and talk about why they can’t muster confidence in the staff or the direction? Absolutely.
“I like to believe I’m responsible, and I understand enough to know, though, that the fans are going to be frustrated,” Rivera said. “I don’t doubt that. I really don’t. I understand the history of what’s gone on here for a while, and we’re trying to change that.”
There are not day-to-day and week-to-week off-field embarrassments, and that’s important. But they have not changed the results on the field, and that’s important, too. Ron Rivera is having another slow start in a career littered with them. It makes you wonder: When will it stop? | 2022-10-04T10:58:10Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Ron Rivera wants patience, but Commanders fans are losing it - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/04/ron-rivera-commanders-record/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/04/ron-rivera-commanders-record/ |
Tuesday briefing: Ukraine takes back more territory; Mar-a-Lago documents; Clean Water Act; pay transparency; and more
Ukrainian forces retook more territory yesterday.
Where? In the country’s east and south, including some areas that Russian President Vladimir Putin is trying to claim through illegal annexations.
Why it’s important: It’s the latest in a string of victories for Ukraine and puts Kyiv in a good position to attack another strategic region.
Today: Russia’s parliament formalized Putin’s annexations, indicating Moscow sees them as irreversible.
Donald Trump and his lawyer disagreed about the Mar-a-Lago documents.
Why? Trump returned some White House records in January, but his lawyer wouldn’t say that was all of them, because he wasn’t sure it was true, The Post reported yesterday.
Why this matters: What the former president knew or didn’t know about the classified documents found at his home in August is a key issue in a criminal investigation.
What else to know: Trump filed a defamation lawsuit against CNN yesterday.
Hurricane Ian has made Florida’s housing crisis even worse.
Thousands of people lost their homes, and those with lower or fixed incomes aren’t sure where they’ll be able to live.
Why? Florida doesn’t have enough housing affordable to lower- and middle-income families, and the hurricane damage is likely to drive prices up more.
What else to know: The Atlantic hurricane season doesn’t officially end until Nov. 30, and forecasters expect more storms are on the way.
The Supreme Court heard a case that could impact water quality.
What to know: Lawyers yesterday tried to challenge the scope of the Clean Water Act, which could limit how much the EPA can protect U.S. waterways.
Today: Justices will hear a case that could affect congressional redistricting nationwide.
Iran is still gripped by anti-government protests.
What to know: They started two weeks ago, after a 22-year-old woman died in custody of the “morality police,” and have mobilized Iranians fed up with years of repression and economic neglect.
The latest: The protests have spread to universities and schools, and Iran’s supreme leader blamed foreigners for the unrest yesterday.
Women’s soccer has a huge, systemic abuse problem.
What to know: A year-long investigation found sexual misconduct and vicious coaching tactics across multiple U.S. teams and coaches.
How we got here: The sport’s officials ignored “player reports and evidence of abuse,” leaving women with few options, the new report found.
What now? U.S. Soccer said it plans to make changes; however, it has limited authority over league and team operations.
Most California companies now have to give salary info in job ads.
Why? A new law, signed last week, makes companies with over 15 employees list salary ranges for jobs and have that information available to existing staff.
The bigger picture: It’s a big win in the push for pay transparency, which experts say is crucial to fixing gender and racial pay gaps.
And now … it’s National Taco Day: Honor it with one of these recipes. Plus, what’s the best frozen chicken nugget? We tried 10 brands to find out. | 2022-10-04T10:58:34Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The 7 things you need to know for Tuesday, October 4 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/the-seven/2022/10/04/what-to-know-for-october-4/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/the-seven/2022/10/04/what-to-know-for-october-4/ |
Shelby Colson and Jacob Coate walk their dogs Moose and Teddy in Arlington, Va., on Aug. 28. (Craig Hudson for The Washington Post)
Also, walking at a faster pace, or upping the intensity by power walking, for example, was found to have health benefits, too, with intensity amplifying the results. Walking at a faster pace was linked to a lower risk for dementia, heart disease, cancer and early death, beyond the benefit accrued for the number of daily steps. | 2022-10-04T10:58:40Z | www.washingtonpost.com | More steps lowers premature death rate - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2022/10/04/walk-more-steps-live-longer/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2022/10/04/walk-more-steps-live-longer/ |
Treating children with IBS is complicated. Hypnosis can help.
Advice by Elizabeth Chang
Alyssa Bland struggled for years with gastrointestinal issues that started when she was a high school freshman. By senior year, her diet consisted mostly of rice cakes, she was afraid to go on dates, she had lost 10 pounds and was only attending school half the day because of the discomfort.
Now a 21-year-old college student in Hawaii, Bland had undergone years of tests that ruled out everything but irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), a chronic condition characterized by abdominal pain, often accompanied by changes in bowel habits. Medications, a strict diet and other treatments didn’t help.
Finally, in her senior year, her doctor suggested another option: hypnotherapy.
Bland was dubious but gave it a shot. “I was able to start eating foods almost immediately after the first session,” she said. “It was pretty surprising.” She attended three or four sessions where a trained therapist guided her into a state of deep relaxation and concentration to help her overcome her intestinal discomfort, and for months after that, she regularly listened to a recording her therapist gave her.
Now, four years later, she said, “I can live my everyday life, I can eat most foods, it doesn’t bother me anymore.”
Bland’s experience is not a fluke. While IBS treatment usually consists of dietary changes or medications to relieve symptoms, decades of research has established that hypnotherapy can ease the condition in children and adults.
“Scientifically, it’s well known,” said Ali Navidi, a clinical psychologist in Burke, Va., whose practice, GI Psychology, offers hypnotherapy for IBS. “The tragedy is that it’s not well known among the patients, and it’s not well known also by the clinicians, the doctors.”
IBS is a debilitating disorder. Sufferers can experience pain, bloating and cramping, along with diarrhea or constipation, or a combination of the two. IBS can also lead to or worsen anxiety and depression.
Studies suggest that, in the United States, the condition affects about 12 percent of the population and is more common in women than men. Research involving American children has found prevalence rates of 2.8 percent to 5.1 percent.
Children who have IBS are understandably sensitive about the issue, and, like Bland, may avoid school and social situations. “They fall behind in their work, which causes anxiety toward school, and then that anxiety toward school makes their IBS symptoms worse,” Navidi said.
What to do, and not do, when your child won’t go to school
Although the cause of IBS is unclear, scientists think it is the result of dysfunctional communication between the brain and the gut.
After you eat, the nerves lining the stomach and small intestine sense the churning, contraction and gas formation happening during digestion and send signals to the brain that something’s going on, said Miranda van Tilburg, a researcher and professor of medicine at the University of North Carolina Center for Functional GI and Motility Disorders. “For … people who don’t have IBS the brain’s going to go, ‘Yeah. You just ate. Stop sending these signals,’ ” van Tilburg said.
In the case of IBS patients, however, the brain says, “ ‘Wait. Tell me more,’ ” she continued. “And so the signal gets magnified,” resulting in pain and discomfort.
When explaining hypnotherapy to parents and children, Jennifer Webster, an attending physician in the Division of Gastroenterology, Hepatology and Nutrition at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, uses underwear as an analogy. You know your underwear is there under your pants, she tells them, but you generally don’t feel it unless it’s necessary.
Your gut should work similarly. “All day long it is active and moving gas, liquid and food around, but you should only feel it when you need to,” say, if you are hungry or need to use the bathroom, Webster explained. “If you have abnormal interaction between your gut and your brain, it is often sending signals to the brain at times it shouldn’t be. These can sometimes be pain signals and other times can be other signals like nausea or bloating.”
In 1984, a physician named Peter Whorwell was the first to help IBS patients decrease those signals through what is called gut-directed hypnosis (GDH). Subsequent research replicated the results: In one of the largest studies, involving 1,000 patients with difficult-to-treat IBS, 76 percent of participants benefited from hypnotherapy, reducing their symptoms by about half. The treatment also reduced the anxiety and depression that can accompany IBS.
Research into GDH in children showed similar improvements. A 2007 study conducted on children with IBS or functional abdominal pain (FAP) found that 59 percent of patients were considered cured, compared with 12 percent of the kids who received standard therapy. Follow-ups an average of 4.8 years later found that two-thirds of the children who had hypnotherapy were still in remission.
The research has shown that “you really, truly teach people skills, so you don’t have to give them pills. And these skills will remain with them for long term,” said van Tilburg, who recommends trying hypnotherapy for children ages 6 and up.
If a person is susceptible to hypnosis (up to 25 percent of the population is not), a GDH session puts them into a deeply relaxed but focused trance-like state. In a trance, people are open to suggestion, van Tilburg said, but they cannot be forced to do something they don’t want to do. Hypnotherapy is not like stage hypnosis — those performances where someone is put in a trance and ordered to quack like a duck.
After a child is in a trance, van Tilburg said, she will suggest strategies that will help their gut feel better. For example, she might suggest that they imagine consuming their favorite drink, which is coating their stomach so no pain can get through. Or she might suggest they give their hand special powers, so when they put it on their tummy, the pain goes away. She said children can be trained to treat their own pain in three to six sessions. It may take up to 12 for adolescents and adults.
Some experts think hypnosis for IBS should be the first-line therapy for children, who are more open to hypnosis than adults. The problem is that much treatment is currently connected to hospitals and research institutions, or must take place in an office with a trained therapist, leaving it out of reach of many patients, whether adults or children.
But there are efforts to make hypnotherapy more available. The Rome Foundation, an organization that focuses on brain-gut issues, offers training for clinicians, as do some hypnosis institutes. Research is being done into other ways of delivering treatment, such as group hypnotherapy for adults and recordings children can listen to at home. Some companies are exploring digital options. MetaMe Health is working on a smartphone app to connect patients with a trained therapist that has received premarket FDA clearance.
Navidi, who started out as a generalist, said that after he started offering hypnotherapy for IBS, his practice was flooded with patients. He established GI Psychology in 2020 to help fill the treatment gap. The clinic has eight practitioners, who can provide teletherapy in 30 states. Treatment is typically 10 50-minute sessions that include clinical hypnosis and cognitive behavioral therapy to help children reframe anxious thoughts about their stomach, he said. The children also receive recordings they practice with at home.
The cost is about $2,100, and parents generally get about half of that back from their insurance company.
Bland, the college student, isn’t quite sure why the hypnotherapy worked — perhaps, she said, it was necessary to reach a subconscious level where healing could occur. But she has a message for adults and children with IBS: “Don’t stop looking for those answers until it feels correct,” she said. “It took me a long time to get where I am today, but I’m really happy I never gave up on it.” | 2022-10-04T11:57:51Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Hypnosis is effective for kids with IBS - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/parenting/2022/10/04/hypnosis-ibs-kids/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/parenting/2022/10/04/hypnosis-ibs-kids/ |
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., right, and Justice Ketnanji Brown Jackson outside the Supreme Court building in Washington on Sept. 30. (Shawn Thew/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)
This week, a zealous band of Republican partisans gathered in Washington intent on advancing their campaign to undermine free and fair elections in this country. It isn’t the Proud Boys responding to President Donald Trump’s call to “stand back and stand by.” Nor is it the majority of House Republicans who sustain the “big lie” that the 2020 election was stolen. It is the six-person, right-wing majority of the Supreme Court using a self-selected docket of cases to advance minority rule.
The Voting Rights Act, one of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s greatest legacies, is a prime target. Five conservative justices joined in 2013’s Shelby County v. Holder to gut the act’s core enforcement mechanism: the requirement of prior federal approval for voting changes in states with a history of discrimination. Writing for the court, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. ignored the detailed record — and common sense — to make his own finding that racial discrimination was no longer a problem in the United States.
Now, the act’s prohibition of voting practices that result in “denial or abridgement” of the right to vote on account of race is at risk. Merrill v. Milligan involves an Alabama redistricting plan that ensures that African Americans, who make up more than one-fourth of the state’s population, will constitute the majority in just one of its seven congressional districts. Having engaged in blatant racial gerrymandering, the state of Alabama now argues that race can’t be used as a factor to draw up a fairer map.
The most ominous case on the docket — Moore v. Harper — also involves gerrymandering.
The right-wing gang on the court ruled in 2019 that federal courts will not review cases of partisan gerrymandering — meaning, drawing congressional districts with the aim of helping one party win a disproportionate number of seats. The court’s opinion offered the reassurance that state courts would continue to curb extremes.
In North Carolina, the state Supreme Court did just that, striking down what it called an “egregious and intentional partisan gerrymander.” Now, North Carolina has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to ignore the state constitution and rule that the U.S. Constitution empowers the state legislature alone to determine how elections are run.
This wingnut argument — called the “independent state legislature theory” — ignores the entire history of elections in the United States. Yet, as The Post’s Ruth Marcus writes in her comprehensive review of the court’s threatening docket, three justices have already indicated they are sympathetic to it.
If the partisan GOP majority on the Supreme Court adopts this theory, it could have truly calamitous effects. Across the country, MAGA Republicans — inflamed by Trump’s “big lie” about the stolen 2020 election — are running candidates for governor and secretary of state and state legislatures. If the court rules in their favor and overrules state constitutions, then Republican majorities in state legislatures would be in position to follow Trump’s 2020 example: claim fraud without proof and replace the electors chosen by the popular vote with their own.
All of this builds on top of cases that have already neutered campaign finance laws and opened the sluice gates to unlimited — and often anonymous — campaign contributions. The Supreme Court ruled in 1976 in Buckley v. Valeo that money was speech and struck down limits on political spending by independent groups.
Then, in a 5-4 decision in Citizens United in 2010, the right-wing justices overturned any limits on campaign funding by corporations. Writing for the majority, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy — a Reagan appointee — risibly declared that spending by corporations or others to oppose or support candidates would not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption. In 2014, in McCutcheon v. FEC, another 5-4 decision, the court outlawed any limits on how much money an individual could give to candidates or campaign committees in any election cycle.
As OpenSecrets reports, non-party outside groups — think PACs and pop-up nonprofit fronts — have spent nearly $4.5 billion influencing elections since Citizens United. In the previous two decades, they spent a combined $750 million. Not surprisingly, this has led to the obscene, spiraling cost of elections.
This year’s grotesqueries featured AIPAC, the powerful pro-Israel lobby, spending millions — including two separate $1 million contributions from Republican donors — through front groups to try to defeat progressive women of color in Democratic Party primaries.
The Supreme Court is the country’s least democratic branch of government. Its appointed, unelected justices serve lifetime terms. They select the cases they hear. And now, after a 40-year campaign by conservatives, the court has a six-person, transparently partisan majority. This session, they will continue to forward the right’s agenda — undermining civil rights, elevating religious doctrine, rolling back the power to regulate.
At the center of that will be their assault on democracy. The House Jan. 6 committee has exposed Trump’s multilayered campaign to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Now, we need an independent inquiry to detail how right-wing justices have subverted our democracy, so we can determine what can be done to save it. | 2022-10-04T12:02:08Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | The Supreme Court’s majority reconvenes its assault on democracy - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/04/supreme-court-voting-rights-act-minority-rule/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/04/supreme-court-voting-rights-act-minority-rule/ |
Phillips Collection spotlights Jonathan Monaghan’s restless vision
‘Move the Way You Want’ is part of the museum’s ‘Intersections’ series pairing contemporary art with works from the collection
Giorgio de Chirico's “Horses” is one of two paintings at the Phillips Collection that inspired video artist Jonathan Monaghan. (Giorgio De Chirico/Phillips Collection/Artists Rights Society/SIAE)
The small Giorgio de Chirico painting on the wall is probably not the first thing visitors to the Phillips Collection will notice upon entering “Move the Way You Want.” But the picture, which depicts two horses on a beach and the remains of a classical Greco-Roman structure, can be seen as the wellspring for Jonathan Monaghan’s entire show. The exhibition’s centerpiece is an eight-minute animated video that features a horse on a beach.
“Move the Way You Want” is the latest installment in the Phillips’s “Intersections” series, which invites contemporary artists to respond to pieces in the museum’s collection — and, if so inclined, the building itself. Monaghan chose two equine paintings, de Chirico’s “Horses” (circa 1928) and Théodore Géricault’s “Two Horses” (1808-09). He also took inspiration from the space he chose: a gallery that served as Duncan and Marjorie Phillips’s dining room before they turned their mansion into a full-time public gallery in 1930.
Anyone who’s seen previous Monaghan videos, however, will recognize that his current piece doesn’t derive simply from those two paintings and the room in which they now hang. “Move the Way You Want” illustrates several interests the artist has demonstrated in previous computer-generated animations.
Monaghan, who chairs Catholic University’s art department, often sets scenes on beaches, which evoke his childhood in New York City’s Rockaway Beach neighborhood. His videos frequently follow a lone animal protagonist that travels through a universe that’s devoid of people yet full of reminders of human civilization. And historical architecture recurs in Monaghan’s work, which contrasts elaborate ornamentation with space-age modernism. (At the show’s opening, Monaghan said that he considers the lavishness of baroque architecture analogous to the profusion of digital stimuli today.)
The artist’s witty animations germinated from a formative influence that has nothing to do with the Phillips: video games. His early pieces actually appropriated characters and settings from such gaming franchises as Street Fighter and Super Mario Bros. What endures from those days is the sense of motion: A creature lopes through incongruous environments, often entering a spaceship that descends, hovers and ascends again. The videos’ vantage points also move, panning up, down and sideways, as if filmed by a movie camera.
As its title suggests, “Move the Way You Want” continues Monaghan’s exploration of motion. But the artist combines this with another perennial interest: the corporate commodification of modern life. So his purple-brown horse is patterned with silver insignia that may look vaguely familiar, since each is a reproduction of the logo Uber used from 2016 to 2018. In a dream-logic version of contemporary D.C., the animal trots along a beach littered with green-and-white Lime electric scooters and orange Jump electric bicycles, and past a farmers market that sells electronics as well as produce.
Also abandoned on the shore is a Peloton stationary bicycle, a device that — not unlike Monaghan’s videos — can simulate journeys. Pelotons are outfitted with display monitors, so the exercise bicycle’s video screen serves as a sort of interior mirror of the animation itself. In fact, the horse initially appears from the Peloton’s screen in a birth scene that’s a metaphor for the creation of computer images: The animal emerges from one screen onto another screen.
To say the horse appears “initially” isn’t quite right, though. The video is a loop, so it doesn’t really begin or end. It depicts daily life as an endless, well, cycle of movement and consumption. At one point, the horse is grabbed by a drone that bears the logo of Amazon Prime. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)
The show does offer a more traditional approach to time by affixing to the room’s walls three large stills from the video, each contained in a computer rendering of an ornate frame. But these pictures are clearly secondary to the video, whose cultural contrasts and historical juxtapositions are accentuated by continual motion. When Monaghan gives everybody permission to move the way they want, he may be thinking less of e-bikes than of his own restless artistic vision.
Jonathan Monaghan: Move the Way You Want
Phillips Collection, 1600 21st St. NW. 202 -387-2151. phillipscollection.org.
Dates: Through Dec. 31.
Admission: Included with general admission of $16; $12 for seniors; $10 for students and teachers; and free for members, children under 18 and military personnel. Masks are required. So are timed-entry tickets, except for members. | 2022-10-04T12:28:18Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Phillips Collection spotlights Jonathan Monaghan’s restless vision - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/10/04/phillips-collection-jonathan-monaghan/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/10/04/phillips-collection-jonathan-monaghan/ |
Hua Hsu’s ‘Stay True’ questions the meaning of a senseless tragedy
Review by Charles Arrowsmith
(Doubleday)
The murder of a college friend lies at the heart of Hua Hsu’s memoir “Stay True.” The friend, referred to in the book only as Ken, was shot dead at 20 years old in Vallejo, Calif., early one Sunday morning in July 1998, after a party in Berkeley. It was “a freak occurrence,” an inept robbery that devolved into violence, and Ken’s assailants were quickly apprehended and jailed. Hsu describes both the buildup and the aftermath with devastating emotional precision, questioning the possibility of meaning in tragedy and the value of the stories we tell while attempting to find it. It is a thoughtful, affecting book.
When an editor at the college paper suggests that Ken, a Japanese American, might have been the victim of a hate crime, Hsu initially rejects the idea. “I was mostly upset that my colleague had tried to slot Ken’s death into a broader context,” he writes, “one beyond my understanding and control. I was unwilling to relinquish him to some greater cause.” As he finds himself drawn to news of other violent murders, though — killings often apparently catalyzed by bigotry — the narrative becomes harder to resist. But can the label hate crime, even if accurate, ever be sufficient — or is it just an attempt to comprehend and contain the unfathomable?
This question occasions for Hsu a reckoning with the nuances and contradictions of Asian American identity, a major theme in the book. He was born in Illinois to Taiwanese parents who didn’t see the point in identifying as “Asian American”: His father “referred to himself as ‘Eastern’ or ‘Oriental,’” and besides, they “hadn’t even planned on becoming Americans.” They kept one foot in Taiwan and raised their son in Chinese-speaking communities, bequeathing to him the “telos of self-improvement baked into the immigrant experience.”
Young Hua, though, was ineluctably American. In Texas as a child, he begged for cowboy boots; as a teenager, he loved Guns N’ Roses and Nirvana. He was keenly aware of an urge to forge his own identity, his youthful zine-making “a way of sketching the outlines of a new self, writing a new personality into being.”
Ken’s experience and demeanor could scarcely have been more different. “The first time I met Ken,” Hsu writes, “I hated him.” He was confident, good-looking, easygoing in a way that was alien to Hsu. He was a poster boy for assimilation: White girlfriend, fraternity brother, patron of Abercrombie & Fitch; “a genre of person I actively avoided — mainstream.”
In the grand tradition of unlikely friends, Hsu slowly loosens up and gains some of Ken’s confidence while Ken comes to understand his friend’s distrust of mainstream culture.
Was Ken’s killing racially motivated? In the end, it didn’t seem to be the case. And besides, the hate-crime narrative, though it seemed to offer a simple explanation, was ultimately inadequate to the grief and the need for meaning felt by those left behind. For Hsu, this need sought any available outlet: “In those first few days,” he writes, “everything assumed a talismanic significance.” He saw omens in the scores of baseball games, in the flies that seemed ubiquitous the week of Ken’s funeral.
As it happened, the killers’ arraignment occurred the same week as the Columbine massacre, another occasion when explanations were everywhere sought but nowhere to be found. “I didn’t understand the point in offering them the privilege of narrative,” Hsu writes of the Columbine killers. “I was more fixated on the paths that had come to an end.”
As his father tells him by way of comfort, after Kurt Cobain’s suicide: “That’s the dilemma of life: you have to find meaning, but by the same time, you have to accept the reality. How to handle the contradiction is a challenge to everyone of us.”
While the murder is the crux of the book, “Stay True” also succeeds as a wry chronicle of the insecurities of youth. Late adolescence is recalled as a time of vivid memory-making, of earnest, intense identification with art and friends. The thrill of creating new rituals, codes and mixtapes is as yet untroubled by the knowledge that they won’t last. Simple pleasures develop totemic significance: a private signal to duck out for a smoke, a friendly Secret Santa tradition (or rather, “Secret Non-Denominational Winter Holiday Gift Giver”). With warmth and humor, Hsu evokes the precocity of college life: “We stayed up so late, possessed by delirium, that we came up with a theory of everything, only we forgot to write it down.”
For all the soul-searching, therapeutic work and years of rumination imprinted on “Stay True,” it’s the ache of a friendship lost but honored that will linger for readers. Though Hsu claims, self-deprecatingly, that the term “good friend … only occasionally applies to me,” the lasting effect of “Stay True” is that of an extraordinary, devotional act of friendship.
Charles Arrowsmith is based in New York and writes about books, films and music. | 2022-10-04T12:28:34Z | www.washingtonpost.com | 'Stay True' by Hua Hsu book review - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2022/10/04/stay-true-memoir-hua-hsu/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2022/10/04/stay-true-memoir-hua-hsu/ |
A model wears a creation for the Chanel ready-to-wear Spring/Summer 2023 fashion collection presented Tuesday, Oct. 4, 2022 in Paris. (Vianney Le Caer/Invision/AP)
PARIS — An understated collection awaited the VIP guests who attended Chanel’s show on the final day of Paris Fashion Week. Kristen Stewart and Diane Kruger were among those who arrived at the Grand Palais Ephemere for one of the day’s biggest events, while some eyes looked forward to Miu Miu and Louis Vuitton later in the program. | 2022-10-04T12:28:41Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Chanel goes understated in final day of Paris Fashion Week - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/chanel-goes-understated-in-final-day-of-paris-fashion-week/2022/10/04/31552868-43d9-11ed-be17-89cbe6b8c0a5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/chanel-goes-understated-in-final-day-of-paris-fashion-week/2022/10/04/31552868-43d9-11ed-be17-89cbe6b8c0a5_story.html |
Republicans Can’t Commit. Just Look at Their Agenda.
Analysis by Robert A. George | Bloomberg
House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy’s new “Commitment to America,” intends to reassure voters of the GOP’s intentions if they win the majority in Congress in the midterm election. Instead, it reveals a party of commitment-phobes.
It’s convenient to say that the contract “nationalized” midterm elections. But that’s not the whole story. I was working for one House Republican as the contract was announced, and then for Gingrich’s communications shop as the contract was enacted under his leadership as the new Speaker, and the contrast between that document and today’s “Commitment” couldn’t be starker.
Far from being a specific, bold legislatively-inspired list, McCarthy’s brainchild is a collection of amorphous, uplifting platitudes — “An Economy That’s Strong…A Nation That’s Safe…A Future That’s Built On Freedom..A Government That’s Accountable.” Dig down a little deeper and one discovers, well, more nebulous phrases — “Confront Big Tech and Demand Fairness,” “Achieve Longer, Healthier Lives for Americans.”
The very words, “commitment to America,” are a retread of a 2020 GOP document. How much of a “commitment” can it be if it can’t even claim a concept different than two-year-old promises?
McCarthy’s document also falls short on its predecessor’s secondary message, as a reflection and implicit repudiation of the failures of the most recent one-term president. Contract Republicans realized that Bush’s vow-breaking — “lie” might be too harsh a word — had a political consequence that required addressing in some fashion. Far from repudiating Donald Trump’s “Big Lie” on the election, McCarthy Republicans don’t appear ready to push back against any of the former president falsehoods and exaggerations.
In short, Gingrich’s contract presented specificity, reflection and bold innovation. McCarthy’s commitment, in contrast, promotes rhetorical vagueness and vaporware.
Republican ‘Commitment’ Is Exercise in Redundancy: David Hopkins
Republicans Aren’t Learning Right Lessons: Jonathan Bernstein
Abortion Remains Big X Factor in Midterm Elections: Joshua Green | 2022-10-04T12:28:59Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Republicans Can’t Commit. Just Look at Their Agenda. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/republicans-cant-commit-just-look-at-their-agenda/2022/10/04/e398fb50-43dc-11ed-be17-89cbe6b8c0a5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/republicans-cant-commit-just-look-at-their-agenda/2022/10/04/e398fb50-43dc-11ed-be17-89cbe6b8c0a5_story.html |
The US Labor Market Is Looser Than It Appears
Analysis by Gary Shilling | Bloomberg
Most seers believe the US labor market is overly strong. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell recently described it as “extremely tight” and “out of balance,” with demand for workers far outstripping supply. I beg to differ.
It is true that quit rates had risen as employees didn’t worry about finding new jobs. Also, job-switchers got annualized pay hikes of 8.4% in August, up from 5.8% early this year, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. That encouraged people to change jobs or strike for higher pay. There were 180 strikes involving 78,000 workers in the first half of 2022, up from 102 strikes covering 26,500 a year earlier.
Job openings are about twice the number unemployed, which means that to return to the 63.4% labor participation rate of February 2020, before the pandemic, it would require 2.8 million people moving into the labor force. Layoffs in July of 1.4 of million were about 23% below the average in 2019.
If there really isn’t any slack in the labor market, then why are real wages falling? Corrected for inflation, average hourly pay in August had fallen 2.1% this year, with the year-over-year jump in the consumer price index at 8.2%. The many employers who scrambled to add employees are now reluctant to cut staff even as the economy slips on concern that they may not be able to find workers when things turn around.
The recent weakness in productivity growth -- and actual declines in the first half of this year -- adds fuel to the fire since it takes more hours worked to produce the same output. In the first quarter, output per hour worked fell at a 7.4% annual rate and by 4.1% in the second quarter.
Furthermore, immigration, which can substitute for native-born workers, has slowed to a trickle. From 2019 to 2021, annual immigration dropped from 1.3 million to 505,000. Also, the rapidly aging postwar babies, now age 58 to 76, are dropping out of the labor force as they retire. The labor participation rate for those 65 and older is 19.1%, compared with 82.8% for those in prime working ages, 25 years to 54 years.
My analysis indicates that current labor market stringency isn’t due to robust demand for workers but because Americans are limiting the supply after the pandemic. After staying at home for two years due to the lockdowns, many people became accustomed to working remotely and putting in fewer hours while others dropped out, retiring early. In late September, office occupancy as measured by workers at actual desks was only 47.5% of early 2020, according to Kastle Systems.
Many switched to part-time from full-time work. In August, 21 million worked part-time because they wanted to while a declining number of part-timers — 4.1 million — wanted full-time jobs but were only offered part-time work. Surveys by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, among others, reveal that the pandemic-induced changes in attitudes toward work, with men, women, the young, middle-aged, full-time and part-time all wanting to work fewer hours than before Covid-19 struck.
Consumers can maintain their real spending in the face of falling real wages by liquidating assets, but that isn’t happening or likely. Much of the earlier three rounds of pandemic-related federal fiscal stimulus in 2020 and 2021 went into single-family housing, as Americans fled cities for suburban and rural areas, and into equities.
But stock prices fell into a bear market and house prices are beginning to decline. With rising mortgage rates, cash-out refinancing, which provided money for other spending, is history. Household net worth dropped 4.1% in the second quarter as stocks and mutual funds tanked, according to the Fed.
Borrowing is getting more expensive as witnessed by the jump in credit-card interest rates from 16% in early March to 18% in September. Low levels of consumer confidence signals that Americans are too scared to support the economy with a spending binge, but are hunkering down instead.
With all these forces weighing on consumers, who account for 68.4% of total output, it’s not surprising that real retail sales in August were down 4.4% from March 2021 and 1.2% from last November.
Unemployment lags the economy in business cycles. Only when business sales and profits nosedive do employers cut staff. And this time, as the recession I’ve been predicting unfolds, employers may be slower than usual to make the switch from recruiting to firing. But it will occur.
In recent months, job openings are falling and so is hiring. Ditto for quit rates as employees begin to worry about finding new jobs. And the unemployment rate ticked higher from 3.5% in July to 3.7% in August.
Don’t be surprised if labor market data moves quickly from feast to famine. That will put further downward pressure on corporate earnings and stock prices. But it will curb inflation, to the benefit of US Treasuries.More from Bloomberg Opinion:
• Corporate Bond Doomsayers Are a Little Premature: Jonathan Levin
• Takeaway for Powell From Greenspan ‘Oasis’ Speech: Daniel Moss
Gary Shilling is president of A. Gary Shilling & Co., a consultancy. He is author, most recently, of “The Age of Deleveraging: Investment Strategies for a Decade of Slow Growth and Deflation,” and he may have a stake in the areas he writes about. | 2022-10-04T12:29:11Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The US Labor Market Is Looser Than It Appears - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/the-us-labor-market-is-looser-than-it-appears/2022/10/04/81551df0-43d4-11ed-be17-89cbe6b8c0a5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/the-us-labor-market-is-looser-than-it-appears/2022/10/04/81551df0-43d4-11ed-be17-89cbe6b8c0a5_story.html |
Extreme Summer
The record-breaking dry spell, covering more than 40 percent of the continental U.S. for nearly two years, has put pressure on livestock herds across the Great Plains
Cattle rancher Brad Randel rounds up some of his black angus cattle to sell at an auction in September in McCook, Neb. (Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post)
MCCOOK, Neb. — As the sun rose on another hot day, rancher Brad Randel rode through his feed lot working at a grim task — culling cattle from his herd because his ranch’s sparse grass can’t sustain them during a crushing drought.
In other years, Randel would have kept the smaller heifers longer to see if he could fatten them up. “But this is no typical year,” he said.
Drought intensity
Data as of Sept. 20
Abnormally dry
Exceptional drought
The Biden administration has committed more than $22 billion to climate-friendly farming practices in the Inflation Reduction Act and other measures, on top of more than $4 billion in disaster relief. Yet many of these Americans still say they don’t believe in climate change and view federal attempts to address agriculture’s greenhouse gas emissions — some 11 percent of the U.S. total — with suspicion.
Even these steps may not be able to compensate for the drought conditions and extreme weather pummeling the region. This summer ranked as America’s third hottest on record, with Nebraska “ground zero” for drought, seeing its third driest June through August period, with an average of 5.8 inches of precipitation.
Randel, a lanky man of deep Christian faith, is praying — along with many of his neighbors — that this latest crushing weather pattern is just one more cycle of tough times on the Great Plains, where, the familiar saying goes, every day that goes by is one day closer to the next rain. But if it doesn’t snow this winter, he says, he’s not sure his cattle operation will survive. He’s already reduced his herd by 37 percent.
“If we don’t get moisture through the winter, then it’s going to be herd liquidation. We’ll have to get rid of everything,” he said. “I don’t know what we’ll do! We’ve never been here before.”
‘Send rain to this thirsty land’
Randel’s sprawling ranch just northeast of McCook, that has been in his family since 1887, offers a visual road map of the toll the drought has taken on this region. It traverses dried-up creeks, desiccated rows of corn and a field where six-foot-high weeds normally grow to shelter calves in winter, now reduced to nothing but dirt.
Randel, who lives on the ranch in a low-slung brick home with his wife and two of his teen daughters — a third is away at college — says the trouble began last summer, when the area got little rain. Then came a snowless winter and another dry spring. So far this year the ranch has gotten nine inches of rain, he said, in a county that normally gets 22 inches of rain a year.
“My dad was famous for saying, ‘It gets like this, we’ve seen droughts before,’” Randel said. “In this country things can turn around in a hurry. One day it can be 100 degrees and the next it’s 40. One day it’s blowing dust and the next you’re fighting mud. We’re ready for that turnaround.”
Farmers and ranchers in the Great Plains have always endured weather extremes, but they’ve been buffeted by a series of recent record-breaking catastrophes that have raised alarms about the risk of extreme weather, according to John K. Hansen, the president of the Nebraska Farmer’s Union. A “bomb cyclone” buried cows alive, killed three and caused the worst flooding the state has ever seen in 2019, then, in December of last year, a storm that spawned several tornadoes, an unheard-of event.
“The drought is just one more out-of-the ordinary extreme weather event. Climate change isn’t coming, climate change is here,” said Hansen, an outlier among many in Nebraska’s farming community.
Hansen said a growing number of farmers have sought mental help from the state’s Rural Response Hotline, seeking vouchers that they can use for counseling — up to 8,046 last year, more than triple the number three years ago. That is one measure of the stress that farm families are under from the twin pressures of the extreme weather and the fallout from the global pandemic, he said.
The manager, Art Ruggles, said that ranchers began bringing their young calves to sell far earlier than normal this summer because they could no longer feed them. Some have been forced to liquidate their entire herds, he said. His family has farmed in the area for over a century, Ruggles said, and the drought is the “worst we’ve seen.”
“People are really negative. I mean, they’re scared,” said Gary Power, 80, a sheep and goat farmer in McCook. “They’re saying, ‘What are we going to do for feed to feed our livestock?’ and ‘Our wheat harvest is one-third of what we were expecting, how long before the bank forecloses?’ ”
Randel’s church recently held a week of noontime prayer vigils where church volunteers passed out fliers that read, “Lord, we are facing severe drought and we plead with You to open the heavens and send rain to this thirsty land.”
On the ranch, Randel, 48, delayed turning out cattle onto their pasture for summer grazing for 45 days. When the rain still didn’t come, he brought them home to be fed in a paddock in August, four months earlier than normal. Ranchers are struggling to find feed for their livestock as the price of hay — if it even can be found — skyrocketed from $192 a ton in 2020 to $333 this year, according to an American Farm Bureau Federation analysis.
The animals seemed confused to end up in a dry pen, a strange stopover from the pasture to their normal winter feeding in fields of tasty corn stalks. Randel’s wife, Adrienne, 47, watched with worry from the picture window in her kitchen as the cows paced along the fence line, obviously not content.
“They seemed to know something was wrong,” she said.
On a recent stop to check on some of their cattle that remained in the pasture, the couple found the animals nibbling at whatever little bit of green they could find — weeds and brownish blades — on a sun-drenched hillside below a field of ruined corn.
“It’s sad, because you always like to see them grazing on lush grass,” said Brad.
“Then you know they’re happy, or at least that’s what I think,” Adrienne said. But she was heartened to see the animals still looked healthy and had a sheen to their coat.
“They look pretty good!” she said.
A historic drought
During the heat wave in early June in western Kansas, Scott Whiting witnessed something on his ranch in Dighton that he never seen before — his cattle trying to climb into their water tanks in a desperate attempt to keep cool. Two of his calves did not survive.
“It was just brutal,” Whiting recalled, a “perfect storm” of factors causing the deaths, including the heat, humidity, hotter-than-usual nights and cattle that had not shed their winter coats.
For Whiting, making sure his cattle have access to water and can keep cool has been a daily battle. He checks on them constantly, set up new sprinklers and is even now contemplating switching from Black Angus cattle — whose dark coats absorb the heat — to lighter-colored animals.
“I’ve got a lot of miles to put on every day just to check on the cattle,” he said. “Sometimes in extreme heat I’ll check the windmills twice a day. We’re set up to haul water if we have to — to be ready to go at a moment’s notice.”
More than 40 percent of the continental U.S. has been in drought for nearly two full years, according to Brad Rippey, a meteorologist with the USDA, going back as far as late September 2020. The current dry spell, which set a modern record when it hit 102 consecutive weeks on Sept. 6, has impacted the country’s most important ranching and grazing lands in the central and western United States.
Clay Pope, an Oklahoma rancher who does outreach for the USDA’s Southern Plains Climate Hub, said that farmers and ranchers — even conservatives who might chafe at the terms “global warming” or “climate change” — need to bolster their land from extreme weather events by minimizing soil tilling, planting cover crops to protect the soil moisture and nutrients during fallow times and using controlled fires to rejuvenate pastures.
“There may be folks that don’t believe in climate change but I’ve never met anybody who doesn’t believe in drought and floods,” Pope said. “Extreme weather is our new reality. We have to deal with it.”
Pope noted that existing USDA conservation programs, which always have way more farmers who want to participate than they can include, got a “huge shot of money” for climate-resilient practices in the Inflation Reduction Act. There’s plenty of room for improvement: Only about a third of cultivated crop acreage is farmed without tilling soil, and even fewer farmers plant cover crops — about six percent — like the Randels.
“Jeez, my grandson, what’s he going to have to deal with?” Johnson said. “I’m watching all the [irrigation] pivots goin’ and I’m thinking, ‘Are we going to be able to do that forever?’ ”
Auctions under pressure
After he culled the herd, Randel and his ranch hands loaded up the 350 young heifers and steers and trucked them about 10 miles up the road to McCook’s Tri-State Livestock Commission sale barn, which draws farmers from throughout the region for its Monday auction. Inside, handlers steered cattle through gates and onto a weighing platform, the air thick with dust and the smell of manure. Bidders and spectators were arrayed in a circle in carpeted stands around the pen.
Auctioneer Terry Elson kept up his running patter as the lots of cattle came up for sale, trying his best to show off the animals’ attributes. He was well aware of the heartbreak of the moment — overseeing the emergency sales of livestock with bloodlines that these farmers had worked for generations to establish.
“You know why they’re here, you know the circumstances of the drought,” Elson told the crowd about one lot from a rancher in nearby Cambridge who was selling almost his entire herd. “You get the chance to bid for 90 heifers, they would make beautiful breeding heifers. … They don’t have a fly on 'em.”
“One good thing about all this is that even though we had to sell, cattle prices have stayed good, so we got a pretty good price for them,” Randel said afterward.
“It’s not like there aren’t days when you go, ‘Really?’” she said. “But we’ve seen God’s faithfulness to us for years and years and generations. So that’s what gives you strength, you know this too shall pass.”
Alice Crites and Emily Guskin contributed to this report. | 2022-10-04T12:29:30Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Historic heat and drought on the Great Plains has hurt livestock, ranchers - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/10/04/drought-livestock-cattle-great-plains/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/10/04/drought-livestock-cattle-great-plains/ |
"Your Money or Your Life" co-author Vicki Robin at her home in Langley, Wash. on Sept. 17. (David Ryder/for The Washington Post)
She anticipated the Great Resignation. Today, Vicki Robin still wants you to save, quit and thrive.
By Helaine Olen
I laughed. The woman who once famously lived with her companion on about $1,000 per month didn’t want me or The Post — owned by Jeff Bezos, one of the richest people in the world — to pay for a hotel?
Before the hustle economy and the “Great Resignation,” there was Robin and her partner, Joe Dominguez. Their book “Your Money or Your Life: 9 Steps to Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Achieving Financial Independence,” published 30 years ago this fall, asked us to take control of our financial and work lives by eschewing mindless spending and instead concentrating on what matters, such as family, friends and hobbies.
Yet today, “Your Money or Your Life” — which still sells thousands of copies a year — is rarely mentioned in the context of our current labor moment. Instead, its legacy is mostly celebrated by the tech-bro-heavy, more apolitical FIRE movement — that’s Financial Independence, Retire Early. Adherents have embraced the frugal philosophy and desire for freedom, but not the book’s greater ambitions.
Robin appreciates her younger acolytes, but is concerned that a vital piece of her message has been lost in translation. The FIRE iteration, she says, is often “absent any social or political critique.” But “Your Money or Your Life” was never supposed to be just a self-help guide to saving your own financial life. For Robin, the vision 30 years ago — and the one she still believes in today — was always about how to rescue us all.
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The heart of “Your Money or Your Life” is a formula — devised by Dominguez, who died in 1997 — to seize control of our destinies by reexamining what work really costs us, spiritually and literally. How much do we spend commuting? How much do we spend on clothes for the office? How much do we spend on fancy vacations, or fancier cars, so we can tolerate our lives? Subtract that out, and you’ve calculated your real hourly wage, the true amount you are selling your days on earth for. “We aren’t making a living, we’re making a dying,” wrote Dominguez and Robin.
“There’s a lot of blather about meaningful work and purpose in life,” Robin tells me. “It’s dangled out as a carrot, and I don’t know how many people actually get to do that.”
But the steps “Your Money or Your Life” recommends are different than the ones undertaken by most recent job hoppers. Instead of finding a better-paying position, the book argues for a different solution: to radically cut back. “Spending money is not an assertion of your freedom. It is the key to your next enslavement,” Robin tells me.
This kind of anti-materialism message was once common on the left. But as inequality soared, it fell into disfavor among many concerned with social justice. It’s a lot easier to preach giving up on conspicuous consumption when it’s an active choice, not a necessity.
Still, that didn’t mean the idea went away. There’s forever a strain in American thought that’s suspicious of our society’s avaricious tendencies. There are Puritans and Quakers, transcendentalists and Shakers, beatniks and practitioners of voluntary simplicity, like Robin.
FIRE is another such movement. It emerged out of the foreclosure crisis and the stock market boom that followed. Robin is, to many in FIRE, an OG of the movement — they discovered “Your Money or Your Life,” and began discussing it on blogs and Reddit forums.
The United States, it is said, is a place where the luxuries are cheap but the necessities expensive. It’s not just a lack of gumption and an addiction to consumer goods that prevents Americans from gaining financial freedom; it’s also the enormous cost of basics such as health care, child care, housing and higher education, paired with a dismal minimum wage and worker protections. It’s instructive to discover what finally moved Robin away from extreme frugality and toward the modest but comfortable life she lives now. She was diagnosed with cancer — a disease that can not only kill you, but, courtesy of the United States’ patchy, expensive health-care system, also inflict massive financial damage.
Robin began to spend royalties from “Your Money or Your Life,” which she had previously mostly been giving away, to fund her treatment. The book’s title took on a new meaning — it was, literally, her money or her life. As she first told me a decade ago, and again this month, “Nobility is one thing, but to die of frugality is another.”
Today, Robin considers FIRE followers to be fellow travelers, but she says more of them should address bigger economic and societal concerns. She tells me she would like to see tuition-free college and universal health care, as well as a lifetime basic income in return for a year or two of service. They are, she says, “things that should happen because of justice and environmental sustainability, but will also benefit the FIRE people in the FIRE movement,” adding, “A lot of people are stuck for their entire lives in jobs that do not agree with their souls because of college debt.” The Biden administration’s debt forgiveness plan doesn’t go far enough, in her view. “We need to look as a society at the system that says to succeed you need a college education, but you have to sell your future to get it.”
Robin’s still striving to change the world. She has written a book on eating locally sourced food. (She cooked me a yummy frittata made with onions, peppers, yellow squash and eggs from her property.) An indefatigable social innovator, she’s pushing a plan to encourage Whidbey Islanders to rent out unused bedrooms, to ease a worker shortage caused by high rents. There’s a podcast, too, called “What Could Possibly Go Right,” where she interviews thought leaders on what they think is going, yes, right in the world.
All of us, Robin told me, deserve our “dignity,” something our society all too often strips away. And that message of dignity for all is what she hopes is her legacy. “I never saw it as a book that’s about giving up things,” she says about “Your Money or Your Life.” “I was selling outsmarting a system that’s trying to outsmart you.”
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Read other Opinions Essays and see more special features. | 2022-10-04T12:29:54Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | 30 years later, Vicki Robin’s ‘Your Money or Your Life’ is more relevant than ever - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/04/vicki-robin-profile-your-money-your-life-anniversary-fire/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/04/vicki-robin-profile-your-money-your-life-anniversary-fire/ |
We’re back! Happy Tuesday, everyone. Our pal Dan Diamond is interviewing Anthony Fauci for USC Annenberg’s Center for Health Journalism this afternoon. Zoom in here.
Today’s edition: The White House is announcing over $6 million in grants aimed at expanding access to reproductive health. The latest on the cost of the new ALS drug. But first …
Dr. Oz has a checkered history of promoting questionable weight-loss plans
On the campaign trail, Mehmet Oz is leaning into his background as a doctor.
The cardiothoracic surgeon turned TV star turned Pennsylvania's GOP nominee for Senate stands in front of banners with the words “Dr. Oz” and his campaign slogan is a “dose of reality.” He has used the theme, “The Doctor is In,” our colleagues Colby Itkowitz and Lenny Bernstein report.
Doctors running for Congress often tout their credentials as surgeons or emergency medical physicians or ophthalmologists, but that can come with extra scrutiny of their medical records. But Oz isn’t just a doctor; he hosted a daytime television show aimed at millions of viewers for over a decade where he provided a platform for potentially dangerous products and fringe viewpoints, Colby and Lenny write.
Doctors in Congress often take the lead on health-care issues. They’re known to sit on powerful health panels or lead the introduction of health-care bills. Yet, Oz’s history will surely raise criticisms from some medical experts and doctors if he's involved in crafting the nation’s health policy should he win in November.
If Oz wins — and Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) wins reelection — there will be five doctors in the Senate. Currently, there are 17 doctors on Capitol Hill, 14 of them Republicans and three of them Democrats. New physician candidates are vying for Congress in the midterm elections, including Democratic nominees Kermit Jones (Calif.) and Annie Andrews (S.C.) — who are endorsed by a new PAC, Healthcare For Action, aiming to boost the number of Democratic health-care workers in Congress — and Republican nominees Larry Lazor (Conn.) and Miriam Levitt Flisser (N.Y.).
While Oz’s show was on air from 2009 to 2021, he received criticism for providing a platform for questionable products and views.
Such treatments included a weight-loss approach that involved taking a hormone women produce during pregnancy while eating 500 calories per day; garcinia cambogia, an herbal weight-loss product the Food and Drug Administration has said can cause liver damage; and selenium supplements, which he called the “holy grail of cancer prevention” (several medical reviews have said there’s no evidence it can stop cancer), Colby and Lenny note.
In 2014, Oz agreed to testify before a Senate subcommittee on consumer protection, product safety and insurance. The hearing was on false advertising in the diet and weight-loss industry, and he spent a morning getting berated by senators.
The defense: “Oz and his defenders have said that his approach on the program was to give viewers hope and provide different points of view,” Colby and Lenny write. He has received some praise for raising awareness about preventive health, and did often include caveats to the treatments he highlighted.
“On his show, Dr. Oz welcomed open, honest conversations and opinions from all kinds of folks,” per 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.”
More from Lenny:
From weight loss to cancer to "iridology," Mehmet Oz promoted questionable or potentially dangerous products on his long-running TV show--with some caveats. @ColbyItkowitz, @LennyMBernstein: https://t.co/8atFBB5wDX
— Lenny Bernstein (@LennyMBernstein) October 3, 2022
John Fetterman, the Democratic nominee for Pennsylvania’s open Senate seat, is targeting his rival’s work while hosting “The Dr. Oz Show.” His campaign has organized “Real Doctors Against Oz,” which consists of more than 100 physicians in the state.
He’s not the first Republican politician with a medical degree to face backlash over issues that run counter to expert advice.
Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.), while serving in the House, said he took hydroxychloroquine “prophylactically,” which former president Donald Trump promoted, though the FDA warned against using it to prevent covid-19, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Medical experts criticized Ben Carson and Paul for comments at a Republican debate during the 2016 presidential election, as the two candidates appeared to validate the push to further space out vaccines, CNN wrote at the time.
Rep. Andy Harris (R-Md.) said he had a complaint filed against him with a physicians board for prescribing ivermectin to treat the coronavirus, per the Baltimore Sun. The FDA has not authorized the use of ivermectin, which is usually used to treat some parasites in livestock and people, and has warned against using it to treat or prevent covid-19 infection.
HHS to announce new Title X grants for reproductive health care
New this A.M.: The Department of Health and Human Services will announce over $6 million in new Title X grants and other funding to protect and expand access to reproductive health care, promote healthy behavior and reduce existing health disparities, according to the White House.
The announcement coincides with the second meeting of the administration’s Task Force on Reproductive Healthcare Access, which President Biden and Vice President Harris will attend today.
The new dollars for the federal family planning program — which directs grants for birth control, reproductive health and preventive services for low-income people — comes after the Biden administration rolled back a contentious Trump-era policy that banned Title X providers from referring patients for abortions, among other restrictions.
Also … The Education Department is releasing new guidance reminding universities that Title IX requires institutions to protect their students from discrimination on the basis of pregnancy, including pregnancy termination.
Planned Parenthood to roll out first mobile abortion clinic
Planned Parenthood announced yesterday that it will soon launch its first mobile abortion clinic in southern Illinois — a response to the growing number of women traveling to access abortion services.
In the months since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Illinois has become a hub for people from other parts of the Midwest and South where abortions have been largely restricted or banned — overwhelming local providers and racking up wait times for the procedure.
The details: The mobile clinic, which will be outfitted in a 37-foot RV, will serve patients along the southern Illinois border with the full slate of services typically provided by a brick-and-mortar Planned Parenthood. Initially, it will provide medication abortion up to 11 weeks gestation, but the organization said it plans to eventually provide surgical abortion as well, per a news release. The mobile abortion clinic is expected to be on the road by the end of the year.
Planned Parenthood Advocates in St. Louis and Southwest Missouri:
🧵100 days after the Supreme Court stripped us of our fundamental right to abortion, @PPSLR is expanding access to health care by opening a Mobile Abortion Clinic in southern Illinois & opening a health center in Rolla! https://t.co/w2M1aOvrgR
— Planned Parenthood Advocates: STL & Southwest MO (@ppact_stl_swmo) October 3, 2022
Amylyx sets ALS drug price at $158k per year
Amylyx Pharmaceuticals announced Friday that it had set the list price of its newly approved drug to slow the progression of ALS at $158,000 per year, although company officials said they expect most patients to pay less for the treatment, our colleague Laurie McGinley reports.
The drug, Relyvrio, was cleared by the Food and Drug Administration on Thursday, making it just the third ALS treatment to ever win the federal regulator’s approval. It will be available in the United States in about four to six weeks, according to the manufacturer.
The cost breakdown: For people with private insurance, Amylyx officials said the company will provide financial assistance to eliminate co-payments. The manufacturer also plans to make the drug available at no cost to uninsured individuals who meet certain eligibility criteria. The company said it is exploring ways to keep down out-of-pocket expenses for patients with government coverage like Medicare and Medicaid.
Some advocates quickly criticized the drug’s price tag as excessive. They point to a recent report by the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review, a nonprofit group that analyzes evidence on the effectiveness and value of drugs, who said a fair price would be $9,100 to $30,600 annually.
Flashback: The pricey cost of the ALS drug is reminiscent of the debate over an expensive new Alzheimer's drug, which was originally priced at $56,000 per patient annually before the company slashed the price tag nearly in half. The decision came after fierce criticism over the cost of the drug, with the CEO saying the price cut was meant to make the drug more available to consumers who couldn't get it due to "financial considerations."
Rep. Tom Malinowski (D-N.J.):
It’s great to see new drugs for ALS. But this is why we passed our bill to let Medicare negotiate drug prices. If companies can just name their price, even one breakthrough drug (for example for Alzheimer’s) could bankrupt the whole system. https://t.co/egbjMzTYAL
Midterm watch
Vulnerable Democrats in competitive races are centering their closing pitches to voters on preserving abortion rights in the final weeks leading up to November’s midterm elections.
Katie Darling, a Democrat and business executive challenging House Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.), is out with a spot that documents the arrival of her son and a message about reproductive rights:
And a new ad from Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-Va.) features a rape survivor who highlights the views of Republican challenger Yesli Vega on the issue of abortion:
Herschel Walker, the former football player and Georgia's Republican nominee for Senate, reportedly paid for a woman’s abortion after they conceived a child while they were dating in 2009, the Daily Beast reports.
Walker denied the allegations, calling the report a “flat-out lie” and threatening to sue the publication. The candidate has said he supports a ban on abortions without exceptions. The Post has not independently verified the reporting in the Daily Beast article, and Walker didn't respond to a text message seeking comment, our colleagues Annie Linskey and Cleve R. Wootson Jr. write.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will no longer maintain a country-by-country list of travel advisories related to covid-19 due to limited testing and reporting data from around the world, CNN reports.
Biden’s vaccine mandate for workers in health-care facilities that receive federal funds survived a renewed challenge brought by 10 mostly Republican-led states, after the Supreme Court declined to hear the case.
The American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Medical Association and the Children’s Hospital Association asked the Justice Department yesterday to investigate a spate of threats against physicians and hospitals that provide gender-affirming care to transgender minors.
Premiums in the health-care program for federal employees and retirees will increase by 8.7 percent on average for 2023 — the largest increase in more than a decade, our colleague Eric Yoder reports.
How Amazon, Google, and Facebook Helped Fund the Campaign to Overturn Roe (By Sam Biddle | The Intercept)
At N.Y.U., Students Were Failing Organic Chemistry. Who Was to Blame? ( By Stephanie Saul | The New York Times)
Mental Health Crisis Teams Aren’t Just for Cities Anymore (By Tony Leys and Arielle Zionts | Kaiser Health News)
A lot of my neighbors work for the CDC or the Emory hospital system - needless to say, Halloween lawn decoration season around here really rules pic.twitter.com/xQtDAQfARO | 2022-10-04T12:30:12Z | www.washingtonpost.com | If Mehmet Oz wins, there will be five doctors in the U.S. Senate - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/04/if-mehmet-oz-wins-there-will-be-five-doctors-us-senate/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/04/if-mehmet-oz-wins-there-will-be-five-doctors-us-senate/ |
Tiffany Jackson, who died Monday of cancer, was one of the all-time great basketball players at Texas. (Ty Russell/AP)
Tiffany Jackson, an all-American basketball player at Texas and the fifth pick in the 2007 WNBA draft, died Monday at the age of 37 from breast cancer, the school announced.
“We are deeply saddened to hear the news of the passing of Tiffany Jackson, one of the greatest players in the history of Texas women’s basketball,” Longhorns Coach Vic Schaefer said of Jackson, who was the head coach at Wiley College, an NAIA school in Marshall, Tex. “From her days as a player for DFW Elite to her days as a player at the University of Texas, Tiffany has meant so much to so many people in this great state of Texas.”
Jackson was also an all-American in high school at Duncanville (Tex.) High, whose coach tweeted Monday night that she “was an amazing mother, daughter, friend, teammate and role model for so many.”
Today we lost an XPantherette Tiffany Jackson. She was an amazing mother, daughter, friend, teammate and role model for so many. Our prayers are with the Jackson family during this time. pic.twitter.com/VdtrEkkweO
— LaJeanna Howard (@Coach_LHoward) October 4, 2022
A three-time all-American playing for the Longhorns from 2003 to 2007, Jackson was a member of the 30-5 Texas team that advanced to the 2004 NCAA tournament’s Sweet 16 and was named ESPN’s national freshman of the year. She is the only player in Texas women’s basketball history with at least 1,000 points, 1,000 rebounds, 300 steals and 150 blocks.
“Tiffany had a great career and was an impact player,” said Jody Conradt, the former Texas women’s basketball coach who retired after Jackson’s senior season. “She was recognized for her all-around game and the fact that she was tremendously mobile and could play multiple positions. She was beloved by teammates, and we share in the sadness of her passing.”
Jackson, a 6-foot-3 forward, was drafted by the New York Liberty and spent three seasons with the team before she was traded to the Tulsa Shock in 2010. Her best professional season, when she averaged 12.4 points and 8.4 rebounds, came in 2011 with the Shock.
Jackson was found to have breast cancer in 2015, and with her cancer in remission she played one more season in the WNBA with Los Angeles in 2017. She retired at 32 and served as an assistant coach for two years at Texas.
Jackson had been playing in Israel during the WNBA’s offseason when she found a small lump in early 2015. She saw a doctor when she returned home to Dallas but did not have a mammogram, she later told ESPN, because the WNBA season was about to begin. She became concerned when she noticed it changing. Married at the time, Jackson was the mother of a young son and had 16 chemotherapy treatments.
“My little boy is 3, and he doesn’t really understand what’s going on,” she told ESPN in 2016. “He just knows that on some days he stays with Granny, and then he’ll ask about what kind of Band-Aid I got from the doctor. They give me different ones with Spider-Man or Scooby-Doo on them, and my son loves that. My husband works in East Texas, so he has a long commute. There is a lot to manage.”
Jackson used her Stage 3 diagnosis to try to increase awareness about the disease.
“You hear ‘breast cancer’ and you think you understand it,” she told ESPN. “But you don’t really understand it until it hits closer to you. Or it hits home.
“It was something that wasn’t even in my mind, really. So I feel like just knowing there is a possibility will help people. I wish I would have known more. I have been talking at schools and colleges about it. Especially with the African American community. Because we aren’t getting early checkups as much. So we’re being diagnosed when it’s Stage 3 or Stage 4, and we’re dying at higher rates. So I’ve been preaching, preaching, preaching that.”
Saddened to learn about the passing of my former teammate Tiffany Jackson. A University of Texas and WNBA legend. Rest well, Tiff. 💛💜
— Alana Beard (@Alanabeard20) October 4, 2022
Wow… just hearing about Tiffany Jackson 😭 Prayers up to her family. Such a blow as she was absolutely amazing 🥹 Going to miss her smile, presence and heart for others ❤️ #RIH
— Tamika Catchings (@Catchin24) October 4, 2022
One of the first college basketball games that my sisters and I ever went to was at the University of Texas… and Tiffany Jackson immediately inspired all. ❤️
May her soul rest in peace, sending love to her family. 🙏🏿🕊
— Chiney Ogwumike (@chiney) October 4, 2022 | 2022-10-04T12:30:55Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Tiffany Jackson, former WNBA player and all-American at Texas, dies at 37 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/04/tiffany-jackson-dies/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/04/tiffany-jackson-dies/ |
The longtime Facebook chief officer stepped down last week. Three days later, she announced one of the biggest donations for abortion rights in ACLU history.
Sheryl Sandberg in 2016 with tech leaders Jeff Bezos of Amazon (left) and Larry Page of Google. Sandberg announced that she was giving $3 million to the ACLU to preserve abortion rights. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
Less than three days after she left her position as the No. 2 corporate officer at Facebook, Sheryl Sandberg is already remaking herself as one of the foremost philanthropists fighting the curtailment of abortion rights across the United States.
On Tuesday, Sandberg and the American Civil Liberties Union announced that Facebook’s former chief operating office was donating $3 million to fight abortion bans — money the ACLU said would be used “to protect reproductive health care in courts, legislatures, and at the ballot box over the next three years.”
The donation, one of the largest supporting abortion rights to the ACLU, marks a new chapter for Sandberg — among the most prominent female business executives in America. During her fourteen-year tenure at Facebook, she shied away from politically controversial moves.
“Now, more than ever, we must keep up the fight to defend our right to choose and protect abortion access,” Sandberg said in a statement. “I am proud to work with the ACLU to educate voters and persuade more people who support rights for women to act — and restore rights that were taken from us.”
Following the controversial June Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, activists on both sides of the issue are waging fierce battles to pass or fight greater abortion restrictions in states across the country. At least 15 states have banned or mostly banned abortion following the ruling, according to a September analysis by The Washington Post. Some states had already passed “trigger bans'' that were designed to take effect in the event that Roe was struck down. In other states, lawmakers are rushing to pass new antiabortion laws.
The abortion issue has abruptly transformed the 2022 midterm campaign season, giving Democrats what they hope will be an unexpected boost. But years of legal battles loom ahead.
Sheryl Sandberg departure marks the end of an era for women in tech
Sandberg has long been a women’s rights advocate, championing her signature brand of corporate feminism in her best-selling book, “Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead,” and her Lean In foundation. She is a major donor to Planned Parenthood and was known for promoting women to leadership positions during her 14-year tenure at the social network.
But she was also criticized during the Trump years for political timidity. She did not publicly comment when former president Donald Trump, as a candidate, made disparaging remarks about women, including bragging on tape that he would grope them against their will. She was called out for not publicly supporting or attending the Women’s March, a global gathering of millions of people in protest of Trump’s stance on women, in 2017. Facebook then spent years making extensive efforts to curry favor with the Trump administration, even going so far as to rewrite and interpret its policies to avoid conflict with the president and his followers.
In this next chapter, Sandberg, 53, is likely to take bigger risks in public. She indicated as much to The Post in June, saying that one reason it was a good time for her to resign from Meta, as Facebook renamed itself, was that it was a “really important moment for women that I really want to be part of.”
The landscape for women is shifting quickly.
Last month, South Carolina Republicans did not pass a near-total abortion ban that did not carve out exceptions for victims of rape or incest after two days of contentious debate. The state already bans abortions after cardiac activity in the fetus can be detected, which occurs around six weeks. In August, Kansas voters rejected a ballot measure that would have set aside abortion protections in the state’s constitution, paving the way for additional restrictions or even a total ban.
“As the resounding victory in Kansas showed us, extremist policies on abortion don’t stand a chance when voters have the final say,” ACLU executive director Anthony Romero said in a statement. “With Sheryl’s support on abortion rights, we can kick it into overdrive and redouble the fight for abortion access in the states.”
Romero said the ACLU plans to educate voters about politicians’ records on abortion, and invest in ballot measures “to ensure voters are heard loud and clear when legislatures and governors need to be overridden by the voices of the electorate.” Planned Parenthood, already a Sandberg beneficiary, plans to spend $50 million on the November midterms in an effort to elect abortion rights supporters across the country.
How abortion rights organizers won in Kansas: Horse parades and canvassing
Sandberg has sought to position herself as a champion of women’s rights at work and home. In a 2010 TED Talk, Sandberg encouraged women not to hold themselves back in the workplace and to pick spouses who embrace equal partnership to reach the same heights as men in corporate America.
Later, Sandberg released her book and started the Lean In foundation to study sexism and help women form networking groups.
Upon announcing her decision to leave Meta, Sandberg said in a June Facebook post that she planned to focus more on her foundation and philanthropy, “which is more important to me than ever given how critical this moment is for women.”
In recent months, Sandberg has become more outspoken on her Facebook page about reproductive rights. In August, she touted a study from her foundation about how younger employees prefer to work for a company that supports abortion access. In May, Sandberg made the unusual move as a high-ranking corporate executive to harshly criticize the leaked draft opinion from the Supreme Court overturning Roe v Wade, arguing it deprived women of vital health-care access.
“This is a scary day for women all across our country,” she wrote in a public post on her personal Facebook page. “Every woman, no matter where she lives, must be free to choose whether and when she becomes a mother. Few things are more important to women’s health and equality.”
Those comments arrived days before the company sent a memo to employees reminding them of an existing policy not to discuss controversial topics such as abortion on widespread company channels because it might create a hostile environment. | 2022-10-04T13:29:34Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg gives $3 million to fight abortion bans - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/10/04/sandberg-facebook-meta-aclu-abortion/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/10/04/sandberg-facebook-meta-aclu-abortion/ |
This artist covered his mansion in doodles, fulfilling a childhood dream
British artist Sam Cox, a.k.a. Mr. Doodle, poses for a photo Oct. 3 in the Doodle House, a mansion in Tenterden, England, that has been covered, inside and out, in the artist's trademark monochrome, hand-drawn doodles. (Gareth Fuller/AP)
LONDON — There are a number of ways to turn heads in a neighborhood: Covering every inch of your home with black and white doodles is certainly one of them.
British artist Sam Cox, 28, says he has fulfilled his childhood dream by transforming his home into a quirky work of art and covering it with monochrome, free-flowing drawings.
“I’ve always wanted to live in a completely doodled house,” he told The Washington Post in an interview Tuesday. “It feels the most natural way to create art for me, and the most instinctive process when I pick up a pen and just start drawing.”
He bought the 13-room mansion in Kent, southeastern England, in 2019 and, with the help of his family and friends, transformed it into a perfectly white canvas for him to begin his doodles.
The bedsheets, toilet seat, cooking utilities, lamp shades and computer mouse are all doodled — with no surface left blank.
“Everything is doodled,” he said. “It’s living as an artwork.”
A video time-lapse he posted online Monday has attracted millions of views globally, showcasing the hand-drawn doodles. He did not use computer-generated imagery, or CGI, he said. Instead, the animation is made from 1,857 photographs, “painstakingly taken between September 2020 and September 2022.”
Cox, who also goes by “Mr. Doodle,” has worked as an artist most of his life, and some of his work has fetched hefty prices at auction in Asia. His doodles are also featured in coloring books and on T-shirts and are shared among fans in the art world.
He began drawing as a child and would work through hundreds of packets of paper with his scribbles. He then asked his parents if he could start doodling on furniture and his bedroom walls, to which they acquiesced after “some convincing,” he added.
He tries not to overplan the doodles, which would make his work feel “forced.” Instead, he lets himself get lost in the work. “My mind tends to wander around, and I end up thinking about all sorts of things,” he told The Post. “I just have a vague idea and let myself relax and let my hand do the work.”
The artist’s grand project took almost two years, propelled in part by Britain’s coronavirus lockdowns.
The lockdowns “helped accidentally,” he told The Post. “We were forced to be inside, and my main project was so easy to access because we live there.”
He began in the bedrooms and doodled the upper floor, including a “cloud room” for thinking. Each room has a loose theme as the doodling travels downstairs, displaying animals and aliens. It finishes with spray-painted drawings on the exterior of his grand home; importantly in Britain, he uses weatherproof paint. He has also doodled his Tesla car, which schoolchildren enjoy waving at when he drives through town.
Ukrainian artist turns antitank ‘hedgehog’ into symbol of resistance
The home is monochrome, which creates a stark contrast, Cox said. His wife Alena, known as Mrs. Doodle, has also been involved, sometimes coloring in his other canvas projects. She hails from Kharkiv in Ukraine, and the artistic couple have produced a colorful doodled heart as part of a charity project to raise funds for children caught in the war.
All his work is hand-drawn, and if he makes a mistake he tends to leave it, Cox said. “The nature of a doodle is to let it be,” he added.
Cox used 900 liters (238 gallons) of white paint, 401 cans of black spray paint and 286 bottles of black drawing paint, and he went through 2,296 pen nibs for the doodles, he said.
It is not to everyone’s taste, however.
“You are not welcome in my home,” wrote one person online. “Bits here and there are great but the whole house including furniture will hurt your eyes eventually,” said another. “This is a trypophobic nightmare,” added one person on Twitter, referring to people who suffer from a fear of repetitive patterns.
Others online have also questioned whether living surrounded by the immersive art could be jarring. “You do get used to it,” Cox said, explaining that he doesn’t suffer headaches or feel overstimulated by the decorative walls. “It just feels complete and like a happy place when it’s all doodled.”
Whether the house is a masterpiece or a monstrosity, the couple and their dog will continue living in it and have no plans to turn it into a gallery, Cox said. They are excited to create online tours, given the international interest.
“I’m pretty committed to staying in it,” he said. “We really like where we live, and we’re really happy being in the home. We want it so stay doodled. … We think it’s really fun.”
The project was kept under wraps for two years, said Cox, who lived in constant fear that a delivery driver or neighbor might take a photograph and share it online before it was complete. That didn’t happen, and his neighbors have been overwhelmingly supportive of the artistic curiosity he has created, he said.
“It’s been a really good response,” he said. “They’ve turned out to be really excited by it, and they can’t wait to come around and have a tour.”
Cox has shows in China and says he is keen to do more international projects soon. He is already looking for yet bigger canvases to cover in his doodles. “I’d love to do a whole street or a village one day,” he said.
For the art snobs who may not view the humble doodle as a high art form, Cox said he wants to encourage students in classrooms or people stuck in meetings to never consider their work “just a doodle” and to know that it “can take you far.” | 2022-10-04T13:55:46Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Mr. Doodles, British artist Sam Cox, covered his Kent house with drawings - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/04/uk-artist-sam-cox-doodle-home/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/04/uk-artist-sam-cox-doodle-home/ |
Georgia GOP Senate candidate Herschel Walker speaks with the press in Norcross, Ga., on Sept. 9. (Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post)
The first October surprise of the 2022 election landed late Monday, and it’s one that could have major implications for control of the Senate.
The Daily Beast reported that Georgia Republican Senate candidate Herschel Walker paid for a girlfriend’s abortion in 2009. Walker has campaigned on an antiabortion platform — with no exceptions — and has said that he always opposed such rights. The Washington Post has not independently confirmed the report, and Walker is denying it.
His son Christian, a conservative who had previously indicated that he supported Walker’s campaign, is also now speaking out against him, saying that his dad “threatened to kill us” — apparently referring to him and his mother — and that the family repeatedly had to move to flee “your violence.” National Republicans have indicated they’ll back their candidate.
So where do things go from here?
What’s clear right now is there is a reason Republicans are standing by Walker: They have little other choice. Georgia law doesn’t allow a party to replace a candidate this late in the process.
“Any vacancy which occurs in any party nomination filled by a primary and which is created by reason of the withdrawal of a candidate less than 60 days prior to the date of the election shall not be filled,” the law says.
Also factoring into the GOP’s continued support: The party was increasingly counting on Georgia to make its Senate majority.
With polls showing Republican candidates underperforming the fundamentals in several key Senate races, Walker — for all his previous problems, which were many — hasn’t lagged as badly as some. And just two weeks ago, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) named Georgia alongside Nevada as the GOP’s best pickup opportunities, apparently over others in Arizona, Colorado and New Hampshire.
McConnell wagered Republicans would hold GOP seats in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, at which point they would need either Georgia or Nevada to take the Senate majority. But GOP nominee Mehmet Oz still trails in Pennsylvania — and if he lost, Georgia might be necessary (though much remains in flux).
We’ll have to wait to see exactly how winnable the race remains; frequent polling should give us some clues in the days to come.
It’s worth emphasizing that such reports haven’t always torpedoed the careers of antiabortion Republicans. In 2012, Rep. Scott DesJarlais (R-Tenn.) was reported to have tried persuading a woman with whom he had a relationship to get an abortion despite campaigning hard against abortion rights; he won his next GOP primary by 38 votes and remains in Congress to this day.
But DesJarlais’s situation isn’t totally analogous to Walker’s. In a safe GOP seat, all DesJarlais had to do was survive a primary; Walker will have to win in one of the country’s preeminent swing states, where moderate voters will matter. And most polls have already shown Sen. Raphael G. Warnock (D-Ga.) leading, although the race is tight.
Those close margins mean even a little bit of slippage in Walker’s support could take this race off the table for the GOP. Walker has remained competitive despite a series of ugly personal revelations. Those include his ex-wife saying that he repeatedly held a gun to her head (which he has not denied) and threatened to cut her with a razor, as well as more recent reports, again broken by the Daily Beast, that Walker fathered three children with different women whom he hadn’t disclosed. Walker, who has campaigned against absentee Black fathers, denied hiding the children.
If the Daily Beast’s report is accurate, it would further substantiate claims of hypocrisy on the part of the former University of Georgia and NFL star. And it could alienate socially conservative Republicans.
And that could be troublesome in Georgia not just because of how tight the race is, but what the ballot will look like.
Unlike many other states, Georgia has a demonstrated history of Libertarian Party candidates performing reasonably well — often winning a few percentage points worth of votes, but sometimes more.
A Libertarian nominee for statewide office in 2008 made history by winning more than 1 million votes. The same year, a Libertarian nominee took enough of the vote (3.4 percent) to force a runoff in a Senate race. Then it happened again in 2020, when the Libertarian nominee’s 2.3 percent helped push Sen. David Perdue (R-Ga.) into a runoff; Perdue had been just 0.27 percent away from winning a majority of votes, which would have ended the race.
That runoff, of course, ultimately proved decisive in delivering the Democrats the 50 votes they needed to control the Senate.
In this race, it’s not clear that the Libertarian candidate will necessarily hurt Walker. Walker actually seems to have performed marginally better in polls that include that candidate, Chase Oliver, who usually polls at 3 or 4 percent. But Republicans generally fear that Libertarian candidates siphon more votes from them than from Democrats, as evidenced by them trying to remove such candidates from the ballot.
Ultimately, as in 2020, it’s more likely that the Libertarian nominee’s impact will be to push the race to a runoff, rather than boost Warnock’s share of the vote; after all, Oliver could be an outlet for voters to vote against Walker but not help Warnock get to a majority. Then the race would ultimately boil down to a one-on-one between Walker and Warnock.
And if the 2020 runoff and Walker’s campaign to date have shown us anything, it’s that extending the contest into December — with the whole nation watching and scrutinizing the candidates — might not be a great thing for the GOP’s hopes of a majority. | 2022-10-04T14:01:24Z | www.washingtonpost.com | What happens next after Herschel Walker abortion story - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/04/herschel-walker-abortion-georgia-runoff/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/04/herschel-walker-abortion-georgia-runoff/ |
Pedestrians walk past the closed gates of Euston Station on Saturday, as strike action by railway staff restarts. (Niklas Halle'n/AFP/Getty Images)
LONDON — Massive train strikes are expected to disrupt the lives of millions of people in the United Kingdom this week, compounding an already challenging political environment for Britain’s new prime minister, Liz Truss.
The unions representing train conductors and other rail workers, who are set to go on strike on Oct. 5, 6, 7 and 8, as well as next Monday in Scotland, say there has been too little progress in long-running negotiations with the government over pay rises, layoffs and working conditions — and argue those issues are more acute as the United Kingdom is facing a historic cost-of-living crisis. The Bank of England is expecting inflation to hit 11 percent this month.
5 problems behind the global cost-of-living crisis
Tensions between the unions and Britain’s political leadership have grown increasingly public. Union leaders say their problems are worse since the newly elected Truss, who replaced Boris Johnson last month, proposed economic plans that set the pound on a dizzying downward spiral last week and sparked panic in financial markets.
A walkout Saturday was billed as the country’s largest rail strike in decades — timed to coincide with the ruling Conservative Party’s annual conference in Birmingham. Wednesday’s strikes will take place when Truss is expected to speak there.
Train conductors from 13 rail companies — including Chiltern Railways, North Eastern Railway and London Overground — plan to strike on Wednesday over unmet demands “for pay which keeps pace with the cost of living,” one of two unions organizing the strike said. The Heathrow Express, which takes travelers from central London to the U.K.’s busiest airport, will also not run on Wednesday.
Some workers at Great Western Railway will strike between noon on Thursday and the end of the day Friday, their union said. It is one of Britain’s largest train operators, and connects London with Wales and the southwest of England.
Covid pandemic is not the supply chains’ only problem
Rail workers are not the only ones striking. Truss has only been prime minister for a month, but already her government has had to deal with the fallout of large-scale strikes across industries, from transport to trash collection and lawyers — all related to pay, and symptomatic of a deeper unease within the British economy.
Inflation in the U.K. is at 9.9 percent — 4.5 times higher than the Bank of England’s target. It is expected to hit 11 percent in October, putting more pressure on households already struggling to pay for rent, food and utilities bills. While inflation is soaring globally, the U.K. has been hit particularly hard, with rising consumer demand and supply chain bottlenecks pushing prices up, and the war in Ukraine multiplying the cost of gas and electricity, according to the British Parliament.
Some Brits are abandoning their pets as cost of living skyrockets
Truss’s announcement in late September of a plan for the economy hinging on big tax cuts primarily for the wealthy contributed to a massive devaluation of Britain’s currency that forced Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng, her finance minister, to abandon plans to abolish the top rate of income tax, which they said had become a “distraction.”
Truss has been a vocal critic of unions and strikes. In late July, when she was running to replace scandal-plagued former prime minister Boris Johnson, Truss told the Sunday Express that one of her first acts as prime minister would be to “curtail the ability of trade unions to cause persistent dismay and disruption to our daily lives.”
On Saturday, the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers said in a news release that it had a “positive meeting” with Truss’s secretary of state for transport, Anne-Marie Trevelyan. But it said “nothing has concretely changed,” and added that Kwarteng’s “threat to impose further restriction on the right to strike has inflamed members’ feelings even more,” leading to the strike.
“The government must change course,” it said.
If negotiations are not resolved, union leaders have hinted the strikes could extend into the Christmas period. “The way things are, we’re going to have to get creative,” RMT Assistant General Secretary Eddie Dempsey told the Mirror on Saturday.
Karla Adam contributed to this report. | 2022-10-04T14:02:46Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Massive U.K. train strikes are latest challenge for Liz Truss - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/04/uk-rail-strikes-liz-truss-inflation/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/04/uk-rail-strikes-liz-truss-inflation/ |
Mia P. Manansala talks about cozy mysteries and Filipino food
Review by Samantha Chery
Mia P. Manansala said she finds it a little weird when people ask her what she wants readers to learn from her mystery novels. There’s nothing to learn, she insists. They’re just fun reads that happen to focus on a Filipina protagonist.
The Tita Rosie’s Kitchen Mystery books are cozy mysteries, a genre characterized by amateur sleuths solving cases in small towns. Manansala’s writing follows baking aficionado Lila Macapagal, a young Filipino woman who protects her family and friends from being blamed for the foul play that crops up in Shady Palms, a fictional town a few hours from Chicago.
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Lila doesn’t work alone. To get the job done, she leans on her Tita Rosie, who owns a Filipino restaurant in town; her longtime best friend, Adeena; and a flock of fussing Filipino aunties and their children. Lila’s squad also includes her crushes: Adeena’s lawyer brother Amir and a handsome dentist named Dr. Jae.
In the first book in the series, “Arsenic and Adobo,” which came out in 2021, the group tries to find out who poisoned Lila’s former flame. The sequel, “Homicide and Halo-Halo,” centers on a different murder tied to the town’s Miss Teen Shady Palms Pageant. The third book, “Blackmail and Bibingka,” was just released.
Manansala spoke over Zoom recently about inspiration for her work and what readers should expect from “Blackmail and Bibingka.”
Q: How has your family influenced your writing?
A: [My mom] was happy when I pursued writing. I got my love of cozy mysteries from her. She used to work at Walden Books when those still existed. She was shelving books one day, and she was like, “Oh, ‘Chocolate Chip Cookie Murder.’ What’s this about?” She messaged me, “Hey, I found a book that has food and mysteries.” Mysteries are our favorite genre. That was my first foray into cozy mysteries, as well as mysteries incorporating food.
A lot of the Tita Rosie’s Kitchen Mystery [series] comes from the idea of food as a love language. It’s heavily based on my father. How food connects culture, history and family and all that, I learned from him.
He passed away in 2018, so he’s not around to see this, but he was an old-school cook, so he didn’t pass on his recipes. He didn’t really have recipes. He cooked by feel. Watching him cook, it’s not [about] measurements, just opening a bottle of sauce and pouring. When we were younger, we were always like, “You should open a restaurant. You’re so good.” And he said no, because he had family in the Philippines who owned restaurants: It was hard work, you don’t have a day off, you have a lot of responsibility. He wanted to keep cooking as something he enjoyed or something he did for the family. But I wanted to explore what that was like, growing up where that was their livelihood.
Q: How has your cultural background influenced your writing?
A: It’s really hard for me to separate Filipino culture and family, because for me growing up, my family was all I had as an intro to Filipino [culture]. I grew up in a working-class, majority-Latino neighborhood. I had ... the occasional family parties because my parents’ friends were all in the suburbs, and they were a little bit more affluent. For me, it was like crossing into a completely different world. And that’s part of how I came up with the protagonist Lila.
Q: Why is food an important aspect to incorporate in your work?
A: Food means different things to different people, particularly when you are an immigrant or [part of the] diaspora. It’s like when [Lila] and her grandmother are butting heads. Her grandmother, having emigrated 30-plus years before her, [compared with] her being born and raised in the States — their ideas of what Filipino food are so different. But that doesn’t mean either of them were wrong necessarily. I wanted to explore that conversation the diaspora has about authenticity: What does that really mean and who’s allowed to create and work in that food space?
Q: What do you want people to take away from your books?
A: It’s really important to me to have Filipino American characters who just exist as they are. So much Asian American literature is focused on the immigrant story and trauma, and those are all hugely important, beautifully written [and] very well needed. But it’s not all that we are, and I wanted to write a story that was entertaining and features us as main characters trying to live our lives.
One thing I always tell people is Lila being Filipino American shapes the way she sees the world, and it particularly shapes the way the world sees her. But it’s only a part of who she is.
We can be the heroes. We can fall in love. We can solve problems. We can go on epic adventures. We can do all the same things as everyone else, [although] there are other things that color our perspective, but it’s no different than any other books out there.
Q: What should readers expect from “Blackmail and Bibingka”?
A: This one is set around Christmastime. I was trying to touch on settings that would feel inherently Filipino even though they’re obviously also very American, and Christmas is a huge deal in the Filipino community. In the book, Lila’s shady cousin Ronnie, Tita Rosie’s only son, has come back to town after ghosting the family. And he’s taking over a winery in town. So he’s like, “I’m back for good. I’m back on my feet.” Lila doesn’t trust it. She knows wherever he goes, trouble is going to follow. When one of his main investors is murdered, he becomes the main suspect. She feels like she owes him nothing, but for Tita Rosie’s sake, she’s going to try to find out who the true killer is.
Blackmail and Bibingka
Berkeley. 288 pp. $16.99 | 2022-10-04T14:39:25Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Blackmail and Bibingka author Mia P. Manansala discusses her novels - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2022/10/04/mia-manansala-mysery-novels/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2022/10/04/mia-manansala-mysery-novels/ |
After a hardscrabble start, Ms. Lynn rose from poverty in Kentucky to the top of Billboard’s Nashville charts and brought a strong woman’s voice to country music
Loretta Lynn performs during South By Southwest in 2016 in Austin. (Rich Fury/Invision/AP)
Her family confirmed the death in a statement but did not cite a cause.
Ms. Lynn’s career was remarkable for its storybook ascent from hardscrabble origins. She was a teenage bride and mother, a grandmother at 29 and a country star at 30. A trailblazer for other female country performers, she was the first woman to win the Country Music Association’s entertainer of the year award, in 1972. She also helped redefine and broaden the appeal of country music.
In 2013, when Ms. Lynn received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, President Barack Obama called her the “rule-breaking, record-setting queen of country music” who “gave voice to a generation, singing what no one wanted to talk about and saying what no one wanted to think about.”
Many of Ms. Lynn’s most memorable songs celebrated her Kentucky roots and were rendered in an unmistakable Appalachian twang. Her first album, “Loretta Lynn Sings” (1963), reached No. 2 on the Billboard country album chart, but her greatest success came later, often with tunes packed with personal meaning or topical social themes.
The first of more than a dozen No. 1 country hits came in 1967, with “Don’t Come Home A-Drinkin’ (With Lovin’ on Your Mind),” written with her sister Peggy Sue about a marriage to an alcoholic.
Several of her songs were tough-minded warnings to romantic rivals for her husband’s affections, including “You Ain’t Woman Enough (To Take My Man)” (1966) and the No. 1 country hit “Fist City” (1968):
I’m not a-sayin’ my baby is a saint cause he ain’t
And that he won’t cat around with a kitty
I’m here to tell you, gal, to lay off of my man
Some of her other well-known songs included “Dear Uncle Sam” (released in 1966), about a woman saying goodbye to her soldier husband; “You’re Lookin’ at Country” (1971); “Love Is the Foundation” (1973); and “One’s on the Way” (1971), written by humorist Shel Silverstein about a beleaguered housewife expecting a child — “I hope it ain’t twins again.”
There was also “The Pill,” about the liberating effect of contraceptives on a woman’s life. Ms. Lynn recorded the song, by Lorene Allen, Don McHan and T.D. Bayless, in 1972. Her record company withheld it from release for three years, and many radio stations refused to play it, but it eventually became a Top 5 country hit.
Ms. Lynn’s “Coal Miner’s Daughter” spent only one week at No. 1 after its release in 1970, but it soon became the singer’s signature tune:
Well, I was born a coal miner’s daughter
He’d shovel coal to make a poor man’s dollar
After a 1976 memoir, co-written with New York Times journalist George Vecsey, Ms. Lynn’s popularity reached its zenith with the 1980 film “Coal Miner’s Daughter.”
While producers were still casting the movie, Ms. Lynn casually announced on “The Tonight Show” that “little Sissy Spacek” would play her on the screen. Spacek, who shadowed Ms. Lynn for months and sang all the movie’s songs, won an Academy Award for best actress for her portrayal.
Critics praised English director Michael Apted’s earthy depiction of Appalachian life and Ms. Lynn’s tempestuous marriage to Oliver “Doolittle” Lynn. She once told Rolling Stone magazine that every time Doolittle hit her, she gave it back in kind — twice.
For all the turbulence in their relationship, Ms. Lynn credited her husband with pushing her to become a performer.
“I married Doo when I wasn’t but a child, and he was my life from that day on,” she said in “Still Woman Enough,” written with Patsi Bale Cox. “He thought I was something special, more special than anyone else in the world, and never let me forget it. That belief would be hard to shove out the door. Doo was my security, my safety net.”
An unelectrified origin
Loretta Webb was born in Butcher Hollow, Ky., on April 14, 1932. The hollow, without electricity and indoor plumbing, sat at the bottom of a hill outside of Van Lear, Ky., named for the local coal company. Her father, who eventually died of black lung disease, worked in the Van Lear mines.
The second of eight children, Loretta attended a one-room schoolhouse before dropping out in elementary school. She cared for her younger siblings while her mother worked in a nursing home. She didn’t ride in a car until she was 12, and the family’s sole connection to the outside world was a battery-powered radio, which broadcast “The Grand Ole Opry.”
A year into their marriage, Ms. Lynn — then pregnant with their first child — followed her husband to Custer, Wash. She had four children by the time she was 19 and ultimately was the mother of six.
After hearing her serenade the children around the house, Doolittle bought his wife a $17 guitar and encouraged her to sit in with a local country group. She soon started her own band, Loretta’s Trail Blazers, and won a talent contest hosted by singer Buck Owens in Tacoma, Wash.
Ms. Lynn wrote and recorded “Honky Tonk Girl” in 1960, then traveled around the country with her husband, pitching the record to disc jockeys and endearing herself to listeners with her unvarnished charm.
During one interview, Dallas disc jockey Bill Mack complimented her on a dress she was wearing.
“Thank you,” Ms. Lynn said. “I just washed it.”
“Oh, really, where did you find a laundry around here?” Mack asked.
“I didn’t find no laundry, I washed it in the back of the car,” Ms. Lynn replied, referring to a basin of water in the car. Mack pressed her further on how she got the dress dried.
“I blowed it dry out the window,” Ms. Lynn said.
In the early 1960s, Ms. Lynn toured as Patsy Cline’s opening act and performed with country star Ernest Tubb.
She formed her most enduring musical partnership with singer Conway Twitty in the 1970s and 1980s. The pair had five No. 1 country singles together and won the Country Music Association’s vocal duo of the year from 1972 through 1975. Their records ranged from the doleful “After the Fire Is Gone” to the upbeat “Louisiana Woman, Mississippi Man” and the melodramatic “As Soon as I Hang Up the Phone.” Twitty died in 1993.
Beginning in the 1960s, Ms. Lynn became a television fixture, with appearances spanning such programs as “The Tonight Show,” “The Muppet Show” and “The Dean Martin Celebrity Roasts.” She discussed her teenage marriage and other intimate subjects with a plain-spoken manner that captivated audiences who had never followed country music.
Ms. Lynn later established a theme park, including a campground and a replica of her childhood home, near her home in Hurricane Mills, Tenn.
Ms. Lynn won Grammy Awards for “After the Fire Is Gone,” her 1971 duet with Twitty, for a 2004 duet, “Portland, Oregon,” with Jack White of the White Stripes, and for her 2004 album “Van Lear Rose.” She was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1988 and received the Kennedy Center Honors in 2003 and a lifetime achievement Grammy in 2010.
Three of Ms. Lynn’s siblings had careers in music. A brother, Jay Lee Webb, who was a singer and played guitar in Ms. Lynn’s band, died in 1996. Her sister Peggy Sue toured with her band in the 1960s and ’70s. Ms. Lynn’s youngest sister, Brenda Gail Lynn, who had a successful country and pop career under the stage name Crystal Gayle, won a Grammy for her 1977 hit “Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue.”
Her eldest son, Jack Benny Lynn — named for two of the singer’s uncles, not the radio and film comedian — died in 1984 after being thrown from a horse into a river on the family property; Ms. Lynn stopped performing for more than a year. She also temporarily retired to nurse her husband before his death in 1996, after 48 years of marriage. A daughter, Betty Sue Lynn, died of emphysema in 2013.
Ms. Lynn’s twin daughters, Peggy and Patsy, performed together as the Lynns; a son, Ernest Ray Lynn, played guitar and bass in his mother’s band. They survive her, in addition to another daughter, Clara Marie Lynn; 21 grandchildren; and a number of great-grandchildren.
Well into her 80s, Ms. Lynn made new recordings and continued to perform. She returned to her Appalachian roots on the largely acoustic album “Full Circle” (2016), which was nominated for a Grammy for best country album and featured “Lay Me Down,” an autumnal duet with fellow octogenarian Willie Nelson. | 2022-10-04T15:09:59Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Loretta Lynn, ever a ‘Coal Miner’s Daughter,’ dies at 90 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/10/04/loretta-lynn-country-star-dead/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/10/04/loretta-lynn-country-star-dead/ |
Review by Ned Blackhawk
Finishing touches are made on a community-curated exhibition of Native American pottery from the Pueblo Indian region of the U.S. Southwest on July 28, at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture in Santa Fe. (Morgan Lee/AP)
Scholars of American history long failed to treat Native peoples as influential actors. In a story whose early chapters were organized around Puritans, patriots and presidents, Indigenous peoples only received mention so that they could be vanquished. These presumptions have remained so ingrained that even as Native American history has flourished over the past generation, few have attempted to synthesize the role that Indigenous people played in the story of North America more generally. Scholars tend instead to focus on the details, narrating the stories of different groups at different times. “Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America” by Pekka Hamalainen represents an attempt to offer a more sweeping view, boldly claiming to show how much power Native Americans exerted over early colonists and settlers. In a rush to overturn many historical fallacies, the book unfortunately ends up reaffirming several of the very myths it aims to contest, particularly a narrative of Indigenous decline at odds with the book’s emphasis on Native American power.
In his best-known work, “The Comanche Empire” (2008), the Finnish-born Hamalainen offered a full-throated rejoinder to the erasure of Native history. It inverted the conventional narrative of early America history, making the case for a process of “reversed colonialism” in which Indigenous peoples dominated the past. The study launched both its subject and author, who became the Rhodes Professor of American History at Oxford.
Like all scholarly achievements, this study built upon the work of others, joining a spate of studies of “Indians and empires” that added new regions, empires and Indian nations to the field. Hamalainen followed up with a similarly expansive study, “Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power” in 2019. Many Lakota Studies scholars, however, balked at its presumptions of Lakota imperialism, arguing that the term “empire” distorts Indigenous historical realities, misconstrues the cultural motivations of Native communities and discounts the legacies of colonialism.
“Indigenous Continent” is unlikely to assuage such concerns. Hamalainen once again leans into the language of empire while downplaying the effects of colonization. The book’s opening pages gesture back to the author’s prior work. We are told that Europeans, not Native peoples, “were the supplicants” of early America, “their lives, movements, and ambitions determined by Native nations.” According to Hamalainen, the field of study should no longer be called “colonial America” at all, but rather “Indigenous America.” Colonial history is best understood as Indigenous history.
This emphasis on Indigenous power drives the narrative and inverts traditional emphases on Euro-Americans: “Haughty Europeans assumed that the Indians were weak and uncivilized, only to find themselves forced to agree to humiliating terms,” he argues. Throughout, he aims to present a history of “persisting Indigenous power” that “remains largely unknown.” Such history, he claims, is “the biggest blind spot in common understandings of the American past.”
Such provocative claims fly in the face of long-standing paradigms, many of which continue to privilege Anglophone actors. But where many have critiqued this way of seeing the past, Hamalainen aspires to abandon it altogether. As evidenced by a short introduction with only one citation, he is clearly in a hurry to do so.
Some may view such provocations as overdrawn, particularly given the heavy focus upon Europeans that follows. In Chapter 4’s examination of 16th-century Spanish exploration, for example, Gov. Juan Ponce de León of Puerto Rico appears in around 10 sentences, while chronicler Álvar Núñez Cabez de Vaca receives whole paragraphs. By contrast, New Mexico’s “more than sixty adobe towns” of Pueblo Indian communities remain undifferentiated, with little attention to their demographic decline following conquest.
Even as Hamalainen dwells on the colonists, he holds that Indigenous peoples were often indifferent to Europeans. “Indians,” we are told, “controlled most of North America, and often they did not know about the exploits of the Europeans beyond their borders. And if they did, they did not care.” This suggestion, like so many, is intended to disrupt conventional understandings, and it is preceded by a qualification on why the “creation of the U.S. Constitution figure[s] only marginally in this history.” In casual fashion, Hamalainen suggests that Indians so dominated the continent that they had little interest in, or potential influence upon, this formative moment in U.S. history.
For mixed-descent people on America’s frontier, acceptance and suspicion
As it does elsewhere, “Indigenous America” here sidesteps canonical subjects. Many Native nations closely followed the deliberations of the Constitutional Convention, as legal historian Mary Sarah Bilder has written. Cherokee, Chickasaw and Choctaw communities all sent leaders, doing so in part to ensure that their bilateral treaties with the United States were maintained. Moreover, the Constitution, specifically mentions “Indians,” three times (including in the 14th Amendment). Hamalainen thus misses the actual place of Indian peoples in the formation of constitutional law and policy, unpersuasively asserting that the early Republic remained “overwhelmed by Indigenous power.”
Sometimes in “Indigenous Continent,” such “power” implies distance and autonomy — the capacity to maintain a world separate from the one European colonists were creating. Hamalainen identifies, for example, a provocative moment about the relative retreat of Europeans from the continent’s interior circa 1700: “North America had become divided in two: there was the narrow and patchy colonial belt on the coastal plains, where Europeans dominated, and there was the immense Indigenous interior.”
But Hamalainen also equates “power” and the ability to project violence without properly interrogating the relationship between the two. “When war did come,” Native peoples reportedly, “won as often as not.” While learning that Native peoples won battles against Europeans may surprise some readers, the struggle for North America was a violent, costly and transformative process for all involved. Native military victories were often followed by defeats as well as campaigns of forced removal, ethnic cleansing, reservation confinement and child adductions.
In the stories it does tell, “Indigenous Continent” does not fully deliver upon its early promises of Indigenous power and European submission. For example, we learn that the Puritan Great Migration of the 1630s brought thousands of settlers as well as waves of pathogens to New England. Starting in 1633, “More than eighty percent of the Native Americans in the region died.” As epidemics stalked the lives of Native peoples, the region’s Wabanaki and Pequot communities nonetheless still “surrounded the New Englanders,” exacerbating tensions within Puritan society: “The Massachusetts project was fraught with ambiguity from the start. The English claimed land for a colony without Indigenous consent.” The subsequent “apocalyptic violence” of the Pequot War (1636-37) featured “genocidal violence,” as Puritan leaders now believed that Indians remained “lesser people who needed to be destroyed to make room for a better world.” None of this suggests any degree of English supplication to Indigenous power. On the contrary, European diseases, demography and desires advanced Puritan settlement.
Moreover, for a work that aspires to deliver an inversion of U.S. history, “Indigenous Continent” has only limited historical sweep. It ends in 1890 with the Wounded Knee Massacre, which the author states, “was a sign of American weakness and fear.” Only a few, concluding sentences are offered to explain the “endurance” of Native nations throughout the 20th and now 21st centuries. The centrality of treaties, court rulings affirming the sovereignty of tribal nations and Native activism remain outside the scope of its account of “Indigenous power.”
Ultimately, binary conceptions of “power” and “weakness” remain too unwieldy to capture the harrowing challenges confronting Native people. Rather than seeing federal Indian policy as a constitutive feature of the emerging administrative state, “Indigenous America” discounts it, strangely suggesting that “reservations were a sign of American weakness, not strength.” Little else is offered about these new chapters of state violence and Indigenous resistance, in which Indian children became principal casualties. In fact, the removal of Indian children to U.S. boarding schools, which expanded after the 1870s, fueled the growth of federal authority across western communities. Many of these practices lasted nearly a century and provided both the infrastructure and ideology for subsequent initiatives to assimilate Native communities, including Cold War-era adoption programs that fueled decades of reservation advocacy that culminated in the passage of the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978. This congressional statute recognized tribal authority in such areas; however, its statutory provisions to protect “Indian families” remains challenged. The Supreme Court hears Brackeen v. Haaland next month, a challenge to the 44-year-old law’s constitutionality.
So, while there is much to gain in rethinking U.S. history, doing so demands more nuanced analysis. With its crude celebrations of Indigenous agency, “Indigenous Continent” offers a limited entryway into a historical landscape marred by violence. In the great recalibration of American history now underway, more textured methods are needed, not overviews that often replicate the things many already believe, even as they claim to overturn them.
Ned Blackhawk is an enrolled member of the Te-Moak Tribe of Western Shoshone Indians of Nevada and the Howard R. Lamar Professor of History and American Studies at Yale University. His most recent work, “The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History,” will be released in April
Indigenous Continent
The Epic Contest for North America
By Pekka Hamalainen.
Liveright. 592 pp. $40 | 2022-10-04T15:23:05Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Book review of "Indigenous Continent" by Pekka Hamalainen. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2022/10/05/indigenous-continent-pekka-hamalainen-review/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2022/10/05/indigenous-continent-pekka-hamalainen-review/ |
Why Trump might want to pay attention to the Oath Keepers’ trial
Stewart Rhodes, founder of the Oath Keepers, speaks during a rally outside the White House on June 25, 2017. (Susan Walsh/AP)
Prosecutors on Monday laid out their case against Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes and four of his associates, providing a detailed look at how a criminal trial for seditious conspiracy will play out.
Former president Donald Trump should pay close attention. The same legal theory under which Rhodes and his cohorts are being tried might apply to the man they wanted to keep in power in defiance of the election results.
Monday’s proceeding previewed an array of evidence that show Rhodes and his followers assembled an armed force, led them to the Capitol and, once there, helped direct the mob in a military-style operation. The goal was to prevent Joe Biden from taking office.
The Post reports: “In U.S. District Court in Washington, Assistant U.S. Attorney Jeffrey Nestler highlighted violent rhetoric in Oath Keepers’ text messages, video and recorded conversations from before, during and after the Capitol riot to present the group as bent on keeping President Donald Trump in office ‘by whatever means necessary.’ ” Rhodes, according to Nestler, acted as a “general overlooking the battlefield.” All defendants have pleaded not guilty.
As was the case for Trump, Rhodes immediately went into action once the election was called. In one message, he declared: “If that system declares Biden the winner, I won’t recognize him as the legitimate president because of the fraud.” Of course, Trump was saying much the same thing in plain sight.
Rhodes’s own language will be used against him, including his statement that “all I see Trump doing is complaining ... so the patriots are taking it into their own hands.” (You know things are going to be rough for a defendant when their lawyer tells the jury it will hear his client say a lot of offensive or “ominous" things.)
It’s also likely that the defense attorneys’ pleas for jurors to consider the “context” of those statements will seem awfully flimsy, given the all vivid images of insurrectionists during the attack. The lawyers, for example, claimed their clients acted “defensively.” We will see how that squares with visual and audio evidence.
Former prosecutor Barbara McQuade tells me: “The lawyer for Stewart Rhodes said in opening statement that Rhodes will testify in his own defense. Court filings indicate that his defense centers around the idea that he was expecting President Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act and call up the Oath Keepers to active military duty on Jan. 6. For Rhodes to pursue this defense, he will have to testify or otherwise present evidence about the basis for this belief. It will be interesting to see whether he is able to connect the Oath Keepers to the former president or any of his associates.” She adds, “If so, he may be able to provide the evidentiary link necessary to charge Trump or others with seditious conspiracy.”
As the prosecutors revealed their case, it was hard not to think about all that happened in the White House as the Oath Keepers planned their mission. The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection showed that Trump, who screamed foul about the election even before any votes were cast, promoted lies about voter fraud even as his own aides repeatedly debunked his conspiracy theories. He tried to pressure Georgia election officials to “find” just enough votes to flip the state’s results. And he pressured state lawmakers to reverse their voters’ verdicts by appointing phony electors.
When all that didn’t work, Trump summoned his supporters to D.C. for a “wild” rally. He delivered an incendiary speech to a group that he knew was armed, according to testimony before the Jan. 6 committee. He then instructed them to march to the Capitol (allegedly attempting to join them himself) and sent a tweet declaring that Vice President Mike Pence “didn’t have the courage” to reject electoral votes. He refused to call off the mob for more than three hours.
At issue for Trump in any seditious conspiracy charge would be his knowledge of the violent militias and any coordination or encouragement he provided. Other potential charges include conspiracy to defraud the United States and conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, both of which would not require prosecutors to demonstrate Trump’s role in planning or assisting violent conduct.
The government has yet to charge Trump with any crime. But prosecutors must do so if the facts warrant indictment. If no person is above the law, everyone from the foot soldiers of the Jan. 6 attack to the president of the United States should face accountability. | 2022-10-04T15:31:49Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Donald Trump might want to pay attention to Oath Keepers' trial - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/04/oath-keepers-trial-jan-6-donald-trump/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/04/oath-keepers-trial-jan-6-donald-trump/ |
Kids are expensive. Full stop. No matter your level of frugality, it’s certainly costlier to have kids than to opt to be child-free. And yet, there’s a particular kind of societal pushback in the US when you attempt to speak bluntly about the financial concerns of having children. The prevailing retort: “Oh, you’ll figure it out.” While not entirely untrue, there’s a difference between feeling a new pinch in your monthly budget and finding yourself unable to afford what was previously considered comfortable.
It’s neither selfish nor self-indulgent to be pragmatic about the potential cost of conceiving, birthing and raising a child. It’s expensive under ideal conditions, not to mention the tens of thousands it can cost couples who are experiencing fertility struggles. It’s certainly not selfish to opt out of parenthood in part because it’s likely your overall quality of life would decline based on what would be affordable for you.
Prospective parents should absolutely be considering the financial ramifications of having children in the same way that current parents should measure the cost of having more.
To be clear, this isn’t a manifesto about eschewing children simply because of the cost. Instead, it’s an effort to normalize conversations about the full ramifications of electing to have children instead of just saying, “You’ll figure it out.” It’s hardly a reassuring refrain when the current estimate for a middle-class family to raise a child to 18 has topped $300,000, according to the Brookings Institution.
The “we’ll figure it out” style of preparation is especially worrisome amid soaring inflation and tight finances. Almost three-quarters of Americans said they would struggle to meet their financial obligations if their paychecks were delayed a week, according to the 2022 Getting Paid in America survey conducted by the American Payroll Association. Notably, hospitalizations for childbirth are likely one of the most frequent sources of surprise medical bills in the US, suggest findings published recently in JAMA Health Forum.
Besides, what does “figure it out” mean exactly? Does that mean you’ll work longer hours to compensate for the new costs? It seems odd to add a child to your life only to work long hours that prevent you from creating necessary bonds. Does “figure it out” mean quitting a career to save money on child care? Trying to find the perfect alchemy of what is practical and mentally healthy for both parents and in the best interest of a child is a tricky combination.
Shamefully, there are no safety rails when it comes to parental leave in the US. The modest level of protection that exists is through the Family Medical Leave Act, which protects a job for up to 12 weeks after delivery or adoption. It is unpaid and simply requires that your job be available for you upon your return. Without even getting into how horrifyingly paltry those terms are, the other issue is that FMLA is only required by the private sector if you’ve worked for your company for a year and your employer has more than 50 employees within a 75-mile radius.
Of course, your employer may be benevolent and provide paid maternity leave — and requirements do vary by state — but this only accounts for 23% of civilian workers, according to 2021 data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
A majority of the US’s expectant-parent population need to fund their own leave. A short-term disability plan, especially one provided by an employer, is another possibility for subsidizing the cost of maternity leave. But that’s assuming you’re even eligible. Certain segments of the self-employed population, like freelance writers, can find it a struggle to get disability insurance.
As a self-employed woman who is the primary breadwinner, it’s a real smack in the face to realize it’s entirely on me to fund a maternity leave. My husband’s job does offer a paid paternity leave. But assuming I gave birth, it would be physically difficult to resume business as usual shortly after the trauma of delivery. It’s also tricky to discuss how to handle child care and whether one person’s career should temporarily, or long-term, take a back seat.
In our situation, my income is higher, albeit unpredictable, but my husband’s job provides access to high-quality health care and a pension. Neither of us really has the luxury of stepping back without significant long-term consequences to our family’s financial future. It’s a situation that’s not remotely unique.
On top of this, about 44% of Americans say they don’t have family close by, according to Pew Research. Those without family members who can help with caregiving struggle with the financial cost of outsourcing such care — a fair concern considering that 51% of parents say they spend more than 20% of their household income on child care, according to a 2022 Care.com survey.
All these factors are the makings of stress dreams and frantic Google searches. As a 30-something woman who understands the choice to have biological children is now officially in “ticking time bomb” status, I’ve spent many nights crunching numbers to decide just how financially ready my husband and I are to have children.
Ultimately, the potential outlays of $300,000 to raise a kid to 18 and then another, say, $250,000 for college are mind-bending. It can also make prospective parents (at least this one) worry that no amount of money saved will feel like enough to take the leap.
It wasn’t until I came across a blog post by Eric Roberge, a certified financial planner and founder of Beyond Your Hammock, that I found some solace. Boldly titled “What You Need to Save Before Having a Baby Might Be the Wrong Question,” Roberge’s post argues that it’s slightly misguided to focus on saving, and that you should instead focus on cash flow. There are of course upfront costs associated with having a child, whether biologically or through adoption, but the larger consideration is how this new line item in your budget will fit with the amount you earn.
Cash flow is also king when you consider that the estimated $300,000 to raise a child fluctuates over time. Daycare costs will eventually get subsidized by school, particularly if you send your child to a public school. But different phases of a child’s life can come with expensive activities or medical expenses (hello, braces).
The point, though, still stands. Whether you’re fixating on how much to save or your future cash flow, it’s prudent to calculate the predicted costs of kids. Sure, it’s near-impossible to account and plan for every potential variable, but a basic financial safety net is practical and critical.
• Why Is a New York Apartment Still So Hard to Find?: Justin Fox
• Your Guide to the Permanent Pandemic Economy: Allison Schrager
• Get a Prenup Before Paying Spouse’s Student Loan: Erin Lowry | 2022-10-04T15:31:55Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Do You Know How Much a Kid Will Cost You? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/do-you-know-how-much-a-kid-will-cost-you/2022/10/04/25b6366a-43f1-11ed-be17-89cbe6b8c0a5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/do-you-know-how-much-a-kid-will-cost-you/2022/10/04/25b6366a-43f1-11ed-be17-89cbe6b8c0a5_story.html |
US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat from California, holds the signed bill H.R. 5376, the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, during a bill enrollment ceremony at the US Capitol in Washington, D.C., US, on Friday, Aug. 12, 2022. House Democrats delivered the final votes needed to send President Joe Biden a slimmed-down version of his tax, climate and drug price agenda, overcoming a year of infighting and giving themselves a cornerstone achievement to campaign on for the November congressional election. (Bloomberg)
The causes of inflation can be hard to isolate, but in the US at least, one culprit is clear: President Joe Biden and congressional Democrats spent too much in the last two years, and even now refuse to take steps that would ease the problem.
Over the last two years the US has seen both types of inflation. In fairness, there is little the government can do about supply-side inflation. Demand-side inflation, however, is a different story — and prominent economists such as Larry Summers issued prescient warnings about congressional Democrats and the White House were adding to it with their oversized stimulus bill in 2021.
There are drawbacks. First, there has been a run-up in mortgage rates, which has put a damper on the US housing market. As new homebuyers face higher payments and existing homeowners see their equity decline, consumer spending will slow.
The rise in rates has also sent the dollar sharply higher as savers from around the world look to exchange their currency for higher-yielding dollar deposits. This makes imported products cheaper for Americans — but it raises the price foreigners pay for US exports. And expensive exports are bad for the US manufacturing sector.
Meanwhile, you might ask, what have the president and Congress done? The so-called Inflation Reduction Act included hundreds of billions in credits for green energy. That could have been a genuine effort to increase the US supply of energy if it had been paired with permitting reform to speed those projects along.
Unfortunately, Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia was forced to remove his amendment on permitting reform last week after opposition from both Republicans (who want more drastic deregulation) and many Democrats (who want more stringent regulation). The result will be billions of dollars thrown at clean energy — adding to demand-side inflation — with little to any relief in the delays that are contributing to supply-side inflation. That means more of the work to reduce inflation will fall to the Fed, which in turn means higher interest rates.
It gets worse. The White House has a student debt-relief plan that will cost at least $400 billion over the next decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office (the non-partisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget puts the cost even higher, at about $500 billion). That’s even more inflation the Fed will have to fight.
• The Best-Case Scenario for Inflation Is Dead: Jonathan Levin
• October’s Frightening Inflation Data: John Authers
• Welcome to the Scary New Inflationary World: Stuart Trow and Marcus Ashworth | 2022-10-04T15:32:01Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Biden’s Fight Against Inflation Is Failing Homeowners - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/bidens-fight-against-inflationis-failing-homeowners/2022/10/04/a726fdd2-43ed-11ed-be17-89cbe6b8c0a5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/bidens-fight-against-inflationis-failing-homeowners/2022/10/04/a726fdd2-43ed-11ed-be17-89cbe6b8c0a5_story.html |
Katie Darling, a Democrat running a long-shot campaign in Louisiana, talks about her decision to show voters an extraordinarily intimate, vulnerable family scene
By Monica Hesse
A scene from Katie Darling's campaign ad where she gives birth. (Courtesy Katie Darling for Louisiana)
Hesse: Let's talk about maternal gore
Darling’s chances of winning are, frankly, small. The district in which she’s running is represented by Steve Scalise, the Republican House minority whip, who has held the seat for 14 years. In 2020 he won reelection with 72 percent of the vote. | 2022-10-04T15:32:29Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Katie Darling viral campaign ad depicts childbirth, with a pro-choice message - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/10/04/katie-darling-childbirth-viral-campaign-ad/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/10/04/katie-darling-childbirth-viral-campaign-ad/ |
The company eventually could spend up to $100 billion over 20 years
Micron Technology is a maker of memory chips. (Bloomberg News) (Tomohiro Ohsumi/Bloomberg)
Tech giant Micron said it will invest $20 billion in a new chip factory in Upstate New York, and up to $100 billion over twenty years if it decides to expand — another sign of a domestic semiconductor manufacturing boom.
Micron said it will build the factory in Clay, N.Y., just north of Syracuse, with the first phase to run through the end of the decade. The site could eventually include four factories if Micron opts to continue building.
Biden’s visit shows high stakes of $20 billion Ohio chip factory
The news is the latest in a string of U.S. chip-production investments announced in recent months as manufacturers take advantage of $52 billion in federal subsidies passed in the recent Chips and Science Act.
“To those who doubted that America could dominate the industries of the future, I say this — you should never bet against the American people” President Biden said in a statement.
The New York project is the second large investment announcement by Micron in the last few weeks. In August the company said it would build a big chip factory in Boise, Idaho, near the company’s headquarters. | 2022-10-04T15:34:22Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Micron to build $20 billion chip factory in upstate New York - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/10/04/micron-chip-factory-new-york/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/10/04/micron-chip-factory-new-york/ |
Under the new rule, airlines will be required to ensure flight attendants have 10 hours of rest between shifts
Delta flight attendants at Reagan National Airport in July 2020. (Evelyn Hockstein for The Washington Post)
“I can tell you firsthand that well-rested crew members are important to safety,” said Billy Nolen, acting FAA administrator, who announced the signing of the rule at an event held at Reagan National Airport. “And as we’ve seen too often recently, they are on the front lines of responding to unruly passengers who could threaten the safety of the flight and other passengers.”
Nolen was flanked by nearly two dozen flight attendants and union leaders, including Sara Nelson, international president of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, who praised the rule, saying it would improve the health and well-being of flight attendants who have spent more than two years dealing with the effects of the coronavirus pandemic. Also in attendance was Julie Hedrick, president of the Association of Professional Flight Attendants, which represents those who fly for American Airlines.
FAA advances rule to give flight attendants extra rest between shifts, three years after Congress ordered change | 2022-10-04T15:34:28Z | www.washingtonpost.com | FAA increases rest time for flight attendants - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2022/10/04/flight-attendants-rest-time/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2022/10/04/flight-attendants-rest-time/ |
Quarterback Josh Allen throws a pass in the Bills' victory Sunday at Baltimore. (Terrance Williams/AP)
BALTIMORE — The Buffalo Bills occupy the NFL’s flimsiest, most precarious pedestal. They are, almost by acclamation, the league’s Super Bowl favorite this season, the darlings of those preseason prognosticators who so widely expect the team to follow the lead of quarterback Josh Allen and take the logical next steps after falling valiantly to the Kansas City Chiefs in an epic AFC playoff game in January.
And yet, with a wider view, the Bills remain the pluckiest of NFL underdogs. They occupy one of the league’s tiniest and chilliest markets, with a maniacally devoted fan base hungry for the franchise to recapture the glory days of Marv Levy, Jim Kelly, Thurman Thomas, Andre Reed and Bruce Smith. And even those Bills failed to capture the biggest prize, suffering four straight Super Bowl defeats between the 1990 and ’93 seasons.
The Bills’ next Super Bowl title will be their first. Their next Super Bowl appearance, even, will be their first since a 30-13 loss to the Dallas Cowboys on Jan. 30, 1994.
“It’s all about wins,” linebacker Von Miller said here Sunday. “We don’t have the best weather. We’ve got really great food where we’re from. But where we’re at, man, it’s all about wins, man. It’s all about making great plays and bringing wins home to our fans. To bring a tough win like this and make the plane do backflips on the way home and when we land, we see Bills Mafia outside the plane — this is what it’s about.”
Miller was speaking soon after a 23-20 triumph over the Baltimore Ravens, a game in which Buffalo overcame a 20-3 deficit. That victory may have demonstrated the Bills’ championship mettle more than their lopsided wins — by a combined margin of 72-17 — over the Los Angeles Rams, the defending Super Bowl champs, and the Tennessee Titans, last season’s top playoff seed in the AFC, in the season’s first two weeks.
“It wasn’t going our way early, due to multiple variables,” Coach Sean McDermott said of Sunday’s game. “But I thought the coaches adjusted. In some ways, we stuck with the plan. In other ways, they adjusted. And the players executed. … The poise to be able to do that in a hard environment like this against a good football team that’s well-coached also … that’s a really good sign.”
Until Sunday, the Bills had lost seven straight games decided by seven points or fewer, dating to last season. That streak included a 21-19 defeat last month at Miami and the 42-36 heartbreaker at Kansas City in the divisional round of the AFC playoffs last season, an all-time thriller that led the NFL to change its overtime rules for postseason games to ensure each team at least one offensive possession.
We asked the experts. 📝👀 #SBLVII pic.twitter.com/xJZmN6qKg5
Over the same span, the Bills went 14-1 in other games.
“Any time you get a win, it’s awesome,” said safety Jordan Poyer, who had a key end-zone interception of a fourth-down pass by Ravens quarterback Lamar Jackson before the Bills’ game-winning field goal drive. “A win like this, a close game — I think there’s been a lot of talk that the Bills haven’t been able to win the close games. … Nobody was pointing fingers. Nobody was saying hey, and this, that and the other. We just came out one play at a time, brick by brick, didn’t blink and made the plays when we had to.”
Said Allen: “It’s situational football. It’s what Coach McDermott preaches to us. … Those are games that you love winning. It’s a hard-fought battle both ways. Winning on the last play of the game is always fun. I’m proud of our guys.”
It perhaps was a sign of a team adding maturity to its considerable talent level. Wide receiver Stefon Diggs said he sat by center Mitch Morse in the locker room afterward and the two spoke about the sense of calm that accompanied the familiarity of being in a tight game against a formidable team.
“We’re hanging out, thinking about how the game went,” Diggs said. “And Mitch was just saying, like, ‘We’ve been here for some years now.’ … He said it was good to feel like we’ve been there before. We’ve been down before. We’ve rallied back before.”
It’s all part of being an upper-tier NFL team, a lofty perch with which the Bills are becoming increasingly comfortable.
“When you’re a good team,” Diggs said, “you’ve got to beat the good teams. You’ve got to rally. We were down 20-3. Some people probably were like, ‘The game is over.’ But nobody on the sideline was like that.”
Allen has become a legitimate league MVP candidate, a sturdy runner who has developed into an accurate passer. Diggs has topped 100 catches and 1,200 receiving yards in each of the two seasons since Buffalo acquired him in a trade with the Minnesota Vikings. There are capable complementary players on offense, including tailback Devin Singletary and tight end Dawson Knox. The roster is complete. The Bills are ranked third in the NFL in total offense and are tied for first in total defense.
“We’ve got a lot of heart, a lot of grit in this locker room,” Allen said. “… We play with a lot of love for each other. Typically when you have guys that do things the right way, work hard and care about each other, you’re going to have success.”
Von Miller’s eyes have ‘always been on Buffalo.’ Now, it’s a reality.
The Bills signed Miller as a free agent in the offseason not only for his pass-rushing prowess, but also for his Super Bowl résumé. He added a Super Bowl victory with the Rams last season to his previous championship with the Denver Broncos. And when he was asked Sunday about the Bills’ struggles in close games, he called them part of a past in which he was not involved.
“I don’t know what was going on before I got here,” Miller said. “I don’t know. And I think ignorance is bliss. … I go into the game thinking that we have a chance to win any game versus any team. That’s just how I think. I think that energy just bleeds off on my teammates.”
The Bills’ injury-plagued defense has been playing shorthanded lately. Safety Micah Hyde, a key team leader, will miss the rest of the season because of a neck injury. The Dolphins have emerged as a viable threat in the AFC East. The entire AFC is top-heavy with would-be imposing contenders.
But just about everyone expects the Bills, again, to be among the final teams standing in January. The Bills themselves are among those with such expectations.
“Confidence is at an all-time high,” Miller said. “And we just keep playing until the clock says zero.” | 2022-10-04T15:44:54Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The Bills are learning to live with being the Super Bowl favorite - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/04/bills-super-bowl-favorites/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/04/bills-super-bowl-favorites/ |
The FDA was right to warn about the ‘NyQuil chicken challenge’
Signage outside the Food and Drug Administration headquarters in White Oak, Md. (Andrew Kelly/Reuters)
Here’s something you might not have expected to hear from the Food and Drug Administration: Don’t cook your chicken in NyQuil. The FDA is warning that doing so could be dangerous — even fatal.
This is in response to a TikTok challenge in which people boil a whole chicken in over-the-counter cough and cold medicine. This so-called Nyquil chicken challenge encourages other people to do the same and post about it using the hashtag #sleepychicken.
“The challenge sounds silly and unappetizing — and it is,” the FDA’s news alert says. “But it could also be very unsafe. Boiling a medication can make it much more concentrated and change its properties in other ways. Even if you don’t eat the chicken, inhaling the medication’s vapors while cooking could cause high levels of the drugs to enter your body.”
Some have criticized the agency for drawing attention to something that did not seem to be widespread. But I think it was the right call. Even if the alert increased search interest in the challenge, it also made it virtually impossible to find content about it online that isn’t about how dangerous it is. In fact, TikTok has diverted searches for it to a warning about online challenges. That’s a public health success.
There’s another benefit to the FDA’s alert: It raises awareness that just because a medicine is available without a prescription, that does not make it unconditionally safe.
Consider acetaminophen, also known by its brand name, Tylenol. Acetaminophen is ubiquitous in pharmacies and readily available in many stores. It is used to reduce fever and alleviate aches and pains. It is also an active ingredient frequently combined with other medications such as Excedrin, an over-the-counter remedy for migraines, and some cough and cold medicines, including NyQuil.
Acetaminophen has many uses and is very safe in its appropriate dosages. But it can also cause terrible harm: Ingesting large quantities can lead to liver damage and death. Overdoses associated with acetaminophen result in 56,000 emergency room visits and more than 400 deaths per year. Globally, acetaminophen toxicity is the second-most-common cause of acute liver failure leading to liver transplantation. In the United States, it’s far and away the top cause.
Another common over-the-counter remedy is diphenhydramine. Usually referred to as its brand name, Benadryl, this is an antihistamine that’s used for allergy relief and to reduce itchiness. Like acetaminophen, it’s also combined with medications to treat cold and flu and to help with sleep.
Like acetaminophen, diphenhydramine has substantial benefits, but large amounts can be very dangerous. Taking too much at once can lead to heart palpitations, blurry vision, agitation and seizures. People who overdose can slip into a coma and die.
That’s exactly what occurred because of another social media campaign, dubbed the Benadryl challenge, in which young people ingested large amounts of diphenhydramine in an attempt to induce hallucinations. Some ERs reported an uptick in diphenhydramine overdoses after youths consumed many times the amount considered to be safe. In 2020, a 15-year-old girl in Oklahoma reportedly died while attempting the challenge.
There are three key takeaways from these tragic overdoses. First, be aware that all medicines, including those available without a prescription, can be dangerous in large amounts. Working in the ER, I’ve often seen a nonchalance in how patients perceive over-the-counter medicines. People might rush their children to the hospital if they got hold of Grandma’s blood pressure medicines, but they might not do so if they took fistfuls of antihistamines.
Similarly, those who attempt self-harm through medication are often surprised that doctors are most concerned by the amount of acetaminophen they took, not seemingly more powerful drugs such as opioids. To be sure, prescription medications such as blood pressure medicines and opioids can also cause severe harm when used inappropriately. But so can over-the-counter medications. People should lock up medications of all types and keep them away from young children. Those at risk for self-harm should be aware that acetaminophen can result in permanent and irreversible liver damage.
Second, know the ingredients of all the pills you are taking. Accidental overdoses can occur when individuals consume several medications that contain the same active ingredient. And be careful when mixing alcohol, sedatives and illicit substances such as cocaine and methamphetamines with medications. If you are unsure whether someone has ingested unsafe quantities of medicines, do not hesitate to call the poison control hotline at 1-800-222-1222.
Third, for parents and caregivers, keep an eye on your children’s social media accounts. Have discussions with them about how dangerous it can be to misuse medications. Explain how overdoses that cause permanent harm can occur with not only prescription medications but also ones easily available over the counter.
And, please, do not boil your chicken with NyQuil. | 2022-10-04T16:06:44Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | The FDA was right to warn about the ‘NyQuil chicken challenge’ - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/04/fda-nyquil-chicken-challenge-alert/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/04/fda-nyquil-chicken-challenge-alert/ |
Christian Walker turns his online influence against his father
Georgia Republican candidate for Senate Herschel Walker on Sept. 28 in Forsyth, Ga. (Erik S Lesser/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock)
The video had all of the hallmarks of a Christian Walker social-media post. In it, the unquenchably effusive son of Georgia Republican Senate candidate Herschel Walker sits in the front seat of his car, gesticulating with well-practiced enthusiasm and near-shouting his opinion for the benefit of his followers.
“Men,” he exclaimed, “we need you to stop running around” (having sex with) “every woman in town. … Stick to your significant others and raise your kids.”
This is a theme of Walker’s: Men should not cheat on their wives and should be present in their kids’ lives. The recent allegations involving Maroon 5 singer Adam Levine, for example, spurred more than one video from Walker on the subject.
What’s notable about this video, though, is when it was published: July 2021. Before his father announced a run for U.S. Senate. And well before Christian Walker used his modest-but-well-tended online platform this week to blast his father as a hypocrite and a liar shortly after the Daily Beast reported that his father had paid for an abortion.
The Washington Post has not independently confirmed the report, and Herschel Walker is denying it.
When Herschel Walker announced his candidacy in August 2021, Christian Walker was the only child he was known to have had; it has since been revealed that he has three others.
Christian Walker was onboard with his father’s candidacy at the outset, sharing Donald Trump’s endorsement of his father soon after the announcement and posting a video of him embracing Herschel Walker during a campaign event at Mar-a-Lago in December.
What changed, the younger Walker says, is that his father wasn’t forthright about his own past. In a video posted on Twitter on Tuesday morning, Christian Walker explained the shift.
“I did one event last year when we were told he was going to get ahead of his past and hold themselves accountable,” he said. “None of that happened. Everything’s been a lie.”
That was tame compared to the tweets following the Daily Beast report.
“You’re not a ‘family man’ when you left us to (have sex with) a bunch of women, threatened to kill us, and had us move over 6 times in 6 months running from your violence,” Walker wrote on Twitter Monday evening. “...[H]ow DARE YOU LIE and act as though you’re some ‘moral, Christian, upright man.’ You’ve lived a life of DESTROYING other peoples lives. How dare you.”
You likely noticed a theme here: The record of Christian Walker’s positions is clearly defined thanks to his energetic use of social media. This is thanks to Christian Walker’s very deliberate effort to establish himself as an online influencer, sitting in an largely unfilled niche: conservative, Black and gay. He rose to prominence by criticizing the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, generating an audience in part thanks to ironic or critical commentary on his videos.
This journey is not unique. Embracing right-wing positions — sincerely or not — is a viable path to building an audience, as the New York Times explained in the context of Facebook last year. Donald Trump’s false claims about election fraud itself powered an ecosystem of social-media influence that right-wing voices scrambled to leverage. The magic of the internet is that, leveraged cleverly, an audience can be cobbled together around nearly anything: dressing like animals, analyzing science-fiction television episodes, theorizing about secret satanic plots. It’s an attention gold rush in which there are plenty of hefty nuggets to be mined.
Most of Walker’s posts are centered on whatever the right-wing fury du jour happens to be. A recent series, for example, centered on his move from California to Florida, where he proceeded to tout Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis’s leadership. In other posts, he leverages his identity to rail against Pride month or lament the travails of White men — a well-worn path toward appealing to the right.
Walker also has an online shop for a brand called “CANCL,” in which he’s shown wearing both a sweatshirt reading “CANCELLED” and sweatpants reading “CANCEL ME.” He does not balk at contradictions.
It seems likely that his father’s campaign might at one point have thought his son’s online audience — not huge by the modern standards of influence, but substantial — would be a benefit. As Christian Walker noted on Tuesday morning, though, he hasn’t actively promoted his father’s candidacy in recent months, despite, he says, receiving various entreaties to do so. Instead, he’s occasionally revisited that theme from his July 2021 video: Men need to take responsibility for their children. Not the sort of message Walker’s campaign wants Republican voters — already iffy on the candidate — to focus on.
Christian Walker’s criticism has obviously frustrated his father’s allies. One, speaking to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Greg Bluestein, dumped any eventual Herschel Walker loss at his son’s feet — but declined to say it on the record.
Officially, that’s not the campaign line. When The Washington Post reached out about his son’s comments, the Walker campaign pointed to a tweet from the candidate.
“I LOVE my son no matter what,” Walker wrote.
This spurred a furious rejoinder: “If you loved your kids you’d be raising them,” Christian Walker wrote, “instead of running for a senate race to boost your ego.”
This tweet — unlike so many others times in which the younger Walker rushed to share his anger — was quickly deleted.
Taylor Lorenz contributed to this report. | 2022-10-04T16:28:33Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Christian Walker turns his online influence against his father, Herschel - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/04/herschel-walker-georgia-senate-son/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/04/herschel-walker-georgia-senate-son/ |
Twitter is considering Musk’s proposal to proceed with the deal for $54.20 per share.
Elon Musk has renewed his offer to purchase Twitter at the agreed upon price. (Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images)
Elon Musk has offered to proceed with the Twitter deal at a price of $54.20 per share, two people familiar with the negotiations said, a stunning development weeks before the two sides were due to face off in a trial.
Musk sent his new proposal in a letter overnight and Twitter is considering whether to accept the proposal, one person familiar with the situation said. The letter from Musk’s side said they were ready to close the deal and end all litigation, the person said.
Twitter is considering the proposal, and will not act for at least another day, according to one of the people. Because there is great distrust on both sides, Twitter leaders are questioning whether the letter represents a legal maneuvering, this person said.
The offer comes after months of legal wrangling between the billionaire and the social media company following Musk’s moves in July to terminate his planned $44 billion purchase of Twitter. Twitter took him to court to force him to go through with the deal and trial is scheduled for Oct. 17.
Bloomberg first reported news of the offer on Tuesday. Twitter shares were suspended at their highest level in months after the news report. | 2022-10-04T16:59:07Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Elon Musk offers to honor his original bid to buy Twitter - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/10/04/elon-musk-twitter-deal/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/10/04/elon-musk-twitter-deal/ |
New Cyberpunk and Witcher video games announced by CD Projekt RED
CD Projekt, the Polish publisher behind “Cyberpunk 2077” and The Witcher video game series, announced a leadership change and a string of game announcements Tuesday, including a new Cyberpunk game, a new Witcher trilogy and a slew of spinoff titles.
Co-founder Marcin Iwinski also announced that he would step down from his role as joint CEO and submit his candidacy for chairman of CD Projekt’s supervisory board via Twitter.
In a thread on Twitter, the company revealed Orion, a code name for the next game in its Cyberpunk series. Three Witcher projects were also announced: Polaris, the start of a new trilogy for the franchise; Canis Majoris, which will be separate from Polaris but set in the same universe and developed by an external studio; and multiplayer title Sirius from developer Molasses Flood. A fourth project, Hadar, is a new IP developed in-house by CD Projekt RED.
Fueled by Netflix and patches, ‘Cyberpunk 2077’ gets a ‘second chance’
The company also plans to release an expansion for “Cyberpunk 2077,” titled “Phantom Liberty,” next year.
CD Projekt described its strategy in greater detail in a video on its YouTube channel.
In the video, CD Projekt Chief Financial Officer Piotr Nielubowicz explained that the company has been developing two AAA projects in parallel, stating that the ability to work on several titles in tandem is “crucial to our future growth.” He also revealed that CD Projekt’s development studio, CD Projekt RED, will be using the Unreal engine moving forward, replacing the in-house REDengine the company has used since “The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings.”
“A key strategy decision was forming a long-term partnership with Epic Games,” Nielubowicz said. “Unreal engine will be the technology which we will build up on to deliver our creative vision, CD Projekt RED’s unique style and exceptional quality in open world storytelling.”
To bolster CD Projekt’s scope, the company cited the acquisitions of North American developers CD Projekt Vancouver (formerly known as Digital Scapes) and Molasses Flood in Boston. There have also been two new appointments to CD Projekt’s board: Chief Technology Officer and head of production Pawel Zawodny and Chief Marketing Officer and head of franchise development Jeremiah Cohn. | 2022-10-04T16:59:08Z | www.washingtonpost.com | New Cyberpunk and Witcher games announced by CD Projekt RED - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2022/10/04/new-cyberpunk-game-witcher-trilogy-cd-projekt-red/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2022/10/04/new-cyberpunk-game-witcher-trilogy-cd-projekt-red/ |
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