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Christy Holly, who was accused of sexually abusing a player in an investigative report released Monday, is shown during a Racing Louisville women's soccer game in August 2021 at Red Bull Arena in Harrison, N.J. (Howard Smith/ISI Photos via Imagn)
Coaches who abused and bullied players. Team executives who failed to stop it. A league and governing board more interested in protecting their image than protecting their players. The indignities suffered by female athletes are by now — after the scandals in U.S. gymnastics and swimming — sadly familiar. That, though, doesn’t make any less shocking or sickening the details of abuse and misconduct that are laid bare in a new report about U.S. women’s soccer.
A year after players in the National Women’s Soccer League refused to take the field because they felt their complaints about abusive coaches were being ignored, the findings of an independent investigation conducted by former U.S. deputy attorney general Sally Q. Yates confirm and amplify their complaints. The report, released Monday, was damning: “In well over 200 interviews, we heard report after report of relentless, degrading tirades; manipulation that was about power, not improving performance; and retaliation against those who attempted to come forward. Even more disturbing were the stories of sexual misconduct. Players described a pattern of sexually charged comments, unwanted sexual advances and sexual touching, and coercive sexual intercourse.”
The 172-page report focused on three coaches — Christy Holly, Paul Riley and Rory Dames — spotlighting a litany of voluminous allegations against them. And it faulted leaders of the National Women’s Soccer League and the U.S. Soccer Federation, the sport’s governing body, as well as owners, executives and coaches at all levels for their failure over many years to act on the allegations. Complaints were minimized or ignored, and offending coaches were quietly released, free to move on to a new team and new victims. The league and federation, the report said, “appear to have prioritized concerns of legal exposure to litigation by coaches — and the risk of drawing negative attention to the team or league — over player safety and well-being.”
As has happened with executives of other sports dealing with scandal, U.S. Soccer President Cindy Parlow Cone reacted with strong words. “Heartbreaking, infuriating and deeply troubling,” she said, adding the report makes clear the need for systemic changes at all levels of the game. We hope that means, as promised, quick adoption of the report’s recommendations, including setting clear rules for prohibited behavior, thorough vetting of coaches and, most important to our mind, determining whether some team owners should be disciplined or forced to sell their teams. According to the report, three organizations — the Chicago Red Stars, the Portland Thorns and Racing Louisville — didn’t fully cooperate with the investigation, despite public comments to the contrary.
The report noted the abuse that investigators uncovered is rooted in a deeper culture in women’s soccer, beginning in youth leagues that normalize abusive coaching and blur the boundaries between coaches and players. Youth soccer was outside the purview of the investigation, but it seems clear there needs to be rigorous scrutiny and, likely, changes. Unless that happens, parents might want to think twice before letting their daughters play soccer. | 2022-10-05T21:40:57Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Alleged abuse of NWST players is a sadly familiar story - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/05/womens-soccer-abuse-report-sally-yates/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/05/womens-soccer-abuse-report-sally-yates/ |
Why Black people feel Jackson’s ‘seat at the table’ is ours, too
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson on the front plaza of the Supreme Court building in D.C. after an investiture ceremony on Friday. (Amanda Andrade-Rhoades/Bloomberg News)
When you’re Black in America, you spend a lot of time counting firsts. The higher the first, the more we marvel (and shake our heads at how long it took to happen). The higher the first, the more the person who achieved it comes to represent how we want the nation to see us.
The latest vessel of our aspirations is Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first Black woman confirmed to the Supreme Court and the third Black person ever to sit on its mahogany bench. And, man, did she show up and show out during her first week at work. But the real test — for her and us — comes in all the weeks that now follow.
Jackson spoke up early during Monday’s arguments in a case challenging the Clean Water Act, asking questions before half her colleagues did and within the first 10 minutes. On Tuesday, she took the facile reasoning about laws “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition” that Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. used to help overturn Roe v. Wade and turned it into a sledgehammer against Alabama’s gerrymandered congressional maps.
Jackson’s skillful questioning not only set legal Twitter aglow; it also became another item of pride for African Americans, especially Black women. “I love that Justice Jackson isn’t doing the thing that a lot of Black women are expected to do when we start a new job chock full of white folks which is to be quiet and not make a fuss. To know our place,” journalist Imani Gandy tweeted. “She’s come out SWINGING and I LOVE IT.”
In moving remarks at a celebration at the Library of Congress a few hours after her court investiture on Friday, Jackson let the emotion flow right back. “People from all walks of life approach me with what I can only describe as a profound sense of pride and what feels to me like renewed ownership,” she said. “I can see it in their eyes. I can hear it in their voices. They stare at me, as if to say, ‘Look at what we’ve done.’ ”
Sitting in the audience, I felt those words in my bones, having both received and bestowed ones like them. You never forget how powerful such an interaction is. Jackson’s tearful comments proved her a person of enormous humility about her achievement and boundless gratitude for the outpouring of support.
But Jackson knows that bouquets today could turn into brickbats tomorrow. “There is no doubt that I will have my share of pure bad luck,” she said. Bad luck could come in many forms. I’m thinking particularly that it could manifest as other African Americans wondering why Jackson isn’t as forthright as they want her to be on issues important to them. And she probably won’t always be, so long as the law sometimes leads her as a justice to a place that doesn’t align with her preference as a person.
The worst outcome is that such judicial restraint could cause African Americans to question her Blackness altogether. When you hit certain heights, it’s bound to happen. And it will be painful.
In the new Apple TV Plus documentary “Sidney,” Oprah Winfrey recounts life-changing advice she received from revered Black actor Sidney Poitier. It was during a birthday party for Winfrey at the height of her reign as queen of daytime TV. After being at first beloved by Black audiences, she eventually found herself bedeviled by accusations that she wasn’t Black enough. Poitier, who went through the same swing in Black public sentiment, gave Winfrey an insight she said guided her ever since.
“It’s difficult when you’re carrying other people’s dreams,” Winfrey recalled the actor telling her. “And so you have to hold on to the dream that’s inside yourself. And know that if you are true to that, that’s really all that matters.” That heavy load — a burden for anyone to carry — is only weightier when you’re the first of your kind to crack the stratosphere.
The last words of Jackson’s Library of Congress speech showed that she relishes bearing our dreams. “I have a seat at the table now, and I’m ready to work,” she said to thunderous applause. If her first days on the bench are any indicator, Jackson is wasting no time being heard and representing the best of us. It’s our task to let her do it her own way.
Follow Jonathan on Twitter: @Capehartj. Subscribe to Capehart, Jonathan Capehart’s weekly podcast. | 2022-10-05T21:41:03Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Why Ketanji Brown Jackson's Supreme Court seat feels like all Black people's - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/06/jackson-supreme-court-first-arguments-progress/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/06/jackson-supreme-court-first-arguments-progress/ |
He put reporters on the streets and bantering anchors in the studio, creating a format still familiar to TV viewers today
Al Primo in the newsroom of WABC-TV in New York City in 1968. (Family photo)
Harry Waters, a writer for the New York Times who reviewed the WABC-TV news report in 1970, poked fun at the ribbing that went on during the show among its personalities, who included anchorman Roger Grimsby and sports commentator Howard Cosell. The newscast may have been called “Eyewitness News,” Waters wrote, but “to at least this eyewitness the show might better be called ‘Wiseguy News.' ” | 2022-10-05T21:43:46Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Al Primo, creator of ‘eyewitness’ local news, dies at 87 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/10/05/al-primo-eyewitness-local-news-dead/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/10/05/al-primo-eyewitness-local-news-dead/ |
Former D.C. government employee charged with stealing city funds
The D.C. Department of Employment Services, photographed in 2020. (Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images)
A former D.C. government employee was arrested this week over allegations that she embezzled money from a city program designed to help formerly-incarcerated residents and others struggling with employment, the Justice Department said Tuesday. She is accused of causing more than $300,000 in losses by embezzling funds from the program — which helped her find work after she was previously sentenced to more than two years in prison for stealing federal funds while working for a Maryland school district.
The Washington Post reported in 2018 that the city’s inspector general had launched an investigation into Rhayda Barnes-Thomas, who until May of that year worked at Project Empowerment, a program within the D.C. Department of Employment Services that offers job training and subsidies to residents who require “intensive employment assistance” with past histories of homelessness, substance abuse or criminal offenses, among other criteria.
At the time, the inspector general was probing whether Barnes-Thomas, who was hired at Project Empowerment in 2014 after completing the program and was eventually promoted to the role of program analyst, had used internal information to steal money from it.
On Sept. 29, a grand jury indicted Barnes-Thomas in the alleged scheme. She was charged with five counts of wire fraud, three counts of bank fraud, seven counts of aggravated identity theft and one count of first-degree fraud, according to an announcement from the U.S. attorney’s office in D.C. regarding the joint investigation that also includes the D.C. inspector general’s office and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service’s Washington division.
Between 2015 and 2018, Barnes-Thomas, 51, had devised a scheme to defraud the city’s government by reviving the profiles of 16 former Project Empowerment participants and modifying them in the DOES time management system to falsely indicate that they were working for a nonprofit, the indictment alleges. Barnes-Thomas then allegedly ordered prepaid debit cards linked to the fake profiles, prompting the D.C. government to request that Wells Fargo load them with cash.
D.C. hired a woman who stole government funds. Now the city’s probing whether she did it again.
Barnes-Thomas allegedly took steps to obscure her involvement by using the credentials of one of the nonprofit’s employees to enter time and setting up email accounts to help facilitate the scheme, according to the indictment. The prepaid debit card had cash withdrawn from them at ATMs in D.C. and Maryland, the indictment alleges. The Justice Department said in a news release that Barnes-Thomas’s actions are believed to have caused between $314,000 and $350,000 in losses.
Before joining DOES, Barnes-Thomas pleaded guilty in 2011 to stealing federal funds intended for public schools in Charles County, Md. while serving as an administrator for the school system. A federal judge sentenced her to 27 months in prison in connection to that scheme, in which prosecutors said she used Title I grants intended to provide classroom supplies for students in low-income areas. She used the money to buy personal items for herself, her family and friends, including iPods and a Nintendo Wii video game console. She was also ordered to pay $115,00 in restitution.
Dwight E. Crawley, an attorney representing Barnes-Thomas, declined to comment on the indictment Wednesday. Online court records indicate she has pleaded not guilty.
Diane Watkins, a spokesperson for DOES, said in a statement Wednesday that it would be “inappropriate and legally impermissible to make any comment or statement on the case, other than to note that the DC Department of Employment identified and referred the matter to the DC Office of the Inspector General.”
A spokesman for D.C.'s inspector general did not return a request for comment, but a copy of the Justice Department’s news release was posted to the office’s website on Tuesday.
Peter Jamison contributed to this report. | 2022-10-05T22:09:52Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Former D.C. government worker Rhayda Barnes-Thomas charged with stealing city funds - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/05/dc-does-rhayda-barnes-stolen-funds/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/05/dc-does-rhayda-barnes-stolen-funds/ |
Christopher Geldart is accused of grabbing a man in an Arlington parking lot
Christopher Geldart in Washington. (Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post)
Christopher Geldart, a top public safety official in Mayor Muriel E. Bowser’s administration, is on leave while city officials review an incident in which he was accused of grabbing a man’s neck during a dispute in the parking lot of an Arlington shopping center.
According to a statement from Arlington County police, the incident occurred just before 12:30 p.m. Saturday, after the door of Geldart’s vehicle struck the door of another man’s car. The two began arguing, police said, and Geldart, D.C.’s deputy mayor for public safety and justice, “allegedly grabbed the victim by the throat.”
Police said the man reported the incident on Monday, then filed a criminal complaint Tuesday with the county magistrate’s office, which issued a warrant for Geldart for assault and battery.
Geldart, 53, was notified of the warrant by phone and turned himself in before he was released on a summons, according to police. He did not respond to a message seeking comment Wednesday.
NBC Washington first reported the altercation. Bowser’s office said in a statement Wednesday that Geldart was on leave as the city reviews the incident.
“We take any accusations seriously and are reviewing the matter,” the statement said. “Unfortunately, it sounds like something that happens to a lot of people — a dispute over something minor — and we hope it is resolved quickly.”
Geldart was appointed by Bowser (D) as deputy mayor in early 2021, after serving as director of the Department of Public Works and helping lead the city’s early response to the coronavirus pandemic. He previously led D.C.’s Homeland Security and Management Agency between 2012 and 2017. Geldart resigned from the agency after D.C.’s inspector general said he had committed ethics violations, including that he used his office to benefit a “close personal acquaintance,” Washington City Paper reported. The city’s ethics board ultimately dismissed the investigation, saying there was insufficient evidence to support the complaints.
Fox 5 obtained what it said was a video of the Saturday incident, which occurred near a Gold’s Gym. The footage, which does not have audio, shows a man reported to be Geldart pointing at another man, who is standing between two cars. The man turns around and points back, and Geldart approaches him. As the two stand chest to chest, Geldart appears to push the man with his right arm, and the other man pushes it away.
Bystanders soon separate the two, and Geldart walks away.
Salvador Rizzo and Emily Davies contributed to this report. | 2022-10-05T22:09:58Z | www.washingtonpost.com | D.C. deputy mayor for public safety on leave after assault accusation - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/05/dc-geldart-assault/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/05/dc-geldart-assault/ |
Second man charged with posing as federal law enforcement pleads guilty
Prosecutors had accused Haider Ali, 36, of cozying up to neighbors who worked for the Secret Service and not paying rent in a luxury apartment complex
An evidence photograph in the case shows a rifle scope, tactical gear and storage equipment, clothing and patches with police insignia, handcuffs, breaching equipment and a cleaning kit for firearms. (U.S. District Court in D.C.)
A second man pleaded guilty Wednesday to posing as a member of federal law enforcement while he cozied up to neighbors who worked for the Secret Service and didn’t pay rent in a luxury apartment complex in downtown Washington.
Haider Ali, 36, pleaded guilty in federal court to charges of conspiracy, bank fraud and unlawful possession of a large capacity ammunition feeding device. His defense attorneys and prosecutors agreed to recommend a prison sentence between 63 and 78 months.
U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly left Ali on home incarceration until his sentencing, which is scheduled for Feb. 24.
Guns, drones, luxury apartments: Motive of accused police posers still unclear
In April, a federal grand jury indicted Ali and another man, Arian Taherzadeh, after prosecutors said they carried out an elaborate ruse at the Crossing apartments. By prosecutors’ telling, Ali and Taherzadeh posed as agents with the Department of Homeland Security and ingratiated themselves with members of the Secret Service assigned to protect the White House complex and first lady Jill Biden.
Ali and Taherzadeh initially pleaded not guilty, with Ali’s defense arguing that Taherzadeh had tricked his client into believing he was working for a legitimate security company. At a hearing on Wednesday, Ali appeared to maintain that position — though he ultimately admitted to joining the impersonation scheme and owning a large capacity ammunition feeding device.
“I’m having problems here, I must admit, in terms of accepting this plea,” Kollar-Kotelly said, after Ali suggested he was unaware of much of the ruse until he was arrested. “He doesn’t seem to be agreeing to much in terms of what he has done.”
The scheme unfolded between December 2018 and April 2022, and three apartment complexes were defrauded out of than $800,000 in unpaid rent, parking and associated fees, according to prosecutors.
Prosecutors said Ali joined the ruse — led by Taherzadeh, who pleaded guilty to conspiracy, unlawful possession and voyeurism charges in August — as early as June 2020. Ali said Wednesday that he was initially fooled but knew he was participating in a ruse by the end of 2021.
Prosecutors initially feared the men could pose a threat to national security, because of the positions of their neighbors. Prosecutors said Ali falsely claimed that he participated in the capture of the wife of Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman and that he had a connection to a senior official in the Pakistani Intelligence Service.
But on Wednesday, Kollar-Kotelly described the purpose of the conspiracy as much simpler: The men were angling to make money and not pay rent.
“It was impersonating and getting the benefits out of doing that,” she said. “These benefits were the apartment buildings … and getting additional money from the bank fraud scheme.”
Ali agreed with that characterization. | 2022-10-05T22:10:04Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Second man charged with posing as federal law enforcement pleads guilty - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/05/haider-ali-guilty-plea-fraud/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/05/haider-ali-guilty-plea-fraud/ |
Gov. Hogan will testify in former chief of staff’s trial, filing says
Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan talks to reporters on April 4 in Annapolis, Md. (Brian Witte/AP)
Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) will be called by prosecutors as a witness in the trial of his former chief of staff, who is accused of defrauding a quasi-governmental agency, a new filing in the case suggests.
Roy C. McGrath was indicted last year in connection to a nearly quarter-million-dollar severance package he received from the Maryland Environmental Service (MES), where he served as executive director before becoming Hogan’s top aide in 2020.
McGrath’s federal trial, which is scheduled to begin on Oct. 24, will center partly on whether Hogan approved or consented to the payment of $233,647.23, which McGrath arranged to receive as he left as director of the Maryland Environmental Service to work for the governor.
Hogan’s potential appearance in court, unusual for a sitting governor, would provide him an opportunity to clarify his stance on an episode that prompted legislative hearings he once labeled a “witchhunt” in a message to McGrath. It would also provide McGrath’s lawyer an opportunity to cross-examine him.
McGrath, a longtime Hogan ally until their falling out after the severance became public, has maintained that Hogan approved it. But the governor, who is cooperating with law enforcement and has not been accused of any crime, has repeatedly denied knowledge of it.
“I know you did nothing wrong. I know it is unfair. I will stand with you,” Hogan wrote to his former aide in an undated message after it was publicly revealed that McGrath received the payment. McGrath has said he resigned from the chief-of-staff job, which he held for less than three months, because of the governor’s pledge to stand by him.
Michael Ricci, a spokesman for Hogan, has said the governor sent the message before learning more details about how the severance package was obtained. Prosecutors and the governor’s office also say McGrath falsified a memo in which he said the governor approved the severance.
In an email Wednesday, Ricci said: “Over the last two years, our office has been actively assisting in these ongoing investigations. As these cases move forward, we are confident that the justice system will uphold the public trust.”
McGrath’s lawyer, Joseph Murtha, said his client stands by his assertion that the governor approved the payment “and will continue to be steadfast about the fact that the governor’s backpedaling was more because of the political fallout, rather than what he actually said.”
The filing that suggests Hogan will testify is a proposal by prosecutors of questions for voir dire, the preliminary examination of jurors by the judge and lawyers to winnow the pool. It says the trial is expected to last three weeks.
“Governor Larry Hogan will be called as a witness by the Government in this case,” says one of the proposed questions in the filing, which was previously reported by the Daily Record. It then asks whether that would affect the potential juror’s ability to be impartial.
Marcia Lubin, a spokeswoman for the U.S. attorney’s office in Maryland, declined to comment on whether Hogan will be called as a witness.
McGrath also is accused during his time with MES of submitting false time and attendance reports when he was on vacation and using agency funds to pay a personal pledge to a museum where he served on the board of directors. He faces federal charges of wire fraud, theft and falsifying records.
He also faces charges in state court of theft, misconduct in office and violating Maryland’s wiretap laws by recording private calls with Hogan and other officials without their permission. A trial on those charges is scheduled for next year. | 2022-10-05T22:10:11Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Gov. Larry Hogan to testify in trial of former top aide, Roy McGrath - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/05/larry-hogan-testify-mcgrath/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/05/larry-hogan-testify-mcgrath/ |
Vice President Harris was in a minor car accident in a D.C. tunnel, but the Secret Service initially described the incident as a “mechanical failure” in an alert. (Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post)
A motorcade taking Vice President Harris to work was in a one-car accident on a closed roadway in D.C. Monday morning, an incident that concerned both the Secret Service director and the vice president and revived worries about the agency’s history of concealing its mistakes, according to two people familiar with the incident. | 2022-10-05T22:22:58Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Vice President Harris had a motorcade accident, but Secret Service called it 'mechanical failure' - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/10/05/harris-motorcade-accident-secret-service/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/10/05/harris-motorcade-accident-secret-service/ |
IMF-World Bank meetings are the last stop before a coming economic storm
The International Monetary Fund headquarters in Washington, D.C., on April 3, 2021. (Samuel Corum/Bloomberg)
Lawrence H. Summers, a Post Opinions contributing columnist, is a professor at and past president of Harvard University. He was treasury secretary from 1999 to 2001 and an economic adviser to President Barack Obama from 2009 through 2010. Masood Ahmed is president of the Center for Global Development; he has previously served as a senior official at the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
When they gather in Washington next week for the International Monetary Fund and World Bank Group annual meetings, the world’s finance ministers face what has been labeled a polycrisis: Challenges ranging from increased interest rates, climate change and an epically strong dollar, to food-supply shortages, high inflation and a still-prevalent pandemic all combine to threaten not just the global economy but also the livelihoods of hundreds of millions.
It is likely now that in the next year the United States will go into recession, Europe will be battered by high energy costs and China will suffer its lowest growth in decades. A major slowdown in the global economy is almost inevitable.
What is at stake — what will greatly depend on decisions that finance ministers make next week — is whether developing countries suffer a lost decade of economic opportunity, as happened to many countries in the 1980s, or whether they are enabled to maintain momentum, as occurred after the 2009 financial crisis.
While much will depend on national policy choices, the external environment will be enormously important for most countries. Global cooperation through the IMF and the World Bank matters a great deal. The challenge for these institutions will be not to just discuss new funds and funding mechanisms but to actually deliver the greatly increased support the moment demands.
Action in three areas is essential:
Ease immediate financing pressures: Beyond Ukraine’s need for sustained support, the war has led to higher food, energy and fertilizer prices, all of which are straining the budgets of the most vulnerable low- and middle-income economies. There will be further challenges as interest rates rise, exports to the industrial world fall and diminishing global liquidity makes it harder to attract capital. To avoid cascading downturns, rapid and substantial new finance will be required.
The IMF has provided some financing. As its covid response demonstrated, however, it can do much more — if the fund’s major shareholders provide clear and united direction. Appropriately, the IMF has temporarily raised by 50 percent the ceiling on the financing it provides to countries through its emergency window; it now needs to show similar initiative for its regular programs. Many countries that need IMF financing do not seek it because of the stigma involved. This problem can be addressed by developing a new contingent financing facility that provides funding to countries hurt by external developments without insisting on traditional IMF conditionality.
The World Bank announced that it will scale up new funding commitments to $170 billion through June 2023 to help borrowing countries address these shocks. However, as the bank’s response to the pandemic demonstrated, commitments are not the same as money received: Between 2019 and 2022, the bank increased commitments by over $36 billion but disbursement grew half as quickly. At next week’s meetings, shareholders should extract a pledge that these new commitments will be disbursed quickly.
Deal with unsustainable debt: The issue of debt needs to be tackled, too. Sixty percent of low-income countries and a third of emerging markets are already at high risk of debt distress. To start, the large creditor countries of the Group of 20 should suspend debt service for the neediest countries, which would provide about $15 billion of cash-flow relief next year.
Even so, many countries will still need to restructure their debt. Unfortunately, the machinery for resolving sovereign debt problems is dysfunctional and unlikely to be rethought anytime soon. But the IMF could help fill the gap by playing a more active role in sovereign debt resolution, working with major creditors to make the process more predictable and productive.
To be sure, there are serious problems of coordination among official as well as between public and private creditors. China’s reluctance to engage in coordinated debt relief and restructurings has been a particular problem given the scale of Chinese holdings. But that is not a reason for others to stand back — it is a reason to move faster so as to set an example.
Don’t forget climate change and pandemics: While the meetings will properly focus on the immediate crisis, it would be reckless to ignore longer-term challenges. An important step would be for shareholders to agree that the World Bank should, over time, substantially reorient its focus onto global rather than just national challenges.
Reducing the risk of pandemics, combating climate change and preserving biodiversity will require a new generation of investment that a reinvented World Bank would be uniquely positioned to catalyze. Sustainability must become as central to the bank’s work as reconstruction and development.
An expanded role for the World Bank would also mean far more lending and advising. The fastest way to get this started would be to implement the recommendations of a recent independent expert group convened by the G-20, which found that the World Bank and other development banks could use existing capital more efficiently while preserving their core financial strength. In parallel, shareholders should start discussions around a “green capital” increase to support an expanded focus on global public goods, and also to drive the bank’s renewal as a partner with the private sector on sustainable investment. Taken together, these changes could drive more than a trillion dollars in new public investment over the next decade and encourage even larger increases in private investment.
Trust in international cooperation has been severely damaged, first by real and perceived shortcomings in the help given to developing countries during the pandemic and now by sky-high food and energy prices and the threat of recession spreading out from the industrial world. The global economy is in dire need of repair. Next week is the time to start. | 2022-10-05T22:49:09Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | IMF-World Bank meetings are the last stop before an economic storm - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/05/imf-world-bank-meetings-prepare-economic-downtown/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/05/imf-world-bank-meetings-prepare-economic-downtown/ |
Kent Carter, right, with Julius D. “JD” Spain Sr., center, and Michael Hemminger, with whom Carter served with in the Arlington NAACP. (Julius D. “JD” Spain Sr.)
Kent Carter, a prominent racial-justice leader in Northern Virginia, was one of three people killed over the weekend in the Turks and Caicos Islands amid a string of violent attacks that have shaken this British territory in the Caribbean.
Carter and his girlfriend had traveled to the popular vacation destination to celebrate his 40th birthday, his half brother Barry Cantrell said, and were being shuttled back to their hotel from a water-skiing excursion before the attack.
Trevor Botting, the territory’s police commissioner, said that at around 6 p.m. Oct. 2, a group of “armed criminals” apprehended a vehicle containing staff from a local business and two tourists.
The assailants “proceeded to indiscriminately shoot into the vehicle,” he said, killing one local employee and one tourist from the United States and injuring three others in the vehicle. They did not name any of the victims.
Carter’s girlfriend survived with minor injuries, according to Cantrell. Officials said they believe one of the attackers was later killed by police.
Botting said Monday that the ambush was “carried out by armed gang members who act without conscience, who have no regard for life, and who are hellbent on causing indiscriminate harm and misery.”
Botting connected the incident to several other episodes involving armed attackers over the weekend, noting that violence has been on the rise on the Caribbean archipelago. In addition to the three deaths, five people were injured in this string of incidents.
Julius D. “J.D.” Spain Sr., president of the Arlington NAACP, described Carter — an Army veteran and realtor who had been serving as the group’s first vice president — as a “gentle giant.”
“He was a servant leader,” Spain said. “He was one who didn’t ask for anything in return, but did it because he knew it had to be done.”
A high school football player who grew up near Knoxville, Tenn., Carter served as a military policeman at Fort Bragg in North Carolina. Even while deployed in Afghanistan, he would proudly wear orange gear to support the University of Tennessee football team, his half brother said.
“No matter where he went, East Tennessee always stuck with him,” Cantrell added. “We both had kind of a rough background … but look at how he turned out. Anything he touched, he was very good at.”
Carter moved to the D.C. area after leaving the Army and worked as a special agent for the U.S. Air Force and the Department of Commerce before making a career shift to sell real estate.
Spain said he first met Carter through Alexandria’s Universal Lodge No. 1, the oldest branch of the Prince Hall Freemasonry. Carter would go on to lead the lodge, which is part of a historically all-Black Masonic association that conducts charitable work such as food drives.
“His impact in our community and his character and trustworthiness and judgment were impeccable. He’s one of those silent but very effective leaders. … No one can speak ill will of Kent. He was just a very warmhearted individual.”
Carter, who also chaired the Arlington NAACP’s criminal justice committee, helped organize a large racial-justice protest in the Court House neighborhood following the police killing of George Floyd in summer 2020.
Weeks later, he was appointed to the county’s police practices working group, which was tasked with reviewing policies for law enforcement in Arlington. Carter worked on a subcommittee of the group that helped design recommendations for the county’s new civilian oversight board.
The office of Turks and Caicos Premier Washington Misick wrote in a statement Tuesday that the incident on Turks and Caicos over the weekend “is rare and does not reflect who we are as a people.”
The attack, the statement said, was “not one in which the victim was targeted.”
Botting said police and the attackers exchanged fire in a separate encounter later that weekend.
After officers in a patrol car intercepted the assailants’ vehicle, the attackers began shooting automatic weapons toward the officers. Their bullets repeatedly struck the windshield and deflated two tires on the patrol car.
Officials said they are investigating reports about an unidentified body found nearby, which they believe was one of the armed attackers shot by police. They said they also believe shots discharged by the attackers during the confrontation with police struck a different man, who had arrived at a hospital with a head injury.
Cantrell, who received a call from Carter’s girlfriend as soon as she got back to her hotel, said he is still processing the news about his half brother. A fellow sports lover, he had recently spent a weekend in Atlanta with his half brother watching baseball and visiting the College Football Hall of Fame.
“To be honest, it has still not registered,” he said. “You just don’t want to believe it.” | 2022-10-05T22:53:31Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Kent Carter, Arlington NAACP leader, killed in Turks and Caicos ambush - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/05/turks-caicos-arlington-kent-carter/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/05/turks-caicos-arlington-kent-carter/ |
Ukrainian Maj. Volodymyr Voloshyn watches a military drone operator, Arthur, as he communicates with an artillery brigade to direct their fire in the Mykolaiv region in southern Ukraine on Oct. 5. (Heidi Levine/FTWP)
MYKOLAIV REGION, Ukraine — The drone operator ignored the occasional thunder of outgoing artillery in the distance and kept his eyes focused on the computer monitor in front of him, waiting for the burst of smoke to appear. His thumbs pushed the joystick left, then right, before moving to his cellphone screen to report where the artillery should aim next.
Some three miles from Ukraine’s southern front line, U.S.-provided M777 howitzers were pounding the Russian forces who were refusing to yield any more ground.
Another soldier, whose call sign is “Dobriy,” then informed his comrades in this Ukrainian special forces unit that their drone wasn’t the only one in the sky. He had just been told that a Russian Orlan reconnaissance UAV was headed this way, and if they were spotted, shelling would surely follow. The day before, the field behind this short trench line was littered with rockets. “That was especially for me,” Dobriy said with a grin.
His commander, Col. Roman Kostenko, now looked concerned. “Should we leave?” he asked, referring to himself and The Washington Post journalists he brought with him. “Too late,” answered Arthur, the drone operator, still not taking his eyes off the screen in front of him.
A day after Ukrainian forces reclaimed more territory in the southern Kherson and Mykolaiv regions, the jubilation of a breakthrough at this part of the front line was tempered by anxiety over an expected hard fight ahead.
Kyiv’s military here has pushed the Russians back by dozens of miles in some spots after struggling to advance for months. But after Ukraine’s remarkably successful counteroffensive in the northeast Kharkiv region, soldiers stationed near the southern front cautioned that the situation remains tense. Kherson is too important, politically and militarily, for the Russians to retreat as messily as in Kharkiv, they said.
“This is not Kharkiv,” Kostenko said. “There, they left all of their ammunition and vehicles and fled. Here, we don’t even have many trophies. They just retreated from the fight, took everything with them to their new position and are digging in anew.”
What the Ukrainians have observed is an orderly Russian pullback from some towns and villages in what could be preparation to tighten the front line around the city of Kherson, the lone regional capital Moscow’s forces have captured since their invasion began last February, and the neighboring town of Nova Kakhovka, which is home to a hydroelectric power plant that also controls a vital water supply to Crimea, which Russia illegally annexed in 2014. Seizing the plant and restoring the water flow, which Ukraine had cut off, was one of Russia’ top military objectives in the early days of the invasion.
The Ukrainian advances come as the Russian force finds itself in an increasingly precarious position in and around Kherson. The city is situated on the only slice of territory the Russian military controls west of the Dnieper River. The land is flat, making it particularly difficult for Russia to defend.
The slice of occupied land is connected to the rest of Russian-controlled territory by two main crossings over the Dnieper — the Antonovsky Bridge in Kherson, which is badly damaged, and the Kakhovka hydroelectric dam, which is about 45 miles to the east and remains passable.
Russian forces risk getting cut off in Kherson — surrounded by Ukrainian forces on three sides and the river on the fourth — if the Ukrainians manage to advance close enough to the river to make it impassable.
“If the Ukrainian military is able to get artillery within range of the main bridges and river crossings, then the Russian position in general may become untenable,” said Michael Kofman, a military analyst at Virginia-based research group CNA.
Cautious military strategy would call for retreating over the river rather than bearing the risk of getting surrounded or besieged in Kherson. But the Russians are likely to fight to hold Kherson because it is the capital of a region that Putin claims to have annexed.
The city and its environs would also serve as a helpful bridgehead on the western side of the river for the Russians, should they manage to reconstitute their combat power and go on the offensive seeking to capture the port cities of Mykolaiv and Odessa.
“We think it unlikely the Russian leadership would sanction a full pullout from Kherson for political reasons,” said a Western official who insisted on anonymity to brief reporters about sensitive security information. “So this situation in the south could become increasingly messy with, potentially, a more desperate Russian force with backs to the river.”
“It won’t be an easy rush through unconstrained territory,” the official added. “They will have a challenge there.”
So far, the Ukrainians have made the most progress pushing the Russians back northeast of Kherson. How fast the Russian front might collapse depends on whether the Russians have set up echelon defenses to fall back on between the front and the city.
Unlike in Kharkiv, where local militiamen and Russian national guardsmen were primarily manning a front that fell quickly, Russia has put more seasoned forces — paratroopers and marines — in and around Kherson. They are tougher adversaries, but even those units now seem disjointed due to heavy casualties.
Capt. Andriy Pidlisnyy said his Ukrainian military unit in the Mykolaiv region recently captured a Russian prisoner who explained Moscow’s manpower problems like this: In the prisoner’s three-man tank crew, all three were from different units within Russia’s forces.
The prisoner, a paratrooper, was the driver. The commander, was a mercenary from the Wagner paramilitary outfit. And the gunner was mobilized from the occupied Luhansk region, which is under the control of Kremlin proxies.
“If even at the tank level they have such a hodgepodge from different units, then at the level where there is a company, battalion and brigade, it’s clear that there can be no normal coordination,” Pidlisnyy said.
Ukraine is now looking to take advantage of a key transition period for Russia, before the reinforcements from Putin’s recent mobilization arrive at the front. Near the recently liberated settlement of Davydiv Brid, there was a flurry of activity on the road Wednesday as Ukrainian forces moved pontoon bridges, self-propelled howitzers, and armored vehicles. Kostenko’s drone unit prepared homemade explosives in recycled soda cans to drop on fields around Davydiv Brid — an inventive demining tactic.
The Ukrainian counteroffensive, pressing on two fronts, is now moving so fast that even soldiers on the ground have trouble keeping up.
“Is Snihurivka ours already?” Kostenko asked his deputy, referring to a town in the Mykolaiv region that has been a stronghold for Russian forces since the early days of the war.
“Almost,” Maj. Volodymyr Voloshyn answered.
Retaking Davydiv Brid and Snihurivka would give the Ukrainians access to roads leading deeper into the Kherson region and add pressure on the Russians from the northwest.
“Soon we’ll be in Crimea,” Voloshyn deadpanned.
The men are both from southern Ukraine themselves, as is the rest of their 29-man unit. Kostenko, a member of Ukraine’s parliament, splits his time between here, Kyiv, and international trips to lobby for Ukraine to receive more weapons. On a recent visit to Washington, he asked members of Congress for more tanks and armored personnel carriers.
His own hometown of Charivne in Kherson region is still occupied. Staring at a tablet with a map of the village on Wednesday, he pointed out to a drone operator where his house is located. “Whatever you do, don’t let anyone fire there,” he joked.
Expelling Russian soldiers from his backyard is a personal priority. And while he doesn’t expect it to be easy, the recent gains have convinced all of Ukraine that it is possible.
“The success of the counteroffensive in Kharkiv really motivated fighters here,” Kostenko said. “The instinct is to be cautious, but sometimes you have to shove your foot in there to see it’s not that scary and you can go further. When what happened in Kharkiv showed that we can do it, the result came here, too. We started pushing ahead.”
Sonne reported from Washington. Emily Rauhala in Brussels contributed to this report. | 2022-10-05T22:53:37Z | www.washingtonpost.com | A more strategic Russian retreat signals long fight ahead in Kherson - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/05/more-strategic-russian-retreat-signals-long-fight-ahead-kherson/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/05/more-strategic-russian-retreat-signals-long-fight-ahead-kherson/ |
Nobel Prize shared by 3 pioneers in ‘click chemistry’
2 Americans and a Danish scientist win the high honor in chemistry for a process of joining molecules that helps in medicine.
The 2022 Nobel Prize in chemistry winners, from left, K. Barry Sharpless, Carolyn Bertozzi and Morten Meldal, were honored for their work in snapping molecules together to help create medicines. (Scripps Research; Andrew Brodhead/Stanford University;Philip Davali/Ritzau Scanpix via AP)
Three scientists were jointly awarded this year’s Nobel Prize in chemistry Wednesday for developing a way of “snapping molecules together” that can be used to design better medicines, including ones that target diseases such as cancer more precisely.
Americans Carolyn Bertozzi and K. Barry Sharpless, and Danish scientist Morten Meldal were cited for their work on click chemistry and bioorthogonal reactions, which are used to make cancer drugs, map DNA and create materials that are tailored to a specific purpose.
“It’s all about snapping molecules together,” said Johan Aqvist, a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which announced the winners at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm.
Sharpless, 81, who won a Nobel Prize in 2001, first proposed the idea of connecting molecules using chemical “buckles” around 2000, Aqvist said.
Meldal, 68, based at the University of Copenhagen, and Sharpless, who is affiliated with Scripps Research in California, independently found the first such candidates that would easily snap together with each other but not with other molecules.
Bertozzi, 55, who is based at Stanford University, found a way to make the process work inside living organisms without disrupting them, establishing a new method known as bioorthogonal reactions.
One of three daughters, Bertozzi said she was “fortunate because I grew up with parents that were very supportive ... about having their girls participate in the sciences.”
Jon Lorsch, director of the U.S. National Institute of General Medical Sciences, which supports the work of Bertozzi and Sharpless, described click chemistry and bioorthogonal chemistry as “sort of like molecular Lego — you have a group on one molecule that specifically attaches to a group on another molecule,” like Legos clicking together.
The first iteration of click chemistry could not initially be used to work on living cells. “The original click chemistry used copper as a catalyst to join molecules,” Lorsch said. “But the trouble is that copper is toxic to most living systems at higher concentrations.”
Bertozzi then figured out a way to jump-start the reactions without copper or other toxic solvents.
The awards continue this week, with the Nobel Prize in literature announced Thursday and the Peace Prize on Friday. The prizes carry a cash award of nearly $900,000. The money comes from a gift left by the prize’s creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel, in 1895. | 2022-10-05T22:53:43Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Nobel Prize shared by 3 pioneers in ‘click chemistry’ - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/kidspost/2022/10/05/nobel-prize-shared-by-3-pioneers-click-chemistry/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/kidspost/2022/10/05/nobel-prize-shared-by-3-pioneers-click-chemistry/ |
U.S. weighs aid to Cuba following hurricane and request from Havana
Demonstrators shout during a blackout Friday in Havana in the aftermath of Hurricane Ian. (Alexandre Meneghini/Reuters)
The Biden administration is having “ongoing conversations” with the Cuban government on “the humanitarian needs of the Cuban people” in the wake of the devastation on the island caused by Hurricane Ian, a senior State Department official said Wednesday.
The talks follow a rare request for emergency aid last week from the Havana government after Cuba suffered an islandwide loss of electricity, floods and extensive damage after its western third took a direct hit from Ian as it made its way toward Florida.
Neither side has specified what kind of aid is being discussed. The State Department official spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive diplomatic efforts.
But the talks mark a new stage in sporadic efforts to communicate following President Donald Trump’s rollback of the normalization of ties that began in 2015, when Barack Obama renewed U.S. diplomatic relations with Havana’s communist government more than five decades after they were severed.
President Biden campaigned on a pledge to relax the renewed sanctions and isolation of Cuba imposed by Trump, who also reinstated Cuba’s U.S. designation as a state sponsor of terrorism.
Biden’s administration has made only minor adjustments to the relationship, however, including allowing increases in the number of commercial U.S. flights to the island, loosening restrictions on sending remittances to family members by Cuban Americans, and permitting certain categories of U.S. citizen to travel there. Recently, the administration reversed an earlier refusal to issue a Treasury Department license to a Maryland-based producer of electric scooters and bicycles to privately owned companies in Cuba. The license was granted under an exception to existing trade restrictions for reasons relating to environmental quality.
Cuba’s appeal for humanitarian assistance comes as the island — even before the storm and a deadly fire that struck a large Cuban oil storage facility in August — has struggled with a major economic crisis, including shortages of food and fuel. Last week brought the first significant street protests, in the capital and other cities, since major anti-government demonstrations were put down with a violent security response in July 2021.
Last week’s protests appeared in large part to be a response to the islandwide blackout and general economic strife, although chants of “freedom” were also heard. The demonstrations have reportedly died down as power has been restored to some areas, although frequent blackouts continue to occur. There are also sporadic cuts to internet service, variously blamed by Cubans on the electricity problem and possible government intervention.
Physical proximity, with only 90 miles separating the two countries, has meant that any hurricane affecting Cuba is likely also to take aim at the United States. Havana has rebuffed U.S. offers of assistance following previous major storms. In 2005, the United States rejected a Cuban offer to send physicians to New Orleans to assist in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.
The Biden administration offered unspecified technical assistance following an August fire sparked by lightning at a fuel storage facility in the city of Matanzas, east of Havana. The massive blaze continued for days and added to overall fuel shortages on the island. The Cuban government said it was grateful but did not follow up on the offer beyond the reported acceptance of some firefighting equipment.
The two government have also held talks related to the record number of Cubans seeking admission to the United States across the Mexican border. In April, according to unpublished U.S. Customs and Border Protection figures obtained by The Washington Post, CBP was on pace to apprehend more than 155,000 Cubans during the current fiscal year, nearly four times the 2021 total and a twelvefold increase over 2020. | 2022-10-06T00:07:51Z | www.washingtonpost.com | U.S. weighs aid to Cuba following hurricane and request from Havana - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/10/05/cuba-hurricane-ian-us-aid/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/10/05/cuba-hurricane-ian-us-aid/ |
D.C. schools investigate after video shows fight between student, staff member
D.C. Public Schools officials said they are investigating after a video circulating on social media Wednesday showed an altercation between a student and staff member at a District school.
The video, posted on Twitter, includes text stating, “AT BALLOU HIGH SCHOOL [A] TEACHER AND A STUDENT GOT INTO A BRIEF ALTERCATION.” It shows what begins as a heated exchange between a student and staff member, including the student yelling expletives at the staff member. The staff member is then seen grabbing the student, the student starts throwing punches, and a third person who is not identified by the school district separates the two.
“At one of our schools, an interaction between a staff member and a student took place where the individual engaged in conduct that does not meet standards and expectations of DCPS staff toward the student,” the school system said in a statement. “While we cannot discuss personnel matters, the school took immediate steps to report the incident to the appropriate DCPS departments for further investigation.”
The statement does not identify the school where the incident occurred.
“DC Public Schools is committed to fostering a safe and nurturing environment conducive to the learning and success of all students,” the school system’s statement said. No additional information was provided. | 2022-10-06T00:12:19Z | www.washingtonpost.com | D.C. schools investigate after video shows fight between student, staff member - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/10/05/dc-school-staff-student-fight-video/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/10/05/dc-school-staff-student-fight-video/ |
Without the $1.8 billion initiative, the Army Corps of Engineers says much of the city would be at risk for flooding by 2075. But questions persist about its effectiveness and impact.
Tidal flooding fills the streets in Norfolk's Lake Olney area on Monday. (Jim Morrison for The Washington Post)
NORFOLK — Norfolk’s downtown waterfront is a parade of people drawn to the water during a Friday lunch hour, some heading to a waiting cruise ship and others strolling to Town Point Park with its expansive view of the Elizabeth River, the shipyards and the city of Portsmouth across the water.
They stream through a portal in a concrete flood wall running along Waterside Drive that blends into the streetscape, a guardian that for 50 years has protected the city’s economic heart. But the combination of rising waters and stronger storms, along with sinking land, means the wall now falls short of providing the protection that the federal government demands.
To arm the city against those storms, Norfolk has entered the first phase of a $1.8 billion project being designed with the Army Corps of Engineers that features an existing 2,700-foot-long downtown wall raised by about five feet and extended to cover the minor league baseball stadium on the Elizabeth River. Over time, more barriers and other protections, including nearly eight miles of sea walls, levees and berms, will be extended along the city’s southern and western flanks on the Elizabeth and Lafayette rivers.
The corps says that without the project, all but a slender rectangle of the city’s interior would be at risk for flooding by 2075. The study estimates annual net benefits of $122 million by reducing storm damage and improving the city’s ability to rebound from a storm.
A 2015 corps study targeted Norfolk because waters are rising faster here than elsewhere in the country, putting the city at risk sooner. The corps later identified cities including Miami and Charleston, S.C., as facing existential threats. Those cities, pioneers in addressing the urban climate threat, are finding that protecting themselves from storm surges is more than a design and engineering problem. It is a complicated and evolving mix of science, social justice, urban planning and finance.
The design is moving ahead even as local officials, researchers and environmentalists raise questions about the project’s effectiveness in solving all the risks coastal cities face. “Part of the issue is whether or not a sea wall is the right place to start,” said Rob Young, director of Western Carolina University’s Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines.
The barriers don’t eliminate more recurrent risks, such as increasingly frequent high tide flooding and rainstorms that dump inches of precipitation in just hours. In the aftermath of Hurricane Ian, when winds pushed high tides, Norfolk closed the gate on its downtown flood wall, but intersections blocks away still flooded. The most expensive and extensive protections — sea walls and levees — end up shielding only the most valuable real estate and not the most vulnerable people, studies show.
“So we build a sea wall, and if it’s still flooding weeks out of the year, have we solved the right problem?” Young said. “What is going to be the most disruptive to the long-term economic viability of our community? Is it the next storm? Or is it long-term sea level rise and the failure of our storm-water handling system and rain bombs that cause flooding in areas that are disconnected from the harbor?”
Young and others say the cost-benefit model used by the corps, which focuses on property values, needs to be modified.
“There are real economic justice and racial justice problems with the way they do their economic analysis,” he said. “What the corps is saying is that the only thing Americans value for their tax dollars is property values. I hope we value historical and cultural importance and maintaining community. I hope we value so many other things — recreational benefits, ecosystem benefits.”
The corps plan calls for Norfolk’s minority Southside neighborhoods on the Elizabeth River to be protected with natural solutions such as living shorelines planted with grasses and reefs, as well as elevating 750 homes.
“I think we need to be very open and very clear [if] that’s the policy direction we want to go in,” Norfolk Mayor Kenneth Cooper Alexander said during a city council meeting in late May where the corps presented its conceptual plan. “I think that’s a conversation that we need to have in this council if there’s not going to be any structural protection for the Southside.”
What gets protected and how is determined through a cost-benefit analysis the corps is required to use. Generally, it focuses on reducing damage to property today and in the future. Michelle Hamor, planning chief of the corps’ Norfolk District, said the cost-benefit analysis for the Norfolk sea wall did not support building hard structures to protect those shorelines. A plan to buy out hundreds of homes in those neighborhoods has been paused pending an evaluation in the context of the Biden administration’s environmental justice directive, she said.
Norfolk council members also are concerned about a levee along Town Point Park blocking the view of the water. Alexander suggested creating an elevated park.
Kyle Spencer, Norfolk’s chief resilience officer, said the city will work with the corps to look at removing the street and creating a waterfront park with a view.
“It does create a challenge,” he said, noting that buses drop off passengers at the cruise terminal and the city holds numerous festivals in the park. “So the feasibility has got to be looked at with all the factors included, not just flooding.”
The effect of waterfront walls and decisions about which neighborhoods to protect are just some of the issues facing cities like Norfolk threatened by climate change. Research in recent years has shown that building walls along some waterfronts deflects the water elsewhere, causing damage. Barriers like one across the mouth of the Lafayette River, which is proposed for Norfolk, alter the hydrology of ecosystems. That creates the potential for water quality problems when the barriers prevent tidal flushing, trapping nutrients and creating kill zones for marine life.
Environmental groups have called for more use of natural defenses. Recent studies have shown that in some places, nature-based solutions such as wetlands, reefs and restoring the natural flow of rivers are more economical and offer additional benefits like improving water quality and blunting storm surges. Hamor, however, said there is limited opportunity in Norfolk, a city built out 97 percent.
Then there is the money. Localities are responsible for 35 percent of the funding, potentially hundreds of millions of dollars. The first phase of the Norfolk plan will cost more than $600 million, with the city required to contribute more than $200 million to get the federal share. Local leaders, including council members, say the city will need help from the state to raise that money.
For cities like Norfolk, the next big storm is an existential threat. Doing nothing is not an option. Andria P. McClellan, a Norfolk council member who has made environmental, equity and flooding concerns among her priorities, said the city can’t afford to push the start too far down the road.
“I think that tension exists between making it perfect and getting it done,” she said. “At some point, we have to pick a design and move forward.”
“I am certain the solution won’t be perfect,” she added. “But it will be better than what we have currently.”
The sea walls, levees and natural solutions planned for Norfolk and the other cities will not eliminate flooding from storms or increasingly frequent high tides. A recent report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration noted that Norfolk had 15 days of high tide flooding in 2021, up from five in 2000. By 2050, Norfolk could see 85 to 125 days of high tide flooding.
Norfolk City Manager Larry “Chip” Filer acknowledged that the corps’ project is only a partial answer.
“This doesn’t take care of rain events. It doesn’t take care of water quality issues. We have all of those things we also are going to need to think about, and those may take and require other sources of funding, including our own capital projects,” he said.
The walls may also create problems elsewhere, according to emerging research. Modeling studies looking at the San Francisco Bay and the Chesapeake Bay concluded that erecting walls along a portion of the shoreline would deflect water and cause flooding. The California studies concluded that walls along some sections of the bay could cause flooding as far as 60 miles away and cause hundreds of millions of dollars in damage, often in disadvantaged communities. The Chesapeake Bay study found that walls along the lower portion of the bay would amplify the storm surge from a hurricane in the densely populated upper portions in places such as Baltimore and Annapolis.
The walls protecting downtown Norfolk are likely to deflect storm surge across the Elizabeth River to the vulnerable, largely minority neighborhoods of Berkley and Campostella and the city of Portsmouth, said Ming Li, a professor at the University of Maryland who has modeled the effects of using walls along the Chesapeake Bay shoreline.
“If you protect one segment of the coastline, you’re going to push water away to other places,” Li said.
The corps did not consult with the nearby cities of Portsmouth, Chesapeake and Virginia Beach about the effects of a downtown wall. With limited funding for the feasibility study, the focus was on Norfolk, said Aaron Edmonson, the engineering and construction chief for the Norfolk District. Edmonson and Spencer, the city’s chief resilience officer, said the deflected water will dissipate into the Atlantic Ocean and the bay, but the corps will examine the issue.
Other localities are navigating the Army Corps of Engineers process. Miami-Dade County last year rejected a $4.8 billion conceptual plan by the corps. Developers were concerned about a wall as high as 20 feet lowering real estate values and separating neighborhoods, and environmentalists were concerned about the effects on the Biscayne Bay, already threatened by pollution. While the plan included elevating homes and businesses, making sewer plants and fire and police stations more resilient, and adding natural defenses by planting mangroves, opponents also said it didn’t do enough to stem flooding from high tides and other symptoms of the climate crisis. The city and the corps are working on a new plan.
Charleston’s $1.1 billion project would wrap a wall ranging from three feet high to 11 feet high about eight miles around the downtown peninsula. Tidal gates would close during storm surges and open to drain rainwater with help from pumps during normal rain events. While the design is moving along, some council members wanted a solution that addressed not only storm surge, but also the increasing flooding from high tides blocking some key arteries in the city.
Mayor John J. Tecklenburg noted that legislation passed by the Senate and expected to be passed by the House, the Shoreline Health Oversight, Restoration, Resilience and Enhancement (SHORRE) Act, would give the corps more leeway to include protections against tidal flooding, extreme rainfall and sea level rise in projects.
“This is an existential threat long term for our city,” he said. “If you look out 50 to 100 years, and the impacts that storm surge and other flood risks have on our city, either we need to do something like this, or start planning on moving to Asheville.”
“And I’m not the guy that wants to move there,” he said of the North Carolina mountains.
Young, with Western Carolina University, said there needs to be a national conversation about where to spend billions on shoreline protection.
“We’re just acting as if we can hold every inch of U.S. shoreline in place, for forever, including places like Norfolk and Charleston that are built on marshes,” he added. “The United States needs its own coastal master plan so that we’re not wasting federal money in places that we will ultimately walk away from. That’s where the real failure is. We have no recognition of the national scope of this problem.” | 2022-10-06T02:10:05Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Norfolk seawall project proposed to combat storm surges - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/05/norfolk-seawall-flood-army-corps/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/05/norfolk-seawall-flood-army-corps/ |
The USS Ronald Reagan, top right, participates with other U.S. and South Korean navy ships during joint exercises off South Korea's eastern coast on Sept. 29, 2022. (AP)
TOKYO — North Korea on Thursday condemned military drills by the United States and its allies in the region as a “serious threat to the stability" of the Korean Peninsula, suggesting its latest missile launches were in response to the exercises.
Speaking for the first time since the country began its most recent round of weapons tests late last month, the North Korean Foreign Ministry denounced the United States for “unwarrantedly" referring Pyongyang’s ballistic missile launches to the United Nations Security Council. It defended its actions as “just counteraction measures” against the exercises.
The United States, South Korea and Japan since August have been conducting military maneuvers to demonstrate their readiness to work together in the event of a conflict with the North. While the allies say the drills are defensive in nature, Kim Jong Un’s regime has long viewed them as hostile acts and used them to justify its weapons development and nuclear program.
“North Korea’s consistent and persistent claims that its missile launches are in response to joint U.S.-R.O.K. drills is part of North Korea’s long running strategy of establishing equivalence between their illicit provocations and U.S.-R.O.K. joint military exercises,” said Go Myong-hyun, a senior fellow at the Asan Institute of Policy Studies in Seoul, using an abbreviation for South Korea’s official name, the Republic of Korea.
Go added that the North Korean Foreign Ministry’s statement Thursday “echoes precisely the talking points intended to inculcate the perception that the drills and provocations are equivalent, when in fact they are not.”
Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said North Korea’s missile launches “absolutely cannot be tolerated.”
“This is the sixth time in the short period, just counting the ones from the end of September," Kishida said Thursday.
There has been a flurry of activity this week between the allies’ drills and North Korean ballistic missile tests, which violate U.N. Security Council resolutions. The reciprocal actions point to rising tensions as the United States, South Korea and Japan work more closely together to guard against North Korea’s nuclear and weapons development.
With a new South Korean conservative president who is taking a harder line toward the North, U.S. and South Korean militaries resumed drills this summer for the first time in five years.
North Korea codifies right to launch preemptive nuclear strikes
North Korea’s recent rounds of tests began on Sept. 24 as the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan arrived in South Korea to participate in the exercises.
On Tuesday, as drills involving the American carrier wrapped up, North Korea test-fired an intermediate-range missile over Japan for the first time since 2017. In response, the United States, South Korea and Japan conducted air, sea and land drills, including rare missile exercises by the U.S. and South Korean militaries and deploying the Reagan back out to the waters east of North Korea.
On Thursday, North Korea test-fired two short-range ballistic missiles into the sea off its east coast. In its statement, North Korea said it is watching U.S. actions in the region, specifically the repositioning of the aircraft carrier.
Julia Mio Inuma contributed to this report. | 2022-10-06T03:15:53Z | www.washingtonpost.com | North Korea denounces U.S. in statement after firing more missiles - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/05/north-korea-missile-tests-military-drills/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/05/north-korea-missile-tests-military-drills/ |
Dear Amy: I have never had a ton of friends. As something of an introvert, I value quality over quantity. I have never had a tight “group” of girlfriends — just individuals, with some overlap with people who know each other.
As we’ve gotten older, and especially during the pandemic, I don’t see or speak to my friends as frequently as I used to. Some have gotten busier with work and hobbies, and some are still reluctant to resume pre-pandemic activities.
All of my friends seem to have friends they are closer to than they are to me, so they don’t seem to “need” me as much as I need them. I have tried meeting new people at activities I participate in, but it’s hard to get past the friendly acquaintance stage.
We are all in our 50s, so I feel I should be past this. How do I make new, genuine friends at this age and/or strengthen the friendships I have?
J: It would help if you could recognize that long-standing, deep and intimate friendships are a fairly rare treasure.
Even people you might believe are social butterflies probably have only one or two people they feel truly intimately connected to. Your statement reveals an assumption that “all” of your friends have friends they are closer to than they are to you.
My first suggestion is that you do what you can to improve the connection with the friends you have. This would involve you being more actively in touch. Even making a phone call can be hard for introverts, but if some social outreach, through a call or a text, becomes part of your daily “self-care,” some of these connections should strengthen.
These “check-ins” are a reminder to others that you are here, and that you are interested in them. This might be especially important to those friends who are still somewhat sequestered.
Dear Amy: I am a physical therapist and work in a building with others who do the same. I have my own office space. I used to rent it to a friend, who recently moved to another space on my floor when a room opened up.
After she moved, she asked to use my room for an hour when she knew I wouldn’t be there. I said yes. Today, when I came in, I noticed that she had been in my room after I left yesterday but hadn’t asked me first.
We are friends, and I want to stay on good terms. But I feel as if she has taken advantage of my good will toward her, because she is just starting out. It’s hard to say no, but I pay rent and feel as if it’s not my responsibility to support her.
Learning: It’s especially “hard to say no” if you aren’t asked.
You should be extremely straightforward: “Now that you have your own space, it’s important that you not use mine. If you have an emergency, let me know, and we can talk about it.”
Using your space without your permission is a boundary breach, but — as the leaseholder — it could also have unintended and serious consequences for you.
After you talk, it would be wisest for you to make sure you are the only person who has keys to your room. Change the locks if necessary.
Thank you for this line: “You’ve turned what should be a transactional experience into an emotionally fraught experience.” Job seekers must always remember that they are responsible for serving their own interests.
Experienced: This can be tough to do, but it is necessary. | 2022-10-06T04:07:54Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Ask Amy: How do I get closer to old friends and make new ones? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/10/06/ask-amy-new-old-friends/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/10/06/ask-amy-new-old-friends/ |
Dear Miss Manners: I have a good friend who always interrupts me in a conversation. I don’t think I’ve ever completed a sentence around her! Then she proceeds to tell me she has a brother, cousin, neighbor, etc. who has gone through whatever I’m trying to express. Help! What do I do?
Even constant interrupters occasionally check for a physical or verbal affirmation to see that their audience is still with them. Think of your friend as a wild animal looking for a meal: These checks are her way of making sure you are a suitable audience (meal) because you are still listening (alive).
The answer to the latter is: “Very interesting. I just was not sure if you were finished.”
This eventually works on even the wildest humans, which Miss Manners knows from having spent a great deal of time observing them in their natural habitat. Not having spent much time in the woods, she makes no similar claim about actual wild animals — no matter how chatty they may be.
Some friends acknowledge this; others don’t — and who, truly, can keep track of all the likes and dislikes of our friends? I don’t mind.
I always have tea bags in my purse — a habit from years of traveling for work. When offered coffee, could I reply that I don’t drink coffee, but ask whether I could have a cup of hot water, because I have a tea bag to use?
I did this once, some time back, and was told by the hostess that she had no means of boiling water — even though a microwave and stove were in the kitchen — but that she could give me some water from the faucet. It made a lousy cup of tea.
The etiquette rule that prevents guests from asking for things not offered is not absolute.
You can ask whether there is pepper when offered salt. You can ask for mustard when there is ketchup. And you can ask for tea when there is coffee — without, please, offering your own tea bag.
Miss Manners also allows guests to ask for water, so long as they do not tell us about the pills they are taking, and for the bathroom, so long as they do not tell us why they need one. | 2022-10-06T04:08:07Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Miss Manners: My friend constantly interrupts me. What can I do? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/10/06/miss-manners-interrupting-friend-conversation/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/10/06/miss-manners-interrupting-friend-conversation/ |
Sarah Cahlan
More than 100 people were killed after security personnel clashed with fans at a soccer stadium in Indonesia on Oct. 1. (Video: Ahmad Hendra/RCBFM radio, Twitter, Youtube)
A massive barrage of tear gas munitions fired by Indonesian police at soccer fans prompted the fatal crush in Malang last weekend that left at least 130 people dead, a Washington Post investigation shows.
The firing of at least 40 munitions at the crowd within a 10-minute span, in violation of national protocols and international security guidelines for soccer matches, sent fans streaming for the exits. The munitions included tear gas, flash bangs and flares.
Many fans were either trampled to death or fatally crushed against walls and metal gates because some of the exits were closed, the investigation found. The Indonesian National Police did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
The review — based on an examination of more than 100 videos and photographs, interviews with 11 witnesses and analyses by crowd control experts and civil rights advocates — reveals how the police’s use of tear gas in response to several hundred fans entering the field caused a huge surge at the southern end of Kanjuruhan stadium, where survivors say the bulk of the deaths occurred. Several doors were locked, witnesses said, further fueling the panic. This was confirmed by the country’s president, who has ordered a safety review of stadiums in the country.
As of Thursday, officials said 131 people had died, including 40 children. Human rights groups, including Amnesty International Indonesia, say the toll in Indonesia’s Malang regency could be as high as 200.
The Indonesian government has called for an inquiry into the incident, which is among the deadliest crowd disasters ever recorded. Provincial police officials have said their use of tear gas was warranted because “there was anarchy,” but crowd control experts who reviewed a video reconstruction provided by The Post disagreed.
The chief of Malang’s police department and nine other officers were dismissed Wednesday for their role in the disaster. Another 18 officers are also under investigation.
The police response violated the Football Association of Indonesia’s protocols, which state that all matches have to abide by security provisions laid out by FIFA, soccer’s global governing body. FIFA bars “crowd control gas” from being used inside stadiums and mandates that exit gates and emergency exits remain unobstructed at all times.
Videos provided exclusively to The Post show that police, shortly after the game ended, fired at least 40 nonlethal munitions at fans either on the field or in the stands. Much of the gas drifted toward seating sections, or “tribunes,” 11, 12 and 13.
Police standing in front of section 13 fired tear gas onto the field and upward into the stands, prompting thousands of spectators to evacuate their seats, videos show. Bottlenecks formed at the exits, which were only wide enough for one or two people to pass at a time, eyewitnesses said.
Clifford Stott, a professor at Keele University in Britain who studies the policing of sports fans, reviewed videos provided by The Post and said that what happened at Kanjuruhan was a direct result of police action combined with poor stadium management. Along with another crowd control expert and four civil rights advocates, he said the police use of tear gas was disproportionate.
“To fire tear gas into the stands when the gates are locked is likely to lead to nothing else other than the massive amounts of fatalities,” he said. “And that’s exactly what’s occurred.”
At 9:39 p.m. on Saturday, the referee blew the final whistle in the game between Arema FC and Persebaya Surabaya, rival teams in East Java province. The vast majority of spectators were fans of Arema FC, the home team, which had lost to Persebaya for the first time in 23 years. As Arema players began to leave the field, a few supporters hopped the barrier to approach them.
Fans, some angry about their team losing the game, ran onto the soccer pitch and surrounded the goalkeeper after the match ended. (Video: Source: Ahmad Hendra/RCBFM radio)
By about 9:45 p.m., several hundred spectators were on the field.
Two minutes after the players were escorted off the field, security personnel guarding the exit began pushing back the crowd, scattering the fans. Tensions rapidly escalated.
Officers at a soccer game in Indonesia where more than 100 people died on Oct. 1 chased crowds of fans on the pitch and hit them with batons. (Video: Left: Ahmad Hendra/RCBFM radio, Right: Twitter)
Officers in military fatigues started to push fans back toward sections 11, 12 and 13, kicking them and striking them with batons and riot shields. Some spectators fell as they tried to clamber over metal barriers and back into the stands.
At about 9:50 p.m., police escalated to tear gas and flash bangs. Smoke caused by flares and gas drifted toward the southern seating sections, videos show.
Spectators in sections 9 and 10 told The Post they coughed and their eyes started tearing almost immediately. In sections 12 and 13, rows of people were almost entirely blanketed by chemicals. Cries from tribune 13 echoed through the stands, witnesses said.
“The gas burned,” recalled Elmiati, 33. She was seated near the exit in section 13 with her husband and 3-year-old son but was separated from them during the chaos. Both of them died of injuries later that night.
“They kept firing into the tribunes … but the people there had no idea what was happening,” said Elmiati, who like many Indonesians only goes by one name. “We weren’t the ones who had run onto the field.”
Fans desperately tried to exit a soccer stadium in Indonesia where more than 100 people died on Oct. 1. (Video: Source: Left: Youtube, Middle: Youtube, Right: Newsflare)
As gas and smoke wafted through sections 12 and 13, many spectators jumped back onto the field to escape it, according to 10 witnesses interviewed by The Post. Others who tried to leave found the exits blocked, prompting them to jump onto the field, too, in search of another way out.
Officers then fired more tear gas toward the southern end of the stadium, some directly into the stands.
Smoke covered stands on the south side of the soccer stadium in Indonesia where more than 100 people died on Oct. 1. (Video: Left: Obtained by The Washington Post, Right:Twitter)
“Everyone panicked. The supporters panicked because they wanted to get out, and the security forces also panicked,” said Ari Bowo Sucipto, a local photographer on the scene. “Both sides panicked … and it became a cycle.”
Ranto Sibarani, a human rights lawyer in Medan, Indonesia, who reviewed video footage, said authorities appeared to be firing nonlethal munitions “sporadically” and without a clear strategy. There were local, national and military forces on the pitch, and it wasn’t clear who was in charge. The result was a massive, uncoordinated use of chemicals, Sibarani said.
Officers deployed nonlethal munitions toward fans at a soccer stadium in Indonesia, where more than 100 people died on Oct. 1. (Video: Ahmad Hendra/RCBFM radio)
Wirya Adiwena, deputy director for Amnesty International Indonesia, said police actions reflected a systemic problem in Indonesian law enforcement. An Amnesty report in 2020 documented 43 incidents of police violence during protests, including videos that show officers using tear gas in narrow spaces and firing water cannons at close range.
“This is not just the responsibility of the people who are swinging the batons,” he said, “but also of the people who have allowed a procedure like this to be implemented time and time again.”
Blocked Exit
Deaths occurred
VIP & MEDIA AREA
Source: Witnesses
Mohammed Iqbal, a 17-year-old who was seated close to Elmiati in section 13, said he ran when tear gas hit. He headed toward the exit at section 8, but it appeared closed. He returned to section 13, where he slipped and fell down stairs leading to the exit. Curled up on the ground, he suffered injuries to his arms, legs and stomach.
“I was ready to die there,” said Iqbal, a food vendor. “I thought for certain I’d never make it out.”
Dedi Prasetyo, spokesman for the national police force, said managing the exits was the responsibility of the game organizers, not the police.
The Football Association of Indonesia acknowledged Tuesday that some of the exits were closed when police began firing tear gas, but it did not say how many. Stadium workers had not had time to reopen all the gates, said Erwin Tobing, a representative of the association.
But crowd control experts note that by the time police started firing tear gas, the game had been over for about 11 minutes.
Police investigators, citing their review of surveillance video of six of the 14 gates in the stadium, said Tuesday that the doors were open but too narrow to handle the mass of people exiting.
Photos and videos show some doors around the stadium were bent and warped after the incident.
“I’ve seen video footage of heavy steel gates that have been bent by the pressure. Well, they can only have been bent by the pressure if they were locked shut,” Stott said. The exits that were open were obstructed in some places by people who had fainted or tripped, witnesses said.
Bhaitul Rohman, 27, said he left through the exit in section 3 before going to section 4 to help others who were stuck.
“I saw about 20 people just piled up on top of one another,” he said. “I felt a hand holding my leg and saw a man who couldn’t get out from under the pile of bodies.”
Adi Renaldi in Malang, Indonesia, and Winda Charmila in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, contributed to this report. | 2022-10-06T04:12:16Z | www.washingtonpost.com | How police action in Indonesia led to a stampede in the soccer stadium - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/06/indonesia-kanjuruhan-stadium-stampede-police/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/06/indonesia-kanjuruhan-stadium-stampede-police/ |
A look at the top contenders for the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize
Nobel Prize medals replicas are displayed Sept. 19 inside the Norwegian Nobel Institute, in Oslo. (Staff/Reuters)
The awarding Friday of the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize comes at a particularly fraught moment, amid Europe’s biggest land war since World War II, major increases in food and energy prices and growing alarm over talk of using nuclear weapons.
While the nominations closed in February — before the invasion of Ukraine — it is widely believed the war could have an effect on the final selection, as the Norwegian Nobel Committee often makes political statements with its choices.
In 2021, the committee put the focus on freedom of the press with awards to embattled journalists Dmitry Muratov of Russia and Maria Ressa of the Philippines, while in 2020, it feted the World Food Program. In light of current events, 2022 might be about politics again.
Here are some of the contenders as chosen by the Peace Research Institute of Oslo, whose shortlists in the past have included the 2019 winner, Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, and the 2018 winners, humanitarians Denis Mukwege and Nadia Murad.
Russian and Belarusian opposition
Two likely possibilities could be the most prominent opposition figures in Russia and its close ally Belarus: Alexei Navalny and Svetlana Tikhanovskaya.
Navalny, who has appeared on a string of shortlists over the years, is currently spending much of his time in solitary confinement at a Russian high-security penal colony 155 miles east of Moscow as he is tried for a string of crimes against the state.
His anti-corruption organization has highlighted the misdeeds of Vladimir Putin’s regime for years and resulted in his poisoning at the hands of Russia’s security forces. After a convalescence in Germany, however, he returned to the country in January 2021 and was immediately imprisoned.
From his cell, he has managed to repeatedly condemn the war in Ukraine and Putin’s “criminal mobilization because of which tens of thousands of people are going to die in trenches."
After her husband was imprisoned just two days following his announcement in 2020 that he would run for president, Tikhanovskaya became the leader of the opposition in Belarus against long-serving strongman and close Putin ally Alexander Lukashenko.
His victory in August 2020 was widely described as rigged, but the ensuing protests were crushed and Tikhanovskaya and her two children fled the country out of fear for their safety. But in the years since she became the face of a movement challenging Lukashenko’s rule, Tikhanovskaya has continued to present herself as Belarus’s legitimate leader.
Chinese activists
The doomed 2019 pro-democracy demonstrations in Hong Kong gained worldwide attention, as did China’s brutal treatment of the Uyghur minority in the far west of the country, which was addressed in a long-delayed United Nations report released in August.
The committee could send a message by awarding the prize to activists like Nathan Law and Agnes Chow of Hong Kong or Ilham Tohti, an imprisoned Uyghur scholar.
Law, who was given political asylum in Britain last year, is one of the most prominent of the Hong Kong activists in exile. He co-founded the pro-democracy Demosisto party in 2016 and was briefly elected as a lawmaker in the city before being disqualified for not taking the oath of office correctly.
He fled the country before the passage of the draconian national security law in 2020 that outlawed most protests and snagged many of his fellow activists, including Chow.
She gained prominence as a 15-year-old spokesperson of the 2012 student protests and went on to participate in most of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movements, including the Demosisto party. She was eventually arrested and imprisoned for 10 months for her role in the 2019 protests and was released in June 2021. She remains in Hong Kong.
Tohti, a professor of economics, has been imprisoned for life since 2014 on charges of advocating separatism. In 2006, he established a website to draw attention to the discrimination faced by Uyghurs, as well as provide a platform for exchange between Uyghurs and Han Chinese, China’s largest ethnic group. He was arrested in January 2014 and convicted in September after a two-day trial.
Interfaith champion
The selection of Harsh Mander, an activist for interfaith harmony in India, would cast a harsh spotlight on the growing religious polarization in the country that many say has been fueled by the right-wing Hindu nationalist government.
Beginning in 2017, Mander, 67, led activists, writers, lawyers and artists in his Karwan-e-Mohabbat, or Caravan of Love, across India to visit families affected by communal bloodshed.
Mander has been highly critical of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his policies that Mander says deepen the religious cleavages in the country and are discriminatory toward Muslims.
The ‘World Court’
In a time of increased rivalry among the global powers and competing narratives about world events, there is a degree of yearning for international institutions that can present impartial opinions, which makes the 77-year-old International Court of Justice, or “World Court,” an attractive candidate.
“Despite having no binding force, the Court’s advisory opinions nevertheless carry great legal weight and moral authority,” the court has noted about itself, and it has been an instrument of preventive diplomacy to keep the peace.
Established in 1945 after World War II, the ICJ is the main United Nations judicial body with the mandate to settle legal disputes between countries and provide advisory opinions on matters of law referred to by other U.N. bodies.
On March 16, the court ordered Russia to completely stop its military operations in Ukraine. The decision is seen as mostly symbolic, as the court lacks a viable way to enforce its ruling.
Research and activism
If the committee decides to go the route of activism, two organizations that work on human rights and peaceful responses to conflict that might catch its eye are the San Francisco-based Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG) and the Center for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies (CANVAS), an organization based in Belgrade.
HRDAG aims to bring the rigor of scientific analysis to human rights, with investigations into conflicts, while CANVAS educates activists about nonviolent resistance to autocratic regimes and the promotion of human rights and democracy.
Though HRDAG and CANVAS are not directly linked, they were formed in a similar period of activism around the turn of the millennium. Both organizations have worked on similar causes.
They carried out significant work during the Arab Spring, with CANVAS initially advising anti-government protesters in Syria before a violent government response to demonstrations helped turn it toward civil war.
HRDAG would become particularly well-known at the start of the war, where it was one of the few organizations that tried to put a number on the war’s enormous toll in Syrian lives.
Robyn Dixon and Mary Ilyushina in Riga, Latvia; Theodora Yu in Hong Kong; Lily Kuo in Taipei, Taiwan; Gerry Shih and Niha Masih in New Delhi; and Maite Fernández Simon and Adam Taylor in Washington contributed to this report. | 2022-10-06T07:54:51Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Who could win the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize? 9 contenders make shortlist - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/06/nobel-prize-2022-shortlist-contenders/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/06/nobel-prize-2022-shortlist-contenders/ |
Suzan Haidamous
Dua Abdel Nour, 22, and her husband, Zein al-Deen Hamad, 24, tried to escape to provide a better future for the child they were expecting. Although they both survived after the boat that was supposed to smuggle them from Lebanon to Europe sank, they lost the baby. (Tamara Saade for The Washington Post)
TRIPOLI, Lebanon — As Dua Abdel Nour floated in the endless sea, her torso flattened on a plank of wood and her hand clutching onto her college sweetheart, she found herself imagining what she must look like from above, her head bobbing in the water like a character in a disaster film.
For 36 hours, she and her husband of four months fought to stay alive after the boat that was supposed to smuggle them from Lebanon to Europe sank. They were parched and hungry, their arms and legs inflamed from fighting against the ceaseless waves. Her life vest had bunched up around her neck, stripping her skin right off.
“He kept telling me, ‘I can’t anymore,’ ” Abdel Nour, 22, said of her husband, Zein al-Deen Hamad, 24. But she wouldn’t let go. “I told him, ‘If you drown, I drown.’ ”
The couple was saved by fishing boats dispatched from the Syrian island of Arwad to look for survivors of the capsized boat, which had set out before dawn on Sept. 21 carrying around 140 people. At least 100 bodies have so far been retrieved. Those rescued were treated in Syria’s coastal city of Tartous, and the Lebanese among them were sent home.
Lebanon has always been a place of haves and have-nots, but the gulf between them has widened to an extraordinary degree. In the northern cities of Tripoli and Akkar, and the surrounding villages, many people now live without electricity and running water. Residents call the area “the forgotten North” and are going to desperate lengths to escape.
A tragedy at sea shakes the poorest city in Lebanon
In Syria, Abdel Nour learned that the baby she was pregnant with had died. When she returned to Tripoli, she visited the government hospital for an abortion, only to be told by the physician that, due to a lack of funds, they can only take emergency cases. He advised her to come back “when she starts bleeding.”
She spent days hunting for the pills the doctor had prescribed, but they left her in agonizing pain and didn’t finish the job. Her panic grew: Abdel Nour has a nursing degree and knows the perils of not expelling a dead fetus.
Finally, someone heard about her case and called the health minister, who intervened to put an end to her nightmare.
“This is what it’s come to: You need a wasta even if you’re dying,” she said, using an Arabic word that denotes a mix of favoritism, nepotism and connections. It has long ruled the lives of those in Lebanon. And as the country collapses, it is sometimes the only currency left.
“Tripoli and Akkar are isolated from Lebanon. It’s like they’re not in the country,” Abdel Nour said. “The poverty here is surreal.”
Lebanon’s leaders have failed to address what the World Bank has called one of the world’s worst economic crises since the mid-19th century. The local currency has lost over 96 percent of its value since 2019. Salaries have not caught up, for those lucky enough to still have jobs.
Another bank heist in Beirut, another hero for Lebanon’s weary public
In the absence of government services, such as health care and electricity, the country has been carved into spheres of influence, with residents turning to local politicians to meet their most basic needs.
Abdel Nour graduated at the top of her class but said no one would hire her. She watched as peers with wasta filled positions others more worthy had applied for. “You get desperate here,” she said, speaking from her in-laws’ house where she and her husband share a single room.
“I studied and worked hard and now find that those who have lesser degrees than mine got employed and are getting promoted, and I’m still where I am.”
She was further disheartened when she lost out on two job offers in Saudi Arabia. She applied for a passport more than a year ago but, like many Lebanese hoping for a way out, is still waiting. Those with wasta get to skip the line.
“That’s what pushed us to get out of where we are, this system of wasta and favoritism, to go to a civilized country without these kinds of [political] parties,” Abdel Nour said.
Her husband gave up his nursing degree and joined the army to support her studies — “she’s smarter than me,” Hamad explained — but the army’s budget has been slashed. Their meals consisted of two pieces of bread per soldier and a can of tuna divided between several men.
“And they ask you why are you going to the sea,” Abdel Nour said sardonically.
Lebanon’s prime minister, Najib Mikati, hails from Tripoli, and he is on Forbes’s list of the world’s top 1,000 billionaires. But the country’s second-largest city remains desperately poor, a place without a patron.
Its neighborhoods still bear the marks of the civil war that ended in 1990, dotted with collapsing facades riddled with bullet holes. The streets are crowded with 1970s-era Mercedes-Benz cars, often held together with tape and rope. Darkness floods most residential buildings, where the elevators have become decorative.
Hamad’s father said they now use their fridge as a cabinet: inside are a few jars of pickles, some bread, one tomato.
There’s been no running water for months because the pumps run on fuel, a luxury item nowadays. In its absence, people buy gallons of water from deliverymen like Wissam al-Talawi, who took the only job he could find to support his family. Unable to imagine a future here, he, too, decided to get on the boat with his wife and four kids.
He sold his house and everything he owned and borrowed money to pay the $18,000 for the trip. When he saw the overcrowded boat, he and most of the passengers, as well as the captain, wanted to turn back. But the smugglers wanted their money and wouldn’t allow it. “They told [the captain], ‘We’ll shoot your kids,’ ” he said.
Only 2½ hours into the journey, the motor failed and the boat began to sink. People jumped in the water and, in the chaos, Talawi lost his wife, Salma, and two of his children, Mahmoud and Maya. He would not see them again. His two other kids were still with him, though, struggling to tread water and stay alive under the beating sun.
“I just kept kissing them,” he said, his tears falling freely. “They’d tell me they want water; I kept telling them, ‘Soon God will give us some reprieve.’ I told them, ‘Forgive me, my loves. Forgive me.’ ”
He watched his son, Ammoura, drown. Then he attached his life jacket to that of his daughter, Mimi, and put her arms around his neck, drifting in and out of consciousness as he tried to keep them afloat, waking up each time to her tiny voice: “Daddy, I’m with you. Don’t leave me.” But he couldn’t save her either.
“I can’t sleep. I can’t sleep,” he said, his voice thinning in agony. “I told them, ‘Forgive me.’ I couldn’t, I couldn’t see them. I would just hear my daughter’s voice. Her voice cuts me. Her voice.”
He hoped he could give his children a better life, dreaming of running water and free education in Germany. He was tired of not being able to provide for them.
As he spoke, an ice cream truck passed by, its “Für Elise” jingle drifting through the open window.
“That’s the ice cream guy. Every time he’d pass, my son would hear him and want ice cream,” Talawi remembered, a laugh trickling into his voice. “When your child asks you for something and you can’t offer it to them, you feel wrong. You feel as if you failed.”
Suzan Haidamous reported from Washington. | 2022-10-06T08:16:41Z | www.washingtonpost.com | In Lebanon’s ‘forgotten north,’ despair drives people to the sea - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/06/lebanon-migrant-tragedy-tripoli-survivors/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/06/lebanon-migrant-tragedy-tripoli-survivors/ |
Gunman attacks Thai day-care center, killing at least 31
At least 31 people are dead in attack on Thai day-care center, said police.
Thai police said the gunman was a former police officer and the attack took place in the northeast of the country. The motive for the attack, which included children among the victims, was unclear they said. | 2022-10-06T08:16:44Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Thailand daycare center attack kills at least 30, including children - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/06/thailand-daycare-children-attack/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/06/thailand-daycare-children-attack/ |
A pastor was part of the Jan. 6 mob — then preached about it, FBI says
Pastor Bill Dunfee, left, greets people protesting his church in Warsaw, Ohio, in 2010. (Jay LaPrete/AP)
Pastor Bill Dunfee stood before his congregants in late December 2020 and told them that they were victims of a great injustice, federal prosecutors say.
“The Government, the tyrants, the socialists, the Marxists, the progressives, the RINOs, they fear you. And they should,” he allegedly said Dec. 27, 2020, during his Sunday sermon, using an acronym for a disparaging phrase about politicians considered “Republicans in name only.” “Our problem is we haven’t given them reason to fear us.”
But Dunfee, who started the New Beginnings Ministries church in Warsaw, Ohio, in 2001, had an idea about how they could change that: by going to the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, a recently filed FBI affidavit states.
“It’s not over … are you ready?” he allegedly said of the 2020 presidential election results.
Federal officials said Wednesday that Dunfee, 57, made good on his promise 10 days later and nearly 300 miles away. They’re accusing him of traveling from his home in Frazeysburg, Ohio, to Washington, D.C., where he allegedly instigated rioters, pushed barricades into officers and praised those who stormed the Capitol as they left the building.
Dunfee has been charged with several felonies and misdemeanors, including committing violence on the grounds of the U.S. Capitol, interfering with a law enforcement officer during a civil disorder, and obstruction of an official proceeding.
On Wednesday, Dunfee was arrested in Ohio, made his first court appearance and was freed upon the promise that he would attend future court hearings. Neither Dunfee nor the church he leads immediately responded to a request for comment. Federal court records do not list an attorney for him.
How one of America’s ugliest days unraveled inside and outside the Capitol
Dunfee is one of more than 870 people arrested in connection to the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, including roughly 265 charged with assaulting or impeding law enforcement, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia.
Five hours before rioters broke into the Capitol, Dunfee was a few hundred feet away on its east plaza, the FBI affidavit states. Around 9:20 a.m. on Jan. 6, Dunfee allegedly stood in a raised flower bed and used a bullhorn to goad supporters of President Donald Trump.
“This election has been stolen right out from underneath of our noses and it is time for the American people to rise up,” he said, according to the FBI. “Rise up. Rise up. Today is the day … that these elected officials realize that we are no longer playing games, that we are not sheeple.”
Dunfee told protesters not to destroy any property but said elected officials “need to fear us,” the affidavit states.
At 1:05 p.m., while Dunfee was allegedly on the Capitol’s east plaza, Congress met inside the building in a joint session to certify Joe Biden’s electoral win. Around the same time, Trump concluded a more than hour-long speech a mile and a half away, on the White House Ellipse.
“We’re going to the Capitol,” Trump said. “We’re going to try and give [Republicans] the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country.”
Dunfee was already outside the Capitol, according to federal officials. Still holding a bullhorn at 1:14 p.m., he gave the crowd a play-by-play of the proceedings happening inside the building. “They just objected to Arizona,” he allegedly said, referring to Republicans’ challenge to the certification of that state’s 11 electoral votes, which were eventually awarded to Biden.
Less than 15 minutes later, Dunfee allegedly informed the crowd that “Donald Trump is leading. President Trump is leading the crowd.” Dunfee exhorted those around him to “fight for Trump” and “hold the line,” according to the affidavit.
“The crowd then began to chant, ‘Fight for Trump,’ ” it states.
Around 1:35, Dunfee allegedly aimed his bullhorn at Capitol police. “Mister police officers, we want you to understand something,” he said, according to the affidavit. “We want you to understand something. We want Donald Trump and if Donald Trump is not coming, we are taking our house. We are taking our house.”
In its affidavit, the FBI described Dunfee’s words as a warning “that the crowd of rioters would breach the U.S. Capitol by force if necessary.”
At 1:44, Dunfee pushed a metal barricade against officers trying to hold the swell of protesters back, the affidavit states. About eight minutes later, he encouraged people not to get violent, destroy things or do anything that would send them to jail, court records state.
Just before 2 p.m., Dunfee again pushed a metal barricade into Capitol Police officers, the FBI affidavit states. Once those barricades were breached some 20 minutes later, he is accused of advancing on the Capitol with his hands in the air.
Around 2:07, Dunfee, nearing the Capitol’s east entrance, allegedly told members of the mob to raise their arms as he walked toward a group of police officers blocking them from entering the building. About 15 minutes later, he is accused of pushing through members of the mob to approach the doors once more before he eventually walked away.
Dunfee stayed outside, even as others went in, waiting for his compatriots to reemerge, the affidavit states.
At 2:47 p.m., as rioters exited, one stated that they had achieved their goal of stopping Congress from certifying Biden’s electoral victory. “We did it. We shut ’em all down. We did our job,” the rioter said.
“Hallelujah,” Dunfee allegedly responded. “Mission accomplished.”
The FBI started investigating Dunfee in February 2021 and called him in March of that year. During a phone interview, Dunfee told the agents that he went to “the rally” on Jan. 6 and, on the advice of his lawyer, didn’t want to answer any more questions, the affidavit states.
Nearly five months after the attack on the Capitol, Dunfee addressed what had happened while speaking at New Beginnings Ministries in Ohio, according to the FBI. He allegedly told his flock that he and others showed up at the Capitol to warn Congress that they weren’t going to “let an election be stolen,” only to later be smeared as a “bunch of terrorists.”
Dunfee told his church they weren’t terrorists, the FBI affidavit states. While protesting at the Capitol on Jan. 6, he was surrounded by “many, many, many, many patriots,” he said.
Dunfee allegedly repeated to his congregants what he had told them in late December: This wasn’t over.
“The bottom line is this … you are not stealing this election,” he said, according to court records. “You’re not going to rob us, deprive us of a democracy, of a republic, without us being heard.” | 2022-10-06T08:38:31Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Ohio pastor arrested, accused of pushing Capitol police barrier on Jan. 6 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/10/06/ohio-pastor-arrested-capitol-riot/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/10/06/ohio-pastor-arrested-capitol-riot/ |
Did the civil rights movement use military tactics to topple Jim Crow?
Review by Kevin Boyle
Police lead Black schoolchildren to jail in May 1963 after their arrest for protesting racial discrimination in Birmingham, Ala. (Bill Hudson/AP)
Behind Thomas Ricks’s new book, “Waging a Good War: A Military History of the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1968,” lies an obvious question. In the 20th century, the world’s militaries unleashed a wave of destruction unprecedented in human history, devastating vast stretches of countryside, leveling entire cities and killing more than 100 million people, a portion of them with genocidal intent. So what’s to be gained by casting one of the century’s greatest nonviolent movements in martial terms, by thinking of it as yet another army fighting yet another war?
According to Ricks, such a reinterpretation opens a new understanding of the civil rights movement’s remarkable success. Ricks, a Pulitzer Prize-winning national security reporter who has also written six widely praised books on American military policy and political history, makes his case through an extended analogy. The movement was able to topple Jim Crow, he argues, because it acted the way a successful military acts. Its leaders set a clearly defined goal, adopted a tactical approach that served its ends, carefully trained their troops in those tactics, and then gave them the logistical, emotional and public-facing support they needed to see the movement’s mission through.
Ricks weaves that analogy through his vigorous retelling of what historians have come to call the movement’s “classic phase,” from the 1955-1956 Montgomery bus boycott to Martin Luther King Jr.’s murder in April 1968. The boycott was a highly organized, intensely disciplined siege of one of Jim Crow’s citadels, he says. The 1961 Freedom Rides were a “daring but almost suicidal foray behind enemy lines” much like World War II’s Doolittle Raid. In the spring of 1963, the movement fought its Gettysburg — the epic confrontation that reshaped the course of the war — in the streets of Birmingham, Ala. With the next year’s Freedom Summer, it staged its blitzkrieg, in hopes of breaking open White Mississippi’s deeply entrenched defenses. In Selma, Ala., in 1965, it reached its Yorktown, the last great battle of the modern American Revolution. Then the movement’s discipline broke, Ricks says, its leadership fractured, and it spiraled down to its tragic end on the blood-soaked balcony of Memphis’s Lorraine Motel.
It’s an intriguing analogy swept along by Ricks’s impressive storytelling skills. It also misses one crucial point. Ricks is certainly right to say that the best militaries have clear goals and tactics that they execute with precision. But that’s true of any successful organization, from the well-run grade school around the corner to the massive corporation that puts a package on your front step the day after you clicked your order into a shopping cart. What sets the military apart, what lies at its core, is its commitment to using violence to pummel its opponents into submission. The Union Army didn’t turn the course of the Civil War at Gettysburg purely because it had an effective plan, but because it littered the ground with Confederate corpses.
For its part, the Southern civil rights movement wasn’t trying to beat anyone into submission. It was trying to make real the United States’ promise of equal justice by forcing an intensely reluctant federal government to use the powers at its disposal to break the state laws that sustained Jim Crow. Sometimes the movement targeted the federal courts, more often the White House — Ricks oddly dismisses one of the most important of those moments, the 1957 Little Rock crisis, as nothing more than a “skirmish” though it was in that crisis that the movement proved its power to push the president into actions he desperately wanted to avoid. In its breakthrough years, the movement turned to Congress, where it had to shatter the institutional arrangements that had blocked meaningful racial reforms for almost a century.
The campaign had its casualties, of course, all of them on the movement side; in the long arc of the Southern struggle, not a single segregationist was killed, even on those rare occasions when Washington sent federal troops into the South to protect Black rights. Ricks emphasizes the tactical value that the movement derived from its willingness to endure the brutality its opponents inflicted without retaliating in kind; its success rested, he says, on its embrace of Gandhian resistance. For most of the figures who dominate his story, though, nonviolence was far more than tactical. King, James Lawson, James Bevel and John Lewis all devoted themselves to Gandhism because it dovetailed so perfectly with the Christian concept of redemptive suffering. In their sense of the movement, activists had to offer themselves up to the White South’s violence — to be threatened, beaten, tortured, maimed, even murdered — to free the nation of its sins.
That’s where Ricks’s analogy breaks down, not on the movement’s mechanics but on its mind-set. Imagine a commanding officer marching his unarmed troops toward the enemy lines on the far side of the Edmund Pettus Bridge, knowing that they have no way to defend themselves from the assault to come, and believing that through the resulting horror they might achieve something transcendent. It’s impossible to do because militaries operate on a fundamentally different imperative than the movement did. Armies are forces of destruction, as the past century’s dark history makes clear. The movement was a moral crusade, driven by a radical faith that the soul of America could be redeemed by ordinary people willing to take the terrible weight of its racism on their shoulders.
Kevin Boyle teaches American history at Northwestern University and is the author of “The Shattering: America in the 1960s.” His book, “Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age,” won the National Book Award for Nonfiction.
Waging a Good War
A Military History of the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1968
By Thomas E. Ricks | 2022-10-06T09:57:06Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Book review of Waging a Good War: A Military History of the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1968 by Thomas Ricks - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2022/10/06/did-civil-rights-movement-use-military-tactics-topple-jim-crow/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2022/10/06/did-civil-rights-movement-use-military-tactics-topple-jim-crow/ |
A dark tale of money corrupting politics — and destroying the climate
Review by Richard Schiffman
A gas flare from a Shell Chemicals petroleum refinery illuminates the sky on Aug. 21, 2019, in Norco, La. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
In November 1959 Edward Teller, “the father of the hydrogen bomb,” told a group of oil company executives and scientists gathered at Columbia University that continued burning of fossil fuels would warm the planet, potentially melting the ice caps and submerging New York and other coastal cities — posing a threat to civilization comparable to a global nuclear war.
Teller’s remarkably prescient words are quoted in investigative journalist Geoff Dembicki’s new book “The Petroleum Papers: Inside the Far-Right Conspiracy to Cover Up Climate Change.” But it turns out that the renowned physicist was not the only one to know about climate change well before awareness of the issue became widespread. We learn that Exxon, the world’s largest publicly traded oil company, quietly studied climate science as a top priority during the 1970s, transforming one of its supertankers into a floating lab to measure carbon dioxide levels at sea. James Black, a company scientist, briefed executives about the immense danger to humankind from the unrestricted combustion of fossil fuels, advising them to act quickly.
Likewise, a working group at Shell warned that, if we waited for global warming to be easily detectable before we acted, “it could be too late.” In the 1990s, British Petroleum produced a series of documentaries that predicted “devastating consequences” from rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, including sea level rise that would render low-lying countries like Bangladesh defenseless against floods.
Fossil fuel companies didn’t limit themselves to studying the mayhem that their products were poised to unleash. They also investigated potential solutions. A carbon tax and emissions trading scheme could be effective in helping to stabilize climate change, Imperial Oil (a subsidiary of Exxon) concluded in a 1991 report.
The companies knew that “stopping climate change was not only possible, but economically feasible,” Dembicki concludes. Nevertheless, they did everything in their power to make sure that “this climate solution never happened.”
In a classical Greek tragedy, the world is brought to ruin by a character’s moral flaw. The moral flaw that has brought the planet to the brink of climate chaos, according to the author, is unbridled greed compounded by hubris — a bloated sense of corporate entitlement. It led the fossil fuel industry to fight a decades-long war against the science of global warming — a science, ironically, that it had been instrumental in creating.
It was not, of course, a war that it could expect to win. Victory, in this case, did not mean winning the argument: The science has been beyond dispute for more than half a century. It was enough to plant sufficient doubt and uncertainty in the public mind to prevent effective climate policies from being implemented.
Big Oil pursued this goal through anonymous front groups with virtuous-sounding names like the Advancement of Sound Science Coalition, a “one-stop shop for any corporate backer looking to dismiss scientific findings that were bad for their business model.” This shadowy confederation of fake grass-roots groups and far-right think tanks was financed most notably by the industrialist Koch brothers, and by leading fossil fuel companies (which frequently funneled their largesse through middlemen such as the American Petroleum Institute and the National Association of Manufacturers to hide their hand.)
The agenda evolved over time. When the effort to discredit the science was no longer deemed credible, companies turned to greenwashing — employing the language of sustainability and environmental responsibility — at the same time that they lobbied against emissions-limiting policies they claimed would cost jobs and violate the sanctity of the free market. Equally damaging, Dembicki says, is how Big Oil pushed for the development of vast, untapped sources of fossil fuels called “carbon bombs” that, if unleashed, would make even the most modest global emissions targets unattainable.
The author, a Canadian freelance reporter, pays special attention to the tar sands, a vast tract of boreal forest in northern Alberta that contains the third-largest petroleum reserve on the planet. Scientists warned that the prodigious energy needed to process the gritty mixture, combined with transporting the oil hundreds of miles from the remote region by pipeline, would make it the most expensive and ecologically destructive oil on Earth.
The industry, bent on expansion, turned a deaf ear to these warnings. Companies said, moreover, they were not to blame for warming the planet. Consumers who use oil for transportation, heating and the production of their food, they asserted, are responsible, not the companies that dig it out of the ground.
That might seem a reasonable argument if it were not for the decades-long corporate effort to deceive the public. This pernicious campaign, the author says, effectively blocked the development of greener alternatives — ensuring that the world would be unable to put the brake on climate change in time. It is an argument that is now being heard in courtrooms as scores of states and municipalities sue Big Oil companies for damages to their communities.
What makes the current state of affairs doubly tragic is that there was a time when America seemed poised to act. The author writes almost wistfully of a 2008 TV advertisement in which Newt Gingrich and Nancy Pelosi jointly called for action on climate change. (Gingrich later reversed himself, calling the ad “probably the dumbest single thing I’ve done in recent years.”)
The era of bipartisan support for climate action did not last long. In 1992, 88 percent of Americans believed that global warming was a serious problem. By 1997, only 42 percent agreed with that statement. Dembicki blames what might well be the best-financed disinformation campaign in history for this startling turnaround. But the impact on American politics didn’t end there. He goes on to implicate Koch and fossil-fuel company money in the rise of the tea party movement, as well as the election of Donald Trump.
It is a dark tale of money corrupting politics and paralyzing the public will. Still, not everyone we read about in these pages is a climate villain. There are also heroes like Seattle lawyer Steve Berman, who led the way in suing Big Oil companies for damages. There is also Enrique Rosero, an idealistic young Exxon engineer who called the corporation out for its role in the climate coverup during a town hall meeting for employees and was forced from his job as a result. Local activist Lucy Molina organized against a refinery in Colorado that was causing spikes in asthma and cancer in her Denver suburb.
Most poignantly, we meet Joanna Sustento, a young Filipina who lived through Typhoon Haiyan in November 2013, one of the most powerful storms in recorded history. Her heart-wrenching account of watching virtually her entire family drown that day is strung out episodically throughout the book, portraying the human cost of the corporate coverup of global warming.
The unrelenting volley of facts in “The Petroleum Papers” can be dry at times, and some of the portraits of key figures can seem less than fully fleshed out. But for those who want a no-frills account of how we ended up on the climate precipice, this is an essential read.
The Petroleum Papers
Inside the Far-Right Conspiracy to Cover Up Climate Change
By Geoff Dembicki
Greystone. 256pp. $27.95. | 2022-10-06T09:57:18Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Book review of "The Petroleum Papers: Inside the Far-Right conspiracy to Cover Up Climate Change" by Geoff Dembicki - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2022/10/06/petroleum-papers-dembicki-review/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2022/10/06/petroleum-papers-dembicki-review/ |
Review by Sally Satel
The property of Chestnut Lodge on Jan. 5, 2006. (Robert A. Reeder/The Washington Post)
Rachel Aviv was hospitalized for “failure to eat” when she was 6 years old. The doctors at Children’s Hospital of Michigan diagnosed her with anorexia and attributed the problem to tension between her recently divorced parents. Six weeks later, she was eating, and the hospital discharged her to first grade.
The experience left Aviv, a staff writer at the New Yorker, with an enduring interest in how mental illness shapes self-understanding. She became captivated, in particular, by the early phases of mental illness, when the condition is “consuming and disabling but has not yet remade a person’s identity and social world.”
It is those early phases that Aviv depicts in “Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us.” Each of four chapters, prologue and epilogue is devoted to a person with mental illness, including the author herself when she was young. The accounts are vivid, wrenching and ambitiously researched and include dispatches from the subjects’ voluminous diaries, blogs and unpublished memoirs.
Among her subjects is Ray Osheroff, a man with severe depression who was caught between the psychoanalytic and biochemical explanations of his condition. In 1979, the hard-charging nephrologist admitted himself to Chestnut Lodge, an elite psychiatric hospital outside Washington where the psychoanalytic model of diagnosis and treatment reigned supreme.
His analyst at the Lodge construed Osheroff’s relentless agitation, obsessive rumination and crushing despair as manifestations of narcissism that needed to be treated by restructuring his personality. “There had to be some tearing down and rebuilding,” in the words of a social worker there. For eight tormented months, doctors refused his requests for medication, so he moved to a medication-friendly facility in Connecticut. Within a month, his most severe symptoms resolved.
Osheroff sued Chestnut Lodge for malpractice in 1982 and settled. According to the New York Times, the case shook “the conventional belief, held even by some doctors, that chronic depression is not an illness, but merely a character flaw.” Later in life, Osheroff no longer saw his depressive ordeal as an illness — a designation that had once brought him great relief — but as “a state of disconnection.” Aviv concludes that “two different stories about his illness, the psychoanalytic and the neurobiological, had failed him.”
Naomi Gaines, a young Black woman from Minneapolis, was distressed by the racial injustice she saw around her. In 2003, while in the grip of postpartum psychosis, she threw her 1-year-old twin boys off the Wabasha Street Bridge, then jumped after them into the water below. Gaines and one son survived. Her psychiatrists understood her suicide attempt as “a choice she made in order to act out her defiance to society which she perceived as ‘oppressive and unjust.’ ” They could not accept that her existential concerns influenced the content of her psychotic symptoms. In short, the psychiatrists confused her mental illness with her ideology.
Laura Delano was from an elite Greenwich, Conn., family. While at Harvard, she was diagnosed as having bipolar II disorder. “It was like being told: It’s not your fault,” she said. “You are not lazy. You are not irresponsible.” When another psychiatrist changed Delano’s diagnosis to borderline personality disorder — a fuzzier, and mainly female, condition — she felt betrayed. “The story that was supposed to explain her life wasn’t offering the kind of clarity or healing she felt she’d been promised,” Aviv writes.
Eventually, Delano decided to discontinue her medications (doing so was a slow, complicated process). “I never had a baseline sense of myself, of who I am, of what my capacities are,” she explained. Once medication-free, Delano felt somewhat better but said she was “still wondering how to be an adult in this world.” Much of her time these days is spent coaching others through the medication withdrawal process.
As for the author herself, she says she was “recruited” for anorexia, but the illness never became a “ ‘career.’ It didn’t provide the language with which I came to understand myself.” Instead, she regarded her childhood eating disorder as a way of coping with stress.
Aviv wonders why her story saved her from a “career” of mental illness but others’ stories were less salutary. The answer, she speculates, “requires paying more attention to the distance between the psychiatric models that explain illness and the stories through which people find meaning themselves.”
True enough. And no one would agree more than psychiatrists. Before the Osheroff case, Chestnut Lodge was the site of lectures by Harry Stack Sullivan, an influential American psychiatrist who recommended more or less the approach that Aviv seems to favor, focusing on the particulars of a patient’s early and recent life, including issues like social class and ethnicity.
Thirty years ago, psychiatrist Peter Kramer, the author of “Listening to Prozac: A Psychiatrist Explores Antidepressant Drugs and the Remaking of the Self,” (whom Aviv interviews) was perhaps the first to examine the relationship between medication and identity.
In a perfect illustration of such remaking, Aviv describes how her antidepressant affected her desire for children. She stopped the medication when she became pregnant but soon felt estranged from prospective motherhood. Upon restarting the drug, she was “connected again to my reasons for having a baby.”
These days, health-care systems often relegate psychiatrists to prescribing and little else. Even so, psychiatrists recognize that patients form bonds with their diagnoses, for better or worse. Like their patients, they also puzzle over the mystery of where drug effects leave off and the “true” self begins. One of the goals of psychotherapy, in fact, is to help patients fashion a narrative that, ideally, brings them insight and freedom — just as the author prescribes.
The book is organized around a profound and plausible hypothesis: that the stories people tell themselves about their mental disorders shape the course of their lives. Yet the case studies in this book cannot prove it, as the author seems to suggest.
After all, Aviv might have had the same brilliant future no matter what she told herself about her eating disorder. Her subjects — who still face considerable challenges in life — may have fared worse than Aviv not because they could not construct a better storyline for themselves but because they were inherently sicker.
This year, Aviv won a National Magazine Award for profile writing. “Strangers to Ourselves” showcases her mastery of psychological portraiture. It is these stories and the ones her subjects tell themselves about their mental disorders that fascinate. As for the author’s framing questions, while they are essential to ask, they remain unanswered.
Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us
By Sally Satel
Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 288 pp. $28. | 2022-10-06T09:57:24Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Book review of “Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories that Make Us” by Rachel Aviv - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/10/06/stories-we-tell-about-mental-illness-others-our-own/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/10/06/stories-we-tell-about-mental-illness-others-our-own/ |
Redonda, as Michael Hingston explains in his new book, ‘Try Not to Be Strange,’ has inspired a whimsical kingdom of writers and other royal wannabes
The island of Redonda in the Caribbean is the setting of the myth of the “Kingdom of Redonda.” (Courtesy of author's collection)
What bookstores and the literary life contribute to ... life
Just what, you may wonder, am I talking about? The answer can be found in Michael Hingston’s “Try Not to Be Strange: The Curious History of the Kingdom of Redonda.” It’s a wonderfully entertaining book, an account of how its Canadian author grew fascinated with a literary jape, a kind of role-playing game or shared-world fantasy involving some of the most eccentric and some of the most famous writers of modern times.
Located in the Lesser Antilles, not far from Montserrat, Redonda is an actual place, geographically speaking. Essentially a really big rock, one mile long and a third of a mile wide, it was named by Christopher Columbus and, for centuries, was mainly viewed as an obstacle to sail around, being largely uninhabitable. In the 19th century, however, the island’s superabundance of guano and phosphate led to the establishment of a small mining operation. One day in 1880, a citizen of Montserrat traveled to the island to celebrate the 15th birthday of his son Matthew Phipps Shiell. As a special surprise, he crowned the boy Felipe I, king of Redonda. No one much noticed or cared.
A few years later, the island’s youthful “monarch” traveled to England — his father’s parting words were “Try not to be strange” — intending to make his fortune as a writer. In 1895, M.P. Shiel (spelled with only one “l”) brought out his first book, “Prince Zaleski,” whose eponymous protagonist resembles an ultra-decadent Sherlock Holmes (and is, after Holmes himself, my favorite Victorian amateur detective). In retelling three exceptionally eerie mysteries solved by Zaleski, Shiel employed a mannered, bejeweled prose that would grow even more over-the-top in the almost surreal, supernatural short stories assembled in “Shapes in the Fire” (1896). Of these stories, especially “Vaila,” later rewritten as “The House of Sounds,” H.P. Lovecraft once wrote, “Shiel has done so much better than my best that I am left breathless and inarticulate.”
Shiel’s literary career would peak in 1901 with his baroque science fiction masterpiece, “The Purple Cloud,” in which a character named Adam Jeffson finds himself the last man alive on Earth. That novel cemented my own fascination with this unusual writer, and I began to collect Shiel’s books and learn more about the man himself.
As Hingston notes, Shiel’s personal life wasn’t just bohemian and maritally irresponsible: He served time in prison after being convicted of sexually abusing a young stepdaughter, a charge he denied. In his later years, though, he made one truly devoted disciple, an up-and-coming man of letters named Terence Ian Fytton Armstrong, who wrote poetry and edited anthologies as John Gawsworth. Just before Shiel died in 1947, he named Gawsworth as his successor to the joke throne of Redonda.
Perhaps surprisingly, King Juan I took up his royal duties with resolute, if tongue-in-cheek seriousness. He quickly came to see Redonda, to quote Hingston, as “an exotic symbol. . . of wonder and wish-fulfillment” and “an intricate fantasy realm that was insulated from the multiple harshnesses of reality.” Before long, the island’s new sovereign began to issue proclamations, investing his favorite bookmen and women with titles and high offices in the Redondan court. Hingston’s appendix reproduces some of these documents: Arthur Machen, Dorothy L. Sayers, Lawrence Durrell, Alfred Knopf and Dylan Thomas are among those listed under the rubric “Duchies of the Realm.”
If you love heroic fantasy a la George R.R. Martin, you’ll love ‘The Last Viking’
In short order, there was also a Redondan national anthem and the first of the island’s several different flags. Sometimes King Juan — who kept King Felipe’s cremated remains in a tea caddie — would sprinkle a few royal ashes into a special guest’s food. A short film, made near the end of Gawsworth’s life, features a scene in which Durrell meets his old friend with the salutation, “Hail, O king!”
By that time, however, Gawsworth had descended into poverty, homelessness and severe alcoholism. The once proud monarch began to award Redondan titles to anyone who would lend him money or buy him a drink. He also named different people as his chosen heir to the throne. Consequently, after Gawsworth’s death in 1970, nearly a dozen people — including his bartender, as well as a self-proclaimed King Guillermo I who lived in Skagway, Alaska — declared themselves to be the new and rightful ruler of the fantasy realm. Still, a writer and vegetarian activist named Jon Wynne-Tyson emerged as the most widely recognized claimant, partly because he had actually traveled to Redonda to be crowned.
In his later years, King Juan II grew tired of the burdens of power and resolved to abdicate after reading Javier Marías’s novel, “All Souls,” in which the autobiographical protagonist collects Gawsworth’s poetry. After some negotiation, in 1997, Marías accepted the crown as King Xavier, promising to keep alive the work of Shiel and Gawsworth as well as maintain Redonda’s literary culture. The novelist A.S. Byatt, filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola and cultural scholar Marina Warner soon appeared on the kingdom’s honors list. For a long time, I quietly — but alas vainly — hoped that my enthusiastic review of one of Marías’s books would lead to seeing my own name among the latest Knights Grand Commander in the Order of the Star of Redonda. Even now, I stand ready to pledge my fealty to King Xavier’s successor, whoever it may turn out to be.
In “Try Not to Be Strange,” Hingston relates all this whimsy, with abundant anecdotes, in the manner of A.J.A. Symons’s 1934 classic, “The Quest for Corvo,” which transformed writing a biography into an intensely personal adventure. Thus, Hingston recounts how he learned of Redonda from Marías’s novels, slowly began to collect books relating to the kingdom, then grew increasingly obsessed until one exciting day he bid “more money that I’d ever spent on anything that I couldn’t drive or live inside” to acquire, at auction, a trove of Gawsworth’s papers. Afterward, he started to communicate with living Redondan notables and to research the micro-nation’s various rival monarchs, including a raffish ship’s captain known as King Bob the Bald.
Hingston’s quest reaches its inevitable climax when he travels to the actual Redonda on a mini-expedition that devolves into frivolity, confusion, exhaustion and near-disaster. How could it be otherwise? What really matters isn’t the island itself, but the idea of this literary Neverland, this magic kingdom of the imagination.
By Michael Hingston
Biblioasis. 302 pp. Paperback, $18.95 | 2022-10-06T10:18:56Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Try Not to be Strange, by Michael Hingston book review - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2022/10/06/redonda-island-history/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2022/10/06/redonda-island-history/ |
For the nation’s oldest orchestra, a $550 million renovation of the acoustically plagued concert hall aims to be a sonic boon
Workers spruce up the renovated David Geffen Hall at Lincoln Center in New York, which opens to the public Oct. 8. (Jeenah Moon for The Washington Post)
NEW YORK — “There she is,” I hear someone say as we round the corner. I’m backstage at the newly renovated David Geffen Hall at Lincoln Center, taking a hard-hat tour through its noisy, labyrinthine corridors with New York Philharmonic CEO Deborah Borda. But she’s not the “she” in question.
Rather, “she” is a broad-shouldered, custom-crafted digital organ, slowly getting dollied out of a freight elevator and making the last leg of its journey from a manufacturer in Pennsylvania to its new home in the hall, where its precision sampled tones will sound through an array of 78 speakers.
Normally my metaphors aren’t obvious enough to block an entire hallway, but this massive instrument, an eye-catching hybrid of the old and the new, makes a fitting symbol for the overhaul of this historically acoustically plagued venue. At David Geffen Hall, a traditional function has taken on a futurist form to achieve a practical goal: Better sound for all.
The organ, crafted from the same rich hardwood as the stage, is but one of several thousand hand-selected details of the new venue, of which every bit of visible material is new. The $550 million hall is the prize at the end of a years-long process, undertaken to address a decades-long grievance: The old one sounded like hot garbage. (So I hear! Just reporting the news!)
According to Borda, talk of renovations to remedy the hall’s chronic sonic problems started in the 1990s, when the orchestra still had the shakes from its last traumatic demolition job in the mid-1970s (and Philharmonic Hall made its grand lateral transformation into Avery Fisher Hall). Architects Philip Johnson and John Burgee, along with acoustician Cyril M. Harris, had lent the hall a leaner look with cleaner lines but zero soul.
Cycles of subsequent plans materialized and fizzled, and frustrations mounted within the ranks; at one point in the early aughts, the New York Philharmonic was ready to jump ship from Lincoln Center and run into the arms of Carnegie Hall. That didn’t happen.
In 2015, a surprise $100 million gift from music and entertainment magnate David Geffen secured his name on the side of the building into perpetuity. It also secured the Philharmonic a fighting chance at fixing an existential problem.
“These projects are generally 20-year journeys,” Borda says. “Job number one was the acoustics, but it was really time to redesign the hall, better optimize the space and make it an inviting and beautiful place for all New Yorkers. It’s really all to make a home for music for the 21st century.”
For the New York Philharmonic, the oldest orchestra in the country (founded in 1842), thinking in terms of centuries comes naturally. The orchestra was hard hit by the pandemic, losing $27 million in ticket sales over the period, and laying off 40 percent of its administrative staff, according to Borda. But the shuttering of the performing arts world also had a fortuitous effect on the renovation of the concert hall, allowing the Phil to finish construction ahead of schedule. (It was scheduled to open in 2023.)
The break also coincided with other big, institutional changes. Music director Jaap van Zweden announced in September 2021 that he would step down at the end of the 2023-2024 season. The Dutch conductor started in 2018 and pointed to a reconsideration of his priorities to explain his departure. (It is “out of freedom,” he told the New York Times.) In 2024, he will embark on a five-year contract as music director for the Seoul Philharmonic.
As for the search for his successor, Borda smiles, pleads the Fifth, and seems to greatly enjoy doing so.
Borda herself announced her departure in June, as well as her successor, National Symphony Orchestra Executive Director Gary Ginstling, who will start as executive director Nov. 1, working with Borda until he takes the top job in June 2023.
Live classical music is picking up steam, with robust fall seasons
The next several days mark the first steps in what is arguably a new path for the orchestra. (Just please be careful, there’s still stuff all over the floor.)
An invitation-only concert for donors and friends Oct. 6 will be followed by a “hard-hat concert” for the construction crews and orchestra staff Oct. 7. But the hall doesn’t officially open to the public until Oct. 8, when composer and jazz trumpeter Etienne Charles premieres a work commissioned by Lincoln Center.
“San Juan Hill: A New York Story” is an “immersive multimedia” tribute to the largely Black and Puerto Rican neighborhood razed to make way for Lincoln Center’s opening in 1956. Artist Nina Chanel Abney’s vibrant companion mural, “San Juan Heal,” brightens the hall’s W. 65th Street facade.
And on Oct. 12, “NY Phil Returns Home” gives the hall a proper debut. Van Zweden will lead the orchestra in the world premiere of Marcos Balter’s “Oyá” (for light, electronics and orchestra), a reprise of composer Tania Leon’s Pulitzer-winning “Stride” (a product of the NYPhil’s “Project 19” initiative for women composers), and works by John Adams (“My Father Knew Charles Ives”) and Ottorino Respighi (“Pines of Rome”).
22 for ’22: Composers and performers to watch this year
In the past, the design of the hall was dictated by straight lines and orderly rows; a scheme — immediately disrupted by the continuous requisite supplementation of various baffles, panels and other acoustic treatments — attempted to improve the sound.
The new hall seems to anticipate these concerns with each contour of every wall — an undulating wood surface that again fuses old and new, form and function: The randomized undulations of the wood walls shape the sound while their classically informed vertical lines guide your eyes. The tiers themselves feel wrapped around you like shawls of oak, beech and walnut. A ring of blue light illuminates the perimeter of the uppermost tier. (Borda calls it an homage to Frank Gehry, the architect with whom she opened L.A.’s Walt Disney Concert Hall in 2003.)
In those upper tiers (favored by handfuls of construction workers at the rehearsal I attended), long single rows of single seats angle toward the stage. (The term “bus seats” is thrown around in the tour.) It’s a small but impactful highlight of the new hall’s emphasis on attention. A profoundly adjusted rake (i.e. slope of the floor) contributes to this. It gives the room the feel of an elongated bowl, and in concert with the curvature of the aisles — as well as a subtle system of three variations in seat widths — allows for unobstructed views from every seat.
To that end, wherever you are in the hall, the stage feels closer, because it is. The proscenium has been removed entirely and the stage brought forward 25 feet, fitted with flexible risers and parterre seating. Thus, the audience surrounds the stage. A blue and crimson pattern of rose petals diffusing over the seat backs reinforces the natural fall of one’s attention toward the music. It’s as if you’re inside the body of an instrument.
One notable addition is really more of a subtraction: the removal of just over 500 seats, bringing the capacity of the hall from 2,738 to 2,200, but greatly increasing the intimacy of the listening experience.
This extra room also aided in modernizing the capabilities of the hall, which architect Gary McCluskie of Diamond Schmitt Architects emphasized was guided by the direction of contemporary music itself, which increasingly extends into multimedia territory. The hall answers this with multiple stage configurations, a pop-out projection booth, elaborate lighting rigs obscured by an elegant mesh ceiling, and acoustic capabilities that can transform to accommodate acoustic or amplified music.
In the lobby, architects Tod Williams and Billie Tsein have brightened up (and doubled the size of) what once was a dour downer of a space — which didn’t really offer much of it.
Public space and access have been increased and encouraged through wide entrances from Lincoln Plaza, and ground-level offices were removed to make room for a “Sidewalk Studio” for street-facing performances. Grand glassy overhangs emphasize the height of the lobby, and a glowing 50-foot media wall animates the interior. (This screen will live-stream performances from within the hall to allow visitors to drop in and listen.)
Copper trimmings, slender metallic chandeliers and rich woods throughout evoke orchestral materials, while long drapes and deep blue walls imbue humanity into a space that, on a good day, felt civic at best.
As for the sound of the orchestra in the new hall? This critic is bound by the sacred oath of embargo not to breathe a subjective word about that until such time as it officially opens. Fine.
The musicians, meanwhile, are free to sing its praises, and do.
“It’s amazing,” says second flutist Yoobin Son, now in her 10th year with the orchestra and fresh off the stage from a rehearsal of Florence Price’s fourth symphony. She’s thrilled at how well she can hear her fellow players. “It sounds bright, alive, young,” she says.
But Son sounds equally pumped about the new music stands, the comfier chairs onstage and the luck by which she scored a spot in the new dressing rooms with natural light. It’s the little things.
When asked what she’s glad to leave behind from the old hall, she says everything.
“I mean there were good memories. It was where I had my first everything with this orchestra,” Son says. “But the hall was difficult to play in, and I knew it was bad because we’d go on tour, I’d hear us in these other halls and think, ‘Wow … we sound good!’ ”
Son found that the muddle onstage in the old hall also forced the orchestra as a whole to rely more on the conductor. For an orchestra in transition — especially one making the swing from one music director to the next — the ability to listen to each other is paramount.
Concertmaster Frank Huang has been with the orchestra for seven years, and while the placement of some sections and tilting of certain acoustic panels are still being tweaked, he can already sense a closer musical conversation happening in the hall, onstage and off.
“You weren’t getting a good mix of the different colors and timbres of the orchestra,” Huang says. “Now you’re getting a much more realistic sound, and visually you’re also much closer. We’re able to pull the audience into our sound now, we don’t have to worry about playing out. The more intimate colors are there. It widens our palette.”
For listeners making their first visit to the hall, I can at least say without getting too subjective or getting in any trouble that the difference in sound is immediate and arresting. And that’s not just between Geffen and its past iterations, but between Geffen and most of the major concert halls I’ve experienced. Not once did I find myself leaning forward in my seat or squinting with my ears. The sound finds you.
For the orchestra, meanwhile, the new hall is a beast that will require some firm taming and fine tuning. Consensus points to this sonic settling-in as the primary project of year one.
“It’ll take a while to get the perfect mix for us,” says Huang, his fellow players making a radiant racket behind us. “But that’s part of the fun.”
NY Phil Comes Home Oct. 12 at 7:30 p.m. at David Geffen Hall, 10 Lincoln Center Plaza, New York. nyphil.org. | 2022-10-06T10:19:02Z | www.washingtonpost.com | With new David Geffen Hall, the NYPhil returns on an optimistic note - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/music/2022/10/06/geffen-hall-renovation-nyphil/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/music/2022/10/06/geffen-hall-renovation-nyphil/ |
Veterans’ suicides decline but remain ‘unfathomable and unacceptable’
A display at the Manchester VA Medical Center in Manchester, N.H., in 2019. (Office of Public Affairs, Manchester VA Medical Center/AP)
Jeffrey Freeman was despondent after severe pain from fibromyalgia and an Air Force injury left him unable to work and provide for his family. Then, in November 2012, he thought of a way out — his life insurance policy offered his family financial relief and money for his son’s college education.
“I saw a big rig coming,” Freeman said in a telephone conversation. “I closed my eyes and stepped in front of the truck.”
The driver swerved, leaving Freeman alive, though blown to the ground by truck’s gust.
Had the driver not acted quickly, Freeman — now 60 and an American Legion area vice commander in Oakdale, Calif. — would have been among the death count in a new report on veterans’ suicides. It shows recent declines in those fatalities, even as the report demonstrates how big the problem remains.
Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.), chairman of the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee, described the latest suicide data as “positive news.” That’s a weird concept when their 2020 suicide rate was 57 percent greater than that of other adults.
Yet, Tester is correct — even if the good news also emphasizes the bad.
Despite the improving data, the 6,146 veterans’ suicides in 2020 equaled a daily average of almost 17, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs’ annual National Veteran Suicide Prevention report released last month. The number shocks, but it “was lower than each prior year since 2006,” when it was just above 6,000. The daily average was a notable drop from its highest point, 18.6 in 2018.
“It’s clear VA is having real success getting more veterans into care,” Tester added in a press release. “Make no mistake, we have a lot of work to do.”
The reasons behind suicide are complex. That also applies to increases and decreases in the numbers and rates. A VA statement said recent declines are reflective “of fundamental truths: suicide is preventable; suicide prevention requires a public health approach that includes and moves beyond the individual and pathology into the communal and population.”
Among what VA calls “anchors of hope” is the major fall in suicides. “From 2001 through 2018, the number of Veteran suicides increased on average by 47 deaths per year,” the report said. “From 2019 to 2020, there were consecutive reductions, of 307 and 343 suicides, respectively, an unprecedented decrease since 2001.”
“Operation Deep Dive,” released last month by the America’s Warrior Partnership (AWP), said former service members “take their own lives each year at a rate approximately 2.4 times greater than previously reported by” VA. Deep Dive “identified a 37% greater suicide rate than reported by VA for years 2014-2018.”
Whichever is correct, “the scope is sobering,” Rep. Mike Bost (Ill.), the top Republican on the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee, said at its hearing last week.
“And either way … both numbers are unfathomable and unacceptable,” Bost said, adding that “unlike [the] AWP study, the VA data does not include deaths by overdoses or certain injuries.”
On the agenda should be the pervasive issue of firearms. As deadly as guns are generally, the prevalence is much worse regarding veterans suicides. “Among U.S. adults who died from suicide in 2020, firearms were more commonly involved among Veterans (71.0%) than non-Veterans (50.3%),” according to the report.
Why suicides are much more common among veterans than the general population is “really hard to answer,” said Michael Schoenbaum, senior adviser for mental health services at the National Institute of Mental Health. In an interview, he cited among other factors the relationship between veterans and guns, saying “a higher fraction of veterans live in households that have firearms than non-veterans.”
Christine Yu Moutier, a psychiatrist and the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention’s chief medical officer, said research indicates that contrary to easy assumptions, combat and deployments are not the driving factors behind veterans suicides. Unaddressed mental health conditions and barriers to mental health treatment, she said, are “much more strong and potent risk factors for suicidal behavior.”
Those factors can have an outsized influence in certain occupations infused with “macho culture,” she explained, including the military and law enforcement.
Freeman, who was a military law enforcement officer, also cited his “typical male ego” that was damaged because he couldn’t work and provide for his family as an issue when he sought relief from a careening big rig.
After the truck blew him back, Freeman said, he “grabbed my car keys, got in my car, drove myself to the nearest hospital and had myself 51-50′d for attempting to kill myself,” referring to police code for psychiatric commitment. | 2022-10-06T10:19:14Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Veterans’ suicides decline but remain ‘unfathomable and unacceptable’ - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/06/veteran-suicides-report-decline/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/06/veteran-suicides-report-decline/ |
Chef Kwame Onwuachi at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York. (Evan Sung)
NEW YORK — As Kwame Onwuachi walks me through what will be the dining room at Tatiana, his forthcoming restaurant in David Geffen Hall at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, he points out the columns, which shimmer like light reflected off the surface of a soap bubble. The effect is purposeful: The columns are designed to recall the iridescent pools that Onwuachi remembers from childhood, the ones formed whenever the gushing water from an open fire hydrant interacted with the oil-slicked streets of his neighborhood in the Bronx.
The columns are a minor detail, but they provide a clue as to what both Onwuachi and Lincoln Center want from this new restaurant in the renovated concert hall, which reopens Oct. 8. The chef wants to inject a little of his New York — the West African aromas, the chopped-cheese sandwiches, the brutal summers when the only relief was an open hydrant — into this cultural institution on the Upper West Side, which was built, as its former president once said, as “a kind of moat, protected from the city.”
For its part, Lincoln Center wants to make amends for its role in erasing the San Juan Hill neighborhood, which was once rich with music, particularly jazz, from pioneers such as James P. Johnson and Thelonious Monk. The arts complex is tearing down those walls that isolated it from much of Gotham. Leah Johnson, executive vice president and chief communications, marketing and advocacy officer, says Lincoln Center has launched some initiatives to diversify its programming, its audience and its staff and contractors.
Onwuachi’s Tatiana fits right in with those goals.
The restaurant leans on the same Afro-Caribbean flavors that defined Onwuachi’s Washington restaurants — the short-lived Shaw Bijou as well as Kith and Kin on the Wharf, which earned him a James Beard Award — but this time, the antecedents to the chef’s cooking are located just a subway ride away. They can be found in the Jamaican bakeries along White Plains Road in the North Bronx; among the food court vendors at the New World Mall in Flushing, Queens; inside the Senegalese restaurants of Harlem; and next to the Dominican food carts that occupy the sidewalks in the West Bronx.
Onwuachi absorbed these influences and more as a child, and at age 32, he will reimagine them in a restaurant at an arts complex that, as one New York publication wrote last year, was “built specifically for performance companies that were bastions of white culture.”
“Kwame is a quintessential New Yorker,” says Johnson, the Lincoln Center executive. “So when Kwame started talking to us about his philosophy, about his cuisine, about how he thought about coming to New York and opening up a restaurant that would reflect, really, all of New York because that’s who Kwame is … he was just the right person for us.”
Tatiana, set to open in early November, is a homecoming for Onwuachi. He resigned from Kith and Kin in July 2020, a few months after he had to lay off his staff of 70 at the start of the coronavirus pandemic. In February 2021, Onwuachi moved to Los Angeles, where, among other projects, he co-founded a production company, Broken Whip Media, and started acting. (He has a planned cameo in the cinematic version of his 2019 memoir, “Notes From a Young Black Chef,” which is set to start filming next year.) But Onwuachi returned to New York in April, lured back home by the idea of opening another restaurant, this one named for his half sister, Tatiana Steed, who’s a private chef in New Orleans.
“I wanted it to be a restaurant that reflected my childhood, and a big part of that was spending time with my sister. She took care of me a lot,” Onwuachi says about Steed, who is five years older than him. “There’d be times when she would stick up for me if I ever got bullied.”
Tatiana, the restaurant, will be the only full-service, sit-down dining option at Geffen Hall, Johnson says. Unlike the previous dining occupant, Lincoln Center Kitchen, Tatiana will be walled-off from the main hall, not spread out among its marble floors or tucked into a curtained nook.
Onwuachi is a partner with Lincoln Center in the restaurant, not a chef contracted for the job. The latter condition is important to Onwuachi, who told the New York Times two years ago, “Something that profits off of Black and Brown dollars should be Black-owned.” The chef also owns all the intellectual property to the Tatiana brand.
Lincoln Center has been hands-off with Tatiana, Johnson says. Onwuachi makes the decisions. He has hired Kamat Newman, who last worked at Wax Myrtle’s in Austin, as his chef de cuisine. He has also hired Bradley Knebel, who has held various positions with the Union Square Hospitality Group, as Tatiana’s general manager. Onwuachi “has been leading every aspect, from design elements to concept and also to interviewing,” Johnson says. “If you want to be a dishwasher for Tatiana, you’ve met Kwame.”
The challenge for Tatiana, Knebel says, will be to create a destination restaurant at a hall that’s already a destination. Johnson has even higher expectations. She hopes that in a city full of great restaurants, Tatiana will become a magnet for diners, regardless of whether a group is performing in Geffen Hall.
Whatever the response, it will no doubt be an improvement over Onwuachi’s childhood trip to Lincoln Center. The chef recalls that his mother, Jewel Robinson, took him to a performance at the hall when he was a kid. He doesn’t remember the production. All he remembers is making origami figures and flicking them off the balcony. Mom was embarrassed.
“She said she would never take me out again. So she never took me again, and I was very happy about that,” Onwuachi says. “I would appreciate it now. As a kid, I couldn’t sit still. I’d rather watch Power Rangers.” | 2022-10-06T10:32:02Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Kwame Onwuachi's Lincoln Center restaurant aims to 'reflect all of New York' - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/food/2022/10/06/kwame-onwuachi-tatiana-lincoln-center/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/food/2022/10/06/kwame-onwuachi-tatiana-lincoln-center/ |
‘This will be a site for healing,’ said Ronal Bassham, a veteran of the Korean and Vietnam wars
Twelve pillars at the new African American Veterans Monument in Buffalo present the 12 wars that Black Americans fought in. (Courtesy of Lauren McGuire)
“This monument is a pebble compared to the mountain of anger I have felt over the years," he said. “But this will be a site for healing.”
He reenacted Civil War battles as a Black soldier fighting for freedom. Then he learned about his great-great-grandfather. | 2022-10-06T10:32:08Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Buffalo monument honors service of Black Americans in 12 U.S. wars. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/10/06/buffalo-monument-black-veterans/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/10/06/buffalo-monument-black-veterans/ |
Texas executes John Henry Ramirez, who won religious-rights Supreme Court case
John Henry Ramirez. (Texas Department of Criminal Justice/AP )
As the lethal injection coursed through John Henry Ramirez’s veins Wednesday night, Pastor Dana Moore laid his hands on the Texas death row inmate’s chest. A prayer rang out as Ramirez was executed in Huntsville in a small room known as the death chamber, with its seafoam-green walls and gurney with restraints.
It was the conclusion of a 2004 murder case that garnered national attention after the Supreme Court ruled in March that Ramirez’s pastor could touch him and pray during his execution. Ramirez, who said he experienced a spiritual transformation while on death row, had requested that Moore “feel my heart and feel when I transition,” he told The Washington Post in 2021.
On Wednesday, Ramirez’s request was granted. Before he died at 6:41 p.m., Ramirez told the family of Pablo Castro, the father of nine he’d stabbed to death nearly two decades ago, that he appreciated their attempts to communicate with him.
“I tried to reply back, but there is nothing that I could have said or done that would have helped you,” Ramirez said, according to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.
Supreme Court considers a minister’s role at the time an inmate is put to death
Ramirez was convicted of the 2004 killing of Castro, 45, in Corpus Christi, Tex. Ramirez stabbed the convenience store clerk 29 times. He was 20 years old when he left Castro to die in a parking lot, fleeing the scene with $1.25 in change. He evaded arrest by escaping to Mexico, until he was caught in 2008 and sentenced to death.
It was while on death row that Ramirez met Moore and other Second Baptist Church members. He became a member of the church, despite being a Messianic Jew, The Post reported.
Ramirez was scheduled to be executed on Sept. 8, 2021, and requested that Moore be there to pray and lay his hands on him. However, Texas officials said Moore could be present during the execution but could not touch the inmate.
Ramirez’s case for religious rights ultimately made its way to the Supreme Court, and as he waited in a holding room the night of his planned 2021 execution, the justices stopped the procedure. About six months later, the court ruled 8 to 1 in favor of Ramirez and his request to have his pastor’s hands on him as he’s executed.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., writing for the majority, said Ramirez’s religious rights were protected by federal law. Texas, he added, should be able to accommodate the inmate’s request. If the pastor is allowed to be in the room, “we do not see how letting the spiritual advisor stand slightly closer, reach out his arm, and touch a part of the prisoner’s body well away from the site of any IV line would meaningfully increase risk,” Roberts wrote.
Justice Clarence Thomas, the only one who dissented, said Ramirez appeared to be trying to delay his execution.
Castro’s family agreed, writing in an amicus brief to the court that “Pablo Castro’s children — and victims of violent crime across the Nation — deserve better.”
“The suffering of Castro’s family has been needlessly exacerbated by nearly decades of undue delays and manipulative, whipsaw litigation tactics,” they wrote.
Supreme Court says death row inmate entitled to pastor’s touch at execution
After the court sided with Ramirez, his execution date was set for Oct. 5. Then an employee from Nueces County District Attorney Mark Gonzalez’s office mistakenly filed a request for a new execution date.
According to court records, the staffer hadn’t consulted with Gonzalez, who opposes the death penalty, before doing so. Gonzalez then submitted a request two days later to withdraw the death warrant. In June, a judge said he was “not sure that I have the power” to take it back — marking the first time a motion like that had been denied by a judge, Ramirez’s attorney Seth Kretzer told The Post.
In a last attempt, Gonzalez and Kretzer filed a motion last week to withdraw the warrant. It was denied. On Monday, the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles voted against commuting the execution.
All possible legal options to save Ramirez from execution had been exhausted.
If his case was tried today, Ramirez “in most places would not be capitally prosecuted,” said Robert Dunham, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, a nonprofit that provides information and analysis on death penalty issues.
However, Dunham said several factors could have made Ramirez’s execution more likely, including his age and ethnicity.
It is “truly the convergence of all these arbitrary and discriminatory factors in imposing death penalties,” Dunham added. “His case is emblematic because, statistically, all the odds were stacked against him.”
On Wednesday morning, the 38-year-old was transported from the Polunsky Unit in Livingston to the Huntsville Unit — a 44-mile trek. Once there, he stayed in a holding cell until 6 p.m., when he was walked to the execution chamber, Texas Department of Criminal Justice spokesman Robert Hurst said.
Eleven witnesses — five for the victim and six for Ramirez— watched through the window to see the inmate take his last breaths, Hurst said. Castro’s son, Aaron, read a Bible verse that asks, “Who is a God like you, who pardons sin and forgives the transgression of the remnant of his inheritance?”
“Peace and love and justice for Pablo G. Castro, may his name not be forgotten, and may God have mercy in John Henry Ramirez for it is not up to us,” Castro said in his victim statement. “He is receiving his true judgement with our Lord and Savior. … A life taken away is not to be celebrated but closure can definitely take place.”
After that, Ramirez said he regretted his “heinous act,” adding that he hopes his death provides some comfort to Castro’s family.
“Just know that I fought a good fight, and I am ready to go. I am ready, Warden,” where his last words.
Moore’s hands touched his chest until he was declared dead, officials said. | 2022-10-06T10:40:52Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Texas executes John Henry Ramirez, who won religious-rights Supreme Court case - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/10/06/john-henry-ramirez-executed-texas/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/10/06/john-henry-ramirez-executed-texas/ |
California family, including baby, found dead after armed kidnapping
Pictures of 8-month-old Aroohi Dheri, her mother, Jasleen Kaur, her father, Jasdeep Singh, and her uncle Amandeep Singh are displayed at a news conference in Merced, Calif., on Wednesday. (Andrew Kuhn/Merced Sun-Star/AP)
Four members of a California family, including a baby, were found dead two days after authorities said they were kidnapped at gunpoint in an incident that set off a manhunt.
Law enforcement officials had been searching for 8-month-old Aroohi Dheri, mother Jasleen Kaur, 27, father Jasdeep Singh, 36, and the baby’s uncle Amandeep Singh, 39, since they were reported missing on Monday. Surveillance footage captured outside the family’s business in Merced, a city of nearly 90,000 people east of San Jose, showed them being led out and driven away by an armed man.
“Tonight, our worst fears have been confirmed,” Merced County Sheriff Vern Warnke said Wednesday in a news conference. “We found the four people from the kidnapping, and they are in fact deceased.”
Officers were called to an “extremely rural farm area” around 5:30 p.m. on Wednesday by a farmhand who came across the victims’ bodies while at work, Warnke said. Deputies and detectives arrived at the scene and found the bodies of the victims “relatively close together,” he said.
Suspect in custody, but kidnapped Calif. family still missing, police say
Authorities at a news conference played CCTV footage that showed an armed man walking into a building off South Highway 59 that was identified as the family’s trucking business. The man was then seen leaving with the family members, some of whom appeared to have their hands zip-tied behind their backs, and loading them into a vehicle before driving away.
Earlier in the day, authorities said they took a person of interest in the kidnapping into custody. Identified as Jesus Manuel Salgado, 48, he tried to take his own life before he was apprehended and was taken to a hospital in critical condition, the sheriff’s office said. At a previous news conference, county law enforcement officials said Salgado was convicted of a robbery in 2005 and released on parole in 2015.
Authorities said the motive behind the kidnapping was still unclear Wednesday. Investigators, including crime lab experts, were planning to work through the night to comb through the crime scene, Warnke said. “Now, our focus is on conviction,” he added.
Merced County law enforcement on Oct. 5 detailed the kidnapping of a California family of four, including an 8-month-old. A suspect is in custody. (Video: Reuters)
Family members of the victims were notified of their deaths Wednesday and connected with resources for “spiritual guidance,” Warnke said.
“There are no words right now to describe the anger I feel and the senselessness of this incident,” Warnke said.
Andrea Salcedo contributed to this report. | 2022-10-06T10:40:58Z | www.washingtonpost.com | California family of four found dead after armed kidnapping, police say - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/10/06/merced-family-kidnapped-dead-california/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/10/06/merced-family-kidnapped-dead-california/ |
Virginians can pay a new fee by mile. It’s already nation’s largest system.
The state has quickly emerged as a leader in efforts to charge a fee to supplement gas taxes as more electric vehicles hit the roads
A view of Richmond Highway looking south from Holly Hill Road in Fairfax County. (Michael S. Williamson/The Washington Post)
More than 7,000 Virginians have signed up to pay a fee for each mile they drive under a program launched this summer, putting the state at the forefront of a nationwide effort using new technology to prop up gas taxes that pay for roads.
The Virginia program, known as Mileage Choice, is aimed at drivers of electric vehicles and fuel-efficient cars who pay less in gas taxes while using the same roads as other drivers. Since 2020, Virginia has levied a fixed fee on those kinds of vehicles based on the difference between what they would have paid in gas taxes if driving an average number of miles.
In July, the state launched an alternative program to let drivers pay the fee at a per-mile rate — a cost savings for those who drive less than the average amount, which officials peg at 11,600 miles annually. For drivers of battery-powered cars, that fee works out to a penny per mile.
With the Biden administration aiming for half of new vehicle sales to be electric by the end of the decade, the federal government and states across the country are exploring such fees, seeing them as a way to ensure drivers continue to pay for the roads they use. The push is coming years after state and federal officials began to notice that increased fuel efficiency was denting transportation budgets funded by gas taxes.
Oregon and Utah have the nation’s longest-running per-mile programs, while other states have run pilots.
Officials at Virginia’s Department of Motor Vehicles said they are pleased with the quick growth, which has attracted the attention of transportation officials across the country. Last year’s infrastructure law calls on the federal Transportation Department to test such a tax at the national level.
“It’s definitely exceeded our expectations,” said Jessica Cowardin, a spokeswoman for the Virginia agency.
Two states tax some drivers by the mile. Many more want to give it a try.
Scott Cummings, the assistant commissioner for finance at the Virginia DMV, said the need for a fee became clear in 2019 when gas tax revenue declined, even as the number of miles driven grew in the state. That tax is a major component of the state’s transportation budget, used to build and maintain roads.
In response, the Virginia General Assembly decided to impose new fees on electric vehicles and gas-powered vehicles with fuel efficiency of more than 25 miles per gallon, levying a flat fee paid at registration. Last year, before the per-mile option launched, 1.9 million vehicles were subject to the flat fee.
The fees are calculated on a sliding scale. Lawmakers devised a formula that calculated what drivers of a 25-mile-per-gallon or higher vehicle would pay in gas taxes compared with one that gets 23.7 miles per gallon, then set the fee at 85 percent of the difference. Despite the complexities, it closes the revenue gap in the gas tax while providing slightly more benefits for the most fuel-efficient vehicles.
The driver of a new Nissan Altima that gets 30 miles a gallon would pay a flat “highway use” fee of $24.46, plus an average $108.27 in state gas taxes for a total of $132.73. The owner of a new Hyundai Ioniq hybrid that gets 55 miles per gallon would pay a $66.29 flat fee plus $59.05 in gas taxes for a total of $125.35. The driver of an electric Tesla Model 3 would only pay the flat fee of $116.49.
The per-mile fee is calculated by dividing the annual fee by 11,600, while drivers who opt in to the mileage tracking program won’t pay more than the flat fee amount. Virginia recently received its first revenue from the per-mile program, pocketing $2,100 for miles driven in August.
The state programs are in their infancy, but by enrolling some 2,000 drivers a month, Virginia’s has rapidly become the largest in the country, just as Utah — which has about 4,000 drivers enrolled — previously leapfrogged Oregon (830 drivers).
“Virginia’s may be the largest, but we will always be the longest-running,” said Michelle Godfrey, a spokeswoman for the Oregon Transportation Department.
Donald Camp, 73, a retired State Department employee, was among the first in Virginia to sign up. He got a mailer from the Department of Motor Vehicles indicating that his eight-year-old Nissan Leaf was eligible, then decided to give it a go. Camp, who lives in Falls Church, said setting up the program was simple after the tracking device arrived in the mail.
The flat fee for a vehicle like Camp’s is $116 a year. He said he doesn’t drive much, figuring he’ll pay about $20 total on a per-mile basis.
“I will save an enormous amount,” Camp said.
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The growing interest in mileage fees represents a shift in the politics of fees imposed on electric vehicles. Almost a decade ago, Virginia state Sen. Scott A. Surovell (D-Fairfax) helped to lead a revolt of Toyota Prius owners who objected to a $100 fee the administration of then-Governor Robert F. McDonnell (R) was trying to impose on hybrids.
“A lot of people felt like they were being punished for being virtuous,” Surovell said.
But now, he said: “Everybody recognizes that if you’re going to buy an electric car that uses zero gasoline, it’s going to have a big impact on roads capital and maintenance funds.”
The mileage fee’s future in Virginia is not assured. The law creating the program was passed under former governor Ralph Northam (D). Macaulay Porter, a spokeswoman for Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R), referred to the program as a “pilot.”
“The governor will work with the General Assembly to assess the success of the program, as we ensure our transportation infrastructure is adequately maintained for the future,” Porter said in an email.
Like many states, the federal government has relied on a gas tax to help fund investments in roads and transportation, but Congress hasn’t increased the 18.4-cent tax since 1993. Its buying power has been significantly eroded by inflation and gains in fuel efficiency over that time.
Transportation agencies that offer the per-mile option through tracking devices also face questions about the privacy of users. Virginia offers two options, one of which tracks the driver’s location. The Virginia program doesn’t differentiate between miles driven inside and outside the state, but as states begin to consider how to attribute miles and share fees among one another, officials involved in designing the programs say location data will be vital.
Camp said he was surprised when the program’s app showed a dashboard grading his driving habits on braking, acceleration, cornering and speed. He said he didn’t recall opting in to have detailed data collected and was surprised to see the results.
“I have no idea how this information is used,” he said.
Cummings said the only data the state receives is the number of miles a participant drives and the amount of fees they have paid. He said Emovis, a firm that runs the system, is required to follow strict limits on how it uses data, adding that it can’t be shared with third parties.
The federal government has not openly taken steps toward implementing the pilot called for in the infrastructure law, which directs the Transportation and Treasury departments to devise a plan while providing a $50 million budget to fund the work. Federal Highway Administration officials say the agency is preparing to identify members of an advisory committee that will help to design the test. | 2022-10-06T10:49:36Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Virginians can pay new fee by the mile to boost gas tax - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2022/10/06/virginia-gas-tax-mile/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2022/10/06/virginia-gas-tax-mile/ |
Migrants line up at an informal border crossing from Champlain, N.Y. to Saint-Bernard-de-Lacolle, Quebec, on Jan. 12. When they arrive, they're arrested by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and then allowed to claim asylum. (Wilson Ring/AP)
TORONTO — Canada’s top court is set to hear arguments Thursday on whether the United States is a safe destination for people seeking asylum.
The case, which is being watched closely in Ottawa and Washington, could upend the deal under which the two countries have for nearly two decades shared responsibility for migrants in need of protection.
At issue is the constitutionality of the Safe Third Country Agreement, the 2004 pact between the two countries. Under the deal, asylum seekers who enter Canada at official land border crossings are sent back to the United States — and vice versa. The premise is that both nations meet their obligations under international refugee law and are safe for those seeking refuge, so claimants must request protection in the country where they first arrive.
The appellants in the case before the Supreme Court of Canada are challenging the agreement’s foundations.
They include a Salvadoran woman and her daughters who fled gender-based persecution and gang violence; a family from Syria who sought asylum in Canada after President Donald Trump issued an executive order barring entry to people from seven majority-Muslim countries; and a Muslim woman from Ethiopia who feared her Oromo ethnicity made her a target for persecution.
They argue that the pact violates the right of “life, liberty and security of the person” guaranteed by Canada’s constitution because it subjects asylum seekers who are bounced back to the United States to possible detention on the U.S. side and removal to the countries and persecution they sought to flee.
That, they say, puts both countries at risk of violating international conventions on refugees that commit signatories to the principle of non-refoulement — refraining from sending refugees and asylum seekers back to countries where they could face the very persecution or torture they sought to flee.
“Absent this court’s intervention, refugees will continue to be transferred to the U.S. despite the real risk of refoulment from the U.S. for some of them,” the appellants wrote in their submission to the court.
Canadian court says sending asylum seekers back to U.S. violates their rights
Canada’s ministers of immigration and public safety counter in court filings that the U.S. process for adjudicating asylum claims is “robust and fair” with “built-in protections and safeguards compliant with its non-refoulement obligations.”
“The evidence … shows the continued designation of the United States remains reasonable,” they wrote. (The Canadian government does not make that evidence public.)
A Canadian federal court disagreed. In a 2020 decision, the court in Ottawa said that while it was not the “role of the Court to pass judgment on the U.S. asylum system,” the Safe Third Country Agreement violated the constitutional right to life, liberty and security of the person.
Justice Ann Marie McDonald pointed to the case of Nedira Mustefa, the Ethiopian asylum seeker. After Canada returned her to the United States in 2017, she was detained and placed temporarily in solitary confinement.
“The evidence establishes that … applying” the agreement “will provoke certain, and known, reactions by U.S. officials,” McDonald wrote. “Canada cannot turn a blind eye to the consequences … The evidence clearly demonstrates that those who returned … are detained as a penalty.”
Canada is turning asylum seekers away at the border. In the U.S., they face deportation.
A federal appeals court last year overturned the lower court’s decision — in part, it said, because the evidence marshaled by the asylum seekers, “although voluminous, is somewhat piecemeal and individualized and, thus, is problematic for drawing systemwide inferences concerning the situation in the United States.”
The claimants and several advocacy groups, including Amnesty International, appealed to the Supreme Court.
The Safe Third Country Agreement has long drawn criticism from refugee advocates and human rights groups. In 2007, they successfully petitioned a court to declare the United States unsafe for refugees, but that was also overturned on appeal.
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The deal has drawn broader attention here in recent years because it has a loophole. While asylum seekers who enter the country at official land border crossings are sent back to the United States, those who make unauthorized entries elsewhere along the 5,500-mile border may stay and file their claims.
Since 2017, more than 67,800 asylum seekers have entered Canada at such crossings and filed claims for protection. Around 28,300 claims have been accepted; around 19,600 have been rejected.
The number of asylum seekers crossing into Canada at unofficial points of entry rose sharply under Trump, who sought to limit legal immigration, illegal immigration and asylum.
Some dragged their belongings across the border in perilous winter journeys, losing limbs to frostbite.
In a twist, Canada asks U.S. for help cracking down at its southern border
Such crossings have not abated under President Biden. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police has “intercepted” more than 23,000 asylum seekers at unofficial border crossings during the first eight months of this year — the most since Canada began tracking the number in 2017.
“While, yes, during the Trump administration, there were plenty examples of really horrific treatment of immigrants and refugees … it’s not the case that now there’s a new administration in power, so there’s no concern anymore,” said Julia Sande, a human rights law campaigner with Amnesty International in Canada. “A lot of the concerns still remain.”
Florida man arrested after 4 people, including infant and teenage boy, found dead near U.S.-Canada border
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government has pressed U.S. officials to extend the Safe Third Country Agreement to cover the entire U.S.-Canada border, not just official crossings. Advocates argue that that would not stop the movement of asylum seekers; it would just push them to pursue more dangerous routes to avoid authorities.
The Canadian ministers, in their submission to the court, asked that any declaration that the agreement was invalid be suspended for 12 months so that the government could respond. They said there were likely to be operational challenges at the U.S.-Canada border given that it would mean asylum seekers could make claims at official land crossings.
“It is vital during that time to preserve certainty and order at Canada’s land border,” the ministers wrote. “There may be a range of remedies available to the government to respond to the declaration and there are significant competing and complex policy matters including foreign policy considerations that must be accommodated.” | 2022-10-06T10:58:14Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Canada's Supreme Court hears arguments on Safe Third Country Agreement - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/06/canada-supreme-court-safe-third-country-agreement/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/06/canada-supreme-court-safe-third-country-agreement/ |
Florida’s waterways contaminated post-Ian, posing health risks
Storm washed organic matter and pollutants into waterways, also signaling potentially serious environmental effects to come
A portable toilet knocked over by Hurricane Ian in Sarasota County, Fla. (Photo by Dave Tomasko)
Dave Tomasko, director of the Sarasota Bay Estuary Program, described several such scenes as he visited North Port and other locations in Sarasota County, Fla. His job was to collect data to determine whether the water is safe for people to enter. For now, he concluded, residents should stay away.
“What’s in the water is pretty gross. Our bays look like root beer right now,” Tomasko said. “It smells terrible.”
Hurricane Ian, which made landfall in Florida as a Category 4 storm, left scars not only on the land but also in the water. The storm’s winds and excessive rain washed leaves, organic matter and contaminants into streams and the bays, signaling the beginning of serious environmental effects that could emerge. Researchers say the degraded water quality could damage aquatic ecosystems for weeks, months or longer and pose a danger to human health in the short term. Images and videos from space captured the extent of the runoff.
Drone footage released by Daytona Beach Police Department on Sept. 30 showed widespread flooding after extensive damage caused by post-tropical cyclone Ian. (Video: Daytona Beach Police Department)
Since Ian’s landfall a week ago, Tomasko said he received a dozen emails about overflows from wastewater treatment plants along the western coast of Florida, from Palmetto to Fort Myers. As of Tuesday, Orlando asked residents to limit how often they flush toilets, take showers, wash dishes and do laundry because of overflowing sewers.
Satellites show an increase in runoff of some of these materials, soils and overflowing rivers on land into the ocean, as shown in images comparing Oct. 2 to before Ian hit. Major discoloration in near-shore waters indicates a change in the clarity of the water, or turbidity.
The brown water seen in the images contains a substance called tannins, which is dissolved organic matter that floats near the top of the water, making it look like tea or coffee. Some of the water’s turquoise color is probably from organic matter and sediment churned to the surface by the hurricane.
“The fact that you can see it from a satellite is pretty impressive to the magnitude of freshwater that’s coming off the landscape,” said Todd Osborne, a biogeochemist at the University of Florida. “That’s all that excessive rain flushing that material out into the near-shore waters … and the storm surge inundating the landscape, turning up lots of sediment and then flowing back into the ocean.”
He said the amount of runoff caused by Ian is “just so much bigger than things we’ve seen in the past.”
Osborne said the emptying of freshwater streams into the ocean is a natural process and isn’t necessarily a harmful occurrence at small scale. The organic materials can in fact serve as food for microbial populations, which are consumed by other animals higher in the food web.
Researchers are particularly concerned for the region’s sea grasses, which require a lot of light and help maintain the local ecosystem. They help prevent erosion, maintain water clarity by trapping sediments and particles with their leaves, and provide food for animals and economically important fish. Poor water quality could wipe out parts of the local sea grass population.
“Time will tell how it shakes out, but depending on ocean currents and things, that’s a big concern from an environmental standpoint,” said Osborne. “The longer it takes for [the water] to settle out will define the impact it has on our near-shore sea grass habitats.”
The storm may have also washed in pesticides and herbicides from farms and yards as well as wastewater products into bodies of water, posing a risk to people’s health if they are exposed.
“Unless you absolutely have to be in the water, it’s not a good time to be in there,” he said.
Such human-induced pollutants and nutrients coming off the land can also spur harmful algal blooms that are dangerous for animals and people, said marine and environmental scientist Hans Paerl. Harmful algal blooms, also known as red tides, are especially prevalent off the western coast of Florida and can affect fisheries key to the state’s economy.
“The story’s not over when the storm leaves. In fact, it’s sort of just beginning from an environmental perspective,” said Paerl, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “With all that runoff, we’re getting a lot of nutrients that are coming off the land, particularly nitrogen and phosphorus, which can increase harmful algal blooms.”
In the wake of Hurricane Ian, residents of North Port, Fla., on Sept. 29 used small boats and high-clearance cars to evacuate their flooded neighborhood. (Video: Rich Matthews, Whitney Leaming/The Washington Post)
Researchers are unsure how long water quality issues will last. Flooding has continued across parts of central Florida, raising river levels, causing more destruction and complicating cleanup efforts. Property loss is already estimated at more than $60 billion in Florida, according to an industry trade group.
Tomasko said the effects Ian had on water quality are some of the worst in the state’s recent history, topping 2004’s Hurricane Charley, the last Category 4 storm to make landfall along the western coastline of Florida. After Charley rolled through, almost in the same location as Ian, it took weeks for improvements in affected areas like the Charlotte Harbor, just north of Fort Myers. The nearby Peace River was in poor condition for two or three months.
“It is the worst hurricane impact to a lot of our state, worse than Charley,” Tomasko said of Ian. “That’s saying a lot, because Charley was pretty bad for a long time.” | 2022-10-06T11:33:11Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Florida’s waterways contaminated post-Ian, posing environmental and health risks - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/10/05/ian-hurricane-water-quality-florida/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/10/05/ian-hurricane-water-quality-florida/ |
After Jeff German of the Las Vegas Review-Journal was found dead, his fellow reporters knew they would have to investigate his death before they mourned it. Now a suspect is behind bars.
Jeff German, on the Strip in Las Vegas in June 2021, had a reputation as a relentless investigative reporter. "If this had happened to one of us,” a colleague said, "Jeff would have worked his tail off on every aspect of it." (K.M. Cannon/Las Vegas Review-Journal via AP)
It was after midnight when Las Vegas Review-Journal executive editor Glenn Cook hit send on a short email to the staff.
“I’m beyond devastated to be sending you this message,” he wrote. Veteran investigative reporter Jeff German had been found dead outside his home hours earlier, on the morning of Sept. 3, Cook told his employees, adding: “It appears he was stabbed to death.”
It was a terrible way to break the news to them. Cook would have preferred to tell them all personally — “I just remember wanting to throw up,” he recalled later — but the Review-Journal was minutes away from publishing its first news story about their colleague’s killing.
And his email would serve as a tacit marching order for their workweek ahead: Even while they were mourning a friend’s death, these journalists would need to investigate it.
Over four breakneck days of relentless reporting, the staff of the Review-Journal would essentially crack the case — delving into German’s old reporting and doing their own on-the-ground detective work to identify a surprising suspect, who is now behind bars, facing murder charges.
“If this had happened to one of us,” David Ferrara, an editor and writer, told The Washington Post, “Jeff would have worked his tail off on every aspect of it. That was part of the reaction: Let’s do the best we can, because he would have done that for us.”
Cook woke early on Sunday morning, Sept. 4, to deploy several key staffers. They needed to polish German’s obituary and make calls around town for a story about reactions to his death.
The circumstances were disturbing. Police were saying that German had been found with stab wounds in a side yard of his suburban home, about seven miles west of downtown and the Vegas Strip. They believed he had been lying there for nearly a day before a neighbor spotted him and called 911. There were signs of an altercation.
Separately, Cook asked German’s direct supervisor, investigations editor Rhonda Prast, to pull together a list of people who had been the subject of German’s stories.
“Jeff wrote about a lot of bad people,” Cook explained later, “who did a lot of bad stuff over the course of his career.”
At 69, German (pronounced GARE-men) had spent 40 years covering the seamier sides of Sin City. The Milwaukee native had moved to Nevada in 1982, eager to cover organized crime, and quickly developed sources across Las Vegas. Originally writing for the Las Vegas Sun, he explored the lingering mob connections to the flourishing casino industry. In 1997, he broke the news of the execution-style slaying of loan shark and racketeer “Fat Herbie” Blitzstein, said to be the last mobster killed in Las Vegas. A year later, when casino magnate Ted Binion died of a drug overdose, German dug deeper on a hunch that foul play may have been involved; eventually the man’s girlfriend and her lover were convicted of murder though both were later acquitted after an appeal, and German published a book on the case.
The scoops kept coming after German got laid off from the Sun and moved to the Review-Journal in 2010. With fellow investigative reporters, he uncovered wasteful spending at the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, leading to charges against several agency officials; and after a deadly 2019 fire at the Alpine Motel Apartments, they found failures in previous city inspections of the building. Deeply involved in the coverage of the October 2017 gun massacre at a country music festival, German was the first to report that the shooter had fired several bullets at a large jet fuel tank at a nearby airport.
‘It seemed to last forever.’ One year later, mystery of Las Vegas massacre remains
But for all the bad actors German had intersected with over the years, Cook still couldn’t quite get his head around the idea that one of them would kill him this way.
“If someone were to put a hit on Jeff over a story he did, would you really stab someone to death in broad daylight on a Friday?” he said. “Those details were almost what made it unbelievable to us.”
Glenn Puit was inclined to agree. One of the paper’s most experienced reporters, he was in his final week at the Review-Journal before going to a job in public relations.
On Labor Day Monday, two days after German was found dead, Puit and a younger reporter, Sabrina Schnur, set out early to knock on doors in the neighborhood. As the temperature surged past 100 degrees, they took occasional breaks in their air-conditioned cars.
“At that point we both assumed, given the nature of the crime, that this was going to be a domestic violence homicide or a random burglary by a person who was unhinged,” Puit recalled. A statement from police suggesting that the suspect may have been “casing the area” to commit other crimes reinforced the theory.
But just before noon Monday, police released a photo of a potential suspect. The person, apparently captured on security camera walking along a sidewalk, was unrecognizable to the two reporters — face and frame obscured, perhaps intentionally, by a wide-brimmed straw hat and a bulky orange construction jacket.
Schnur, though, focused on a corner of the image that showed a brick border along the sidewalk. Scouring the neighborhood, she found it several blocks away from German’s cul-de-sac home.
Why would a burglar take such a circuitous and high-exposure path through the neighborhood?
As the two reporters rethought their assumptions about a motive, another colleague was staring at the figure in the center of the photo.
Ferrara, the Review-Journal’s assistant city editor, had worked closely with German for years, sharing a closet-sized courthouse office with him back when Ferrara covered state courts and German covered federal courts.
Like Prast, the investigations editor, Ferrara had spent a day immersed in German’s past work. But it wasn’t the old stories about ruthless criminals and mobbed-up casinos that absorbed his attention. Instead, he caught up on German’s recent investigation into an elected county official who, his subordinates alleged, created a hostile work environment and carried on what they perceived as an inappropriate relationship with a staffer.
Ferrara was so absorbed that he brought his laptop to the gym with him Monday morning. When Cook ran into him there, Ferrara called the executive editor over to eyeball the photos on his screen.
“It’s him. Look at him,” Ferrara said, Cook recalled. “He’s short. Look at his posture.”
They toggled between two sets of photos Ferrara had compiled.
One set showed the orange-jacketed suspect.
The other showed the man who had spent the past spring under German’s reporting microscope: Clark County Public Administrator Robert Telles.
Looking forward to lying smear piece #4 by @JGermanRJ. #onetrickpony I think he’s mad that I haven’t crawled into a hole and died.
Ferrara wasn’t alone in his suspicions. A small group of newsroom colleagues had started reviewing Telles’s social media accounts. Judging from tweets like this, the county official was clearly very upset about German’s reporting.
Typical bully. Can’t take a pound of [criticism] after slinging 100 pounds of BS. Up to article #4 now. You’d think he’d have better things to do.
Telles, 45, was the product of a politically-connected family from El Paso, whose great-uncle had served as the city’s first Mexican American mayor and President John F. Kennedy’s ambassador to Costa Rica. A married father of three, Telles had launched his career in Las Vegas as a probate lawyer before running for and winning the post of county public administrator in 2018.
But as Telles geared up his reelection campaign this year, German published a story in May describing how his small agency, which oversees the settlement of unclaimed estates, had been wracked by “allegations of emotional stress, bullying and favoritism.” German wrote that the office had broken down between factions — employees who had come in with Telles, and those hired under the tenure of his longtime predecessor. Frustrated with Telles’s management, and suspicious of his relationship with a staffer, some of the holdover staff had gone so far as to secretly videotape their “clandestine meetings” in the back seat of her SUV at the parking lot of a local outlet mall.
Both Telles and the woman said their meetings were innocent conversations to vent about office politics and denied that they were romantically involved. The county brought in an outside consultant to help oversee Telles’s office and attempt to ease the tensions.
In addition to his acidic tweets, Telles openly stewed over the Review-Journal’s coverage in posts on his campaign website, accusing German of trying “to drag me through the mud.” He mulled legal action but wrote that “suing a newspaper, like the Las Vegas Review-Journal, is near impossible.”
Weeks later, he badly lost his reelection bid, placing third in the Democratic primary behind one of his disgruntled deputies.
With Ferrara leading the drumbeat, the newsroom began to buzz with speculation about Telles. But metro editor Carri Geer remained wary. “It didn’t seem possible,” she said later. “Yeah, [I knew] it would make a great story, but I was always skeptical, playing devil’s advocate.”
But on Tuesday afternoon, police released a new video of the orange-jacketed suspect walking, and a photo of a car linked to the suspect. They described it as red or maroon GMC Yukon Denali.
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Everything started happening fast.
A friend of Ferrara’s messaged him with a photo he had found on Facebook. It showed what appeared to be Telles’s family standing next to a maroon Denali.
Ferrara looked up possible addresses for Telles. One was roughly 1.2 miles from German’s house; another was 2 miles away; a third was roughly 6 miles distant. Then he received another message from a friend sharing a Google Street View image of one of the addresses. It had a recent timestamp — and it showed a maroon SUV in the driveway.
“As soon as that happened, we just knew,” Ferrara recalled.
Geer dispatched staffers to go to Telles’s house — not to talk to him, but just to drive by and see what they could see. The situation was volatile, editors realized: There was a risk that a suspect who might have killed their colleague could react badly if approached. Also, “we sure don’t want to make him jump in the car and flee,” Cook said.
Reporters Brett Clarkson and Katelyn Newberg made the trip together, with Newberg driving while Clarkson positioned himself to have a clear view from the back window.
“I was fully suspecting no one was going to be there and there would be no car,” said Clarkson, who had just joined the Review-Journal weeks earlier. “If he really did this, there’s no way the car will actually be there.”
Newberg kept her eyes on the street ahead as they drove past Telles’s house. “We didn’t want him to know we were there,” she said.
They were both stunned to see that not only was Telles at home, he was out in his driveway, washing a maroon SUV — the exact make and model described in the police report. Review-Journal director of photography Ben Hager discreetly snapped a photo.
Police have not disclosed to what extent they had developed Telles as a suspect before the Review-Journal staff had zeroed in on him. Law enforcement officials frequently withhold from the public some details drawn from a crime scene as they conduct their investigation. The journalists, though, shared some of their own intel with police, from their list of German’s controversial story subjects to their identification of his car as a possible match for the suspect vehicle.
In the course of one of the newsroom’s conversations with police, Geer said, editors learned that police were also surveilling Telles’s home.
“We asked the police, through our sources, if we should pull our reporters back,” she recalled. “They said yes.”
Reporters were back on the scene, though, for the start of a long and surreal Wednesday.
Police taped off the area surrounding Telles’s house and executed a search warrant — finally giving the Review-Journal enough cause to write a story describing the county official as a suspect.
When police returned Telles to his house after hours of questioning, journalists noticed he was wearing a full-body white costume that resembled a hazmat suit — the only thing he had left to wear after police took his clothes for testing.
That afternoon, when police came back to arrest him, Telles barricaded himself in his home, made suicidal statements, and attempted to wound himself, police said, before he was carried out on a stretcher. He has been charged with murder and is being held without bond.
Cook said that no one in his newsroom is seeking credit for drawing attention to Telles as a potential suspect. But he allows that it’s fair to credit the Review-Journal as having “a role in making sure Robert Telles was on the radar of law enforcement from the get-go.”
As his colleagues pivot from investigating German’s death to mourning him, though, the Review-Journal remains an inextricable part of its own story. On Wednesday, the newspaper was granted a temporary restraining order to prevent law enforcement from searching the contents of the computers and phone they seized from German’s home.
German, his boss said, was famously protective of the people who shared information with him for his stories. As much as the Review-Journal wants to see law enforcement win a conviction, the paper wants to keep the government from perusing his files — something Cook said would set a unfavorable precedent for journalists and violate German’s right to protect his sources to the very end.
“I have a hard time believing there’s anybody in Nevada more deeply sourced than Jeff,” he said. | 2022-10-06T11:50:45Z | www.washingtonpost.com | A Las Vegas newspaper's quest to solve reporter Jeff German's killing - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/media/2022/10/06/jeff-german-las-vegas-review-journal-robert-telles/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/media/2022/10/06/jeff-german-las-vegas-review-journal-robert-telles/ |
Price caps on Russian oil aren’t ideal. But they’re our best option.
By Peter R. Orszag
Theodore Bunzel
A flare stack at Rosneft's oil stabilization facility outside the town of Neftegorsk in the Samara Region of Russia on Sept. 6. (Alexander Manzyuk/Reuters)
Peter R. Orszag, the chief executive of financial advisory at Lazard, served as director of the Office of Management and Budget from 2009 to 2010. Theodore Bunzel is managing director and co-head of geopolitical advisory at Lazard.
The Biden administration’s proposed price cap on Russian oil, which the European Union agreed to on Wednesday, might seem too clever by half. But it’s worth trying for a simple reason: It’s better than any alternative.
This is a time-sensitive issue, as we’re facing a global energy shock. OPEC and its allies also announced on Wednesday that they will slash oil production, despite pleas from the Biden administration, which will likely result in higher gas prices. The price cap also seeks to address the European Union’s ban on insuring ships transporting Russian oil, set to go into effect in December, that would have essentially put a hard-stop to most Russian exports.
The price cap will modify the insurance ban, providing a much-needed release valve for the expected supply shock. The general scheme is to allow Western insurers, shippers and financiers to continue facilitating the export of Russian oil around the world but only below a price cap somewhere between $40 and $60 per barrel for crude oil (close to Russia’s $40 marginal cost of production). The idea is twofold: Keep Russia’s oil flowing into global markets while also reducing the amount of revenue fueling Vladimir Putin’s war machine.
Why would we want Russian oil to continue to flow at all? Well, unfortunately, because we need it. The hard truth is that the global economy is tottering on the edge of recession, with Europe particularly vulnerable to energy prices. The withdrawal of Russian oil exports would create an energy supply shock that would not only exacerbate economic distress but also fray Western unity against Russia’s war in Ukraine. This helps explain why Ukrainians have been supportive of the price cap: It will hit Russia’s oil revenue without throwing the global economy into a tailspin.
Still, the price cap idea has some serious obstacles. Implementation will be leaky. Buyers such as China, India and Turkey might try to work around the cap by taking non-Western shipping insurance and services or by cutting side deals to pay Russians indirectly. Oil importers might also resort to significant corruption and rent-seeking. And perhaps most alarmingly, Russia could shut off some of its maritime oil exports in protest.
But there are reasons to believe it will not be so easy for Russia to work around the price cap. Yes, Russia will find ways to export some of its oil through shadow tankers, and China will use its own tankers and insurance, avoiding Western services. And yes, some countries might be willing to accept alternative forms of insurance being developed by Russia and others. But Russia’s extensive reliance on Western providers will be hard to replace.
For example, the Institute of International Finance estimates that Greek oil tankers alone accounted for 55 percent of capacity leaving Russia between March and August. Moreover, about half of Russian maritime crude oil exports are shipped from Russia’s Baltic or Arctic ports, passing through the Danish straits or Strait of Gibraltar and often heading through the Mediterranean and the Suez Canal to destinations such as India. Making this long journey without Western services will be exceedingly difficult.
Plus, even if Russia finds a way to work around the price cap for most of its exports, the cap’s existence gives negotiators in China, India, Turkey and other emerging markets significant leverage to drive down prices. We’re already starting to see this dynamic at play, for example, in Russia’s recent long-term contract negotiations with Indonesia and others. In that sense, the policy is already “working.”
Finally, Russia is unlikely to protest the price cap with a significant, sustained cut in its oil exports. For one thing, Putin needs the revenue (even at a lower price). Russia has traditionally relied on oil and gas exports for 45 percent of its federal budget revenue, with oil revenue three times that of gas revenue. This dependence on oil has only been enhanced by the Kremlin’s decision to shut off gas supplies to Europe and increase military spending on mobilization and escalation in Ukraine.
In addition, Russia could impair its long-term productive capacity if it shuts in millions of barrels per day. Russian storage is limited and already mostly full. It’s not easy to turn oil wells on and off, particularly in Siberia and northern Russia, where such a stoppage could freeze and damage infrastructure. (The country did shut in nearly 2 million barrels per day of production during the pandemic, but this might be harder to replicate after finally getting production back to pre-covid levels.)
The bottom line is that, at a moment when economic clouds are darkening, we need to avoid an unnecessary oil supply shock. Europe is heading into a tough winter, with sky-high gas and electricity prices and a looming recession. Even if it seems distasteful, finding a way to keep Russian oil flowing — but at a reduced price — could prove essential to fortifying Western unity and support for Ukraine. The proposed price cap is the best option we have. | 2022-10-06T12:03:46Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Biden's price caps on Russian oil is a good, but not perfect, solution - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/06/biden-russia-oil-price-caps/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/06/biden-russia-oil-price-caps/ |
Ketanji Brown Jackson shows how originalism is supposed to work
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson outside the Supreme Court building in Washington last week. (Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)
Ketanji Brown Jackson, the newest Supreme Court justice and first African American woman on the court, made her presence known on Tuesday during oral arguments in a dispute over whether Alabama’s redistricting plan is illegal.
The case, Merrill v. Milligan, centers on whether the state must create a second majority-Black congressional district. Alabama and, likely, the right-wing majority on the court say no, contending that the Voting Rights Act’s requirement to do so is unconstitutional. Jackson, however, blew up that argument, illustrating why she is such a potent intellectual force and why faux originalists trying to undo remedies for enduring racism have so much to lose.
First, some background: Republicans have been telling themselves a useful fiction, namely that racism has vanished, and any attempt to teach about the enduring effects or to remedy enduring discrimination is unfair to White people and is unconstitutional. We see the phenomenon in their contrived war against “critical race theory” in schools (even though it not taught to children).
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. mouthed this notion in a 2007 case: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race,” he wrote, “is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” The same reasoning echoed in his ruling in 2013’s Shelby County v. Holder, which invalidated the preclearance provisions of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. Republicans celebrated the latter decision, which reinforced their conviction that Whites are victims of government attempts to address the ongoing inequities suffered by Blacks and other disadvantaged groups.
This is of a piece with white-grievance proponents’ infatuation with a single sentence from the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous 1963 speech: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” This is often misconstrued as a condemnation of efforts to promote racial injustice, ignoring the rest of the speech and King’s life’s work. Indeed, King was dedicated to exposing enduring racism and devising legislative and moral responses to it. The result was, among other things, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which specifically targeted measures that discriminated against Black voters in the South.
And that brings us to Jackson on Tuesday. Mark Joseph Stern writes for Slate:
In a series of extraordinary exchanges with Alabama Solicitor General Edmund LaCour, Jackson explained that the entire point of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments was to provide equal opportunity for formerly enslaved people, using color-conscious remedies whenever necessary to put them on the same plane as whites.
As Stern explains, this was a “masterclass” in originalism. And by that he means it was historically pristine originalism, not the faux originalism of the right-wing majority that cherry-picks its way through history to reach a desired partisan end.
Jackson took her colleagues through the history of the Civil War amendments, revisions to the Voting Rights Act in 1982 and even the Report of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction from 1866. Jackson informed her colleagues: “The legislator who introduced [the 14th] amendment said that ‘unless the Constitution should restrain them, those states will all, I fear, keep up this discrimination and crush to death the hated Freedman.’ ” Jackson observed, “That’s not a race-neutral or race-blind idea in terms of the remedy.”
To borrow from the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who once chastised Roberts for “throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet”: The Constitution does not bar Congress from giving umbrellas to those who’ve been rained on for centuries.
The right-wing’s fixation on a “colorblind” society serves to strip Congress of the power under the 14th Amendment to address discrimination. The right-wing justices are so determined to show the Constitution to require their “colorblind” result that they’ve ignored the history, meaning and intent of the document they claim to revere.
The court’s six-justice conservative majority has shown repeatedly that it has the votes to achieve the radical, partisan outcomes it desires, so it need not make convincing arguments — or even coherent ones (see it’s ruling overturning abortion rights). That’s what makes Jackson’s remarks so effective. Essentially, she said, “I’m making sure everyone understands what is going on here.”
She might have made it more difficult for the court to adopt Alabama’s extreme position. Election law guru Rick Hasen observes that “there did not appear to be any appetite on the Court for Alabama’s constellation of radical arguments, including one that would require proof of racially discriminatory intent to require the creation of a minority opportunity district.” He continues: “That would look radical: the Court would be overturning decades of precedent, beginning with the Court’s 1986 decision in Gingles, which sets up a three-part threshold test for [Voting Rights Act] redistricting claims, followed by a look at the totality of the circumstances.” Instead, the court is likely to finesse its decision to ostensibly leave Gingles in place but make it near-impossible for plaintiffs to succeed in Voting Rights Act claims.
Jackson’s analysis is not new. Voting rights advocates have been making similar arguments for years. But rarely — if ever — has a member of the court so authoritatively and definitively used the relevant legislative and constitutional history to demolish the “colorblind” charade. And doing so with a purely originalist interpretation made it much more powerful.
No wonder Republicans were so desperate to keep her off the court. To the dismay of the senators who sneered at her qualifications (insisting that President Biden’s decision to limit potential nominees to Black women meant he would select someone of lesser quality), she demonstrated that she not only deserves to be there but that there is no better judge out there who can stand up to Republicans as they try to systematically dismantle civil rights. | 2022-10-06T12:03:48Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Ketanji Brown Jackson shows how originalism is supposed to work - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/06/ketanji-brown-jackson-supreme-court-alabama-originalism/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/06/ketanji-brown-jackson-supreme-court-alabama-originalism/ |
Trump filing offers the Supreme Court wide purview in executive power
By Jenny A. Durkan
A page from the order granting a request by former president Donald Trump's legal team to appoint a special master to review documents seized by the FBI during a search of his Mar-a-Lago estate. (Jon Elswick/AP) (AP)
Jenny A. Durkan was the mayor of Seattle from 2017 to 2021. She served five years as U.S. attorney for the Western District of Washington.
By granting former president Donald Trump’s request for a special master, federal Judge Aileen Cannon sent the Justice Department’s probe of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago down a side alley, encroaching on and delaying the federal prosecutors’ work.
The DOJ successfully appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, wisely focusing on the national security issues at stake when classified documents go missing, and not on the thornier questions of whether former presidents can assert executive privilege. But Cannon then issued another ruling giving Trump’s lawyers more latitude than the special master had ruled, and the DOJ has signaled it plans a much broader appeal to the 11th Circuit.
Now Trump has petitioned the Supreme Court to step into the fray, seeking to allow the special master to review about 100 classified items. What happens next is likely to have effects well beyond the documents case, including putting the extent of executive privilege squarely in the hands of the conservative Supreme Court.
If the Supreme Court intervenes, it could expand a former president’s right to assert executive privilege, or limit Congress’s ability to impinge on executive powers through legislation, including the 1978 Presidential Records Act. Such a ruling could jeopardize other investigations into Trump’s affairs by Congress, the states and the Justice Department. The reason: They rely on documents and testimony they have access to largely because President Biden has taken the position that a sitting president can waive the privilege for his predecessors.
Executive privilege exists to ensure presidents obtain the best, candid advice when they make decisions. Some argue the privilege is meaningless if a politically opposed successor can waive it. Others counter that the privilege belongs to the Office of the President for the benefit of the country and not to any individual. Biden concluded that full access to the truth regarding efforts to block the peaceful transfer of power in the 2020 election best served the nation.
A Supreme Court decision favoring post-presidential privileges is not out of the question. Recently, Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, in a concurring opinion on another Trump case, asserted that former presidents must retain some ability to assert executive privilege. His opinion points to support for at least balancing the need to produce evidence in governmental investigations and the need to protect a president’s right to confidential deliberations. Notably, it was former president George W. Bush, not then-President Trump, who decided what Bush administration records were available for Kavanaugh’s Senate confirmation hearing. That’s a reminder that there is some history of former presidents retaining say over whether subpoenaed or requested materials are subject to executive privilege.
Preserving the privilege for ex-presidents is not merely a favor for Trump. It is closely aligned to some conservatives’ belief in the supreme powers of the executive branch and the wrongful encroachment on those powers by judicial and congressional overreach. In a 2019 address to the Federalist Society, then-Attorney General William Barr denounced the erosion of a president’s constitutional powers by Congress, the judiciary and “so-called progressives [who] treat politics as their religion.” In Barr’s view, executive powers include “the powers necessary to protect the independence of the executive branch and the confidentiality of its internal deliberations.”
Though he has since seemed to have turned on Trump, Barr at the time stated his pride in “taking up the torch” to ensure conservative “originalists” were appointed to the Supreme Court, courts of appeals and district courts. And though he urged the DOJ to appeal Cannon’s rulings, he did so knowing the shared philosophy of the judges he had helped place on the bench. Barr also knows it is likely the Supreme Court, with a conservative majority of 6-3, will ultimately decide the issue.
If Trump’s right to assert privilege as a private citizen is expanded by the Supreme Court, or even the 11th Circuit, all pending investigations of Trump would need to assess what evidence was privileged and therefore off-limits to state and federal probes. Those assessments would be subject to court challenge by the former president. The results could range from lengthy delay to total dismissal of cases.
The DOJ investigation of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago presents profound legal jeopardy for Trump. When all the facts are known, the former president’s undoing could come from cheating the National Archives and hoarding classified documents. But an appeal in the case also presents risks to the Justice Department probe and the other investigations. Now that the door to appeal is open, expect Trump’s team and conservative allies to make it as broad as possible, both to undermine the many investigations pending against him and to broaden the powers of the executive branch they view as so broadly abused during his time in office. | 2022-10-06T12:03:49Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Trump filing offers the Supreme Court wide purview in executive power - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/06/trump-executive-power-supreme-court/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/06/trump-executive-power-supreme-court/ |
Nobel Prize in literature awarded to Annie Ernaux
French writer Annie Ernaux answers questions after attending the screening of the film “Les Annees Super 8" on May 23, 2022. Ernaux won the 2022 Nobel Prize for Literature. (Julie Sebadelha/AFP/Getty Images)
The Swedish Academy said that it had awarded Ernaux the prize “for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory.” In its announcement, the Academy noted that it had not yet been able to reach Ernaux. She later told Sweden’s SVT television that winning the Nobel Prize was a “a great honor” and “a very great responsibility,” according to the Associated Press.
Ernaux’s work frequently deals with questions of personal history. Her memoir “The Happening” discusses an illegal abortion that she had in the 1960s. A 2018 translation of her memoir “The Years” was shortlisted for the Booker prize. A translation of Ernaux’s “Getting Lost,” a diary of her affair with a younger, married man, was published earlier this year.
Ernaux was born in 1940 in Normandy, the daughter of working class parents. She published her first book, “Cleaned Out,” a fictionalized account of her abortion, in 1974. She has two sons and lives in Cergy, in the Northwestern suburbs of Paris. She has previously won several French language literary prizes, including the Prix Renaudot.
In 1996, author Linda Barrett Osborne wrote, “Annie Ernaux’s work can evoke the same response that some modern art does in viewers: a tendency to think that, because it appears simple or direct in composition, it was simple to conceive, that anyone could create the same forms and impressions. Instead, at her best, Ernaux has the ability to refine ordinary experience, stripping it of irrelevancy and digression and reducing it to a kind of iconography of the late-20th-century soul.”
In “I Remain in Darkness,” Ernaux chronicled her mother’s decline from Alzheimer’s. Released in English in 2000, and translated by Tanya Leslie, the book “details brilliantly, with all the unconscious acuity of actual presence, the miseries and the interdependencies, the frustration and the tedium, the toxic mix of devotion and revulsion that characterize for so many of us the long process of losing an elderly parent,” according to a review in The Washington Post.
Yale University Press is scheduled to publish a translation of Ernaux’s “Look at the Lights, My Love” in Fall 2023. John Donatich, director of Yale University Press said in a statement, “As a great admirer of Annie Ernaux’s extraordinary work, it is a particular pleasure for me to see her receive this global recognition. Her visionary nonfiction is a profound achievement, and it richly deserves the wide readership this prize will attract. Those many new readers are about to make a wonderful discovery.”
Ernaux’s work has also been adapted to film. An adaptation of “The Happening,” directed by Audrey Diwan, received the 2021 Golden Lion at the Venice International Film Festival, and 2020′s “Simple Passion” was a Cannes Film Festival selection. Ernaux is also a filmmaker. “The Super 8 Years” is a 60-minute film she made with her son David Ernaux-Briot composed of old home movies. She will be presenting the movie at the New York Film Festival next week.
The New Republic recently described Ernaux as “a perennial front-runner” for the Nobel Prize “who never quite crosses the line,” but suggested that in selecting her the Academy might “make a principled statement about reproductive rights,” especially given her work in “The Happening.” In response to an audience question on whether the choice was a political one, Ellen Mattson, a representative of the Academy said, “We concentrate on literature and literary quality,” before adding, “The message is that this is literature for everyone.”
The Nobel Prize for literature is awarded annually by the 18-member Swedish Academy. It typically recognizes an author’s full body of work, though the academy has singled out individual works by laureates on nine occasions. This year, the prize is worth roughly $913,000.
Nobel Prize awarded to three scientists for work in click chemistry, which links molecules quickly
In response to an audience question at the 2022 announcement about the Nobel Prize’s general focus on European writers, Mattson said, “We have many different criteria, and you cannot satisfy all of them.” Stressing again that literary quality was most important to the committee, he went on, “One year, we gave the prize to a non-European writer, last year, Abdulrazak Gurnah. This year, we give the prize to a woman.” Ernaux is the 17th woman to win the prize. | 2022-10-06T12:56:09Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Annie Ernaux is the winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize for literature - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2022/10/06/annie-ernaux-nobel-prize-literature-2022/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2022/10/06/annie-ernaux-nobel-prize-literature-2022/ |
3 great audiobooks to listen to this month
For your playlist, terrific tales for a variety of listeners
Review by Katherine A. Powers
(Harper Audio)
‘Act of Oblivion,’ by Robert Harris
This enthralling novel takes its title from the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 and Charles II’s proclamation designed to bring peace after the upheaval of the English Civil War and Interregnum. The edict pardoned anti-royalists with exceptions, most notably of the 59 men who had signed Charles I’s death warrant (a painful thought during the reign of another Charles). If seized, the men were to be hanged, drawn and quartered as traitors. Ned Whalley and his son-in-law William Goffe, both historical figures, are pursued from England to America, across the “archipelago of tiny settlements” of New England, by a fictional nemesis, Richard Nayler, a man obsessed with avenging the death of his wife and infant son. Veteran actor Tim McInnerny delivers a masterly narration of Harris’s novel. He truly inhabits the characters, his voice and manner finely tuned to the personality and convictions of each: Goffe, a fanatical, millenarian Puritan; Walley, more practical and ultimately disillusioned; Nayler, smoothly menacing, but prey to depression. Aside from a tedious, unnecessary litany of characters at the beginning, this production is perfect. (HarperAudio, Unabridged, 15 ¾ hours)
3 new audiobooks to kick off your fall playlist
‘Retail Gangster: The Insane, Real-Life Story of Crazy Eddie,’ by Gary Weiss
Weiss’s irresistible account of the life of Eddie Antar, a small-time huckster and high school dropout who became a wealthy merchant, securities fraudster, fugitive and convict, is also a tale of the rise of consumer electronics in America and a fond portrait of the sleazy, disintegrating city that was New York in the 1970s. Narrator Richard Ferrone, whose gravelly, big-city voice is wonderfully suited to stories of criminal enterprise, does the book full justice. His delivery is so engaged with Eddie’s flimflam and high jinx, it is almost impossible to believe that he — or at least his voice — was not a player. Antar’s financial finagling was relentless: He pocketed sales tax, scammed insurance companies, shifted money to give the illusion of growth and profited handsomely through insider trading. Add to that, forgery, swindling his ex-wife out of monetary support and operating under a false identity. But the real engine of his success was the in-your-face TV ads performed by the manic comedian Jerry Carroll. Everyone hated them, but they worked — and we may thank Ferrone for sparing us any attempt to reproduce them. (Hachette, Unabridged, 13 hours)
‘The Bullet that Missed,’ by Richard Osman
This is the third installment of the adventures of Richard Osman’s Thursday Murder Club, a small posse of residents of a retirement village in Kent. You could begin this thoroughly entertaining series here, but you would miss the backstory and satisfaction of reuniting with old friends; former MI6 operative, Elizabeth (and Stephen, “who, for a number of reasons, is Elizabeth’s third husband”); retired nurse, Joyce, seemingly ditsy but who notices everything; onetime labor organizer, Ron, hothead and West Ham football fanatic; and psychiatrist, Ibrahim, gentle, well-dressed and organized. The plot involves a murdered journalist, a former KGB goon, a Swedish money launderer, kidnapping, death by knitting needle, and Alan, an extremely personable dog. The narrator of the preceding books, the brilliant Lesley Manville, has here been replaced by Fiona Shaw, and unlike many substitutions, this is not a disaster. A talented comic actor, perhaps best known as Petunia Dursley from the Harry Potter films, she maintains the wry spirit of the series and captures the personalities of the characters with empathy and flair — though her “Swedish” accent is downright peculiar. (Penguin Audio, Unabridged, 11 ¼ hours) | 2022-10-06T12:56:15Z | www.washingtonpost.com | 3 great audiobooks to listen to this month - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2022/10/06/best-audiobooks/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2022/10/06/best-audiobooks/ |
Storm clouds loom over the U.S. Capitol in July. (Tom Brenner for The Washington Post)
Election deniers increasingly dominate the Republican Party — and could soon gain unprecedented power over the nation’s democratic system. That is the takeaway from an alarming investigation by The Post’s Amy Gardner. Her analysis found that a majority of GOP nominees in congressional and key statewide races this November — 299 in all — have engaged in some form of election denialism. More than 60 percent of the House candidates are running in districts with partisan profiles suggesting they are unlikely to lose. Only two states — Rhode Island and North Dakota — did not nominate a single election denier in any of the races examined by The Post, while Republicans in Montana, Tennessee, West Virginia and Wyoming nominated election deniers for every major race. And The Post’s latest tally captures only part of the threat.
The country does not have to sit by and watch the system unravel. Any leader claiming to believe in democracy has options to act forcefully and immediately to bolster the system against another 2020-style attack. It’s past time for them to do so.
The Post’s numbers are ominous — but not shocking. Conspiracy-theorizing candidates defeated moderate Republicans in primary after primary this summer. The Post analysis counted candidates for Congress, governor, lieutenant governor, secretary of state and attorney general who had questioned President Biden’s victory, opposed counting his electoral college votes, supported partisan ballot reviews or lawsuits seeking to overturn the 2020 results, or attended the “Stop the Steal” rally on Jan. 6, 2021.
Many of the offices for which these candidates are running oversee critical parts of the election process. Governors could refuse to certify state electors or even certify bogus alternative slates. Secretaries of state not only have authority over election procedures, but they could spread public distrust after a vote by refusing to certify results or calling for unnecessary audits and recounts. And, as the country saw in 2021, members of Congress can spuriously object to counting the electoral votes states submit.
The Post’s count does not even capture the mischief that could take place at the local level. There has been an exodus of experienced poll workers, with conspiracy theorists and partisan operatives increasingly filling the void. Election officials are also increasingly under pressure from harassment campaigns, including coordinated records requests that waste officials’ time and resources. Several states have passed laws empowering partisan poll watchers, forcing election administrators to prepare for more confrontations at polling sites.
Then there are rogue county clerks and other local officials who could do considerable damage to democracy but often fly under the radar. In Coffee County, Ga., a local elections official told The Post that she had opened her office to election deniers searching for evidence of voter fraud. A criminal investigation into the voting systems breach is ongoing. State canvassers, who are responsible for certifying vote totals, can do significant harm: In Michigan, for example, Republican state canvassers attempted this year to block an abortion rights amendment from getting onto the ballot, forcing the state Supreme Court to intervene. In 2020, Michigan’s canvassers came under pressure to refuse to certify Mr. Biden’s victory in the state — and they nearly buckled. The country might not be so fortunate next time.
Because states and localities administer elections in the United States, responsibility for preparing the electoral system for another 2020-style assault falls firstly on them. The most immediate task is investing in training and security for poll workers. While they are at it, local officials should seek to remove partisan pressures from the vote counting process by doing things such as changing the requirements for those seeking to run for state secretary of state to make the office less political.
Congress’s essential task
Yet the greatest single measure to protect U.S. democracy lies in Congress. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) voiced his support last week for the Electoral Count Reform Act, which would make it harder for conspiracy theorists to hijack the electoral process and overturn a legitimate vote. It is an essential response to the wave of election deniers likely to take office next year — and, as such, it is the most important legislation federal lawmakers will have considered in recent years.
The bill would reform the archaic rules governing the counting and certifying of electoral votes in presidential elections. By stitching shut many of the loopholes President Donald Trump and his allies tried to exploit to overturn his 2020 loss, the legislation could help prevent another Jan. 6 — or something even worse. It would confirm that the vice president’s role in counting electoral votes is solely ceremonial, a response to Mr. Trump’s attempts to pressure Vice President Mike Pence to unilaterally toss out votes. The bill would instruct Congress to consider only one slate of electors from each state, avoiding the potential for conflicting submissions to stoke controversy about the count. And it would create a judicial review process to restrain rogue state officials from sending in unlawful slates.
The effort has garnered remarkable bipartisan support. Last week, the Senate Rules Committee, led by Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), advanced the bill 14-1, with only Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) voting against it. At least 11 Republicans are already on record supporting the proposal. The story of cross-aisle collaboration isn’t nearly as rosy in the House of Representatives, where an alternative bill drafted by Reps. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) and Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) received only scant GOP support. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) even whipped against it. The opposition, especially from election deniers in the House, is “sort of like a bank robber saying, ‘Please be sure to keep the door unlocked,’” Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) told us. The Post’s election-denier count suggests that opposition to the bill is likely to only gain strength next year, which means it is crucial for Congress to seize the opportunity to pass this legislation now.
The bill is hardly perfect, and though they seem bureaucratic and arcane, the details can make a huge difference. The legislation’s supporters have fixed some of its weaknesses already, stipulating that only “force majeure” or act-of-God-type events qualify as extraordinary and catastrophic for the purposes of extending a voting period, for example. A modification clarified that “conclusive”, governor-approved slates of electors are still subject to challenge in federal court.
Not perfect, but still good
There’s still room for other tweaks that ought to be acceptable to both parties, most notably raising the threshold for the number of members of Congress necessary to sustain an objection to a state’s electoral slate; a large number of House Republicans tried to reject Biden electoral slates on Jan. 6, 2021, and The Post’s count suggests that the congressional GOP will soon be even more packed with election deniers. Senators could also make clearer the grounds on which lawmakers would be allowed to object. But the effort to write a perfect bill should not disrupt the effort to pass a good one. And, as it stands, the Senate’s bill is good.
To their credit, some Senate Republicans have rallied behind Electoral Count Act reform, despite extreme pressures from election deniers within their own party. More should follow. Democrats should in turn rise to the occasion by throwing themselves behind the best bill they can get — whether or not it’s the one they would have written if they had gone it alone.
Responsibility for securing democracy does not lie only with Congress or state officials. In a functioning democracy, it is ultimately up to voters to decide who will govern, and the country’s democratic system is still working. Yet the rules and procedures Congress writes now might determine just how long that remains true. | 2022-10-06T13:09:15Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | How Congress and voters can respond to rising GOP election deniers - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/06/election-deniers-republicans-count-congress/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/06/election-deniers-republicans-count-congress/ |
‘Riotsville, USA’ is a history lesson and a meditation on policing
Documentary uses archival footage to examine the militarization of law enforcement
The documentary “Riotsville, USA” follows the upheaval of the late 1960s, using archival footage, text and poetic voice-over narration. (Magnolia Pictures)
Assembled entirely of archival footage from just a few sources, “Riotsville, USA” deals primarily with a single aspect of late-1960s American history: the official response to uprisings in neglected Black neighborhoods. This tight focus is the documentary’s strength, but also something of a weakness.
The film germinated from director Sierra Pettengill’s discovery of military-shot footage of training exercises at simulated towns, each dubbed Riotsville, USA, built at U.S. Army bases. (The movie mentions two, at Virginia’s Fort Belvoir and Georgia’s Fort Gordon, but doesn’t say if there were more.) Staged as the brass watched enthusiastically from grandstands, the drills pitted soldiers in uniform against their peers, who were dressed in civilian clothing to impersonate urban rioters (and, in one of the movie’s sequences, antiwar protesters).
The filmmakers forgo any interviews with experts on the period, but they do use on-screen text and voice-over narration to sketch its story’s context. After major disturbances in such cities as Los Angeles in 1965 and Chicago in 1966, President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed a study commission that came to be known after its chair, Illinois Gov. Otto Kerner. The Kerner Commission’s 1968 report surprised Johnson (and many others) by denouncing White racism and recommending that the way to end riots was to invest billions in dramatically improving the lives of impoverished inner-city residents.
Fifty years after the Kerner Commission, a new report cites some of the same concerns about race and poverty
That didn’t happen, but the feds did spring for one measure the commission proposed: increased federal funding for local police departments. This led to the erection of Riotsvilles and, indirectly, to today’s militarized U.S. law enforcement.
“Riotsville, USA” includes several clips from “Public Broadcast Laboratory,” a newsmagazine TV show produced from 1967 to 1969 by National Education Television, the precursor to PBS. The excerpts feature mostly Black commentators, as well as folk singer Frederick Douglass Kirkpatrick’s performance of a song bluntly titled “Burn, Baby, Burn.” (No wonder the program lost its funding.)
The documentary’s final section addresses the 1968 Republican National Convention in Miami Beach, which transpired as demonstrators battled police in Liberty City — a Miami neighborhood that was geographically nearby but culturally in another universe. This chapter is constructed mostly from NBC News coverage of the events, featuring anchors Chet Huntley and David Brinkley and sponsored by Gulf. Pettengill includes a Gulf insecticide ad from the convention coverage as a darkly ironic wink at the Riotsville-trained local police’s spraying of tear gas from trucks repurposed from mosquito-eradication duty.
Retropolis: How three violent days gripped a Black Miami neighborhood as Nixon was nominated in 1968
“Riotsville, USA” is as much a meditation as it is a history lesson. The narration, written by critic Tobi Haslett and spoken by actress Charlene Modeste, is poetic, pondering and mostly open-ended. The voice-over is heard only when the footage is digitally distorted so as to undermine the sense of realism. Jace Clayton’s otherworldly electronic score also distances the viewer from the historical images.
The problem with the filmmakers’ strategy is that it assumes significant knowledge of the events of 1968. The documentary elides the aftermath of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, skips Robert F. Kennedy’s killing altogether, and emphasizes disturbances at the Republican National Convention over the bigger and better-known mayhem at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Aside from that one sequence in which military personnel pose as antiwar demonstrators, the movie downplays youth-culture discontent and the anti-Vietnam movement that upended the ’68 presidential race. The film views all of 1968’s upheavals through the prism of racial conflict.
What happened in Chicago in 1968, and why is everybody talking about it now?
What “Riotsville, USA” gets right about that pivotal year, and every year since, is the governmental paranoia and overreaction. When discussing the mid-1960s riots, the film notes that reports of snipers during urban riots were found to be false. Then it shows how soldiers, nonetheless, were dispatched to Riotsvilles and trained to storm the fake buildings in search of snipers.
Unrated. At Landmark’s E Street Cinema and the Cinema Arts Theatre. Contains violence, mostly staged. 91 minutes. | 2022-10-06T13:18:05Z | www.washingtonpost.com | 'Riotsville, USA' is a history lesson and a meditation on policing - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/movies/2022/10/06/riotsville-usa-movie-review/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/movies/2022/10/06/riotsville-usa-movie-review/ |
(María Alconada Brooks/Washington Post illustration; iStock)
Dear Sahaj: How do you handle special occasions that only serve as a negative experience rather than something to celebrate? I dread my birthday every year. For the past several years, I’ve noticed that something bad usually happens around my birthday. One year, it was revealed that my dad had been cheating on my mom right after my birthday. Another year, I had a huge mental breakdown and was almost sent to a facility before my birthday. Earlier this week, my boyfriend’s dog was put to sleep and I was very close to him. I’m writing this question on my birthday, so it’s been a few days since the dog’s passing. Honestly, I’d rather forget about it altogether. My birthday is just something I don’t think is worth celebrating, so I’m usually depressed during my birthday.
However, I've noticed that there's still a part of me that wants to celebrate the occasion, but I don't even know where to start.
How can I turn my birthday, an occasion where bad things usually happen, into something more positive?
— Birthday Blues
Birthday Blues: I’m sorry to hear that there’s been so much pain associated with your birthday.
If you truly don’t want to celebrate your birthday, I’d say: That’s perfectly okay! It’s your prerogative. However, I want to explore the ambivalence in your question further.
You are holding so many different feelings about this day. How can you hold them all at once while also acknowledging that your life is worth celebrating?
You cannot control the circumstances around your birthday, but you can control the circumstances in which you honor and celebrate your life. You have lived through hard times. You have persevered. You have loved and grieved and hurt. You may feel disappointed or angry. You are resilient. You are constantly learning. You are worthy.
All of this can be true at once. Your ambivalence makes sense, but I encourage you to question which feelings you give more power to. It’s important to remember that bad things don’t happen because you were born.
Here are two things to consider:
Think about the good things that have happened around your birthday. Think as far back as you can. Seeing the good can help you counter the narrative that your birthday is always surrounded by negativity.
What are the advantages and disadvantages of celebrating your birthday? Celebrating your birthday or not celebrating your birthday has nothing to do with what else happens around that day. So why then, are you punishing yourself for external things that are not in your control?
Learning to un-associate your actual birthday from all these other painful experiences may require you to lean into celebrating your life in other ways. This might look like celebrating your half birthday, celebrating on the first day of your birthday month, or outsourcing the plans for your birthday and instead allowing your loved ones to plan it for you! You may even want to do something just for you — a small tradition that allows you to celebrate without the hoopla or pressure of involving other people. Maybe it’s journaling, taking yourself out to a nice meal solo, creating a photobook of the last year with things you want to remember, or spending some time making a gratitude list.
The reality is that life is full of suffering, so it’s even more important that we find ways to honor that suffering while cultivating hope and meaning in our daily lives. And remember that joy can be experienced in different ways (and on different days!). You get to decide when and how you do so.
Looking for advice? Ask our columnist Sahaj Kaur Kohli.
Sahaj Kaur Kohli created Brown Girl Therapy to build a mental health community focused on people with bicultural identities and immigrant parents.
Now, as an advice columnist for The Post, Sahaj is answering your questions about mental health, relationship quandaries, work stress and more. Need help figuring out how to have a tough conversation with a friend, or want advice on how to get over burnout? Ask her here. | 2022-10-06T13:31:04Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Ask Sahaj: My birthday depresses me. But I still want to celebrate it. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/10/06/ask-sahaj-birthday-celebrate-depressed/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/10/06/ask-sahaj-birthday-celebrate-depressed/ |
By Stefano Pitrelli
People visit the Vatican Museums on May 3, 2021. (Remo Casilli/Reuters)
ROME — Police detained an American tourist at a Vatican museum after he disfigured two ancient Roman sculptures by hurling them to the floor, authorities said Thursday.
Italian newspapers reported that the man grew angry because he was not allowed “to see the Pope.” A representative for the Vatican Museums told The Washington Post that his motive was unclear.
The world’s cardinals, who will pick the next pope, get to know one another
A police spokesman said the 65-year-old had been in Rome for about three days and appeared to be “psychologically distressed.” He was given an aggravated property damage charge and released, the spokesman said.
“He smashed the two busts to the ground, one after the other,” Alessandrini said. Both of the toppled heads were from the ancient city of Rome, with one depicting an elderly man, and the other, a young man.
When the first hit the ground, “the loud bang echoed through the long gallery,” he said. Two Vatican police officers stationed within the museum arrived within minutes and took the man into custody.
Technicians are now working to reassemble the damaged sculptures, which had been swiftly taken to the museum’s restoration lab after the incident.
The pieces were fixable but would require 300 hours of restoration work, according to Alessandrini. “The scare was bigger than the actual damage,” he said.
A local’s guide to Rome
For Steves, the downside of such incidents may also be “the loss of access to beautiful art in general.”
To avoid other incidents, the museum could choose to put more security up, as was the case after a notorious artwork assault in 1972. That year, a Hungarian geologist attacked Michelangelo’s Pietà in St. Peter’s Basilica with a hammer, damaging the Carrara marble sculpture depicting the Virgin Mary holding Jesus after the crucifixion. The statue was later repaired and put behind bulletproof glass.
“The reality is you can’t even see the Pietà from the angle Michelangelo wanted you to see it,” Steves said. “He wanted you to be up close.”
Francis reported from London. Compton reported from D.C. | 2022-10-06T14:01:38Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Vatican police detain tourist who smashed ancient Roman busts in museum - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2022/10/06/vatican-museum-statue-american-tourist/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2022/10/06/vatican-museum-statue-american-tourist/ |
The best things to do in the D.C. area the week of Oct. 6-12
Sebastian Smee
Sarah L. Kaufman
The Snallygaster beer festival that returns Saturday promises unlimited sampling of more than 400 beers. (Fritz Hahn/The Washington Post)
‘Sargent and Spain’ exhibition at the National Gallery: John Singer Sargent loved Spain. So did almost every French painter of note in the 19th century, from Delacroix to Manet. But while Manet went there only once, returning ahead of schedule (he didn’t like the food, if you can believe it!), Sargent traveled to Spain on numerous occasions over three decades. He clearly took a liking to tapas. The National Gallery of Art has made Sargent’s Spanish work the subject of a show that features landscapes, pictures of Spanish architecture and everyday life, and portraits of locals, as well as 28 never-published photographs, several of which, the NGA says, were “almost certainly taken by Sargent himself.” Through Jan. 2. Free.
Punk rock photography talk: Though D.C.’s Punk Archive library rooftop shows are over for the season, photographer Chris Suspect is still proving that there is in fact nothing more punk than a public library. He is joined by Alec MacKaye at Mount Pleasant Public Library for a discussion on their experiences in the D.C. punk and hardcore scene. A slide show of 100 (some unpublished) images of over 70 punk bands in the last decade will play during the talk. After the event, the DC Punk Archive will exhibit items from its collection. Also after the event, Suspect invites guests to join him for a drink and a bite at a neighborhood bar. 6:30 to 7:30 p.m. Free.
Mount Vernon Fall Wine Festival and Sunset Tour: Like fellow Virginian Thomas Jefferson, George Washington was a wine aficionado, and he attempted to cultivate both Madeira and indigenous grapes at Mount Vernon, with disappointing results. Washington would be impressed with how far Virginia’s wine industry has come, as demonstrated at the annual Mount Vernon Fall Wine Festival. Twenty wineries, including Barboursville, Williamsburg, Fox Meadow and, of course, Jefferson Vineyards, are showcased on the East Lawn, with its Potomac River views. Picnic blankets are encouraged. Three floors of the mansion are open, and the Mount Vernon Inn sells snacks, ranging from charcuterie platters and shrimp rolls to chili dogs and fried cheese curds. Through Sunday (Saturday is sold out.) $53-$68.
‘Guys and Dolls’ at the Kennedy Center: The Kennedy Center’s popular and consistently polished Broadway Center Stage series is back with a potential bang. The cast is to die for: Jessie Mueller as Adelaide, the chorus girl with the accent you could cut with a deli knife; James Monroe Iglehart as Nathan, her gun-shy paramour; Phillipa Soo as the finger-wagging soul saver Sarah; and Steven Pasquale (Soo’s real-life husband) as suaver-than-suave Sky. They’ll all roll the dice with director Marc Bruni. Through Oct. 16. $59-$299.
Leonard Bernstein’s ‘Kaddish’ at Strathmore music hall: Those moved by Leonard Bernstein’s “Mass” — or those unable to score a ticket for the Kennedy Center revival — might consider taking in another of Bernstein’s large-scale spiritual explorations. The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, under conductor James Conlon, takes on Bernstein’s “Kaddish,” featuring speakers Judith and Leah Pisar, soprano Diana Newman, the University of Maryland Concert Choir (led by Jason Ferdinand), and the Maryland State Boychoir (led by Stephen Holmes). Bernstein composed “Kaddish” in 1963 while still at the helm of the New York Philharmonic, dedicating it to President John F. Kennedy after learning of his assassination. The piece’s blend of sacred and secular, as well as the grief and hope churning at its core, make it an arresting counterpart (and counterpoint) to “Mass.” 8 p.m. $35-$90.
‘Sounds of Hazel’ at Sidney Harman Hall: Dance Theatre of Harlem’s world-premiere ballet pays tribute to Hazel Scott, the Trinidad-born and Juilliard-trained civil rights activist who died in 1981. She’d led a trailblazing career as a jazz and classical pianist, singer, movie star and TV host, but the height of her fame coincided with McCarthyism — and she was blacklisted. Over time, her name faded from history. A team of Black female artists, including choreographer Tiffany Rea-Fisher and composer Erica Lewis-Blunt, created “Sounds of Hazel.” Both Dance Theatre of Harlem and Washington Performing Arts, a co-commissioner, kick off their seasons with this work. Friday at 8 p.m.; Saturday at 2 and 8 p.m. $30-$80.
Unite the District at Audi Field: This multiday festival aims to capture the District’s variety of arts, cultures and — most importantly — cuisines. Guests can try tasting from local restaurants and breweries while enjoying live music from local artists like Sugar Bear and E.U., So Fetch and Little Bacon Bear. VIP tickets include chef tastings with Audi Field’s executive chef. These events lead up to Sunday’s faceoff, D.C. United vs. FC Cincinnati, which doubles as fan appreciation night. Friday at 7 p.m.; Saturday at 6 p.m. $45-$120.
White House Fall Garden Tour: While White House tours are generally available Tuesdays through Saturdays, there’s a catch: Guests must first contact their Congress member to request tickets between 21 and 90 days ahead of time. To avoid the hassle, try a White House Fall Garden Tour instead. This doesn’t include a tour of the interior, but visitors can expect close-up sights of the Rose Garden, Jacqueline Kennedy Garden and Kitchen Garden among ornamental trees planted by former presidents. The National Park Service offers timed tickets distributed the day of the tour at 8:30 a.m. at the White House Visitor Center on a first-come, first-served basis. Saturday and Sunday from 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Free with tickets.
Snallygaster Beer Festival: The annual beer festival from the minds behind ChurchKey, Shelter and other D.C. beer bars is the best day of beer drinking in the region, and it isn’t even close. Snallygaster again promises unlimited sampling of more than 400 beers, including festival debuts from such heralded brewers as Lawson’s Finest Liquids, Suarez Family Brewery, Barreled Souls and Burial. Whether you prefer gueuze, barrel-aged stouts, festbiers or hazy double IPAs, you’re sure to find a dream beer on Pennsylvania Avenue downtown, and probably a few surprises along the way. Beyond the ales and lagers, the afternoon includes food trucks, music and a dedicated family area, as well as areas for wine and cocktails. 2 to 6 p.m. $70-$85.
Kids Euro Fest: European embassies are planning special programming for the littlest world travelers as Kids Euro Fest returns this October. After the series began last Saturday with a launch event for children at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library, the fun continues across the city. Kids can learn about pollinators at the former residence of the Spanish ambassador on 16th Street NW (Saturday) or watch a puppet show at the Embassy of Sweden in Georgetown (Oct. 22). The Kids Euro Fest Family Day party at La Maison Française on Oct. 15 is one of the bigger events, with art workshops from Portugal, outdoor games from Estonia, piano music from Germany and a children’s dance performance from Bulgaria. Various dates and locations. Free, but advance registration is required for kids and adults.
Down in the Reeds Festival: Red Baraat — headliner at the third annual festival at the Parks at Walter Reed — is a band of few words but boundless energy. The center of the group’s lively, predominantly instrumental sound is the dhol, an Indian double-sided drum played by frontman Sunny Jain, who, alongside his Brooklyn bandmates, plays traditional Bhangra music that zips into your ears and moves your feet. The group’s 2017 album, “Bhangra Pirates,” is full of dance-friendly songs like “Gaadi of Truth.” So many instruments get their moment here: an electric guitar vigorously keeping up with invigorating drum playing while the staticky horns come in and out. Medicine Singers, also performing at the festival, specialize in powwow music — propulsive Native American drum and vocal music played during cultural celebrations and gatherings. On the group’s most recent self-titled album, the musicians are doing more than honoring their ancestral music, though. Recorded in collaboration with guitarist Yonatan Gat, the album features plenty of unexpected funk and psych-jazz sounds, including some trippy trumpet playing from the late jaimie branch. The organizers of this festival have described it as a “celebration of the healing power of music,” which means Medicine Singers have come to the right place. 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Free; reservations required.
Rock the Park: This free two-day dance festival in Franklin Square — presented by the local nonprofit DowntownDC — offers plenty of reasons to move, showcasing locally and internationally acclaimed DJs specializing in house, soul, go-go and more. Saturday’s headliner is Kenny Dope of Masters at Work, the legendary New York duo who helped popularize house music throughout the ’90s. Earlier in the day, local DJ Geena Marie and go-go troupe TOB are booked to deliver some hometown sounds. On Sunday, the starriest name in the lineup is DJ Jazzy Jeff, a hip-hop pioneer whose career spans sharing the first Grammy for rap music with Will “the Fresh Prince” Smith and helping break neo-soul stars Jill Scott and Musiq Soulchild. Expect a crowd. This is the second year of Rock the Park, and more than 8,000 attended last year. Saturday and Sunday from 4 to 10 p.m. Free.
Foreign Air at Songbyrd: While you may not know the band’s name, it’s possible you’ve heard Foreign Air’s music: The songs from electro-pop duo Jesse Clasen and Jacob Michael have blared behind pulse-pounding scenes on dramas like “Shameless,” “How to Get Away with Murder” and “You.” But the dark synth melodies and cleverly foreboding lyrics featured on shows don’t always capture Foreign Air’s profundity — or its breadth as a multigenre band. The group’s 14-track album “Hello Sunshine” dropped in early September. “Our sophomore record is like a snapshot of our covid journey,” Clasen said. “We sort of fell back into this desire for natural, raw anti-production. We went to a farm in Virginia to finish the album and didn’t think too hard about things. Just guitar, bass, all real drums.” The first half of the new LP steers into candid confessions, backed by heavy synth and incessant high-hat; in “Blue Days,” Clasen sings, “My ego is evil / It’s coming to get me.” But the second half — in a turn more Cage the Elephant than Glass Animals — slows down and smiles toward reflection: “The sun is shining on you now / You’re learning to forgive at last,” Clasen croons through a touch of distortion on “See a Bit More.” 8 p.m. $18-$22.
Interview: Foreign Air’s ‘emotionally true high intensity’ is back on full blast
U.S. Botanic Garden Fall Festival: The Capitol’s garden is in full fall swing. Activities suitable for all ages include cooking demonstrations, DIY paper (crafted from seeds) and talks with the garden’s experts. Guests can expect music and food available for purchase, as well as autumnal views during a stroll through the garden’s manicured paths. 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Free.
Party for the Arts: Canal Center Plaza opened this week in Old Town Alexandria as an arts and culture hub, and its first weekend will feature a celebration for National Arts and Humanities Month. Artists from around Alexandria are invited — musicians, actors, dancers, writers and visual artists — to share and showcase their work. A few performances already on the lineup: Washington Metropolitan Philharmonic, the Local Motion Project and Alexandria Citizens Band. 4 to 7 p.m. Free.
Oyster Wars: Oyster farmers from Maine to Virginia bring their bivalves to Other Half Brewing in Ivy City during this popular fall food event, co-hosted with the Salt Line. Top-notch oysters aren’t the only draw at Oyster Wars; chefs from the Salt Line and other D.C. restaurants, including Oyster Oyster, Bammy’s, Dauphine’s, Queen’s English, Bourbon Steak and Caruso’s Grocery, offer tastings, while out-of-state breweries, such as Maine’s Vitamin Sea Brewing, pour beers at a cash bar. The party’s soundtrack is courtesy of DJs Stylus Chris and Harry Hotter and reggae band See-I, and a portion of ticket sales supports the Oyster Recovery Partnership and Anacostia Riverkeeper. Admission includes oysters and other food. 3 to 6 p.m. $70-$85.
Clifton Day: Hop on the VRE on a Sunday to take a train ride to the tiny and historic town of Clifton for its 54th annual festival. You’ll feel like you’re in the country (within Fairfax’s borders) at Clifton Day, with fall treats like funnel cakes and hot apple cider for sale, alongside an arts and crafts market and antiques vendors galore. Two stages of live music entertain adults, and a special area for kids includes pony rides, face painting and games. While you’re in town, you might want to check out local Clifton eateries like Trummer’s, Villagio and Main Street Pub. 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Free admission; $5 per car to park. Free train rides to Clifton; return trip $5 for passengers 2 and older.
Capital Jewish Food Festival: Sample hickory-smoked whitefish from Ivy City Smokehouse and classic noodle kugel from Bread Furst at the inaugural Capital Jewish Food Festival, happening at the site of the Capital Jewish Museum’s under-construction downtown building. Inspired by the fall harvest festival Sukkot, this ticketed event with local chefs offers complimentary bite-sized samples, with additional fare for purchase. The long list of Jewish dishes available include Call Your Mother’s bagel chips with candied salmon cream cheese, sandwiches from Corned Beef King, Jewish-Italian wedding soup from Prescription Chicken and chili-covered hot dogs from Catalyst Hot Dogs. (Fun fact: The hot dog is widely believed to be the invention of two German-Jewish immigrants in New York City.) In between bites, don’t miss the stage showcasing cooking demos, workshops and speakers including culinary historian Michael Twitty. 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. $15-$50.
Candlelight Concert Society: Now entering its 50th season, the Candlelight Concert Society welcomes the Brentano String Quartet for an evening of Monteverdi, Mozart (his Clarinet Quintet in A Major, K. 581, with clarinetist Alexander Fiterstein) and Dvorak (his Quartet in A-flat Major, Op. 105) at Horowitz Center Smith Theatre. And while you’re at it, this may be a good time to pick up tickets for the society’s Oct. 29 date at Linehan Concert Hall with pianist Marc-André Hamelin. 4 p.m. $10-$45; younger than 17 free with a paying adult.
Astronomy on Tap at DC9: Join Space Telescope Science Institute astronomer Steph LaMassa for an evening of drinking with the stars. DC9 is hosting three related talks in one night, all exploring the discoveries of the James Webb Space Telescope. Following the event, the rooftop bar provides a place to view the stars through a telescope. 8 p.m. Free with reservation.
Tamino at the Black Cat: Singer-songwriter Tamino-Amir Moharam Fouad was born and raised in Belgium to Egyptian and Lebanese parents and is known for blending Western and Arabic musical traditions with a seamless grace. His debut project, 2018’s “Amir,” was a collaboration with the Nagham Zikrayat Orchestra, a dynamic ensemble featuring musicians from all across the Middle East — but on the album’s opening ballad, “Habibi,” Tamino holds his own, gently pulling listeners into the depths of his voice. He returns to the song’s titular lyric — an Arabic term of endearment — again and again, the repetition evoking massive waves surging from a bottomless ocean. On his latest album, this year’s “Sahar,” the arrangements feel equally sparse, leaving sufficient room for the evocative subtlety of Tamino’s lyricism. Over the wistful midtempo guitar jangle of “Fascination,” he describes a failure to see eye to eye with someone, both poetically and chromatically: “None of your colors can be found within the lines of the pages I made mine.” 7:30 p.m. (doors open). $20-$25.
Anniversary celebration at the Wharf: To commemorate the fifth anniversary of its grand opening, the Wharf is hosting its own birthday party — featuring fireworks. Live musical artists performing on the Transit Pier floating stage include Jarreau Williams and the JoGo Project, and the sidewalk will be dotted with booth sales and smaller performances. Some Wharf businesses offer discounts, like the Boathouse’s 55 percent off sale on paddle rentals, while others promote anniversary specials, like Kaliwa’s two birthday cocktails. To end the night, the fireworks finale begins at 7:55 p.m. over the Washington Channel. The celebration kicks off nine months of community events to commemorate the Wharf’s completion. 5 to 8 p.m. Free.
Washington Ballet’s ‘NEXTsteps’: Before the Washington Ballet dives into the holiday classic “The Nutcracker,” the company will focus on more experimental works with its “NEXTsteps” presentation. These shows at Harman Hall in Penn Quarter spotlight modern ballets created specifically for the Washington Ballet, including pieces from choreographers Dana Genshaft and Silas Farley as well as the troupe’s own Andile Ndlovu. Through Oct. 16. $25 -$120. | 2022-10-06T14:14:44Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Beer and wine festivals, concerts and events in the D.C. area - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/10/06/best-things-do-dc-area-week-oct-6-12/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/10/06/best-things-do-dc-area-week-oct-6-12/ |
New movies to stream from home: ‘Mr. Harrigan’s Phone’ and more
Olivia McCormack
Jaeden Martell, left, and Donald Sutherland in “Mr. Harrigan’s Phone.” (Nicole Rivelli/Netflix)
Based on a Stephen King story first published in the 2020 anthology “If It Bleeds,” “Mr. Harrigan’s Phone” may disappoint fans of King’s more traditional horror oeuvre — mostly because it isn’t really horror. But that’s actually what’s best about it. Adapted for the screen by John Lee Hancock, a writer-director not known for spooky movies (“The Founder,” “The Highwaymen” and “The Blind Side”), the film stars Jaeden Martell (“It”) as Craig, a bullied high school kid who has been hired to read aloud to the wealthy old man of the title (Donald Sutherland), a curmudgeon in failing health who over the years becomes the boy’s mentor — so much so that Craig buys Harrigan a 2007 iPhone in gratitude. (The film is set in the 2000s. When Craig explains what the new device can do — spy on you, know what you like, spread disinformation — Harrigan says, prophetically, “All of us ought to be very frightened by this gizmo.”) After Harrigan dies and is buried with his phone, there is some suggestion of communication from beyond the grave, and some suspicious deaths follow. But King and Hancock don’t go very far with that, leaving the story’s supernatural elements implicit rather than explicit, in favor of a ghost story that works better — and pretty well at that — as a metaphor: a creepy, atmospheric cautionary tale about digital surveillance and the tyranny of electronics. PG-13. Available on Netflix. Contains mature thematic material, some strong language, violent content and brief drug material. 106 minutes. — M.O.
John Lee Hancock Q&A: ‘The Founder’ paints a mixed portrait of the man who took McDonald’s global
For anyone who may have been waiting 35 years to see a female version of the 1987 horror film “Hellraiser’s” bad guy — dubbed “Pinhead” by fans for the character’s facial acupuncture — gender equity is finally here. After multiple sequels, a rebooted version of “Hellraiser” has arrived, with mind-bending visuals and buckets full of gore — but it isn’t just another sequel. As director David Bruckner (“V/H/S”) put it, it’s more a “reimagining” than “strict canon.” In the 11th film in the franchise, the original film’s theme of vice is reprised in the lustful and newly sober character Riley (Odessa A’zion), who is struggling to live with her brother, her brother’s partner and a fourth, easily forgotten roommate. Behind on her bills and hoping for an easy score, the impulsive protagonist and her new beau steal a locked-up puzzle box after its sadistic millionaire owner goes missing. (The box will be familiar to fans of the earlier movies for its ability to open a portal to a realm of sexualized supernatural beings who push pain as the ultimate pleasure. They’re menacing as ever.) In no time, the box begins to do its thing, which isn’t pretty. Luckily, there’s an entire supporting cast of underdeveloped, fresh faces to sate the box’s appetite for carnage. No genuine relationships are established over the course of the film’s two hours (which seem longer), making the deaths lack a certain sense of devastation — even if the shock factor remains. “Hellraiser” could have used a little less on-screen cutting, and a bit more in the editing room, but it succeeds in one crucial regard: making a post-screening walk in the park with your dog after dark a lot more nerve-racking. R. Available on Hulu. Contains strong bloody horror, violence and gore, coarse language throughout, some sexual material and brief graphic nudity. 120 minutes. — O.M.
Can $190,000 guarantee a better life? That is the question initially confronted by the jubilant title character in “To Leslie,” the feature directorial debut of TV veteran Michael Morris, about a lottery winner played by Andrea Riseborough. Life for Leslie and her young son, you would think, would change for the better. But six years after the win, Leslie has been kicked out of a motel and shunned by everyone she knows and is living from bottle to bottle, with barely a cent to her name. Any attempt to start anew is met with hesitation from her now-grown son, James (Owen Teague), who has made a living for himself. (At one point, when Leslie invites James to the zoo, he asks her: What if people stood around and watched you suffer? They already do, she tells him.) Although the how and the why of Leslie’s downfall are parceled only out in pieces by screenwriter Ryan Binaco, Leslie dwells in the past, returning to the bar where her life once changed. Now she’s had so many second chances that, to others, she’s past the point of saving. Life has moved on, and everyone — especially two close friends (Stephen Root and Allison Janney) — remember only the burdensome train wreck that Leslie’s life has become. The film’s theme of redemption may be overly familiar, but Riseborough rises to the occasion, delivering a vulnerable performance as a woman who has been one long disappointment to her friends. The list of crossed-out phone numbers she carries highlights just how many bridges Leslie has burned as she tries to set herself straight. By the time two motel owners (Marc Maron and Andre Royo) try to throw Leslie a lifeline near the end of the film, you’ll be ready for her to put the bottle down and clean up her act. R. Available on demand. Contains strong language throughout and some drug use. 119 minutes. — O.D.
In “Luckiest Girl Alive,” Mila Kunis plays a New Yorker who seems to have it all — great job, hunky fiance and a planned wedding in Nantucket — until questions from a documentary filmmaker cause her to re-examine a troubling high school incident from her past. R. Available on Netflix. Contains violence, rape, sexual material, strong language throughout and teen substance use. 115 minutes.
Dolph Lundgren and Frank Grillo face off in “Operation Seawolf,” a nautical action thriller about Germany’s effort to attack the U.S. homeland by sea in the waning days of World War II. Unrated. Available on demand. 86 minutes.
Winner of an Audience Award at this year’s SXSW Film Festival, “Pretty Problems” is a relationship comedy — Deadline calls it “laugh-out-loud” funny — set in wine country. Unrated. Available on demand. 103 minutes.
The documentary “The Redeem Team” follows the efforts of the U.S. men’s basketball team to redeem itself at the 2008 Olympics after winning only a bronze medal in 2004. TV-MA. Available on Netflix. 98 minutes.
Born from the fires of 2004 failures, Team USA basketball now built to last
While hiking in the remote woods, a couple (Jake Lacy of “White Lotus” and Maika Monroe of “It Follows”) experience sinister events in the horror film “Significant Other.” R. Available on Paramount Plus. Contains violence, gore and strong language. 90 minutes. | 2022-10-06T14:14:56Z | www.washingtonpost.com | New movies to stream from home this week - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/movies/2022/10/06/october-7-new-streaming-movie-roundup/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/movies/2022/10/06/october-7-new-streaming-movie-roundup/ |
Post Politics Now Biden heads to New York to herald IBM’s major investment in Hudson Valley
Noted: Fetterman campaign says it raised $22 million in third quarter
On our radar: Republicans target a House seat in deep-blue Rhode Island
Noted: Governor races in at least five states could determine abortion legality
On our radar: Biden’s visit to Hudson Valley a reminder of Democrats’ win
On our radar: Majority of GOP nominees — 299 in all — deny 2020 election results
Noted: Biden ‘disappointed’ in ruling that DACA program is unlawful
President Biden and first lady Jill Biden return to the White House after visiting Fort Myers, Fla., to survey hurricane damage. (Leigh Vogel/Pool/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)
Today, President Biden is traveling to New York to tour IBM’s facility as the company promotes a $20 billion investment in the Hudson Valley over 10 years, focused on semiconductors, computers, artificial intelligence and other programs. Ahead of the midterm elections, Biden and Democrats have highlighted the bipartisan law to boost production of domestic semiconductor chips.
Biden late Wednesday criticized a federal appeals court ruling that said a program to protect nearly 600,000 young immigrants, known as “dreamers,” from deportation is illegal. The three-judge panel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit allowed those already enrolled to renew their status, but the future of the program — commonly known as DACA — is uncertain.
2 p.m. Biden delivers remarks on job creation at the IBM plan. Watch live here.
4 p.m. Vice President Harris swears in Arati Prabhakar to be director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.
5 p.m. Biden participates in a reception for the Democratic National Committee in Red Bank, N.J.
8 p.m. Biden participates in a reception for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee in New York City.
Got a question about politics? Submit it here. After 3 p.m. weekdays, return to this space and we’ll address what’s
on the mind of readers.
Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) is urging Arizona voters to reject GOP gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake and secretary of state candidate Mark Finchem, calling them threats to democracy and urging voters to back their Democratic rivals.
“If you care about democracy, and you care about the survival of our republic, then you need to understand, we all have to understand, that we cannot give people power who have told us that they will not honor elections,” Cheney said.
The congresswoman is one of former president Donald Trump’s fiercest critics and vice chair of the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by a pro-Trump mob. She spoke late Wednesday at the McCain Institute’s “Defending American Democracy Series” at Arizona State University.
Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. John Fetterman (D) on Thursday announced that his campaign for Senate had raised $22 million in the third quarter — doubling his second quarter total of $11 million. Fetterman is running against Republican Mehmet Oz to fill the seat of Sen. Patrick J. Toomey (R-Pa.), who is retiring.
The massive reported fundraising haul indicates Fetterman’s campaign has not slowed down, despite fears that it might be hampered after he suffered a stroke in May and was absent from the campaign trail for weeks.
By Theodoric Meyer, Leigh Ann Caldwell and Tobi Raji
JOHNSTON, R.I. — Seth Magaziner, the Democratic nominee for an open House seat in Rhode Island, stood in a senior center in this Providence suburb on Wednesday morning, trying to convince Democrats frustrated with high inflation and a weakening economy not to vent their frustrations by voting Republican.
The race should not be competitive. President Biden won the district by nearly 14 points in 2020. Democratic Rep. Jim Langevin has held the seat with little trouble for more than two decades, winning by almost 17 points two years ago. A Republican has not won a House seat in Rhode Island in 30 years.
The future of abortion access in a handful of battleground states may be determined by the winners of their governor’s mansions in November.
Democrats are leaning into that message on the campaign trail, seeking to make the November elections a referendum on what they describe as the Republican Party’s extreme position on abortion. This dynamic is playing out in gubernatorial contests in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia and Arizona — all of which have GOP-controlled state legislatures.
As Rachel Roubein reports in The Health 202:
One of the highlights for Democrats this past summer was a surprising win in New York’s 19th Congressional District, which encompasses the Catskills and the mid-Hudson Valley.
Democrat Pat Ryan — who made abortion rights the centerpiece of his campaign — defeated Republican Marc Molinaro in a special election in August by just over two percentage points. President Biden had won the district by a little more than one point in 2020.
Democratic leaders were buoyed by the results as they face the traditional head winds that cause a party in power to lose seats in a midterm year. They also remain convinced that the Supreme Court decision that took away a national right to an abortion will energize voters as they cast their ballots in the coming weeks.
A majority of Republican nominees on the ballot in November for the House, Senate and key statewide offices — 299 in all — have denied or questioned the outcome of the last presidential election, according to a Washington Post analysis.
Candidates who have challenged or refused to accept Joe Biden’s victory are running in every region of the country and in nearly every state. Republican voters in four states nominated election deniers in all federal and statewide races that The Post examined.
President Biden said he was disappointed in a ruling late Wednesday by an appeals court that the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, was unlawful.
The ruling ordered a lower court review of the program, which was started in 2012 under the Obama administration and prevents “dreamers” — undocumented immigrants who were brought to the United States as children — from being deported.
While the program is intact for now, the decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit stops new DACA applications. | 2022-10-06T14:23:28Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Biden heads to New York to herald IBM investment in Hudson Valley - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/06/biden-new-york-ibm/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/06/biden-new-york-ibm/ |
Gun-control groups urge government to drop Sutherland Springs appeal
Crosses for members of the Holcombe family are part of a makeshift memorial for those who were killed in the Sutherland Springs Baptist Church shooting in Sutherland Springs, Tex. (Eric Gay/AP)
More than three dozen prominent gun-control groups accused the Justice Department on Thursday of “retraumatizing” survivors of the 2017 mass shooting in Sutherland Springs, Tex., by appealing a lawsuit that found the United States Air Force partially responsible for the attack.
Last year, a U.S. district judge found that the government was “60 percent liable” for the attack because it failed to submit records that should have prevented the shooter from buying guns, among other missteps. A few months later, the judge ordered the government to pay the victims more than $230 million in damages. But the Justice Department appealed the ruling, which has left survivors struggling to pay expensive, ongoing medical bills.
In a letter signed by Brady United Against Gun Violence, March for Our Lives and Everytown for Gun Safety, the organizations said it was “well past time” for the government to take responsibility for its “failures” and “lethal inaction” that led to the deadly 2017 shooting. Twenty-six people were killed and 20 others were wounded when former airman Devin Kelley armed with an AR-15-style rifle opened fire inside the First Baptist Church of Sutherland Springs in November 2017. Kelley died by suicide after the attack.
The groups argued the continued legal battle would undermine the "integrity” of existing gun laws, including the nation’s background check system, and delay justice for a community that continues to suffer “irreparable trauma.”
“The government’s apparent refusal to accept responsibility for its failure in this case actively undermines the very gun safety laws it is required to enforce,” the letter reads. “In seeking this appeal, the government is choosing to prolong the suffering that grieving families and injured survivors will endure.”
The letter comes as a DOJ official confirmed that the parties are in mediation.
During the trial, Justice Department lawyers argued that the Sutherland Springs gunman’s violence was “unforeseeable” and that background checks would not have stopped the massacre. That legal position runs counter to the Biden administration’s efforts to expand background checks as a deterrent to such mass shootings.
The letter was released Thursday morning; the Department of Justice did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Dozens of victims sued the United States Air Force in 2018 after the branch said it failed to report Kelley’s history of violence, including a 2012 conviction for domestic assault, to the FBI. That conviction, which led to Kelley’s dismissal from the Air Force, should have prevented the former airman from being able to buy the guns he used in the attack.
U.S. District Judge Xavier Rodriguez later found that the Air Force was 60 percent liable for the shooting, pointing to other details uncovered in the case, including that Air Force officials were aware Kelley had previously researched and threatened a mass shooting and had a history of severe mental health issues that led officials to declare him to be “dangerous” and “a threat.”
According to testimony and evidence in the case, Air Force officials were so alarmed by Kelley’s threats of violence that he was permanently barred not only from the New Mexico air base where he served, but also all bases around the country. Yet Air Force officials failed to report his conviction to the FBI background check system or warn others of his potential for violence, a decision that Rodriguez condemned in a July 2021 ruling.
“The trial conclusively established that no other individual — not even Kelley’s own parents or partners — knew as much as the United States about the violence that Devin Kelley had threatened to commit and was capable of committing,” Rodriguez wrote.
In February, Rodriguez ordered the government to pay more than $230 million to 84 victims and survivors. But in June, the Justice Department gave notice that it planned to appeal that judgment, further delaying any final outcome in the case.
Those involved in the case say the appeal has added to the anguish of survivors, who are struggling to pay expensive medical bills related to their debilitating physical injuries and lingering emotional trauma.
Attorneys for the Justice Department’s civil division, which is handling the case, have not yet disclosed their grounds for appeal. But opponents have seized on their court statements that background checks would not have stopped the violence.
“It’s an absurd argument,” said Kris Brown, the president of Brady United Against Gun Violence, who helped organize the letter to Garland. “A working background check system is our greatest defense and will stop these kinds of shootings.”
In recent weeks, the Justice Department appeared to open the door to resolving the case. In an August statement, Dena Iverson, a spokeswoman, said the department would “continue to engage in a review of this case while it remains on appeal in the Fifth Circuit, considering all options for reaching a resolution, including possible mediation or settlement.”
Last month, government attorneys requested and were granted an extension by the appeals court to file their brief outlining their appeal — pushing back the deadline from Oct. 11 to Nov. 11, just days after the fifth anniversary of the attack.
Even as the Justice Department appealed this case, it has settled with other victims of mass shootings over background check errors. Last October, the Justice Department agreed to pay $88 million to the families of nine people killed in the 2015 shooting at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, S.C., to settle claims that background check errors allowed the gunman to buy a weapon. Weeks later, the government agreed to pay $127.5 million to the families of those killed in the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., over claims the FBI failed to act on tips about the gunman. Both cases were settled before they went to trial.
Groups representing families and survivors from Parkland, Newtown, Conn., and other prominent mass shootings over the past decade were among those who signed Thursday’s letter in support of the Sutherland Springs survivors — which mentions those other settled lawsuits.
“Please allow these victims to finally close this horrific chapter of their lives and move forward,” the letter reads. “Please withdraw your appeal. Please deliver justice.” | 2022-10-06T14:23:32Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Gun-control groups urge government to drop Sutherland Springs appeal - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/10/06/sutherland-springs-justice-department/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/10/06/sutherland-springs-justice-department/ |
Delta Phi Epsilon official improperly benefited from foundation, judge rules
The former Delta Phi Epsilon fraternity house in Northwest Washington, seen in August 2021. (Fredrick Kunkle/The Washington Post)
A D.C. Superior Court judge has found that a longtime officer of Delta Phi Epsilon, a once-prominent foreign service fraternity associated with Georgetown University, took control of the nonprofit organization and a related foundation and used their charitable assets for his own benefit.
Superior Court Judge Shana Frost Matini found that Terrence J. Boyle used charitable funds from the Delta Phi Epsilon Foundation for Foreign Service Education to help purchase a $345,000 house in the District for himself in 1990, court documents say. The property, on 34th Street NW, is now worth more than $1.1 million.
The judge also determined that Boyle oversaw the sale of the fraternity’s 80-year-old chapter house, also in Georgetown, without proper authorization from its members. The house was first donated to the DPE foundation under Boyle’s control in May and then sold a month later to a private buyer for $2.6 million, well below its appraised value of more than $4 million, court papers say.
The court said Boyle violated his fiduciary duties and laws governing nonprofits by disposing of the fraternity’s primary asset without obtaining prior approval from members.
D.C. attorney general accuses Delta Phi Epsilon member of using charitable funds to benefit himself
The ruling — handed up Sept. 21 and based only on allegations whose underlying facts were not in serious dispute — represents a partial victory for Attorney General Karl A. Racine (D), whose office filed a civil complaint against Boyle in June 2021. The court did not order any remedies as part of its judgment. The remaining allegations will proceed to trial.
Defense attorney Harvey J. Volzer, in seeking reconsideration of the decision, argued that the ruling was unfair and based on an incomplete record of evidence — more than 40 defense documents were excluded from consideration because they had not been properly submitted to the court.
Volzer, in court papers, attributed the procedural lapse to a serious case of covid-19 for which he was hospitalized and to the actions of his secretary. Volzer did not respond to phone calls and an email seeking comment.
Boyle, 81, pledged the DPE Alpha Chapter in 1963 as an undergraduate at Georgetown University and remained deeply involved in its financial and social affairs for the next four decades. He managed the chapter house, oversaw fraternity pledging and organized and participated in a variety of social events, including trips to a Caribbean resort, said several former fraternity members. He served as an officer in the foundation and the fraternity from the 1980s until his resignation in 2021. The fraternity has at least 900 members and alumni.
The attorney general’s office, which has taken legal action against several nonprofit organizations for the alleged misuse of charitable funds, announced the ruling, along with favorable decisions in two other cases, in a news release Wednesday.
“Nonprofits receive substantial tax benefits because these organizations, and the people who manage them, are legally required to operate in a manner that is consistent with the organization’s public mission (the public good), not for private benefit,” Racine said in a written statement.
A spokeswoman for his office declined to comment on whether the DPE allegations had been referred for possible criminal investigation. | 2022-10-06T14:23:33Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Delta Phi Epsilon official improperly benefited from foundation, judge rules - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/06/delta-phi-epsilon-terrence-boyle-court/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/06/delta-phi-epsilon-terrence-boyle-court/ |
Pedestrian struck and killed by driver in D.C.’s Mt. Vernon neighborhood
(Clarence Williams/The Washington Post)
A pedestrian was struck and killed Wednesday by a driver in D.C.’s Mount Vernon neighborhood, police said.
The incident happened around 5:21 a.m. at the intersection of 10th Street and Massachusetts Avenue NW.
An initial investigation found the driver of a Dodge Charger was headed west in the 900 block of Massachusetts Avenue NW near 10th Street NW.
D.C. police said the pedestrian — who was later identified as Venancie Musabe, 60, of Fredericksburg — was trying to cross Massachusetts Avenue from the south side of the street to the north side when the Dodge struck her. Musabe was taken to a hospital and later died. Police said the driver stayed on the scene.
Anyone who has information about the crash is asked to call police at 202-727-9099. | 2022-10-06T14:23:41Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Pedestrian struck and killed in D.C.’s Mt. Vernon area - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/06/pedestrian-killed-mtvernon-dc/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/06/pedestrian-killed-mtvernon-dc/ |
Two people were killed in a crash in Tysons, Va., police said. (iStock) (iStock)
Two people are dead after a crash in Tysons, and police said it appears speed was a factor.
The incident happened early Thursday along the eastbound lanes of Route 7, also called Leesburg Pike, near Chain Bridge Road. Both people were pronounced dead at the scene. Their names were not released, pending notification of their families.
The road’s eastbound sides were shut down, and one lane was getting by on the westbound side in the morning rush hour. Drivers were advised to avoid the area, police said. | 2022-10-06T14:23:48Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Two people dead in crash in Tysons Corner - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/06/two-people-dead-crash-tysons-corner/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/06/two-people-dead-crash-tysons-corner/ |
MLB playoffs expansion aims for fairness without killing the fun
Three-game wild-card series helps good teams that barely lose their divisions. But it still leaves room for an underdog to become a champion.
Philadelphia Phillies players celebrate after clinching a playoff berth Monday. The Phillies will finish in third place in the National League East, but their record is good enough for them to be one of three National League wild-card teams. In recent years, the National and American leagues had two wild cards each. (Brett Coomer/AP)
The Major League Baseball (MLB) playoffs begin Friday. The top six teams in the American and National leagues will play for the next few weeks to see which two teams will compete in the 2022 World Series.
The playoffs are different this year. First, the playoffs have expanded from five teams in each league to six, including three “wild card” teams, or teams with the best records that didn’t win a division.
Instead of one “win or go home” game between the two wild-card teams, the three wild-card teams and the division winner with the worst regular season record will play in best-of-three-game series. The two division winners with the best regular season records will wait to play the winners in a best-of-five-game series.
The folks at MLB say this system is more fair. It was tough for a wild-card team that had a terrific record to have their season come down to one all-or-nothing game.
But the MLB playoffs are not designed to be fair. After all, the Houston Astros and Los Angeles Dodgers have spent the 162-game season proving they are the best teams in the American and National leagues.
After Tuesday’s games, the Astros had won 105 games, six more than any other American League team. The Dodgers have won an amazing 110 games and outscored their opponents by an incredible 329 runs.
If they wanted to be fair, MLB would just place the Astros and the Dodgers in the World Series and let them play seven games. The MLB playoffs, however, are designed to be fun with lots of dramatic games where one hit or one pitch could make all the difference.
The best teams do not always win in a short series. In the nine seasons since MLB expanded the playoffs to include a wild-card game (I did not count the pandemic-shortened 2020 season), the team with the best regular season record in its league has gone to the World Series less than half of the time (7 out of 18).
Washington baseball fans know that. The Nationals had the best record in the National League in 2012 and 2014 but did not make the World Series. In 2019, the Nats qualified for the playoffs as a wild card and won it all.
Any team can have a streak in which they win or lose a few games in a row. The Dodgers won 110 games this season, but even they had some losing streaks. Five times during their spectacular 2022 season, the Dodgers lost at least three games in a row. One time, they lost four in a row.
So watch as many playoff games as you can. The Astros and Dodgers are not guaranteed to make the World Series. Anything can happen in the MLB playoffs. And usually does.
Father and son turned their passion for sports into a podcast
Playing college sports is about life lessons more than championships
Serena Williams to retire as greatest women’s tennis player of all time | 2022-10-06T14:58:36Z | www.washingtonpost.com | MLB playoffs expansion aims for fairness without killing the fun - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/kidspost/2022/10/06/mlb-playoffs-expansion-aims-fairness-without-killing-fun/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/kidspost/2022/10/06/mlb-playoffs-expansion-aims-fairness-without-killing-fun/ |
Cheney urges Ariz. voters to reject GOP candidates for governor, secretary of state
Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) on July 12, 2022. (Al Drago/Bloomberg)
Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) urged voters in Arizona to reject Republican nominees for governor and secretary of state, describing them as threats to democracy because they have worked to overturn election results in 2020 and indicated they may not accept the outcome this year.
The congresswoman, one of former president Donald Trump’s fiercest critics, is vice chair of the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by a pro-Trump mob. She spoke late Wednesday at the McCain Institute’s “Defending American Democracy Series.”
Cheney’s targets were Republican gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake, a former television reporter, and secretary of state candidate Mark Finchem, a state legislator. Lake has been endorsed by Trump and, like Finchem, falsely claims the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. Finchem was at the Capitol on Jan. 6 when it was attacked by Trump supporters looking to stop Congress from confirming Joe Biden’s win. He also said he was interviewed by federal officials about the attack, but has denied any wrongdoing.
Lake has called President Biden an “illegitimate president” while echoing Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was rigged. Finchem has said that if he had been secretary of state in 2020, he would not have certified Biden’s win in the state.
Lake and Finchem have suggested that next month’s midterm results could be tainted by fraud.
Reviews of the state’s 2020 election results have shown no widespread fraud.
Public polling shows Lake is in a statistical tie with her Democratic opponent, Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs. There is not widespread polling in the secretary of state race, where Finchem faces Democrat Adrian Fontes, a former Maricopa County Recorder.
Pressed by an attendee on what a Republican voter should do, Cheney said, “I don’t know that I have ever voted for a Democrat. But if I lived in Arizona now, I absolutely would — and for governor and for secretary of state.”
The comments Wednesday from Cheney are her latest warning to Republicans and come after her sharp break with the GOP following the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol by supporters of Trump who believed his false claims that he won the election.
Her warning also comes as more than 200 election deniers are on the ballot across the country in the midterms, posing not only a potential threat to this year’s counting and certification of election results but potentially in the presidential election in 2024 as well.
The McCain Institute is named after the state’s late Republican senator — Sen. John McCain, who criticized Trump and drew his wrath.
Since the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, Cheney has spoken out not only against Trump but his supporters in the party and candidates who, like Trump, refuse to accept the results of the 2020 election. Her rebuke won her adulation across the aisle but made her a pariah in her party. She was deposed from a leadership position in the Republican House caucus and in August she lost her GOP primary for reelection.
12:05 PMOn our radar: Biden’s visit to Hudson Valley a reminder of Democrats’ win | 2022-10-06T15:02:45Z | www.washingtonpost.com | In Arizona, Cheney urges voters to reject GOP candidates for governor, secretary of state - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/06/cheney-arizona-republicans-trump/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/06/cheney-arizona-republicans-trump/ |
A supporter listens as Georgia Republican Senate candidate Herschel Walker participates in his Unite Georgia Bus Tour in Forsyth, Ga., on Sept. 28. (Erik S. Lesser/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)
Right-wing radio host Dana Loesch was blunt in her assessment of the report this week that Georgia Republican Senate candidate Herschel Walker had paid for a girlfriend’s abortion, a report the candidate denies.
There are probably Walker supporters in Georgia for whom this isn’t the case, people who believe that he’s a better candidate than incumbent Sen. Raphael G. Warnock (D) or who appreciate Walker’s more conservative positions on issues. But given the barrage of stories about Walker and the myriad questions about his honesty, it seems clear that Loesch’s approach — hold your nose and win the Senate — will be a central part of Walker’s support.
But will it be enough? Can unvarnished partisan desire for control of the Senate actually win Walker the seat?
We went through a relatively similar test of this five years ago. In 2017, Alabama held a special election to fill a Senate seat left vacant by Jeff Sessions’s appointment as U.S. attorney general. As the final vote approached, pitting Republican Roy Moore against Democrat Doug Jones, The Washington Post reported that Moore was accused of groping a 14-year-old girl in the 1970s. Moore rejected the report and President Donald Trump, who’d endorsed him, stood by his candidate.
But on Election Day, Jones scraped out a narrow victory, carving out a bit of blue in the dark-red Deep South.
How’d it happen? Exit polling showed that Moore saw significant defections from members of his own party. Republicans made up more of the electorate than Democrats (43 to 37 percent) but Democrats were much more likely to vote for Jones, the Democrat, than Republicans were to support Moore. Ninety-eight percent of Democrats backed Jones. Only 91 percent of Republicans voted for Moore. Add in Jones’s advantage with independents and that was that.
Compare that with the results in 2016, when Hillary Clinton won the popular vote in the presidential contest by a wider margin. That year, according to Pew Research Center validated polling, both Clinton and Trump earned about the same level of support from their parties, and about the same level of support from independents. That Democrats made up more of the electorate — and that Republicans were more likely to vote third-party — helped Clinton earn more votes (though not the presidency).
This seems natural. Republicans mostly vote for the Republican and Democrats for the Democrat. That’s the point of parties, right? But it hasn’t always been the case. The Roper Center’s archive of exit polling shows how party loyalty in presidential races has increased over the past 50 years, particularly among Democrats.
The big dip is 1992, when the third-party candidate Ross Perot jumbled party loyalty.
The 2020 presidential contest ended up being a robust demonstration of the effects of party loyalty. Democrats overwhelmingly backed Biden and Republicans Trump, with each party making up a similar portion of the electorate. The difference was independents, who preferred Biden by a significant margin.
Presidential races are not Senate races, certainly, but there has been an increasing correlation between how voters vote in Senate races and how they vote for president.
You can see that below. Over time, the dots (representing the margin in the presidential vote from top to bottom and in a state’s Senate race from left to right) begin to align with the diagonal. Votes for president increasingly look like votes for Senate. The calculated correlation is shown in the gray bar; by 2020, the correlation between the two votes was very strong.
But there are other important ways in which the Walker race is not analogous to either presidential contests or the Alabama special election. For one, control of the Senate was not immediately at stake in Alabama, while a Walker victory would make a flip to the GOP in 2023 much more likely.
For another, the Moore-Jones race was the only contest on the ballot. If you were a Republican who found Moore distasteful there was no reason to go vote at all. In November, that’s not the case. Republican voters will want to vote in House races and in state-level contests, including for governor.
That incumbent Gov. Brian Kemp (R) has a healthy lead in the polls might reduce that pull to some extent, certainly. It’s worth noting, though, that a Kemp-Warnock crossover vote is hardly inconceivable. As I wrote in July, there is much more willingness from voters to back a governor of one party and a Senate candidate from the other.
This happened in Georgia in 2020, of course: with a Republican governor, the state nonetheless elected two Democrats to the Senate.
In Fox News polling released late last month, Kemp had the support of 94 percent of Republicans while his opponent, Stacey Abrams, earned 91 percent of the vote from Democrats. By contrast, Walker was supported by only 82 percent of Republicans, while Warnock was backed by 95 percent of his own party. Less than half of Republicans said they were enthusiastic about voter for Walker — and that was before the latest round of stories about the Republican candidate.
Walker has another important advantage, of course: an insular conservative media ecosystem willing to help keep Republican voters engaged. Walker had a softball interview on the heavily watched Fox News show “Fox & Friends” on Wednesday (also before the latest stories to emerge), conducted by the same guy who in August joined Walker for what served as an extended infomercial about the candidate’s campaign.
Will it be enough? Will Republican desire for control of the Senate be enough to look past Walker’s personal history and his pattern of dishonesty and exaggeration? Or will his name become a shorthand for the importance of candidate quality like Roy Moore or Christine O’Donnell?
Georgia voters will answer that question. | 2022-10-06T15:02:48Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Herschel Walker poses an unusual test of the strength of partisanship - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/06/walker-georgia-senate-republicans/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/06/walker-georgia-senate-republicans/ |
Prominent influencer sues TikTok over ads she says misused her image
The lawsuit highlights another gap in regulation of an online industry that has grown rapidly in recent years
Bethenny Frankel attends the premiere of "Stranger Things" in Brooklyn on May 14. (Evan Agostini/Invision/AP)
A prominent online influencer and reality TV star filed a lawsuit Thursday against TikTok, claiming that the platform has failed to crack down on scam ads using her videos to promote counterfeit products.
Bethenny Frankel, who has more than 990,000 followers on TikTok and was featured in the Bravo television series “The Real Housewives of New York,” says she was scrolling through TikTok on Sept. 16 when many of her followers began asking about an ad they’d seen featuring her promoting a cheap knockoff designer cardigan.
But Frankel, as she alleges in the suit filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, said she never agreed to promote the knockoff cardigan. Instead, she said, a scammer had taken a previous video in which she talked about a different cardigan and edited it to make it look like she was endorsing the knockoff. According to the lawsuit, a summary of which was provided to The Washington Post, Frankel immediately posted a TikTok video alerting her followers to the fake ad and reported the ad through TikTok’s content-flagging system. Within minutes, her video about the incident was removed for bullying.
Frankel is now seeking damages from TikTok for the harm that the fake ad has caused to her brand and wants the company to agree to institute better protections surrounding a creator’s likeness.
“First and foremost, I want there to be a tangible change, whether it’s an act, a law, a process, a step, that protects content creators,” Frankel said in an interview. “An effort needs to be made by TikTok to protect creators and consumers. There are people who purchased these products after they saw these ads with me in them.”
TikTok said it takes claims of copyright and intellectual property infringement very seriously and offers several portals on its website where users can flag content that violates the platform’s guidelines. “We have strict policies to both protect people’s hard earned intellectual property and keep misleading content off of TikTok,” said Ashley Nash-Hahn, a TikTok spokesperson. “We regularly review and improve our policies and processes in order to combat increasingly sophisticated fraud attempts and further strengthen our systems.”
The use of video creators like Frankel to market products on the internet has become a major industry in recent years and influencer marketing spend is expected to total approximately $16.4 billion by the end of this year, according to industry analysts Influencer Marketing Hub. That market is likely to grow at an annual rate of more than 33 percent between the years 2022 to 2030, according to Grand View Research, a business consulting firm.
But that growth has not been accompanied by similar developments of guidelines and rules about how influencers’ images can be used, and abuse, creators say, is common.
Influencers’ reputations are built on maintaining trust with their followers. As more creators post content on TikTok, they say their videos are being used for spammy advertisements hawking subpar products. These ads aren’t simply a nuisance, creators said — they can have major consequences for a creator’s business.
Frankel said she was flooded with messages for days when the fake ad was running on TikTok. “People were saying, ‘I thought you sold out. You’re hawking these bad products,’ ” she said. “It’s such a violation of me as a brand, a media figure. You can’t decide to just use me as an advertisement day in and day out.”
Vanessa Flaherty, president of Digital Brand Architects, an influencer management company and marketing agency, said such abuse can damage a creator’s business. “The value of a creator is in how they recommend products and what brands they stand behind,” she said. “If that’s being taken out of context and being applied to a brand they have not and may never want to endorse or support, that puts their credibility at risk.”
The spam ads can also have legal consequences for creators. Often, content creators sign exclusive deals with brands in specific categories. An ad promoting a competitor’s product, even if their likeness was used unlawfully, could put them in breach of contract with a brand they’ve signed a partnership deal with, Flaherty said.
Tamping down on these fake ads has been a struggle for influencers and brands alike. In her suit, Frankel asks that TikTok create a way for influencers to flag unauthorized ads internally so that they can be swiftly removed.
A representative from Jenni Kayne, a clothing brand, said the company contacted TikTok in mid-September to report ads for a counterfeit product, featuring influencers including Frankel. Representatives from Jenni Kayne submitted a trademark certificate, links to the offending ads and screenshots of the third-party site, along with a formal report to TikTok. Still, the ads weren’t removed for at least 10 days, the company said.
“It was over 20 emails of us begging them,” said Alexa Ritacco, Jenni Kayne’s chief marketing officer. “It took TikTok so long to respond. It was so clear they did not have a protocol for this. We were getting hundreds of direct messages per day about the counterfeit ads."
“Users can report content in the app, and they may escalate concerns related to copyright or trademark infringement via our website,” said Nash-Hahn, the TikTok spokesperson. “Advertising content passes through multiple levels of verification before receiving approval, and we have measures in place to detect and remove fraudulent or violative ads.”
Still, some ads slip through the cracks and creators have taken to TikTok themselves to try to get the message out to followers.
“I can’t believe I have to say this,” Lindsay Albanese, a TikTok creator and founder of online marketplace TheFileist.com, said in a TikTok video to her 656,00 followers in late September. “But if you see an ad out there of me trying to sell a bra, it is a scam. They took my TikTok video … and edited it like I was talking about their bra.”
She said that attempts to flag the issue to TikTok were fruitless and that the fake ad was harming her brand. “It is so infuriating,” she said on TikTok. “I don’t know if these products were ethically made, if this company was following labor laws and fair wages.”
Frankel’s suit alleges that TikTok has not mitigated these problems because it profits from the sales taking place through the phony ads. The suit claims that TikTok generates revenue through advertisements and that scammers are paying the company to run ads for their counterfeit goods, misusing influencers’ likenesses.
“Although the platform is not an e-commerce site, it facilitates and promotes the sale of products,” a summary of Frankel’s complaint reads. “The promotion of products, particularly counterfeit products, garner millions of views and incentivize TikTok to increase their revenue streams by allowing the counterfeit products to be presented to users.”
“They’re using us to sell products, these counterfeit companies,” Albanese said. “It’s just going to get worse until the social media platforms start cracking down quickly. I should be able to email TikTok, say this isn’t me and have it taken down immediately.”
Nash-Hahn said that from July 2021 through December 2021, TikTok received 49,821 global copyright takedown notices and successfully addressed 40,469, or 81.2 percent, of the takedown requests by removing violative content.
In 2017, the Federal Trade Commission urged influencers to disclose partnerships, and platforms such as Instagram and Twitter have since built tools to make partnerships between brands and creators more obvious to viewers. However, because most influencer marketing deals are negotiated outside of tech platforms’ purview, apps like TikTok may be unaware of what deals are fraudulent.
To make matters worse, some influencers fake sponsored content, promoting brands as if they have partnerships, to boost their image. Most brands are okay with the free advertising, but many luxury brands are not.
Frankel said much of this could be solved if platforms such as TikTok had a clearer way to address issues between brands and creators. Influencers, she said, should be able to work with the platforms to ensure they retain control over their image on the app, and brands should be able to flag fraudulent ads or counterfeit products. “I want to be a voice for change in this space,” she said. “I have a platform, I have influence, and I want to make a difference on a greater scale.” She has set up an email address for creators who have been similarly affected to join her suit.
There is bipartisan agreement in Congress that something should be done. On Wednesday, Reps. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) and Gus M. Bilirakis (R-Fla.) introduced legislation to combat the sale of counterfeit products online. The Integrity, Notification, and Fairness in Online Retail Marketplaces for Consumers (INFORM Consumers) Act would require online platforms to collect, verify and disclose certain information from third-party sellers.
Jessica Rich, the former director of the Bureau of Consumer Protection at the FTC, said lawmakers are increasingly interested in holding platforms accountable for the ads and content they host. She pointed to the INFORM act and the movement to revamp Section 230, the legal provision that protects websites from liability for what a third party posts. “The fact that you’ve got so many proposals in Congress to hold platforms liable for content on their sites does tell you that this issue is not adequately addressed under current law,” she said. | 2022-10-06T15:07:07Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Bethenny Frankley, a former real housewife of New York, sues TikTok - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/10/06/bethenny-tiktok-influencer-ad-lawsuit/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/10/06/bethenny-tiktok-influencer-ad-lawsuit/ |
Herschel Walker says abortion ‘nothing to be ashamed of,’ but supports ban
Herschel Walker, Republican candidate for U.S. Senate for Georgia, speaks at a primary watch party on May 23 at the Foundry restaurant in Athens, Ga. (Akili-Casundria Ramsess/AP)
Herschel Walker, the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate in Georgia, is denying the latest reports from the Daily Beast that he paid a former girlfriend to have an abortion — and that the woman is the mother of one of his children.
“I know this is untrue. I know it’s untrue, and they keep telling me things like that, and it’s totally, totally untrue,” Walker said on the “Hugh Hewitt Show.” “And I’m not sure why that would be told. I know nothing about any woman having an abortion. And they can keep coming at me like that, and they’re doing it because they want to distract people.”
“I hate to say I’ve been born again, but I have a new life. And I’ve been moving forward, and had that happened, I would have said it, because it’s nothing to be ashamed of there,” Walker said. “You know, people have done that, but I know nothing about it. And if I knew about it, I would be honest and talk about it, but I know nothing about that.”
The Daily Beast reported Monday that Walker had paid for a girlfriend’s abortion in 2009, and that the woman had provided proof of their relationship, along with a “get well” card Walker had sent her after the procedure. After Walker publicly denied the story as a “flat-out lie” and said he didn’t know who the former girlfriend could be, the woman — whom the Daily Beast had kept anonymous — went back to the news outlet to say she was the mother of one of Walker’s children.
The Washington Post has not been able to independently confirm the Daily Beast reports.
“As I have already said, there is no truth to this or any other Daily Beast report,” Walker’s campaign said in a statement Wednesday night.
Roger Sollenberger, the Daily Beast reporter who broke the stories — as well as others earlier this year about “secret” children Walker had fathered with women who were not his ex-wife — said the outlet was standing by its reporting.
“Just want to point out that while Herschel Walker claims ‘there’s no truth’ to ‘any’ Daily Beast report, he literally confirmed *both* of my Daily Beast reports about his secret kids,” Sollenberger said in a series of Twitter posts. “He confirmed the reports himself and has never asked for a correction … I mean, the campaign can just have him pull up his bank statements and see for themselves.”
Walker is challenging Democratic Sen. Raphael G. Warnock in one of the most closely watched Senate contests of the year. The outcome of the race, which polls show is competitive, is expected to help determine which party controls the Senate for the next two years.
As he runs for Senate, Walker has campaigned as a strict opponent of abortion rights. He has said he opposes abortion without any exceptions and has voiced support for a proposed national ban on the procedure after 15 weeks of pregnancy.
The Daily Beast’s latest reports also prompted one of Walker’s children, who previously supported his father, to publicly criticize Walker on social media.
On Monday evening, Christian Walker alleged in a video posted to Twitter that his father “threatened to kill us” and caused him and his mother to move six times in six months “running from your violence.”
Annie Linskey and Cleve R. Wootson Jr. contributed to this report. | 2022-10-06T15:11:29Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Herschel Walker denies he paid for abortion, still supports ban - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/06/herschel-walker-abortion-allegations/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/06/herschel-walker-abortion-allegations/ |
The MAGA GOP has never been about ‘life.’ Only power.
Kari Lake, the Republican candidate for governor in Arizona, gives a thumbs-up to the crowd as former president Donald Trump speaks during a rally in Prescott, Ariz., on July 22. (Ross D. Franklin/AP)
The cat’s been out of the bag for some time regarding Republicans’ insincere support for “life.” If “life” were the issue when it comes to abortion, the party would not put reproductive health and lives at risk with forced-birth laws. For that matter, a pro-life politician would not oppose effective gun-safety laws; would not oppose mask edicts or discourage vaccinations for the coronavirus; and would not push to cut Medicaid and hobble the Affordable Care Act. However, never has it been more apparent how utterly unprincipled the party is when it comes to an issue it has used for decades to woo its base.
Georgia Senate candidate Herschel Walker, who supports forced birth even in cases of rape, incest and danger to the life of the mother, is credibly accused (with documentary proof) of urging a woman he impregnated to get an abortion and then paying for it, as the Daily Beast first reported. Although Walker has denied the allegation, Republicans have let on that they don’t care anyway. Dana Loesch, a former spokeswoman for the National Rifle Association, made that crystal clear:
She’s right, of course. All the GOP cares about is power. It certainly does not care about the character or quality of its candidates, about actual election results, about officials’ oaths or really any other policy matter. This was the party that had no platform in 2020, only unwavering loyalty to its leader.
Another leader in the posturing Olympics is election denier and radical MAGA candidate for Arizona governor Kari Lake. During a recent radio address, she channeled former president Bill Clinton’s position on abortion: “You know, it would be really wonderful if abortion was rare and legal — the way they said it before, remember? ‘Rare but safe, rare but safe,’ I think is what they said." She added, “It’d be really wonderful if that’s how it turned out.” Oops. That’s not how it’s supposed to go. Sure enough, her spokesperson walked back the comment with the gymnastic claim that a complete ban or a 15-week cutoff would make abortion legal and rare.
Former Maine governor Paul LePage (R), who is running to win his old job back, seemed even more confused as to what his abortion position is meant to be. During a shambolic debate performance on Tuesday, the New York Times reported, LePage “repeatedly stumbled over a question about how he would handle the issue if voters returned him to office.” He didn’t understand the question, he said. Or it was a hypothetical. Or whatever. Easy to get lost when the issue is simply another weapon to wield in search of political office.
Such utterances can’t even be called hypocrisy; hypocrisy assumes one has beliefs. These candidates seem to believe in nothing but their own advancement — though they are quick to declare that whatever Democrats believe in poses an existential threat to America. We’re simply hearing them say out loud what we’ve long suspected they think privately: that voters are suckers, so they’ll tell them whatever they think the rubes will want to hear.
Whether it is Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) declaring that Jan. 6 was not an armed insurrection, or the scores of candidates parroting the “big lie,” or the forced-birth crowd dropping its states’ rights theory to push for a national ban, we see a party that is prepared to do and say anything to hold power, regardless of the harm to our democracy or national security.
A candidate such as J.D. Vance, the GOP nominee for the U.S. Senate in Ohio, can condemn defeated former president Donald Trump, then pivot to pledge undying loyalty — and count on getting rewarded with the nomination for debasing himself.
Republican leaders and enablers (including pundits who dream up ex post facto excuses for policy shifts and inanities) have repeatedly shown that the party doesn’t believe what its candidates say and doesn’t care what lies they tell supporters. We should stop attributing sincerity or good faith to the MAGA GOP. Again and again, its members show their “beliefs” are all a smokescreen to attain and hold power. | 2022-10-06T15:15:55Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Republicans like Herschel Walker aren't pro-life. Only pro-power. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/06/republicans-hypocrisy-abortion-herschel-walker/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/06/republicans-hypocrisy-abortion-herschel-walker/ |
‘Hold Me Tight’ is a meditation on grief both haunting and detached
Vicky Krieps plays a woman who only seems to have left her family without explanation
Vicky Krieps in “Hold Me Tight.” (Kino Lorber)
In the opening minutes of “Hold Me Tight,” we watch as a woman named Clarisse (Vicky Krieps) moves through the rooms of her darkened house, looking in on her sleeping husband (Arieh Worthalter), son (Sacha Ardilly) and daughter (Anne-Sophie Bowen-Chatet) before driving off without so much as a goodbye, just as the sun is starting to rise. Why? And to where?
That’s the smaller of two mysteries at the heart of the French drama by writer-director Mathieu Amalric, adapting a play by Claudine Galea. It isn’t much of a mystery — at least not for long — and the unraveling of it isn’t the point of the film. Not 10 minutes in, when Clarisse stops at a service station to chat with a friend who asks, “Running away, or what?” there are hints that all is not as it seems.
That sense grows more steadily over the course of the strange and compelling film, a study of grief that somehow is at once moving and detached, in the way that people in mourning sometimes engage in denial-like displacement activities: behavior that’s inappropriate to the emotion at hand.
And so, along her journey, Clarisse stops to caress a bemused stranger in a bar, and to immerse her face in a mountain of shaved ice at a fish market.
What’s going on may confuse some viewers — but just for a while. Almaric switches between scenes of Clarisse’s bizarre behavior and mundane life back home without her, but it’s not terribly hard to guess why there is this disconnect in her actions, even before the film tells us.
As suggested by that scene at the fish market, there’s a sense of something frozen in time here: emotions, maybe, in a state of suspended animation, along with something more solid. That’s not far from the truth.
All the while, Clarisse narrates, halfway between poetry and a riddle, as if talking to her absent family: “I’m not the one who left,” she says (over and over, more than once). “I made it up. That’s why you’re here.”
What does she mean by “here”? That’s the film’s bigger mystery. Wherever it is, Almaric seems to suggest, it’s the place we carry those we love, when they are lost.
Unrated. At the Cinema Arts Theatre. Contains strong language, sensuality, nudity and smoking. In French and German with subtitles. 97 minutes. | 2022-10-06T15:37:41Z | www.washingtonpost.com | ‘Hold Me Tight’ is a meditation on grief at once haunting and detached - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/movies/2022/10/06/hold-me-tight-movie-review/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/movies/2022/10/06/hold-me-tight-movie-review/ |
Cheney is a strong GOP voice against election deniers. Where are the rest?
Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) delivers a speech at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum in Simi Valley, Calif., on June 29. (Mark J. Terrill/AP)
The extent to which Republican election deniers will appear on the ballot in November is horrifying. The Post reports that nearly 300 nominees openly challenge President Biden’s election, a profound lie that threatens the core of our electoral politics. This means that after the midterms, federal and state offices will be infested with individuals who are willing to lie about the 2020 election or too deluded to understand there was zero evidence of fraud.
Worse is the tepid response from Republicans who know better.
Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) remains the shining exception that proves the rule of Republican cowardice. In addition to calling out the “Putin wing” of her party and Fox News for spreading Russian propaganda (disclosure: I am an MSNBC contributor), she slammed Arizona Republican candidates on Wednesday at an appearance at Arizona State University hosted by the McCain Institute.
“You have a candidate for governor in Kari Lake, you have a candidate for secretary of state in Mark Finchem, both of whom have said ... that they will only honor the results of an election if they agree with it,” Cheney said. She warned: “The country is at the edge of an abyss. If we don’t reject this appeasement of antidemocratic forces, we are going to go over the edge.”
She continued, “They’ve looked at all of that — the law, the facts and the rulings, the courts — and they’ve said it doesn’t matter to them. And if you care about democracy and you care about the survival of our republic, then you need to understand, we all have to understand, that we cannot give people power who have told us that they will not honor elections.”
In fact, Cheney declared that she would vote for Katie Hobbs, Arizona’s Democratic candidate for governor, or Adrian Fontes, the Democratic nominee for secretary of state. “For almost 40 years now, I’ve been voting Republican. I don’t know if I have ever voted for a Democrat,” she said. “But if I lived in Arizona now, I absolutely would for governor and secretary of state.” (One does question how she remains in a party that puts nearly 300 election deniers on the ballot, but perhaps she’s hoping she can help shrink the number who will win.)
For good measure, she also denounced Republicans coming to Arizona to campaign for election deniers. “[Virginia Gov.] Glenn Youngkin should not come here and campaign for Kari Lake.” She also faulted Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.), who “absolutely knows that what he’s advocating is unconstitutional.” She added, "there have to be consequences.”
Will Cheney travel around the country to contest other deniers in her party? Perhaps, but even if she did, there are too many for one person. And that raises another question: Where are her father’s old allies hiding? Former president George W. Bush, former Florida governor Jeb Bush, former GOP governors in key states (e.g., John Kasich in Ohio, Rick Snyder and John Engler in Michigan) and other former Republican senators and House members have not lined up to support Cheney and call out deniers.
It’s unfathomable that former officials who can no longer suffer political harm would remain mute in the face of the debacle for democracy that Cheney raises. All they need to say is, “I agree with Cheney. Don’t vote for any of these people.” Really, is simple honesty and patriotism that hard? | 2022-10-06T16:38:49Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Cheney supports Democrats in Arizona races - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/06/cheney-election-deniers-republicans-arizona/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/06/cheney-election-deniers-republicans-arizona/ |
ROSEDALE, Md. — They called the cramped basement of the red brick house in the Baltimore suburbs “the lab” and agreed to leave their phones in a bucket at the door before they went in. On group chats, they went by aliases and spoke in code words about the projects they worked on inside.
Cameroon's crackdown on its English-speaking minority is fueling support for a secessionist movement | 2022-10-06T17:35:35Z | www.washingtonpost.com | From a basement near Baltimore, he plotted to smuggle guns to Cameroon - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/06/cameroon-gun-smuggling-st-michael/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/06/cameroon-gun-smuggling-st-michael/ |
Fairfax County police on Thursday identified the victim of a recent hit-and-run crash as 74-year-old Dalchoon Park of Annandale.
Park died Sunday after being struck by a driver as she crossed the 4200 block of Annandale Road, according to police. The driver did not stop to assist or render aid, according to police. They said Park was outside of a crosswalk.
Police said a witness observed a small white SUV or sedan stop in the area at the time of the crash, and then drive away. | 2022-10-06T17:35:41Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Police identify woman killed in Fairfax hit-and-run - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/06/dalchoon-park-fairfax-hit-run/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/06/dalchoon-park-fairfax-hit-run/ |
Mildred Muhammad, shown here in 2008. (Nikki Kahn/The Washington Post)
They’re still not hearing her.
And that infuriates Mildred Muhammad. Because as media reports of the 20th anniversary of her ex-husband’s killing spree, the terror and drama of an entire region ducking for cover in supermarket parking lots, of schools canceling outdoor recess, force her to relive her own personal nightmare, no one’s talking about how it all started.
“It was a domestic violence and child custody issue,” said the woman who escaped becoming the final victim as that horrifying string of murders closed in, closer and closer to her.
Most of the time, Mildred Muhammad and the decayed, violent marriage she escaped is forgotten in the retelling of how John Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo killed 10 innocent people.
“They would rather believe that this was just two Black men in a car, killing innocent people to cause the government to put $10 million on a stolen credit card,” Mildred Muhammad said.
That’s the plot we heard in court, and the way history keeps regaling it.
“They don’t want to hear that a man would do all that just to kill his ex-wife, to get custody of his children,” Mildred Muhammad said.
'I will kill you': The connection between mass shooters and domestic violence
But before his ex-wife finally got custody of their three children — after years of abuse, after local police in Washington state didn’t enforce the restraining order a judge granted, after the folks who knew the couple didn’t believe her when she tried to tell them about the abuse, after he kidnapped the kids to Antigua for 18 months — John Muhammad laid it all out for her, told her exactly what his revenge was going to look like. Someday.
“He said: ‘You have become my enemy, and as my enemy, I will kill you,' ” she said. “I knew he was going to shoot me in the head someday and bury me where no one would be able to find me.”
Knowing all this, she finally fled with the kids across the country, to be near her mom in Maryland. It was far, but she knew she was never safe.
On Week 3 of that sniper spree 20 years ago, when the detectives finally pieced it all together, came to her door and whisked her away to get her out of his path, she remembered what else he told her.
“They asked if I thought he could do something like this and I said ‘Yes.’ I remembered he said to me at one time, ‘You know, I could take a small city, terrorize it and they would think it would be a group of people, but it would only be me,’ she told the investigators, after dropping her head on the table.
She and her three children survived. And she has made it a mission to get the world to wake up and see that giant red flag that keeps waving in our faces, ahead of too many of our bloodiest tragedies.
I talked to Mildred about her work five years ago, as she was busy connecting the dots between intimate partner violence and mass shootings to audiences who have the power to make change.
Because with these mass shootings, we grope for the gunman’s motive: Mental illness? Racism? Religion? Politics?
Sometimes. But what the majority of cases have in common — long before online manifestos — is the abuse of their intimate partners, from the 1984 shooter who killed 21 people in a California McDonald’s to the killer of 49 people at Pulse nightclub in Orlando in 2017.
It’s in the histories of 70 percent of mass shooters studied in a recent Johns Hopkins University report.
And the prevalence of intimate partner violence is stubbornly high. About 1 in 4 women and nearly 1 in 10 men have experienced such abuse — physical, mental or both — during their lifetime, according to numbers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The numbers are especially high for Black women, who are killed at 2½ times the rate of White women and 90 percent of Black victims knew their killer, according to a Violence Policy Center study of CDC numbers. Social scientists are expecting those numbers grew even higher during the pandemic.
“Domestic violence evolved into a worldwide epidemic, thanks to the pandemic,” Mildred Muhammad said.
Going to work has long been the only respite for women in abusive relationships. But when office workers began teleworking, victims became trapped. A recent United Nations report called it the “shadow pandemic.”
Muhammad began noticing the uptick immediately in her networks and she quickly wrote another book, “Being Abused While Teleworking” filled with tips for employers on how to spot abuse happening behind the Zoom calls and for victims on how to survive — and escape.
And she continues her work speaking on military bases, to prosecutors and police officers, reminding them that the abuser they stop could be a mass shooting that they prevent.
“The people he killed from the West Coast all the way to the East Coast would still be alive,” she said, “if they believed me. It all starts with believing women.”
We continue to treat domestic violence as a private issue, something that happens behind closed doors that’s none of our business.
But those terrifying three weeks in October showed us how violence accelerates, unchecked. That’s the moral of the D.C. sniper story and the part that Mildred Muhammad wants us to remember. | 2022-10-06T17:35:47Z | www.washingtonpost.com | D.C. sniper's ex-wife warned of his violence. No one listened. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/06/dc-sniper-mildred-muhammad/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/06/dc-sniper-mildred-muhammad/ |
Republican and retired Navy captain Hung Cao, left, debated Rep. Jennifer Wexton (D) this week. (From left: Hung Cao campaign; AP Photo/Steve Helber)
A previous version of this article incorrectly reported that Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin carried the 10th District in his campaign last year. He lost the district by a slim margin. The article has been corrected.
Rep. Jennifer Wexton (D-Va.) and her Republican opponent, Navy veteran Hung Cao, met for the second time this week to debate in the heat of one of Virginia’s more contentious congressional races this year.
Inflation and abortion kicked off the 90-minute forum Wednesday night, capturing the divides on two issues that have largely defined the campaign narratives in Virginia’s 10th Congressional District and beyond as the nation reels from inflation at a 40-year high and wrestles with the fallout of the overturn of Roe v. Wade.
Wexton, a former domestic-violence prosecutor and state legislator who flipped her Northern Virginia district blue in 2018, is still widely considered to have the upper hand in the race. But while the district is not nearly as competitive as Virginia’s 7th and 2nd, Republicans have been energized after Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) lost the 10th district last year by only a slim margin, believing they could replicate the Republican’s momentum this year due to President Biden’s low approval rating and continuing economic woes. Cao, a Vietnamese refugee who served 25 years in the Navy, retiring as a captain, is a first-time candidate.
The forum, co-hosted by the nonpartisan Prince William Committee of 100 and local chapter of the League of Women Voters, was moderated by Stephen Farnsworth, a political science professor at the University of Mary Washington.
The candidates were asked first to explain what they believed caused high inflation and what should be done to fix it.
Inflation explained: How prices took off
Wexton said it was not due to “any one cause,” noting multiple factors including a “pandemic economy,” supply-chain issues causing a supply-and-demand mismatch and shortages, and the war in Ukraine.
“We’ve worked very hard to lower food and fuel costs through legislation,” Wexton said. “Also the Inflation Reduction Act is going to make a big difference in people’s lives by cutting the costs of health care premiums, allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices and also helping to decrease costs for energy.”
U.S. policymakers misjudged inflation threat until it was too late
Economists don’t believe the Inflation Reduction Act, despite its name, will meaningfully impact inflation — something Cao was quick to hammer on. But as Wexton noted, the legislation is expected to lower household energy costs by offering rebates or tax credits for home green-energy upgrades that could save people hundreds per year.
Analysis: Why the ‘Inflation Reduction Act’ is no such thing
Cao traced inflation to Biden’s day-one executive orders that sought to reverse the Trump administration’s relaxation of environmental regulations, which is not what most economists point to in explaining inflation. Cao decried regulations on oil and gas companies and Biden’s order revoking the permit for the Keystone XL pipeline.
“We can be energy independent. That’s what caused inflation,” Cao said. "[We should] be able to rely on our own oil and gas instead of other countries.”
5 ways the Inflation Reduction Act could save you money
Questions on abortion led to some of the most impassioned responses of the night. Farnsworth asked the candidates what federal action they would take on abortion, considering there are multiple pieces of legislation in Congress pending right now, chief among them a 15-week abortion ban proposed by Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.).
Cao, however, stuck to the party line that has emerged among numerous Republican congressional candidates, who continue to insist abortion policy is a state issue even as Graham has pledged to push the federal legislation forward if Republicans win control of Congress.
“First of all, what you’re trying to ask is where I stand. I’m pro-life, that’s where I’ll always be, in every single thing I do,” Cao said. “My opponent, on the other hand, wants abortion up to the moment of birth. Most Americans do not agree with that. The Dobbs case put this matter back where it belongs, which is in the states. As a federal legislator, this is not within our purview.”
Wexton disputed Cao’s attack. “It’s a lie when my opponent says I favor abortion up to the moment of birth,” she said.” That’s absurd — it doesn’t exist. That’s called infanticide. That’s not something anyone would support.”
She noted she voted to codify Roe v. Wade and that Cao, in supporting the overturn of constitutional right to an abortion, in turn supports allowing states to ban abortion, and possibly even access to contraception. Cao disputed the part about contraception, calling that “fearmongering” and an issue separate from abortion.
On other issues, Cao frequently invoked his family’s story. Reacting to Biden’s executive action to forgive some student loan debt, Cao noted that while growing up in a family of refugees his parents “tucked away every single penny.” “A lot of American families are doing the same things,” he said. “It’s unfair that what we’re saving for our kids, some kids get a free ride.”
Wexton said she was glad Biden was taking student debt seriously but that the plan was not targeted enough and did nothing to make college more affordable. She pointed to legislation she supports in Congress to expand Pell Grants, incentivize state investments in public colleges and increase dual enrollment programs to lower the cost of tuition.
The two clashed starkly on issues ranging from climate change to school shootings, with Cao calling for more school security guards and Wexton calling for universal background checks and a ban on assault weapons.
Gun debate looms again in Va. congressional district miles from NRA
When Farnsworth asked the candidates if they acknowledged the threat of climate change, Wexton said there was “no question” climate change was caused by humans, pointing to increasing wildfires and deadly storms. “This is something extremely important in thinking about what kind of planet we’re going to leave for our kids, whether we’re going to pay for it now or pay for it later,” she said.
But Cao seemed to suggest climate change was not America’s problem. He echoed President Donald Trump’s incorrect theory that a lack of raking the forest floor, rather than climate change, was fueling the increasing wildfires in California.
“If you ever wonder why forest fires stop right at the California border, it’s because they don’t do anything to rake the forest,” Cao said. He added: “Look, America has one of the cleanest, safest practices for petroleum, oil recovery and resources recovery,” calling for holding nations such as China, Saudi Arabia and Iran accountable for their emissions.
Wexton noted that reducing emissions is a global effort and is why she applauded Biden rejoining the Paris Climate Accord.
The candidates disagreed as well about the removal of Confederate monuments from federal property — something Wexton pushed for in the U.S. Capitol itself, replacing Virginia’s statue of Robert E. Lee with civil rights leader Barbara Johns.
Cao said history shouldn’t be erased, arguing that Lee, who enslaved people, “hated” slavery. Lee did once in a letter refer to slavery as a “moral & political evil” — but then in the next breath called it a “painful discipline” that was “necessary for their instruction as a race.”
Analysis: Let's get real about Robert E. Lee and slavery
In closing statements, Cao went after Wexton for repeatedly calling him an “extremist,” drawing on his military background.
“I’ve bled and fought for this country,” he said. “And you’ve used an insane name time and time again that you use for terrorists. Ladies and gentleman, I’ve commanded thousands of soldier sailors in my lifetime, and I knew that some of them didn’t believe the same things I did, but I represented them anyway, because it was my job.”
“I called Mr. Cao an extremist because his views are extreme,” Wexton retorted, pointing to incorrect comments Cao made after the Uvalde mass shooting arguing that more people died by bludgeoning than gunshot wounds, among other things.
National Republicans had identified Virginia’s 10th District as on their wish list of seats to flip this year, but they have put few funds into the race, according to data from the Virginia Public Access Project, leaving Wexton dominant on the airwaves. | 2022-10-06T17:35:53Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Virginia Rep. Jennifer Wexton, Republican Hung Cao debate on inflation, abortion - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/06/wexton-cao-debate-virginia-10th/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/06/wexton-cao-debate-virginia-10th/ |
A partnership between the District’s public schools and a California-based nonprofit will allow students to shape their own curriculums
High School students leave a homecoming pep rally Wednesday at the Francis L. Cardozo Education Campus at the end of the day. (Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post)
Cardozo Education Campus had a problem. Similar to other schools in the District and throughout the country, many of the high-schoolers there were not graduating into the career paths they wanted.
Students leave high school, in some cases go to college, but in others head straight into the workforce. Those students, said school Principal Arthur Mola, often wind up in industries where they are living paycheck to paycheck.
“Our young people are usually the ones that are exploited when they go out into the workforce, and land into minimum wage jobs and land in different types of choices that don’t afford them the type of liberation that comes from being financially independent,” Mola said. Cardozo students are predominantly Black and Hispanic, and about two-thirds of the population is considered at risk, defined by the city as children who are homeless, in foster care or low income. “Young people go into adulthood oftentimes not ready for what college and career experiences are going to be.”
Meanwhile, at Dunbar High School, leaders were pondering similar questions about how to best prepare students for the future. “We know we want our students speaking, writing, reading at high levels, being critical thinkers,” said Nadine Smith, the principal. “But what we also knew is that there was space to reimagine how we got to these goals.”
Students — along with parents, teachers and community members — at both schools have spent the past seven months thinking about these issues and brainstorming solutions. Now, they will have the chance to pilot their ideas. The XQ Institute, an Oakland, Calif.-based nonprofit that helps communities redesign their schools, will grant D.C. schools up to $25 million over five years — with the goal of giving each of the city’s 15 public high schools the opportunity to improve the experience. XQ staff will also help schools get their concepts off the ground.
Cardozo has plans of transforming itself into a business school, with every student graduating as a business owner, said Mola. The school will also start infusing its curriculum with entrepreneurship and economics — from lessons on financial literacy to learning how to write grant proposals in English class.
Dunbar has developed a concept that will use Afrofuturism — a movement that combines science-fiction, history and fantasy to connect members of the Black diaspora to their roots in Africa — as a way for students to understand the issues that affect them locally. Students also asked for more experiential learning, both in the District and in the classroom through the use of virtual reality, Smith said.
“Our students, they were like, ‘Look, we want more hands-on experience.’ The other thing that they shared with us is, ‘We love our iPads, we love your technology. We want to be able to incorporate that into our learning,’ ” Smith added. “With the metaverse, you get to see things from a different angle, you’re no longer constrained by the classroom. So you could be reading ‘Song of Solomon’ and be able to travel to the Gullah islands using virtual reality.”
The effort addresses long-held anxieties about how adequately high schools prepare students for the real world. A national survey of high-schoolers found seven out of 10 students felt high school has prepared or will “somewhat prepare” them for college, according to 2021 research conducted by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, a nonprofit that studies entrepreneurship. The same survey found two out of 10 students felt high school “very much” has prepared or will prepare them for the workforce.
Four other schools — Columbia Heights Educational Campus, Coolidge High School, H.D. Woodson High School and Ron Brown College Preparatory High School — also vied for the opportunity to redesign their campuses. Each proposal was reviewed by a panel of local and national judges.
The schools that were not selected will spend the next several months refining their ideas before having the chance to join the next cohort.
“Reading the DC+XQ High School applications confirmed my belief that we have creative and dedicated communities in our DCPS high schools willing to reach and rise to the opportunity for their young people,” said Cathy Reilly, director of local education advocacy group, S.H.A.P.P.E. Reilly was one of 17 panelists who reviewed the high schools’ proposals. “It will be up to the city and all of us to ensure promises are kept and that schools have the resources and support they need as the plans are refined and implemented.”
After the XQ grant, the district may sustain high school redesign efforts with its own resources, or by seeking outside grants or more financial assistance from the District government, said Lewis Ferebee, the school system’s chancellor. He added he is excited about seeing students attend high schools they have designed for themselves. “That, itself, I think is powerful and really empowering.”
The efforts at Cardoza and Dunbar follow similar projects at Anacostia and Ballou high schools. Students there had the chance to revamp their schools in 2019, thanks to a $3 million grant from the nonprofit DC Public Education Fund. That program was born from the need to improve outcomes for students at those schools and, like with XQ, to modernize curriculums so teens graduate with the skills they need for college or careers.
The Ballou community produced plans to offer information technology and computer engineering career training. At Anacostia, students asked for new programs that would prepare them for jobs in civil and environmental engineering, as well as project-based learning around environmental issues.
Those programs are still in their infancy, Ferebee said. | 2022-10-06T17:36:00Z | www.washingtonpost.com | $25 million grant helps D.C. students redesign their high schools - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/10/06/dc-schools-xq-redesign-cardozo-dunbar/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/10/06/dc-schools-xq-redesign-cardozo-dunbar/ |
Latino children share how they’re figuring out their place in the United States while making their way toward adulthood.
Oct. 6 at 12:15 p.m.
Manuela, Isabella, Joshua, Manuel y Amanda.
More than a quarter of children growing up today in the United States identify as Latino, a percentage expected to grow in coming decades.
They live across the United States, from smaller suburbs like Commerce City, Colo., to metropolises like New York City. Some hail from families that have spent generations laying roots in this country, while for others, the U.S. journey has just begun. Around 95 percent of Latino children were born in the United States — their lives inherently American and Latino.
Growing up Latino includes elements of life that all Latinos share and others that are distinct. It means swaying to mariachis or jumping to Bad Bunny or doing a two-step to Florida Georgia Line. It means speaking Spanish fluently, partly or not at all. It means watching American sitcoms to drown out abuela’s telenovelas — or watching them with her.
But being a Latino child in the United States can also mean code-switching when you walk out the front door. Hearing your name mispronounced by strangers. Being considered a foreigner even if the United States is the only country you’ve ever known or is the one you live in now.
In honor of Hispanic Heritage Month, The Washington Post sought out the voices and stories of five children to describe what it is like to grow up Latino in the United States in 2022.
“My experience can’t be summed up into a neat and perfect box.”
— Manuela
Growing up, Manuela De Armas wanted nothing more than to change her name. She was one of four Venezuelan students at her elementary school in a South Florida suburb. And she didn’t like feeling different.
Then her mother enrolled her in a summer camp with mostly Venezuelan kids. For the first time, she didn’t feel singled out. It gave her a different perspective on what it means to be Hispanic — so much so that five years later, Manuela now leads her school’s Latinx Club and is constantly brainstorming ways to raise awareness about Venezuelan culture.
“Connecting with people who had that similar background and traditions made me realize ‘Yeah, I’m Venezuelan, and I’m really proud of it,’ ” she said.
Days usually begin with a warm arepa, a corn-flour flatbread that is a staple of Venezuelan cuisine. Conversations with parents, grandparents and her older sister are almost exclusively in Spanish. At home, other members of the Venezuelan diaspora and visiting relatives often bring back memories of the country that once was — one Manuela never truly experienced.
“I don’t have enough memories of Venezuela for me to truly miss it,” she said.
It’s that lack of memories that can sometimes feel isolating. Having lived most of her life in the United States, she is sometimes perceived as too American — or gringa — by her Venezuelan loved ones. For her American friends, she seems too Latina.
“People put me in different boxes all the time, so you end up having no clue as to what you identify as,” said Manuela, 16. “Because the truth is, my experience can’t be summed up into a neat and perfect box.”
Navigating that double life can be challenging. There are frustrating offhand comments from some relatives that ignore the hardships of learning a language and staying fluent in it. There is the fear of losing touch with her family’s country — the one she last visited nearly a decade ago. There is also the desire to feel like she belongs in the nation she has called home for 13 years.
“It’s a hard balance,” Manuela said. “But being in Miami, I’m really lucky to be in a place where I can experience being American and Latino at the same time.”
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“Con todo tu corazón.”
— Isabella
Isabella does not know another Cuban girl her age in Omaha. She is growing up 1,500 miles away from the land her grandparents once called home — Cuba. For her dad, raising her to feel like a cubanita is a top priority.
The 7-year-old goes to a bilingual school, though most of her classmates who are Latino are Mexican American, not Cuban. He feeds her a mix of traditional Cuban and American food, from chicken strips and hamburgers to platanitos and picadillo. On the afternoons when Isabella turns on the TV, many of the shows are dubbed in Spanish — a function her dad discovered on the remote and has kept permanent to help her learn the language.
Every night before bed, she clasps her small hands together and prays out loud in Spanish. Around the house, reggaetón and salsa fill the speakers — but so does country music duo Florida Georgia Line. Latino and American influences coexist in their home, in a quiet subdivision near Omaha’s city center — a far cry from Miami, where her father grew up.
“Something special about me is my name is Isabella, but some people call me Bella and in Spanish, that means bella” — or beautiful, she said proudly.
She speaks Spanish conversationally but still stumbles over it, mixing up her verbs or referring to a dance as a “bailo” instead of a “baile.” She talks mostly to her little brother in English but loves to call him “tonto” — or silly — when he is acting bothersome.
While some of the Cuban influence in the household comes naturally, her parents have also been intentional about keeping it alive.
Her father, Albert Varas, was used to going about his daily life in English in Omaha until Isabella was born. It was then when he realized he needed to only speak to her in Spanish if he wanted to keep the language alive in his family.
“The more that time passes by, the more that she just talks to me in Spanish, you know? It’s not like I’m pulling teeth,” he said.
He hopes to take her and her little brother to Cuba some day. But until then, he watches her grow up in a city much different from his hometown of Miami, where the Cuban language and culture thrive.
Isabella says there are a few things that her dad tells her every day. One of them is right before she goes to bed.
He will say “Cómo papi te quiere?” How does daddy love you?
And she will reply: “Con todo tu corazón.” With all of your heart.
And then there’s one more phrase she hears from him a lot, she adds.
“Pórtate bien” — behave.
“It’s that little spark that you need sometimes.”
— Joshua
Born and raised in New York, Joshua Reyes grew up surrounded by a large Dominican population in a neighborhood where speaking Spanish, dancing bachata and eating mangú were the norm.
Then five years ago, Joshua, 14, and his mom, sister and uncle moved to Allentown, Pa. — parting ways with New York’s fast-paced life and with the cultural bubble that made it easy to feel at home.
“It’s hard to not really have as much people anymore that you relate to,” he said. “But now I’m kind of getting into the gist of it. I started meeting other Latinos but also making friends with more White people. I’m really seeing that barrier breaking down.”
Though his family has lived in the Northeast for several generations, some relatives remain in the Dominican Republic. The last time Joshua visited was in 2018 — a trip that gave him a greater appreciation of his family’s sacrifices to provide him opportunities in the United States.
Still, even while being over 1,500 miles away from the island, Joshua has an intense love for his Latin American roots.
“I literally love being Latino so much because not only does it have a lot of history and culture to it, but it just brings you that extra love to yourself,” he said. “I don’t know how to put it into words, but it’s that little spark that you need sometimes, you know?”
What he cherishes the most is the duality of being American and Dominican — something that he said gives him “the perfect balance in life.”
“Just going to school in the morning and then you have all your friends, so you’re fooling around speaking English and Spanish,” Joshua said. “And then you go home and your mom’s all set up with your sofrito, mangú and salami.”
Although Allentown’s Dominican population is smaller, he unexpectedly discovered a connection to his heritage while living there. With a towering 6-foot-5 frame, the teen had always been a “basketball guy.” Then a coach in Pennsylvania inspired him to give baseball a try. Soon enough, he discovered a talent for pitching. His father had played professionally on the island, though he had never given it an earnest try.
“As a Dominican,” he said, “it’s naturally in my blood.”
“If you start something, finish it.”
— Manuel
As the rumbling bus approached the new U.S. suburb where she would go on to spend many years of her life, Maria Rodriguez stared in awe at the kaleidoscope of bright lights bursting out from the darkness of the night.
“I’d never seen so many buildings, so many lights,” said Maria, an undocumented immigrant who crossed the U.S.-Mexico border 21 years ago on a tourist visa that later expired. “I thought ‘Is that where I’m going?’ ”
Today, she is raising four children in the Denver suburb of Commerce City. The youngest is 12-year-old Manuel Guardiola. From the day he was born, Maria recognized the importance of him growing up feeling American.
Her solution? Thrusting him into school sports at age 4.
“He didn’t speak any English. For him it was like, ‘What are they telling me?’ and he struggled a lot,” she said in Spanish. She recalled one day when the coach’s secretary called her because Manuel didn’t understand what the coach was saying. But she couldn’t help either — she still has not learned English. “Little by little he learned the language,” she said.
Now, Manuel speaks English fluently and without an accent. He eats the enchiladas and gorditas his mom prepares at home, and he loves gobbling down jello and milk after sports practice.
Unlike his mom, Denver’s snow-filled winters and mountain landscapes are all Manuel knows.
He is aware of her status — that his mom could get stopped by law enforcement and deported back to Mexico. But he tries not to worry.
“I think it’s unfair,” Manuel said. “People should be able to get papers and have a better life here.”
Every morning when Manuel gets ready for school, he does a daily chore. Sometimes it’s taking out the trash, and other times it’s sweeping the house. His mom will often prepare him huevos con frijoles — eggs with beans. After school, he eats and then gets ready for practice; depending on the season, it’s basketball, football or wrestling.
Maria said she tries to shield Manuel from some of the stresses and struggles in their family. Manuel’s father, 68, recently retired and is on dialysis. They’re relying on his pension alone to make ends meet.
“It’s enough to survive,” Maria said, her voice heavy. “It’s sufficient to give the basics to our children.”
Even while facing hardship, Manuel has kept focused on sports. In 2019, he made it to the state finals for wrestling in his division.
Moments before the final match, his competitor’s family approached him. As his heart was pumping, adrenaline swelling as he prepared to wrestle, the family told him that their son had never fought against “a Mexican” before. The words stung, but he wasn’t sure what to make of them.
Soon after, Manuel won the state championship.
He gives the credit to his mom, who told him from as early as he can remember, “Si intentas algo, termínalo.” If you start something, finish it.
“I’m thankful that my ancestors came to America.”
Living steps away from the U.S.-Mexico border means Amanda Ortiz has never felt out of place being Latina in the United States. That’s all she sees around her — Brownsville, her hometown, is 94 percent Latino.
“I’m with my people. And if I wasn’t with my people, I would feel out of place, and that’s even worse,” she said.
Many in Amanda’s extended family, and most people around her, have lived on the U.S. side of the border for generations. Despite that, she said, Latinos in Brownsville often feel forgotten. Jobs are limited in the Rio Grande Valley. The area has one of the highest poverty rates and highest uninsured rates in the state.
When she watches television, Amanda is struck by how different the rest of the United States is. She cringes when she sees how Latinos are often portrayed.
“The only thing Latinos are known for is being poor,” she said. “Mexicans, they’re I guess known for being cholos, cholas, but that’s not true. They’re stereotyping. I think that’s also a part of our challenges in America.”
Her dad’s family has lived on the U.S. side of the border for generations. She grew up speaking the kind of dialect that is specific to the U.S. border region — English with words and inflections in Spanish.
She said the Spanish speakers in Brownsville often look down upon Mexican Americans who don’t speak the language. She recounted being called a “gringa” in Spanish class because of her English accent. But Spanish-dominant, Mexican national students face their own hardships, she said, noting that she thinks they are often punished more in school than Mexican Americans like her.
Every year, Amanda expresses her heritage in Charro Days, a four-day festival for the residents of Brownsville and their counterparts on the Mexican side of the border, Matamoros. Every year, a grito — a type of shout expressing joy often incorporated in mariachi music — starts the festival, which has traditional dances, boat races, a rodeo and food stands selling elotes, Hot Cheetos with toppings and tamarindo candies.
“I am very proud because I know some people do not have the freedom to come over to America,” she said, “and I’m thankful that my ancestors came to America so that I could have a better life.”
Photos courtesy of Eva Ortiz, Maria Rodriguez, Albert Varas, Joshua Reyes, Manuela De Armas.
Editing by Christine Armario. Copy editing by Paola Ruano. Video editing by Luis Velarde. Design and illustrations by María Alconada Brooks. Development by Agnes Lee.
Silvia Foster-Frau writes for The Washington Post about the nation’s emergence as a predominantly multicultural society, exploring its changing racial, ethnic and cultural demographics, and telling the stories of everyday Americans affected by and a part of such change. Twitter Twitter
María Luisa Paúl is a reporter on The Washington Post's Morning Mix team. She joined The Post as an intern on the General Assignment desk and has previously reported at the Miami Herald and el Nuevo Herald. Twitter Twitter | 2022-10-06T17:48:41Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Growing Up Latino - Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/interactive/2022/growing-up-latino-hispanic-heritage-month/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/interactive/2022/growing-up-latino-hispanic-heritage-month/ |
Actually, Washington and Lincoln would crush Trump in an election
Not that they could run.
Former president Donald Trump points to the crowd as he arrives to speak at a rally on July 22 in Prescott, Ariz. (Ross D. Franklin/AP)
Donald Trump is not a modest guy. This is not exactly a secret. Multiple cities have buildings in which Trump’s last name is visible in letters taller than Trump himself. Trump’s adult life has been centered on drawing attention to himself: to sell stuff, to get viewers, to get votes. And he is good at it.
Yet he can still on occasion impress us with his ability to overstate his own case. As he did in a speech he gave in Florida on Wednesday.
Trump claimed that, shortly before the pandemic began, a pollster came into the Oval Office.
“He said, ‘Sir’,” Trump began — using his infamous tell for a story he’s making up — “‘if George Washington and Abraham Lincoln came alive from the dead and they formed a president-vice president team, you would beat them by 40 percent.’ That’s how good our numbers were!”
Nope. Even then, before the pandemic and before the aftermath of his election loss, Trump would have lost. Badly.
Before we get into the polling, though, it’s worth considering the question in a more abstract way: Is it possible that we could see George Washington face off against Trump in 2024? It’s actually slightly less ridiculous as a concept than you might assume.
Let’s consider three questions.
1. Can a dead person run for president?
There have been times that voters have elected dead people to office. In 2000, Missouri Gov. Mel Carnahan (D) died in a plane crash less than a month before the election. Missouri law stipulated that he remain on the ballot; he went on to win. (The loser, John Ashcroft, was granted the consolation prize of becoming U.S. attorney general.)
In fact, there’s a lengthy history of states having to figure out how to deal with suddenly deceased candidates, as the Congressional Research Service explored in 2002. State governments and political parties have mechanisms in place for handling pre-election deaths. Post-election deaths are a bit trickier. Consider the case of Horace Greeley, who won 44 percent of the vote in the 1872 presidential election only to die before electoral votes were cast. Some of his electors went ahead and voted for him anyway. Luckily for the system, Ulysses S. Grant’s victory was never really in question.
All of this, though, is quite different than getting an already dead person on the ballot.
The Constitution doesn’t actually prohibit dead people from being elected as president. Its only related stipulation is that, to be president, someone must have resided in the United States for 14 years. Had the term been “lived” in the United States, we’d have a problem. But “residing” doesn’t require “living,” and both Washington and Lincoln have been present in the United States (in Virginia and Illinois, respectively) for well over 14 years.
But if we’re assuming that Washington and Lincoln are seeking the Democratic nomination to face off against Trump, it’s worth noting that the party would likely screen them out. In 2020, the Democratic Party’s rules articulated that candidates for the party’s nomination had to affirm in writing that they were Democrats — tricky for Washington and Lincoln because a) they were not Democrats and b) they are dead.
To answer Question 1 in short: No.
2. Can these particular dead people run for
president?
Let’s assume, just for the sake of argument, that the Democratic Party changed its rules (which it could do) and would allow nonliving, non-Democrats to run for their nomination in 2024. Could Washington and Lincoln actually do so?
Both Washington and Lincoln (who, as our theoretical vice-presidential candidate, must meet the same criteria as the president) are over 35 years of age (Washington by 235 and Lincoln by 178 years). Both were either born in the United States or, in the case of Washington, were “a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution.”
But then there’s that pesky 22nd Amendment, ratified in 1951 to prevent another Franklin-Roosevelt-esque domination of the White House. It stipulates that:
“No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once.”
Coming into this, I admit I was curious whether Lincoln’s tragically truncated second term in office would allow him to take another pass at running. But the language is clear. Both men were twice elected to the office. Ergo, they cannot serve in the future — even if, as Trump’s pollster allegedly claimed, they had come back to life.
3. Can these dead people beat Trump?
At last, we come to Trump’s question. Would Washington and Lincoln beat Trump? And the answer is, almost certainly — for the same reason he lost in 2020 in the first place.
It’s important to recognize that this is why he’s telling the story, of course. Trump has always looked for a scapegoat to explain his loss, generally preferring to blame imaginary voter fraud as the cause. But sometimes he also blames the economic turmoil of the pandemic, a tangible externality that conceivably shifted perceptions of his presidency.
But this is a thought exercise more than anything. Could Trump have coasted to reelection in 2020 without the pandemic? Maybe — but that underestimates how broadly unpopular he was. Asked why they were coming out to vote that year, Republicans generally cited Trump: They wanted to see him reelected. When Democrats were asked the same question, they offered the same answer, Trump: They wanted to see him ousted. To think that Democrats had become significantly more favorable to Trump since 2018 — when his unpopularity drove an electoral backlash against Republicans — is to underestimate how unpopular he was.
Lincoln, as Trump liked to remind people, was himself a Republican. So Trump might think about worrying less about fending off a general election challenge from Lincoln than a primary one.
Were the contest between him and Washington, it seems pretty clear that Washington would be encumbered by his personal history. Forcing enslaved people to work on his plantation was less politically risky in 1788 than it is today. (His running mate probably wouldn’t be very excited about it, for one.) Not to mention the questions about whether and how these two dead individuals might effect decision-making once in office. Here, too, Lincoln might have some thoughts.
I think it’s easy to underrate just how weird everybody was in the past.
Like, Abraham Lincoln would literally invite a young woman to the WH to summon Aztec and Native American ghosts to give him and his wife emotional support and political advice. pic.twitter.com/C2syXgzT4U
— Derek Thompson (@DKThomp) October 5, 2022
Would Americans be wary of electing two ghosts to serve in the White House? Probably. Are there a lot of Americans who would rather vote for a ghost than for Trump? Probably. This is a reason Mel Carnahan won: The alternative proved less appealing.
Bear in mind, Trump’s claim wasn’t just that he’d beat Washington but that he would do so by 40 points. By a margin of victory that hasn’t been seen in the United States since the emergence of the Republican Party.
To answer Question 3 in short: Yes.
Again, I am aware that Trump was simply telling a story for effect. But this little thought exercise does prompt some useful reminders. For however popular Trump thinks he is and for however popular he wants others to think he is, he remains not-terribly-popular. If he ran against actually popular former presidents, he would lose.
At least in that case, he’d have a good reason to identify votes cast by dead people as a central cause.
Noted: Durbin says it’s time to imagine a world without a U.S.-Saudi alliance
4:05 PMAnalysis: Get ready for the election-denier storm | 2022-10-06T17:57:25Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Actually, Washington and Lincoln would crush Trump in an election - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/06/trump-washington-lincoln-election/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/06/trump-washington-lincoln-election/ |
The holes in Herschel Walker’s explanations
Herschel Walker appears during a rally in Norcross, Ga., on Sept. 9. (Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post)
After a couple of not terribly enlightening interviews on Fox News, Herschel Walker did a little more explaining Thursday morning in an interview with Hugh Hewitt.
But that interview reinforced several key holes in his accounting of the allegation that he had paid for an abortion 13 years ago — an allegation, published by the Daily Beast, which Walker denies and which The Washington Post has not independently confirmed.
The first is Walker’s continued claim that he doesn’t know the identity of the person making the allegation.
In the days after the initial Daily Beast report, Walker said this in two Fox interviews. Then the Daily Beast reported late Wednesday that the woman is, in fact, one of the mothers of his children. But Walker still says he doesn’t know who she is. The Post has not confirmed the Daily Beast report.
Hewitt asked, “So just to put a bow on it, do you have any idea who this alleged former lover of yours is who says you paid for an abortion and fathered a child? Any idea whatsoever?”
“I have no idea at all,” Walker responded.
But that wouldn’t seem to be terribly difficult for Walker to figure out. This summer, we learned about three children Walker had fathered with different women whom he had not discussed publicly — in addition to his adult son, Christian. Walker confirmed they were his kids but denied he had hidden their paternity. (In a statement sent to The Post, Walker said: “I have four children. Three sons and a daughter. They’re not ‘undisclosed’ — they’re my kids.”) He supplied a background form he had submitted in 2018 when he was appointed to a position by then-President Trump. The form included the names and ages of four children.
The Daily Beast, which also broke the news on that story, reported that by this summer one of the three children was an adult, while the others were 13 years old and 10 years old.
Why that’s significant: The latest Daily Beast report states that Walker had the child with the woman years after the alleged 2009 abortion. That would seem to rule out it being the mother of any of his three oldest children. And that also makes it difficult to see how Walker doesn’t have some idea of the identity of the woman who spoke to the Daily Beast.
(Walker, in the Hewitt interview, initially seemed to deny the report he’d fathered a child with the woman, but later clarified he was only denying the abortion — not later having a child with her.)
Second, Walker has also sought to cast doubt on the Daily Beast’s latest report by calling into question its previous reporting. He said late Wednesday that “there’s no truth to this or any other Daily Beast report.” But even while disputing the characterization that he had hidden the paternity of those children, he had confirmed the truth of its reporting on their existence.
What’s more, a third comment Walker made Thursday morning would seem to confirm he wasn’t exactly forthcoming about those children.
While discussing Christian Walker’s harsh comments against him this week, Walker traced the tension between them back to the reports about his other children.
“I haven’t sat down with Christian since he started believing — I think when he started believing that I had other kids, never told him about it,” Walker said, according to the transcript. “And I think he’s extremely hurt from that, and that was totally, totally not true.”
To unpack that: Walker says his own son believed that his father had “never told him about” the other children. But Walker is suggesting that his son was mistaken in this belief? To the extent that Christian Walker was indeed surprised by such news, that would seem to suggest Walker wasn’t terribly forthcoming, even privately.
The last revealing portion of Thursday’s interview came toward the end. Walker had continued to deny allegedly paying for an abortion, but he also downplayed what it would mean.
“Had that happened, I would have said it, because it’s nothing to be ashamed of there,” He said. “You know, people have done that, but I know nothing about it. And if I knew about it, I would be honest and talk about it.”
That is very difficult to square with Walker’s position on abortion rights. While some Republicans have walked back their hard-line positions after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Walker has stood by his. He has said he opposes abortion rights without any exceptions — including, presumably, for the life of the mother. He even said he would support Sen. Lindsey O. Graham’s (R-S.C.) 15-week federal abortion ban, which other Republicans have distanced themselves from.
“There’s no exception in my mind,” he said in May. “Like I say, I believe in life. I believe in life.”
At an event in June, Walker also repeatedly likened abortion to killing a child, saying, “But do y’all know most African American babies are killed during abortion?”
Now Walker is apparently saying that is “nothing to be ashamed of,” seemingly because other “people have done” it.
The incongruity echoes what could be considered Walker’s chief talking point in recent days. On the one hand, he denies the abortion; on the other, he keeps redirecting the conversation to his belief in “redemption.” This is the subject of an ad Walker released this week, which accuses his opponent, Sen. Raphael G. Warnock (D-Ga.), of not believing in redemption despite his being a preacher.
Walker can argue his reference isn’t to the alleged abortion but rather to other ugly disclosures about his personal life. (He and his campaign have often spoken in such terms — overcoming mental health struggles, starting a new life — when discussing those incidents.) But he’s inviting people who might doubt his denials to also believe that, even if he did it, it shouldn’t be a dealbreaker.
What’s clear is that a candidate who has often struggled to enunciate a coherent message is facing his biggest challenge yet.
Noted: Kelly has narrow lead over Masters in Ariz. Senate race, poll finds | 2022-10-06T17:57:31Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The holes in Herschel Walker’s response to the abortion allegation - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/06/walker-hewitt-interview-abortion/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/06/walker-hewitt-interview-abortion/ |
President Biden and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. (Royal Court of Saudi Arabia / Handout/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
Republicans are surely excited about the news that a group of oil-producing countries led by Saudi Arabia and Russia will slash oil production by 2 million barrels per day. In addition to threatening the global economy, it also could mean the specter of higher energy prices heading into the midterm elections, bolstering GOP attacks at a time when their potency has faded.
Democrats need to respond, not just for their own good but for the good of the country. This is an opportunity to clarify some murky complications in our politics about what the parties stand for — and show that our energy future and even the fate of the Western alliance backing Ukraine are deeply entangled in these midterms.
Rep. Tom Malinowski (D-N.J.), a vulnerable swing-district incumbent, is introducing a bill designed to increase pressure on OPEC and its allies to reverse the move. The bill would require the removal of U.S. troops and missile defense systems from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
This legislation is basically a vehicle for Democrats (and Republicans, if they so choose) to urge Biden to show that there will be consequences for harming U.S. interests. “At the end of the day, the power is in the president’s hands,” Malinowski told me. “He should begin withdrawing some of these assets.”
“No more pleading and cajoling,” he continued. “Just take an action. Make it clear … that the Saudis can’t take us for granted the way that they have been for so many years.”
Biden has invested a great deal in “cajoling” the Saudis, but it obviously failed; the widely criticized fist bump with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman looks even worse in retrospect. The questions now are how widely Democrats will demand consequences and whether Biden will respond.
The key nuance here is that Biden as commander in chief doesn’t need this bill to begin withdrawing military. But Malinowski says that if Democrats widely endorse the idea, it could send a strong signal to Biden and Saudi Arabia alike.
“We’re signaling to the president that he should play this card, and that there would be congressional support for doing so,” said Malinowski, who introduced the bill with Reps. Sean Casten (D-Ill.) and Susan Wild (D-Pa.).
There are other options for Democrats. Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-Va.) is calling for reforms to antitrust legislation that would strip OPEC and its allies of immunity to U.S. lawsuits, an idea that has bipartisan support.
“Democrats and Republicans alike should recognize the need for a coordinated and forceful response from Congress,” Spanberger told me in a statement. Spanberger added that the oil producing countries have sided with Russia “over the United States,” meaning that higher energy prices could strain European countries and weaken the pro-Ukraine alliance.
All this has the potential to produce a clarifying moment, in three ways. First, consider the role of the Republican Party.
In an act of meaningful trolling, Malinowski notes that his bill to pull the U.S. military presence mirrors a measure congressional Republicans introduced in 2020 to help President Donald Trump increase pressure on Saudi Arabia to cut production.
At the time, the situation was reversed — Trump wanted production slashed to boost then-collapsing oil prices to help his reelection. And the pressure paid off in a large oil production cut.
Now, however, it seems unlikely that Republicans would join in pressuring Saudi Arabia to refrain from cutting production, since cuts now could boost energy prices, helping the GOP. That Malinowski’s bill is similar to the 2020 GOP bill is designed to highlight the absurdity of this.
Second, this whole affair highlights the interests Saudi Arabia and Russia might have in seeing a GOP-controlled Congress, as well as that outcome’s geopolitical fallout. Even just a GOP House could slow our transition to green energy and potentially defund U.S. aid to Ukraine at a moment when the Russian invasion is in serious trouble.
Asked whether he believes that the move to cut oil production is designed to help Republicans win Congress, Malinowski allowed that the crown prince and Russia “share an interest in changing American politics in their favor.”
“Whether it’s energy policy or support for human rights around the world or support for Ukraine, there’s a commonality of interests there,” Malinowski told me.
Finally, this could clarify the costs of our entanglement with the Saudis — and do so in a way that unites Democrats. Progressives such as Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) have long pushed for a rethinking of U.S. relations with Saudi Arabia. Now we’re seeing some very forceful noises along these lines from more centrist Democrats:
Matt Duss, a foreign policy adviser to Sanders, points out that such a rethinking could also bolster the Democratic Party’s efforts to align itself firmly on the side of democracy and against autocracy, a goal pretty much all Democrats share.
“If we’re serious about strengthening democracy against authoritarianism, this would be a good moment to seriously reassess the United States’ long-standing relationship with one of the worst authoritarian governments in the world,” Duss told me.
That is something Democrats of all kinds should be able to get behind. | 2022-10-06T18:23:37Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | The Saudi snub of Biden is a disaster. Democrats must respond. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/06/saudis-snub-biden-cut-oil-production-2022-midterms/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/06/saudis-snub-biden-cut-oil-production-2022-midterms/ |
U.S. to redirect flights from Uganda to five airports for Ebola screening
There are no known cases here and the government believes the risk to the public is low.
By Lenny Bernstein
Doctors walk inside the Ebola isolation section of Mubende Regional Referral Hospital, in Mubende, Uganda, last week. (AP Photo/Hajarah Nalwadda)
The United States will immediately begin redirecting travelers from Uganda to five U.S. airports to screen them for the Ebola virus and follow up with them while they are in the country, a senior administration official said Thursday.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will conduct temperature checks and risk assessment on anyone who has been in Uganda over the previous 21 days, the incubation time for the deadly Ebola virus, the official said. State and local officials will follow up with them for 21 days after their arrival, the official said.
The airports are JFK International Airport in New York, Washington-Dulles International Airport, Newark Liberty International Airport, Chicago-O’Hare International Airport, and Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport.
Most of the 145 people who arrive from Uganda each day already land there. There are no direct flights from Uganda to the United States.
Ebola Virus Disease is a rare and often deadly hemorrhagic illness that causes fever, headache, muscle and joint pain, fatigue, loss of appetite and gastrointestinal symptoms as well as unexplained bleeding. Unlike covid-19, the virus is not transmitted through airborne droplets. It is spread through direct contact with bodily fluids, including blood, urine, feces, saliva or other secretions of a person who has symptoms or has died from the disease; infected animals or contaminated objects such as needles, according to the CDC.
There are no known cases in the United States, and the government believes the risk to the public here is low, according to the official.
Uganda is conducting exit screening for the virus and other African countries in the region are also checking arrivals for symptoms of the virus.
No cases of the new Sudan strain of the Ebola virus have been reported outside Uganda, where 44 confirmed cases, 10 confirmed deaths, and 20 probable deaths from the virus have been identified, according to the CDC. This is the fifth outbreak of the Sudan strain of the virus in Uganda since 2000, the health agency said.
There is a vaccine for the Zaire strain of the virus, which caused two large outbreaks in Africa in 2014 and 2018 that killed tens of thousands of people. But a vaccine for the Sudan strain that is being developed has not yet been tested. | 2022-10-06T18:36:43Z | www.washingtonpost.com | U.S. to redirect flights from Uganda to five airports for Ebola screening - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/10/06/ebola-uganda-screening-flights-us/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/10/06/ebola-uganda-screening-flights-us/ |
By Beatriz Rios
Marisa Bellack
Leaders of nations of the European Political Community pose for a photo during the inaugural meeting at Prague Castle on Thursday. (Sean Gallup/Getty Images)
PRAGUE — When French President Emmanuel Macron proposed the idea of a “European Political Community,” bridging the European Union and an outer circle of like-minded democracies, he was met with skepticism. Ukrainian leaders said they wanted full E.U. membership and not second-class status. British leaders said they didn’t want to reenter the entanglements they had just extracted themselves from. Political commentators chided Macron, saying he was again seeking to become the leader of Europe.
And yet Macron’s vision was realized Thursday, at least symbolically, as the leaders from the 27 E.U. member states joined the delegations from 17 non-E.U. countries at Prague Castle. The gathering included representatives from most countries on the continent, with the exception of Russia and Belarus.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, in a speech delivered via video link, said the new group offered “not just another for format of cooperation in Europe but an extremely powerful opportunity to restore peace in Europe.”
While arguing for sustained support for his country, Zelensky framed Russian aggression as an attack on Europe and its values.
E.U. leaders happy to pose with Zelensky, hesitant on Ukraine membership
“This is the Russian formula for war: kill, intimidate, fix threats to free states and their losses, destroy borders and corrupt,” he said. “And each of these elements is anti-European. All of them are directed against Europe.”
The E.U. granted Ukraine candidate status in June. But the process typically takes years. A prospective member’s entire body of laws must be picked over and brought into compliance with standards set in Brussels. And Ukraine must prove that it has moved beyond a political record marred by corruption.
Also addressing the Prague gathering was new British prime minister Liz Truss, who had been among the skeptics of the European Political Community but wrote in a Times op-ed that “it is right that we find common cause with our European friends and allies.”
Truss, a staunch defender of Brexit, insisted that Britain wasn’t about to resume the relationship with Europe it had before the divorce.
“Today’s meeting is not an EU construct or an EU alternative,” she wrote. “It brings together governments from across Europe, around a third of whom are outside the EU. A post-Brexit Britain, as an independent country outside the EU, should be involved in discussions that affect the entire continent and all of us here at home. We are taking part as an independent sovereign nation, and we will act as one.”
In Prague, Truss spoke about the need to for Europe to “continue to stand firm — to ensure that Ukraine wins this war but also to deal with the strategic challenges that it has exposed.”
During her leadership campaign, Truss had provoked French anger by saying “the jury is still out” on whether Macron counts as a “friend or foe.” Asked about it by journalists on Thursday, Truss confirmed she considered him a “friend.”
Macron first floated his idea for the European Political Community during a speech to the European Parliament in May.
“This new European organization would allow democratic European nations that subscribe to our shared core values to find a new space,” he said, citing possible joint projects in the energy, security or infrastructure sectors but also politically sensitive issues such as the free movement of people.
Some analysts have suggested that the proposal is rooted French resistance to enlarging the E.U. — and might be used to sideline aspiring members. In 2019, Macron’s government vetoed the opening of membership talks with Albania and North Macedonia, arguing that deeper cooperation within the bloc should take priority over expansion. The French president has also criticized the E.U. membership process for being “irreversible” and for a “bizarre” sequence that bestows benefits such as free movement within the E.U. before membership negotiations truly begin.
At the same time, Macron has been a vocal defender of the European project and regularly speaks about “European values” — to counter far-right nationalism and illiberal tendencies within the E.U., as well as external threats.
He has regularly positioned himself as the voice of Europe. And he has more room to maneuver since Britain’s exit from the E.U. and the retirement of longtime German chancellor Angela Merkel, who greeted his sweeping proposals for E.U. changes in 2019 with a shrug.
In April, Macron was reelected for another five-year term as head of the E.U.’s second-biggest economy.
But some question whether Macron has the political capital to bring European countries together in more than a symbolic way. The war in Ukraine has boosted his argument that Europe should become a “fully sovereign” bloc of nations. But Macron’s past efforts at rapprochement with Russia, and his willingness to keep talking to President Vladimir Putin even after the invasion, hurt the French leader’s reputation in parts of Europe.
Noack reported from Paris and Bellack from Washington. | 2022-10-06T18:36:43Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Macron’s European Political Community brings in skeptical Ukraine and U.K. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/06/european-political-community-macron-zelensky/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/06/european-political-community-macron-zelensky/ |
Death of 16-year-old protester adds new fuel to Iran uprising
People demonstrate in solidarity with Iranians near the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France, on Tuesday. The death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old who was detained Sept. 13 by the police unit responsible for enforcing Iran’s strict dress code, has led to protests around the world. (Julien Warnand/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock)
The death of a 16-year-old girl during Iran’s ongoing anti-government protests — and the apparent attempt by authorities to cover it up — has given demonstrators another rallying cry.
Nika Shakarami disappeared in Tehran on Sept. 20 after burning her headscarf in protest and being followed by security forces, her family told BBC Persian, citing the account of a friend who was with her at the time. The government then refused to disclose her whereabouts, stole her body for a secret burial and pressured relatives to make false statements about how she died, the family alleges.
Her story is eerily similar to that of Mahsa Amini, the 22-year-old Kurdish woman whose death on Sept. 16 in the custody of Iran’s “morality police” provided the first spark for the largest demonstrations Iran has seen in several years. Authorities said Amini had a heart attack after being arrested for an alleged violation of Iran’s strict dress code, releasing edited footage as evidence. But her family believes she was abused, and at her funeral, mourners yelled, “Death to the dictator” — a taboo reference to Iran’s supreme leader — before being attacked by police.
The protests now sweeping the country are a formidable challenge to Iran’s clerical leadership, reflecting decades of pent-up fury over poverty, repression, gender segregation and human rights violations. Iran’s leaders blamed the West for the popular uprising and have launched a violent crackdown, cutting internet access and killing at least 80 people, according to rights groups. Authorities have also threatened the families of those arrested and killed, seeking to intimidate them into silence.
Despite the danger, Shakarami’s aunt, Atash Shakarami, shared news of the teen’s disappearance on social media. Soon, her story began to circulate online and gain attention in Iran. A video of Shakarami wearing black baggy pants and a black T-shirt, her jet-black hair cut short, while singing a Persian love song went viral.
For days, Iranian authorities did not publicly comment on the case, but the family says they were privately pressured to keep quiet.
Shakarami’s aunt told BBC Persian that the teenager left the house on Sept. 20 with a water bottle in her bag, supposedly to visit her sister. The family later realized she was going to protest and probably took the water to rinse tear gas from her eyes.
They lost contact with her around 7 p.m. Sept. 20, the aunt said, and her Instagram and Telegram accounts were deleted that night. Security forces often demand detainees give them access to their social media accounts.
The family filed a missing persons report and searched for her in hospitals and police stations. But they heard nothing until 10 days later, when they found her body in a morgue.
“When we went to identify her, they didn’t allow us to see her body, only her face for a few seconds,” Atash Shakarami told BBC Persian.
As a condition for releasing the body, authorities demanded that the family bury her privately — a common tactic to avoid the funeral turning into a protest, as in the case of Amini.
The family brought her body to Shakarami’s father’s hometown in the west of Iran on Sunday, but they never got the chance to hold a funeral. That same day, authorities took back Shakarami’s body and buried her in a village about 25 miles away. They also arrested her aunt, Atash Shakarami.
Realizing they could no longer ignore her case, Iranian authorities finally commented Tuesday on Shakarami’s death, claiming that her body was found Sept. 21 in the backyard of a building after she had fallen to her death. Authorities also said they had arrested eight workers allegedly at the building when she died, according to Tasnim News. The news agency is close to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corp whose police force, the Basij, have been a key part of the crackdown on protesters. Fars News, which is also IRGC-affiliated, released video footage Wednesday that it said showed Shakarami entering the building, though the person is not identifiable.
State television also aired footage Wednesday of Shakarami’s aunt corroborating the government narrative, saying that the teen fell from the roof of the building. Her uncle appeared as well and criticized the protests. But as he spoke, a shadow appeared and someone seemed to whisper in Persian, “Say it, you scumbag!”
Iran’s government has long made use of forced confessions, according to rights groups, and on Thursday, Shakarami’s mother told Radio Farda, the Persian arm of U.S.-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, she was also being intimidated.
“They killed my daughter, and now they are threatening me into a forced confession,” she said. | 2022-10-06T18:36:44Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Death of 16-year-old protester Nika Shakarami further fuels anger in Iran - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/06/iran-protests-nika-shakarami-mahsa/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/06/iran-protests-nika-shakarami-mahsa/ |
A boat tour heads toward the base of Horseshoe Falls, as seen from the tunnel observation deck of the Niagara Parks Power Station. (Photos by Laura Randall for The Washington Post)
Now, Canada’s first major hydroelectric power station is the newest major tourist attraction on the Canadian side of the falls. Amid a sea of commercialized activities that include zip lines, casinos and a climate-controlled SkyWheel, the Niagara Parks Power Station offers visitors a unique perspective of one of the world’s most famous natural wonders.
Near Niagara Falls, U.S. and Canadian forts from the War of 1812 still face off
Pristine equipment
The people who worked at the Canadian Niagara Power Co. “took exceptional care and pride in it,” he said. “Everything you could imagine was still there when it closed. They even left the drawing board.”
Gruosso and his team had access to 1,500 archival photos dating as far back as 1901, chronicling “every step of the build,” he said. That included the construction of a huge temporary cofferdam to divert the thundering water from the building site. More than a century later, workers used modern technology and tools to build a similar watertight enclosure to hold back the river so they could reinforce the walls.
Then there’s the marvel that is the tailrace tunnel (the channel that discharged the tailwater back to the river), built in the early 1900s with little more than pickaxes, shovels and rudimentary dynamite.
Engineers weren’t sure what they would find when they first explored the idea of opening the tunnel to visitors. They built a swing stage, a scaffolding platform akin to those used in high-rise window cleaning, that allowed them access to the cavernous space beneath the power station to assess the tunnel’s condition.
“Once we saw how incredibly good the condition of the tunnel was after 100 years of use, we said, ‘Okay, we definitely have a winner here,’ ” he said.
“It offers a whole new perspective on the lower Niagara River,” said David Adames, the commission’s chief executive.
Central Canadian locale
The power station is an easy walk from Table Rock Centre, a prime shopping and eating hub in Queen Victoria Park, yet it feels far removed from the bustling, selfie-taking crowds that tend to dominate the area. A landscaped walkway leads past a key piece of hydroelectric equipment known as an exciter unit (now a blue-and-white art installation) to the main entrance. It’s the first hint that the experience ahead might go beyond a typical nuts-and-bolts engineering tour.
Inside, the light-filled “generator hall” features 51 large arched windows, limestone and granite floors, and the original 14-foot-high red-brass doors, each weighing 3,500 pounds. Interactive exhibits, vintage photographs and repurposed artifacts show how the water entered the building via a 575-foot-long forebay, then flowed through huge steel tubes known as penstocks to spin the blades in turbines that powered the generators to produce electricity.
A six-province jaunt through Canada provides a chance to revel in the classics
Visitors can opt for a self-guided or guided tour of the power station’s main hall, which intersperses history exhibits with interactive displays and original equipment such as motorized oil switches, giant wrenches and all 11 alternating-current generators (painted a striking robin’s-egg blue). Computerized screens hooked up to an original control panel let children test their hydropower knowledge and solve simulated emergencies. There are also exhibits detailing Nikola Tesla’s groundbreaking inventions and his famous DC vs. AC “currents war” with Thomas Edison; a paean to female scientists and staffers; and a scale model of the plant as it looked during peak operation.
In the evening, the power station hosts “Currents: Niagara’s Power Transformed,” a sleek, highly immersive light-and-sound show that brings the machinery to life through music, special laser effects and 3D mapping and imagery.
About 200,000 people visited the power station in its first year of operation, according to the commission. With the tunnel’s opening in July, officials expect the number to grow to 300,000 to 350,000 annual visitors, thanks in part to the attraction’s ability to appeal to a wide range of interest levels, said Adames, the CEO.
“There are so many stories to tell, starting with those who are simply curious about what’s behind those beautiful stone walls,” he added. “There’s the story of hydroelectric generation, the story of innovators at the turn of the century, the human story of the people who worked in the plant and the competition of the people building [power] plants on both sides of the border. It has all of it.”
Randall is a writer based in Los Angeles. Her website is authorlaurarandall.com.
Niagara Parks Power Station
7005 Niagara Pkwy., Niagara Falls, Ontario
bit.ly/niagara-power-station
The Niagara Parks Power Station was Canada’s first major hydroelectric plant; it’s now a tourist attraction with interactive exhibits and repurposed equipment showing visitors how the power of the Niagara River was harnessed to generate electricity. Open daily at 10 a.m.; closing times vary. Check website for details. Regular admission about $20 per person for ages 13 and up; about $14 for ages 6 to 12; and children 5 and under are free. Guided tours and admission from about $28 per person ages 13 and up and about $19 per person ages 6 to 12. Night shows from about $22 per person for ages 13 and up and about $15 ages 6 to 12. | 2022-10-06T19:24:45Z | www.washingtonpost.com | How to see Niagara Falls without the soaking or the crowds - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2022/10/06/niagara-falls-power-station-tour/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2022/10/06/niagara-falls-power-station-tour/ |
First Proud Boys leader set to plead guilty to Jan. 6 seditious conspiracy
Jeremy Bertino was in inner circle of right-wing group led by Henry ‘Enrique’ Tarrio, accused with some Oath Keepers of planning violence to oppose President Biden’s inauguration.
A Proud Boy is set to plead guilty to seditious conspiracy in the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack. (John Minchillo/AP)
A lieutenant of longtime former Proud Boys chairman Henry “Enrique” Tarrio is set to become the group’s first member to plead guilty to seditious conspiracy in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, deepening the government’s case against an organization accused of mobilizing violence to prevent the inauguration of Joe Biden, according to court records.
A plea by Jeremy Bertino, 43, of Belmont, N.C., would give the Justice Department a potential key witness against Tarrio and four other Proud Boys leaders who are set to face trial in December on charges of plotting to oppose by force the presidential transition, culminating in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack at the Capitol.
A plea hearing was set for 3:15 p.m. Thursday, according to court records. Prosecutors charged Bertino by criminal information on Thursday, a type of charging document that can be used in a felony case only with a defendant’s cooperation and that generally signals the existence of a plea agreement. He was charged with count of seditious conspiracy and one count of illegal possession of firearms as a formerly convicted felon. A plea is not final until accepted by a judge.
From December 2020 to January 2021, Bertino “did knowingly combine, conspire, confederate, and agree with” the Proud Boys co-defendants “to oppose by force the authority of the Government of the United States and to delay by force the execution of the laws governing the transfer of power,” the two-page charging document alleges.
Bertino held a place in the inner circle of Proud Boys leaders accused of conspiring to impede Congress with angry supporters of President Donald Trump as lawmakers met to confirm the election results. Prosecutors have alleged that Bertino was in touch with Tarrio and co-defendants close to GOP strategist Roger Stone and online Infowars show host Alex Jones, influential Trump supporters who promoted his incendiary and baseless assertions that the election was stolen from him.
Bertino’s home in North Carolina was searched in March at the same time that Tarrio was arrested on charges that he and at least four others “directed, mobilized and led” a crowd of 200 to 300 supporters onto Capitol grounds. Many in that crowd are accused of leading some of the earliest and most aggressive attacks on police and property.
At the time of the search, Bertino allegedly possessed two pistols, a shotgun, bolt-action rifle and two semiautomatic AR-15 style rifles with scopes. Bertino was convicted in 2004 of first-degree reckless endangerment in New York state, a felony, and sentenced to five years of probation with a period of local jail time, according to court filings.
Tarrio is a former aide to Stone, who remained in contact with Trump at Mar-a-Lago and in Washington in the weeks leading up to the Jan. 6 attack. Stone coordinated post-election protests and privately strategized with figures such as former national security adviser Michael Flynn and ‘Stop the Steal’ organizer Ali Alexander, The Post has reported.
Post exclusive: The Roger Stone Tapes -- Video shows effort to overturn 2020 election results
Stone communicated via encrypted texts after the 2020 election with Tarrio as well as Stewart Rhodes, the founder and leader of the Oath Keepers, a second right-wing extremist group. Rhodes and other group allies are currently on trial, accused of playing an outsized role in planning for and organizing violence at the Capitol.
Tarrio and Rhodes were part of a Signal chat group titled “F.O.S.” — or Friends of Stone, according to documentary video. The same documentary crew recorded Tarrio meeting in an underground parking garage next to the Capitol the evening before Jan. 6 with Rhodes and leaders of two pro-Trump grass roots groups.
Jones, meanwhile, promoted a Nov. 20, 2020, podcast by Tarrio in which he suggested in an expletive-laden call that Trump supporters infiltrate the Biden inauguration and turn it into a “circus, a sign of resistance, a sign of revolution.” That podcast, which featured Tarrio co-defendants Ethan Nordean and Joseph Biggs, a former Infowars employee, was first reported by online news site the Daily Dot and viewed by The Post.
Rhodes, Tarrio, Nordean and Biggs have pleaded not guilty to seditious conspiracy and other charges. Stone, who has not been charged, has categorically denied involvement in the Jan. 6 breach. He has previously told The Post, “Any claim, assertion or implication that I knew about, was involved in or condoned the illegal acts at the Capitol on Jan. 6 is categorically false and there is no witness or document that proves otherwise.”
An attorney for Alexander said he testified to a federal grand jury this summer after being assured he was not a target of the investigation. Jones’s attorney did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Tarrio and Bertino were not present in Washington on Jan. 6, the only two of more than 870 federally charged defendants who were not. But prosecutors alleged that Bertino was in direct contact with Tarrio, who oversaw events from Baltimore, and Nordean, who was in charge in Washington, according to a 10-count indictment against the pair and earlier charging papers.
Released videos show Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio meeting Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes the day before the attack on the Capitol. (Video: U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Columbia)
For instance, Bertino was Nordean’s guest in a Parler-linked video on Dec. 31 in which Bertino called Proud Boys “soldiers of the right wing” at war, and Nordean said that Americans must “desensitize” themselves to violence.
On Dec. 30 and 31, according to his indictment, Tarrio exchanged messages with an individual who sent him a plan called “1776 Returns” to occupy “crucial buildings” in Washington, including the House and Senate. His indictment stated that the individual messaged Tarrio, the “revolution is [sic] important than anything,” to which Tarrio replied, “That’s what every waking moment consists of … I’m not playing games.”
Proud Boys leader charged with conspiracy in Capitol insurrection
On Jan. 4, according to his indictment, Tarrio posted a voice message to a “Ministry of Self Defense” leaders group of Proud Boys, stating, “I didn’t hear this voice note until now, you want to storm the Capitol.” After the Capitol was breached, Tarrio wrote in a Telegram group chat, “We did this,” prosecutors said.
That night, Bertino — previously identified as “Individual A” or “Person 1” in charging papers — messaged Tarrio “1776,” exulting with a profanity, and Tarrio replied “The Winter Palace,” according to the indictment. Prosecutors allege it is a reference to a Proud Boys planning document that had a section called “Storm the Winter Palace,” referring to the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the former imperial palace in St. Petersburg that was raided by Bolsheviks, CNN first reported.
Bertino also suggested to Tarrio that the election result could be invalidated if lawmakers failed to vote by midnight, an argument that echoed the effort by Trump’s own lawyers to deny Biden’s victory.
Bertino has been on the radar screen of both the FBI and a House select committee investigating the events of Jan. 6. Bertino told the House panel that membership “tripled” after Trump famously urged the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by” during a 2020 presidential debate, according to a video clip of his interview played in a House hearing in June.
In a Proud Boys live-stream video taken at the Capitol shortly before it was stormed, Nordean can be seen shouting at police through a bullhorn, “You took our boy in, and you let our stabber go” — an apparent reference to Tarrio’s arrest and the dismissal of charges against another man initially accused of being involved in a Dec. 12 melee. On Jan. 4, Nordean shared a post of a photograph of himself and Bertino captioned, “And fight we will,” and included a link to his podcast “Rebel Talk with Rufio,” in which he and Bertino discussed the stabbing.
Before Bertino, all four of 14 people hit with the historically rare charge of seditious conspiracy in the Capitol riots were affiliated with the Oath Keepers. At least two other Proud Boys defendants have pleaded guilty to conspiring to obstruct Congress’s joint proceeding on Jan. 6 and agreed to cooperate with the government, Matthew Greene, 34, of Syracuse, N.Y., and Charles Donohoe, 34, of Kernersville, N.C.
The latest: Members of the extremist group Oath Keepers, led by founder Stewart Rhodes, planned for an armed rebellion “to shatter a bedrock of American democracy” on Jan. 6, a prosecutor told a jury. Here’s what happened on the second day of testimonies. | 2022-10-06T19:29:07Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Jeremy Bertino is first Proud Boys leader to plead guilty to seditious conspiracy - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/06/proud-boys-bertino-plea-seditious-conspiracy/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/06/proud-boys-bertino-plea-seditious-conspiracy/ |
Biden gave Mohammed bin Salman a fist bump. His reward? A gut punch.
President Biden in Saudi Arabia with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman on July 22. (Bandar Aljaloud/AP)
President Biden went to Jiddah in July and gave a very public fist bump to Saudi Arabia’s thuggish de facto leader, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. The prince, known by his initials MBS, has returned the favor with a sucker punch to the gut.
The Saudi-led decision by the cartel of major oil-producing nations to cut production by 2 million barrels per day is bad news on every level.
The move — with its intended boost in the price of oil — will give Russian President Vladimir Putin more revenue to fund his hideous war in Ukraine and to ease the pain of tough international sanctions. With Russian forces in retreat and fighting-age men fleeing the country to avoid being conscripted as cannon fodder, this is the best news Putin has had in months.
The world economy is still struggling to regain its footing after the disruptions and dislocations of the coronavirus pandemic. This decision by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and its allies, including Russia, will not necessarily create an oil shock that sparks a global recession. But it makes that ugly scenario more likely.
And the production cut will likely raise gasoline prices just weeks before the midterm elections, wreaking havoc with U.S. domestic politics in a way certain to make Biden and the Democratic Party livid. If it’s an effort to slow the United States’ transition away from fossil fuels by electing Republicans, it’s a shortsighted and short-term one: Congress changes hands, but decisions such as California’s efforts to reshape the car market are here to stay.
Saudi Arabia is by far the biggest oil producer in OPEC, and thus calls the shots. Inside the kingdom, MBS, newly appointed prime minister, makes the decisions. How far can he press on — arrogant, brutal, autocratic, reckless, contemptuous of democratic values and innocent lives — before the United States says enough?
Opinions coverage of Jamal Khashoggi’s murder
Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi journalist and Post contributing columnist since 2017, was killed in Istanbul at the consulate of Saudi Arabia in 2018. According to a U.S. intelligence assessment, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman approved an operation to capture or kill him.
Fred Hiatt, The Post’s editorial page editor at the time, called it “a monstrous and unfathomable act.” He wrote a column titled “Why bring a bonesaw to a kidnapping, Your Highness?”
Khashoggi’s columns for The Post described Saudi Arabia under Mohammed bin Salman, calling it “unbearable” and comparing him to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
President Biden, after vowing on the campaign trail to make Saudi Arabia a “pariah,” visited the country in July 2022. Biden defended the trip in a guest opinion for The Post. Washington Post Publisher Fred Ryan wrote that Biden’s trip showed American values are negotiable.
Biden greeted Mohammed bin Salman with a fist bump, which columnist Karen Attiah called “a crass betrayal.” Attiah edited Khashoggi’s columns for The Post.
By unhappy coincidence, it was four years ago this week when Jamal Khashoggi, a dissident Saudi journalist who was a legal resident of the United States and wrote columns for The Post, was lured to the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul, murdered by a Saudi government hit squad and dismembered with a bone saw. The CIA concluded that MBS personally authorized the assassination. He denies involvement in the killing, bristles when asked about it — and most recently has used his new title to claim immunity in a lawsuit against him.
Donald Trump was president then, and he has a soft spot for the Saudis, who knew how to flatter his preening ego: Remember when he went to Riyadh, just four months after taking office, and laid his hands upon a glowing orb? Trump threw doubt on the CIA’s conclusion about Khashoggi, opposed congressional efforts to punish MBS and ignored atrocities the prince’s U.S.-equipped military was committing in Yemen. Trump preferred to boast about all the money U.S. firms were making from arms sales to the Saudis.
Biden decided to try to get the U.S.-Saudi relationship back on a track consistent with American values and interests — hence the visit and fist bump in July. This oil-production cut is the thanks he gets.
In the short term, the president has no choice but to do what he can to keep gas prices down. He could order the release of more oil from the strategic petroleum reserve, perhaps in concert with other wealthy democracies. He is reportedly thinking about relaxing sanctions on Venezuela — run by another authoritarian thug, Nicolás Maduro — which would allow U.S. companies to bring more of that nation’s oil onto the market. Turning to the biggest potential immediate supplier of new oil — Iran — is not presently an option.
More broadly, Biden needs to realize that Saudi Arabia under MBS is more part of the problem than part of the solution — and to adjust U.S. policy accordingly.
He could throw the administration’s weight behind the bipartisan NOPEC bill — No Oil Producing and Exporting Cartels — that was passed by the Senate Judiciary Committee in May. The bill would revoke the sovereign immunity that protects OPEC members and allied oil-producing nations from antitrust lawsuits. The idea of such legislation has been around for years, and the Saudis have always lobbied as hard as they could to squash it.
Biden could also attach conditions to future deliveries of arms and spare parts to the Saudis. One of those conditions should be full and transparent accountability for Khashoggi’s murder. His family still doesn’t even know where his remains are.
Yes, these unsettled times require dealing with unsavory characters. But when one of them goes out of his way to hurt the United States, realpolitik means returning the favor. | 2022-10-06T19:42:13Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Biden fist-bumped Mohammed bin Salman, then got gut-punched - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/06/biden-mohammed-bin-salman-opec-production/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/06/biden-mohammed-bin-salman-opec-production/ |
Blue America tells Florida, ‘You’re welcome’
President Joe Biden talks with residents affected by Hurricane Ian as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis accompanies him during a tour of hurricane destruction in Fort Myers Beach, Florida. (Reuters/Evelyn Hockstein)
As a denizen of Blue America, allow me to offer a message to the people of Florida from here in the nation’s capital: You’re welcome.
You’ve suffered a terrible natural disaster, and we’re here to help. That was the message President Biden brought to Florida when Hurricane Ian hit; his White House took a series of actions to expedite aid to the affected areas, and he promised that the federal government would pay 100 percent of the cost of cleanup in the worst-hit counties.
It’s no more than we expect a president to do, and it’s what the Republicans who dominate the state’s politics, starting with Gov. Ron DeSantis, asked for. Biden even explicitly praised DeSantis’s handling of the disaster. Given the venom DeSantis usually hurls at Biden, it would have been understandable if the president had declined to be so complimentary even as they were pledging to work together.
Not everyone is feeling thankful, however. Before Biden arrived in Florida, DeSantis groused that the “national regime media” were hoping the storm would do more destruction and kill more people because if it did they’d be able to “use it to pursue their political agenda.”
DeSantis didn’t explain how that was supposed to work. But presumably, in this fantasy, the vicious “regime media” would be able to use dead Floridians to make DeSantis himself look bad.
The fact that the worst-hit areas of Florida are deeply Republican hasn’t mattered to the federal response, nor should it. The man who lost his home and told the New York Times that “our governor is the greatest … I’m not a Biden fan at all” is just as deserving of federal aid as anyone else.
So this is a good time to consider how toxic the geographic hostility has become — and few have been as enthusiastic about it as DeSantis. His recent stunt of luring migrants from Texas with false promises and sending them to Martha’s Vineyard was a middle finger to blue states and their liberal ideas about immigrants.
And it’s hard for blue staters to forget that after Superstorm Sandy hit New York and New Jersey in 2012, DeSantis, then a member of Congress, was among a large group of Republicans who voted against aid for the victims and communities affected. This is a familiar pattern: When a natural disaster hits a place with lots of Republicans in it, both parties unite to help, but when the same thing happens in a Democratic area, Republicans lose their sense of generosity.
In fact, Democrats sometimes make a show of their eagerness to help. After winter storms knocked out much of Texas’ power grid in 2021, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez raised millions of dollars to help Texans suffering without electricity.
Republicans might say, “That was just a PR stunt!” But like many things in politics, it had both a practical purpose and a public relations purpose, both of which were admirable. It gave assistance to people in need, and it made the point that we should help each other, even across the geographic lines that divide us. What could be wrong with that?
Liberals do sometimes indulge their less-healthy impulses, such as pointing out that Democratic states are more likely than Republican states to send more in taxes to the federal government than they get back in federal spending, and using that fact to characterize the Republican states as undeserving “takers.”
But when it comes to making policy, Democrats are pretty consistent in their desire to help Republican states, whether it’s giving disaster aid, trying to offer health coverage to red-state residents whose leaders refuse to allow them to have it, or promoting development in rural areas that will likely never vote Democratic.
Liberals should also keep in mind that promoting geographic hostility is vitally important to the larger Republican political project.
That project is dependent on minority rule, which allows the GOP to prevail even when the majority of voters favor Democrats. To be fine with 600,000 people in Wyoming getting the same representation in the Senate as 40 million Californians, or brutal gerrymandering that gives disproportionate power to rural areas at the expense of cities, you have to imagine that geographic lines are immutable and proper borders of identity, separating us from them.
Which is why Republicans so eagerly promote geographic hostility, so their supporters believe that minority rule is not just a happy accident but morally justified, a way of keeping those who aren’t “real” Americans from being represented.
But even the most ardent partisan won’t stand atop the rubble of their destroyed home and say, “I don’t need anything from those people.” When the entire country, in the form of our federal government, reaches out a hand to help, they’ll accept.
And we’re happy to do it. But maybe next time you start pouring contempt on the places where we live, you’ll remember that. | 2022-10-06T19:42:13Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Democrats help Florida after Hurricane Ian. There's a lesson there. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/06/florida-hurricane-ian-democrats-aid/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/06/florida-hurricane-ian-democrats-aid/ |
Moldova’s president: Our democracy’s survival depends on joining the E.U.
By Lally Weymouth
Moldovan President Maia Sandu in 2019 in Chisinau, Moldova. (Andreea Alexandru/AP)
Maia Sandu is a woman on a democratic mission in a war-torn neighborhood — the first honest president that Moldova has elected since breaking away from Russia in 1991. After a series of pro-Russian oligarchs enriched themselves at the expense of this small former Soviet republic, Sandu, a 50-year-old former World Bank employee and education minister, formed her own political party in 2016 to fight corruption. She was appointed prime minister in 2019 and elected president in 2020. Now, instead of focusing fully on criminal justice reforms, she is navigating the shock waves of Russia’s war against neighboring Ukraine and the impact of Russian cutbacks on gas sales to Europe. The Post’s Lally Weymouth sat down with Sandu this week in the presidential offices in Chisinau. Edited excerpts of their conversation:
Weymouth: How do you see the war in Ukraine going?
Sandu: We have condemned the Russian aggression against Ukraine from the very first day. One year ago, none of us would have thought we would have a full-fledged war in Europe. Ukraine is fighting for the free world and is also defending us.
Do you expect the war to go on for a while?
We all want this war to end as soon as possible and Ukraine to recover its territories.
How do you see President [Vladimir] Putin’s actions — his conscription, driving people to flee from Russia to avoid being drafted and his nuclear threats?
We have condemned the actions Russia has been taking. The war has created a lot of pain for Ukraine, but Moldova has also been affected significantly. Our analysis shows that the risk of Russia using nuclear weapons is small, but it should not be excluded.
You’ve spoken about your need to move your country away from its traditional neutral status.
Unfortunately, Russian propaganda has been trying to mislead people in Moldova that neutral means you should not have a defense sector or you should not invest in your defense sector, which is not true. In the constitution it says that we are a neutral country. At the same time, it says that the country should have an army and the army should be able to defend the country. So we are saying that because of the war in Ukraine, we should be more concerned about our security and should invest more than we invested in the past in our defense sector.
What’s the most important thing to you personally?
I do believe that our chance to survive as a democracy — and democracy is very important to us — is to integrate into the European Union. We want to stay part of the free world.
The Post's View: Russian aggression may have a new target -- Moldova
How [else] has Moldova been affected by the war?
It has caused the energy crisis which is affecting Moldova. Because of this war, we have high inflation and today Moldovans pay a price for gas seven times higher than last year. We are also paying a higher price for electricity. Moldova is not a rich country, which means that in people’s budgets, the share of spending on energy and on food is very high.
[Russia’s state-owned energy company] Gazprom threatened to cut off Moldova’s gas supply on Oct. 1. They did not cut off the supply entirely but reduced it by 30 percent. Will you turn to the open market?
The problem is the price. There is still gas on the market, but the prices are very high. They are 10 times higher than last year. Before, we had 100 percent of gas provided by Gazprom. … We will be able to buy gas on the Romanian market, but the question is whether we will be able to afford such prices.
So the gas supply for this month is taken care of?
It is for this month. We will have to see how things develop in the next few months.
People say that your citizens will spend 50 percent of their money on energy and electricity this winter.
The government will try to compensate those with low incomes. The government has some (gas) reserves but not [enough to last] long.
People say that Ilan Shor, a Moldovan oligarch who was convicted in a Moldovan court in 2017 of stealing over $1 billion, is living in Israel and working with the Russians to undermine your government.
He was involved in a banking-sector fraud, which was a significant scheme [involving] a $1 billion fraud of three banks, one of which was a state bank. He left the country when we were elected because he and the other crooked oligarchs realized we are serious when we talk about justice-sector reform and strengthening the independence of the anti-corruption institutions. Now they have been working together with pro-Russian political parties in Moldova, trying to undermine our efforts.
Do you intend to retrieve the money stolen by Mr. Shor and the others?
We need the big countries, including the U.S., to help us stop the movement of dirty money from one country to another and to recover the money that was stolen. People who paid taxes had their money stolen from the state budget. They feel the injustice.
How many pro-Russian parties are in Moldova?
There are two political parties which are in the parliament, one of which is openly pro-Russian. Another is not openly declared as pro-Russian but has close ties to Russia.
The Post's View: Reformers just won a rare victory in Russia’s backyard. Biden should help them.
How is the reform of the justice system going?
We are making progress in reforming justice and prosecution. But building institutions takes time.
Are you satisfied by the pace of reform?
We would like it to happen sooner, but we need to respect the conditions of the E.U.
You hear people complaining that the reforms are too slow.
If you wait too long to enact reforms, it may be difficult to explain to people who gave us their support to fight corruption.
You have managed to achieve E.U. candidate status for Moldova in record time.
To us, E.U. integration is very important. This is probably the only way for us to be able to save and consolidate democracy in this difficult region.
I hear that you hate to talk about yourself.
This is not about me, this is about Moldova and its people.
But you’re the president of Moldova.
I know, but there is an entire team trying to help. And we’ve got to thank the Moldovan people. When some of these corrupt people tried to impose an authoritarian regime, they went to the streets to protest. We appreciate democracy no matter how difficult it is economically.
Do you live here [in the presidential offices]?
There is a house that the former president lived in, but I don’t want to spend people’s money on my electricity consumption, so I stay in my apartment and pay for my own electricity.
I don’t believe [I am making] a sacrifice. It is a sacrifice for some of our ministers who left jobs which paid 10 times higher. We have to go through this because we have to change the situation.
Is the president paid the same as the ministers?
My salary is less than 1,000 euros a month. It’s a poor country.
What made you believe you could do this?
The choice was that I either leave the country or try to change things. I never planned to become a politician, but seeing so many corrupt people in politics, and [seeing] corruption seeping into state institutions, there was no future for this country.
What made you think that it wasn’t hopeless?
I just felt it was my duty to try. I love this country. | 2022-10-06T19:42:14Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Moldova President Sandu: E.U. integration is critical to our democracy's survival - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/06/moldova-president-interview-eu-integration/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/06/moldova-president-interview-eu-integration/ |
A Washington foreign policy legend issues a dire warning
Morton Halperin, right, and Herbert Scoville Jr. discuss a statement by the Federation of American Scientists at a news conference in Washington on Dec. 22, 1971. (Harvey Georges/AP)
America’s role as a promoter of freedom, democracy and universal rights is under unprecedented pressure both at home and abroad. All over the world, autocracy is on the march. The United States’ own democratic credibility is at a historic low. Yet legendary Washington foreign policy practitioner Morton Halperin is still optimistic that democracy can eventually prevail — if we fight for it.
Halperin, who served in senior national security posts under presidents from Lyndon B. Johnson to Barack Obama, retired last month, ending a six-decade career in diplomacy and public service. Now 84, he worked in the Nixon administration under then-national security adviser Henry A. Kissinger, who secretly wiretapped him for 21 months. Halperin once held the No. 8 spot on President Richard M. Nixon’s enemies list. A note next to his name read: “A scandal would be helpful here.”
He oversaw the production of the Pentagon Papers, which documented the coverup of U.S. military failures in the Vietnam War. He literally wrote the book on bureaucratic politics and foreign policy. In between stints in government, Halperin worked for several civil society organizations advocating causes ranging from arms control to civil rights to government accountability. He founded an intergovernmental coalition called the Community of Democracies. His last posting was as a senior adviser to the Open Society Foundations.
Halperin is a proud liberal internationalist who dedicated his life to advancing the cause of democracy and human rights while seeking to prove that the United States could be a force for good in the world. Looking back on that career now, he said what has changed the most is that in the 21st century, the greatest threats to democracies come from within.
“We thought the much greater danger was military coups,” he told me in an interview. “The real danger was the elected autocrat.”
In countries such as Hungary, Turkey and Egypt, he said, we see voters choosing strongmen who dismantle the democratic process and minority rights. Here at home, Donald Trump and his many supporters’ efforts to undermine and overturn free and fair elections, combined with their attacks on minorities, are a worrying escalation of the same trend. Trump and his GOP allies are betting that Americans view the defeat of their political enemies as more important than the preservation of democratic norms.
“I think we underestimated the degree to which people prefer to live in a country where the government represents their view of who the society is,” said Halperin. “The tyranny of the majority … that was a much more serious threat than I contemplated.”
As democracies are being tested internally, the world’s aggressive dictatorships are taking advantage, he warned. Since the end of the Cold War, autocrats have learned that they are more likely to survive internal dissent if they turn to violence against their own people. This has resulted in more repression and political persecution in countries like Myanmar, Syria and Iran.
“In a way, we’ve taught the autocrats that murder is the best option for them,” Halperin said. “Passive resistance works unless you have a leader who is willing to shoot people marching in the street.”
These days, Halperin’s neoliberal worldview is often derided as imperialist or overly aggressive. Americans are rightly wary of foreign intervention after failures in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.
But Halperin, who had a front-row seat to the Vietnam War, said that the critics have learned the wrong lessons. The problem with U.S. foreign policy since World War II has not been the extent to which it has promoted values such as freedom, democracy and human rights, he argued. The issue is rather that various U.S. governments have sided with leaders who had no real legitimacy.
“The fundamental lesson is, [we must] help people who are willing to risk their own lives to help themselves and who have the genuine nationalist support of their own people,” he said. “And the tragedy of Vietnam is, we chose the wrong side. Almost the most important thing in the Pentagon Papers is that Truman was told that Ho Chi Minh was the legitimate leader of Vietnam.”
Today, we in the United States face a world in which our international influence is lessened, people in other countries are less willing to work with us, and our internal will to fight for freedom and democracy has diminished. Nevertheless, Halperin said, Americans still have a duty to help those people abroad who are fighting for dignity and self-determination — wherever they emerge.
“There still continue to be democratic insurgencies, and I think we have to be there for them,” he said. “It’s hard to be optimistic, but you have to be. This is where we have to go. It’s going to take longer than we thought.” | 2022-10-06T19:42:15Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Washington legend warns internal forces pose big threat to democracy - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/06/morton-halperin-warning-electoral-autocrats-democracy/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/06/morton-halperin-warning-electoral-autocrats-democracy/ |
The festival has always punched above its weight. Its challenge now is growing without changing too much.
Virginia’s Middleburg Film Festival debuted in October 2013. (Dayna Smith for the Washington Post)
Middleburg Film Festival Executive Director Susan Koch remembers a moment in 2014 when she knew the festival had fulfilled its mission. The awards-season favorite “The Imitation Game” had been playing to packed crowds when Koch walked through the cozy-elegant lobby of the Salamander Resort and Spa, the festival’s hub in Virginia’s Loudoun County.
She spied Graham Moore, “The Imitation Game’s” screenwriter, sitting “by the fireplace, just working on his next script,” she recalls. “Anybody could come up and talk to him.”
Intimacy, accessibility and buzz have always been paramount at Middleburg, which celebrates its 10th annual edition beginning Thursday with 40 films, its largest program ever. Launched in 2013 by Sheila C. Johnson — who, in addition to owning the Salamander, has served on the board of the Sundance Institute and has produced several films, including “The Butler” and “Summer of Soul (... Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised)” — Middleburg is one of the few regional film festivals that seems to have punched above its weight from the very beginning.
Middleburg’s opening-night film in 2013 was “Nebraska,” with the film’s star, Bruce Dern, in attendance — a “get” that was in place even before Programming Director Connie White came on board. White, a respected figure in the world of festival programming and independent exhibition, was impressed. “Often opening night and [securing] a high-profile guest is one of the first things asked of me,” she observes. Having that prime slot already set, she says, “I could use that when I was approaching other distributors who had never heard of Middleburg.”
From the archives: Middleburg Film Festival is like an itty-bitty Cannes, with a few stars amid the foliage
In a full-circle moment, “Nebraska’s” producers, Middleburg advisory board members Ron Yerxa and Albert Berger, will bring their latest project to this year’s festival: “Somewhere in Queens,” directed by Ray Romano, who will also attend the screening. Other filmmakers scheduled to appear include Gina Prince-Bythewood (“The Woman King”), Rian Johnson (“Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery”) and Florian Zeller (“The Son”), as well as actors Micheal Ward (“Empire of Light”), Dolly De Leon (“Triangle of Sadness”), Anna Diop (“Nanny”) and Brendan Fraser (“The Whale”).
From the beginning, organizers saw a niche for Middleburg — a picturesque town in the middle of Virginia’s horse country, anchored by Johnson’s sprawling, stylishly appointed hotel — as a destination festival on a par with Telluride, but even more approachable. There, film lovers could see the season’s most highly anticipated films and mingle with their makers amid wine tastings, relaxed dinners or casual encounters on the Salamander’s 340-acre campus. The festival’s motto was “four days of fantastic films in a stunning setting,” Koch recalls. (And an expensive one: Rooms at the Salamander run about $500 per night; screening and event packages range from $1,200 to $3,000. More affordable ticket options include the $125 day pass and $18 individual admissions.)
Another catchphrase: “The road to the Oscars goes through Middleburg,” which turned out to be true. Over the years, festivalgoers have been able to see such eventual best-picture winners as “Spotlight,” “Moonlight” and “Green Book,” often with the creative principals in attendance, as well as such nominees as “La La Land,” “Call Me by Your Name” and “The Power of the Dog.” Celebrities have sprinkled their share of pixie dust: In 2016, Emma Stone showed up with “La La Land’s” director, Damien Chazelle; last year, Dakota Johnson came to talk about “The Lost Daughter” (with boyfriend Chris Martin in tow), Kenneth Branagh came with his semi-autobiographical drama “Belfast”; and actress Ann Dowd came with the searing chamber piece “Mass.”
Dowd “had no idea what to expect” from Middleburg, she wrote in a recent email. What she found, she said, was “a beautiful experience.”
At Middleburg, the pandemic pause yields a crop of thoughtful, deeply personal movies
“The events planned — the screening, the q-and-a, the luncheons, the gatherings — were chosen with obvious care and consideration,” Dowd continued. “The event was full of warm, intelligent, kind people who shared a love and respect for film. I remain deeply grateful for being included.”
Branagh, Koch says, was just as effusive. “When you do a film like he did that is so personal, you want that relationship with your audience.”
Of course, it didn’t hurt that, before he presented “Belfast,” Branagh had been treated to a lavish dinner in his honor in the Salamander’s stallion barn, converted for the evening into a glittering party space. The care and feeding of talent was of special importance to Koch who, as a documentary filmmaker, has been to her share of festivals. “We take great care in how we position their films, we give a lot of thought to who’s going to do the conversations, we try to get as big an audience as we can,” Koch says. “We just want them to have as positive an experience as they possibly can, whether it’s by having a dinner or some kind of a chat, or just little things we can do to enhance the experience and separate us out from the pack a little bit.”
The result is that Middleburg has earned deep loyalty among the filmmakers who have appeared there. This year, Noah Baumbach — who brought “Marriage Story” in 2019 — will be on hand with the opening-night film “White Noise,” his adaptation of the Don DeLillo novel. Every year, the festival honors a film composer; this year, Michael Abels, who wrote the scores for “Get Out,” “Us” and “Nope,” will be recognized and five former honorees — Mark Isham, Marco Beltrami, Charles Fox, Kris Bowers and Diane Warren — will come back for a reunion concert (2019 honoree Terence Blanchard will appear Sunday with his band).
And the festival has earned “an incredible amount of trust and respect” among studios and distributors, says Jason Cassidy, vice chairman at Focus Features. In addition to “Belfast,” Focus has brought “Harriet,” “Darkest Hour” and “Loving” to Middleburg in years past; this year the studio will bring “Tár,” starring Cate Blanchett, and James Gray’s semi-autobiographical period piece “Armageddon Time.” Focus, Cassidy adds, “looks forward to continuing to collaborate [with Middleburg] for many years to come.”
Middleburg has felt so sure of its mission, and so assured in its execution of it, that improving on it is a double-edged sword. Although the town doesn’t have a proper movie theater, audiences have grown accustomed to seeing films in the Salamander’s ballroom, as well as a nearby school, sports library and community center. Attendance has remained steady, organizers say, with pre-pandemic levels hovering around 5,000. Although, like most festivals, Middleburg went hybrid in 2020 because of the coronavirus pandemic, unlike some other festivals, the virtual component went away last year. “We didn’t want that to become an option,” White says, “because we think the in-person experience for the audience and filmmakers is so important.”
White recalls the early days of having to explain to recalcitrant studios and distributors where the town was (“30 miles from Dulles, closer than D.C.”); now, she says, they’re calling her asking for precious slots. The past decade started with her promising that they would be happy to get on board early. “Now, it’s like, ‘We want presence at your festival, we want to be in your lineup,’ ” she says. Koch adds: “We’ve gotten quite a few offers to expand to nearby towns, and we’ve really resisted. I don’t know that growth means numbers.”
Johnson says the 10th edition is “a good time to start thinking about the next five or 10 years and how we might want to grow, whether it’s adding a day to the festival, increasing the number of venues or hosting more advance screenings and premieres throughout the year.” Although she has spoken in the past of building a theater on the Salamander grounds, she adds, “These are all questions for our board to consider. Nothing is off the table.”
For the time being, Johnson and her team agree, Middleburg is happy to stay where it is, literally and figuratively.
The Middleburg Film Festival runs Oct. 13-16 at the Salamander Resort and Spa, Middleburg, Va. middleburgfilm.org
Europe’s largest airline is a troll on social media — and it’s working for them | 2022-10-06T20:21:35Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Middleburg Film Festival turns 10 with largest program ever - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/movies/2022/10/06/middleburg-film-festival-tenth-anniversary/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/movies/2022/10/06/middleburg-film-festival-tenth-anniversary/ |
A personal trainer says he was assaulted — by a deputy mayor of D.C.
Christopher Geldart, D.C.’s deputy mayor for public safety and justice (Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post)
Dustin Woodward, a 29-year-old trainer at Gold’s Gym in Arlington, said he had just finished his last training session of the morning on Saturday when he walked out to meet his girlfriend, who had IHOP eggs and pancakes waiting in her car. But when he arrived at the black Kia Sportage, Woodward said his girlfriend looked distressed.
The man in the vehicle one spot over, she told him, had opened the back passenger seat for his daughter and, in the process, hit her car.
“Hey, you just hit my car,” Woodward’s girlfriend said to the man.
“That’s what you get for being parked on the line,” the man responded, according to Woodward.
Unbeknown to the couple at the time, Woodward said, the man was Christopher Geldart, D.C.’s deputy mayor of public safety and justice. And the incident did not end there. Video of part of the encounter shows Woodward and Geldart pointing aggressively at each other before Geldart approached Woodward and the two went chest to chest. Woodward alleges the deputy mayor grabbed him by the throat; the footage shows Geldart appearing to push him, before Woodward shoves his arm away.
Three days later, after Woodward filed a criminal complaint against Geldart with the county magistrate’s office, the office of D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) announced the deputy mayor was on leave and officials were investigating the encounter. In a statement, the mayor’s office downplayed the incident, saying “it sounds like something that happens to a lot of people.” Geldart has not responded to multiple requests for comment.
As deputy mayor, a position he has held since early 2021, Geldart oversees the city’s police force, emergency and fire response, jails, and other agencies tasked with keeping District residents safe. He previously served as director of the Department of Public Works and helped lead the city’s early response to the coronavirus pandemic. In 2017, he resigned from his position at the helm of D.C.’s Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency over allegations that he used the office to benefit a “close personal acquaintance,” though the city’s ethics board ultimately dismissed the investigation, citing insufficient evidence.
Outside of Gold’s Gym on Saturday, the tension between the two men quickly escalated. The following account is based on The Washington Post’s interview with Woodward. The video footage, obtained by FOX 5, does not include audio.
After Geldart retorted to Woodward’s girlfriend that she had parked on the line, Woodward got out of the car and the two men began arguing about whether Geldart had scratched the car, according to Woodward. Woodward threatened to call the police, and Geldart said he would leave before the authorities arrived.
“Call the f---ing police,” Geldart screamed, according to Woodward. “You won’t do it.”
“Shut up!” Woodward yelled, pointing at the deputy mayor.
At that point, Geldart approached Woodward, getting inches from his face. Woodward leaned in. Woodward said Geldart then grabbed his neck before Woodward pushed him away. Shortly after, a woman who appeared to be with Geldart stepped between the two and spoke to the deputy mayor. He then walked away.
Woodward, who has been employed at Gold’s Gym for a few months, said he had seen Geldart around the gym but never interacted with him. He said he learned his name after reporting the incident to a gym manager, who talked to another gym manager, who knew Geldart’s wife.
Woodward said he did not know Geldart was the deputy mayor of D.C. until he searched his name on Google after first reporting the incident to police on Monday.
Woodward then filed a criminal complaint Tuesday with the county magistrate’s office, which issued a warrant for Geldart for assault and battery. Geldart, 53, was notified of the warrant by phone and turned himself in before he was released on a summons, according to police.
Michael Brice-Saddler and Salvador Rizzo contributed to this report. | 2022-10-06T20:25:51Z | www.washingtonpost.com | A personal trainer says he was assaulted — by a deputy mayor of D.C. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/06/christopher-geldart-assault-dustin-woodward/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/06/christopher-geldart-assault-dustin-woodward/ |
13 arrested at D.C. protest over 5th Circuit’s DACA ruling
U.S. Capitol police arrest demonstrators protesting Thursday in support of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) on Capitol Hill. (Jose Luis Magana/AP)
Many of the people protesting were recipients of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program (DACA), said Jossie Flor Sapunar, a spokeswoman for CASA, an immigrant rights group. The program, created during the Obama administration, has changed the lives of hundreds of thousands of young people whose immigrant parents brought them to the United States, but who were previously unable to afford college, work legally or get driver’s licenses.
Protesters disagreed with a ruling Wednesday by a three-judge panel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit that the DACA program was illegal. Those already enrolled in the program can renew their status — a requirement every two years — but new applications are halted.
📢 DC police have given activists the first warning to remove themselves off the streets! They didn’t hold back on police presence. pic.twitter.com/9MP11pxkR7
This ruling was “the latest in a long limbo” that DACA recipients have been living, said Flor Sapunar, who estimated about 100 people joined the protest.
“Thank you for DACA, but the reality is that it’s never been enough,” said Flor Sapunar. “The only thing that can stop this roller coaster of emotions, is offering citizenship to the millions of immigrants who have had DACA and beyond.”
The group gathered at Columbus Circle Thursday morning and marched to the Upper Senate Park, where DACA-recipients shared their stories, Flor Sapunar said. Afterward, the group headed toward the Hart Senate Office Building, where Capitol Police arrested 13 people for blocking traffic along the 100 block of Constitution Avenue shortly after 11 a.m., said Capitol police spokesman Tim Barber.
Cindy Kolade, 29, a DACA recipient from Baltimore who joined the protest, came to the United States from the Ivory Coast with her mom when she was 12 and learned while applying to colleges that she was undocumented. Through DACA, she has been able to study cell and molecular biology at Towson University and is close to finishing her bachelor’s of science degree while also working as a clinical lab technician.
On Thursday, she felt sad, fearful and angry about the court ruling, saying it reinforced her belief that DACA is only “a temporary solution” to the need for a pathway to citizenship.
“With a permanent solution to citizenship, we will be able to not just apply every two years, but it’s going to take the fear out of us,” she said. “It’s going to make sure that we are able to participate in the country that we’ve lived in for so long.” | 2022-10-06T20:25:57Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Immigrant rights advocates arrested at DC protest over DACA ruling - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/06/daca-dreamers-protest-court-immigration/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/06/daca-dreamers-protest-court-immigration/ |
Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan speaks at Politics & Eggs, a forum at Saint Anselm College in Manchester, N.H., on Oct. 6 (Brian Snyder/Reuters)
An earlier version of this story said Hogan allies who gathered to discuss his options reviewed internal polling and heard that 50 percent of Republican voters were “gettable.” Those gathered reviewed a survey of polls and found that half of Republican voters were “persuadable.” The story has been corrected.
Gov. Larry Hogan, who is eyeing a run for the White House, is in the nation’s first primary state — again.
Hogan appeared at Politics & Eggs on Thursday morning, a popular stop for presidential hopefuls at St. Anselm College in New Hampshire, and was later scheduled to meet with police officers and home builders before stumping for a conservative state senate candidate who rejects covid-19 mandates, opposes transgender rights and who once tweeted questioning the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s victory over President Donald Trump.
Hogan’s visits to Massachusetts (he spoke at Harvard and attended an event with Republican Gov. Charlie Baker) and New Hampshire this week, along with a recent gathering of top donors in Annapolis, signal that the governor’s exploration of a presidential bid is intensifying.
“I want to be in position,” Hogan told the audience in Manchester, N.H., when asked if there is a lane for him if Trump runs in 2024. “Is there a lane? That’s part of what we’re trying to find out.”
Hogan, one of the most popular governors in the country, continues to poll well in Maryland. A recent Washington Post-University of Maryland poll found that 73 percent of registered voters approve of the job he is doing. While 74 percent of registered Republicans approve of his performance, only 35 percent said they would support Hogan in a hypothetical race against Trump in 2024. (Trump received 59 percent support).
Hogan said he plans to hold a summit in Annapolis in November, after the midterm elections, with thought leaders from across the country to “talk about the path forward, what we can do to get the country moving in a different direction.”
Hogan’s appearance at Politics & Eggs is his second in the last three years. He spoke there in 2019 when he said that he was seriously considering a primary run against Trump.
On Wednesday night, the governor spent an hour fielding questions at Harvard’s Institute of Politics from students and former Wyoming Gov. Matt Mead, a fellow Republican, that ranged from his handling of the covid-19 crisis to the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol and threats to democracy to his position on the formation of a third party for disaffected Republicans and Democrats.
“It’s very difficult, it’s not worked before and I’m not sure a third party is the right way to go,” said Hogan, who is a proponent of open primaries. “An independent effort that is not far left or far right is possible but I don’t think outside of the current party system is the right way to go … We’d be better off trying to fix the broken parties.”
Hogan has been branded a moderate during his two terms as governor in a blue state. But as he makes his way across the country talking about political divisiveness he also mentions, as he did Wednesday night, that he does not see himself as a moderate but as a “common sense conservative … willing to work across the aisle.”
On Thursday, he was scheduled to raise money for Rich Girard, a former alderman and school board member who is running for state senate in New Hampshire. Girard, who has also been endorsed by Gov. Chris Sununu (R), opposes critical race theory and transgender people using restrooms in accordance with their gender identities. He also tweeted that the 2020 election was stolen.
#nhpolitics #MAGA2020 #voterfraud #2020wasstolen https://t.co/q0NF28oGfi
— Rich Girard (@GirardAtLarge) November 30, 2020
Hogan has trekked across the country headlining events for Republican gubernatorial and congressional candidates in the last three months. In March, he was in Florida meeting with Cuban and Venezuelan dissidents, and in April he was back in the state attending a conference with the Republican Main Street Partnership.
Earlier this summer, he made a stop at the Iowa State Fair, a crucial campaign stop for presidential hopefuls. He has also gone to New Hampshire to raise money for New Hampshire Republicans running for Congress, to Nebraska to support U.S. Rep. Don Bacon’s reelection bid, and to Oregon to stump for Republican Christine Drazan in a tight race for governor.
About a week ago, Hogan hosted about 50 supporters and top donors at an Annapolis ballroom to talk about his future and the possibility of a presidential run after he finishes his second and final term as governor in January.
Hogan and others — including David Weinman, who runs An America United, Hogan’s political organization, and Russ Schriefer, a Republican political strategist and media consultant who has worked on presidential campaigns — spoke about a potential lane toward the White House, according to people who attended or were briefed about the event.
The guests were shown research of current polling that found that 30 percent of Republicans were “hard core” Trump supporters, 20 percent disliked the former president and about 50 percent were “persuadable.”
The attendees were given scenarios for a presidential bid, including information about how much money other candidates have historically raised to enter the field. By Nov. 30, when An America United will hold a fundraiser, Hogan hopes to have raised at least $1 million. | 2022-10-06T20:26:03Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Gov. Larry Hogan positions himself for a possible presidential run - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/06/hogan-president-new-hampshire/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/06/hogan-president-new-hampshire/ |
Man arrested in fatal Pr. George’s shooting
Randy McFail was wanted in an August homicide, police said
A 32-year-old man who was wanted in an August homicide in the unincorporated section of Capitol Heights has been arrested, Prince George’s County police said.
Randy McFail, of Capitol Heights, is charged with first- and second-degree murder and related counts in the shooting of Robert Earl Price, 22, of Washington. McFail was taken into custody by the Bowie Police Department on Tuesday, police said. He is being held without bond at the county jail.
On Aug. 7, officers responded to a reported shooting at about 6:30 p.m. in the 4100 block of Southern Avenue, police said. When officers arrived, they found Price with a gunshot wound in a parking lot. He died at the scene.
Police said the men knew each other and that McFail shot Price during a dispute, according to an initial investigation.
It was not immediately clear whether McFail has an attorney. | 2022-10-06T20:26:10Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Randy McFail arrested in August shooting in Pr. George's - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/06/man-arrested-august-shooting-prince-georges/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/06/man-arrested-august-shooting-prince-georges/ |
Man arrested in fatal mall shooting in Hyattsville
Stephon Edward Jones was taken into custody Thursday, police said.
The Mall at Prince George's in Hyattsville. (Jasmine Hilton/The Washington Post)
A 33-year-old suspect who was wanted in a fatal shooting inside a Hyattsville mall was arrested Thursday morning, Prince George’s County police said.
Stephon Edward Jones, of Washington, was charged with first- and- second-degree murder and related counts in the killing of Darrion Herring, 20, of Hyattsville. He remains in custody in D.C. where he was arrested and awaits extradition to Prince George’s County, police said.
Man fatally shot at the Mall at Prince George’s, police say
On Aug. 18, Hyattsville police and county police officers responded to the 3500 block of East-West Highway at about 4 p.m. for a reported shooting at the Mall at Prince George’s, police said. Herring was found with gunshot wounds in the mall’s food court. He died at the scene.
Police said Jones fatally shot Herring during a verbal dispute, according to an initial investigation. Before the shooting, police said Jones threatened Herring in the men’s bathroom, according to charging documents. When the two saw each other again in the food court, which police said was captured on surveillance video, “words were exchanged” and Jones stood up, took out a handgun and fired at Herring. He then fled the scene.
It was not immediately clear whether Jones has an attorney. | 2022-10-06T20:26:16Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Stephon Edward Jones arrested in shooting at Mall at Prince George's - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/06/man-arrested-mall-shooting-hyattsville/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/06/man-arrested-mall-shooting-hyattsville/ |
Four wounded, one critically, in D.C. shooting, police say
The incident occurred just before 1:10 p.m. in the 1200 block of North Capitol Street in Northwest Washington
The scene of a shooting in the 1200 block of North Capitol Street NW, where four people were shot on Thursday. (Omari Daniels)
Four men were shot and wounded Thursday afternoon in Northwest Washington, police said.
The shooting occurred just before 1:10 p.m. in the 1200 block of North Capitol Street NW. All four men were conscious half an hour after the shooting, police said. At least some of the victims were found inside the Tyler House apartment complex.
D.C. Police Commander Tasha Bryant, who runs the First District station, said one of the victims was critically wounded and the other three had injuries that were not thought to be life-threatening.
She said a white sedan was spotted fleeing the location, headed eastbound on New York Avenue NW, with two suspects potentially inside. She said that, preliminarily, it appeared the shots were fired from the vehicle.
“We take gun violence very seriously,” Bryant said in a briefing at the scene. “We’re committed to removing violent offenders from these communities.”
On Sunday, police said a 22-year-old man was fatally shot in the 1200 block of North Capitol Street NW. Asked about a possible connection between that killing and the shooting on Thursday, Bryant said, “At this time, I do not want to say that it was connected. We are still in the preliminary stages of our investigation.”
Robert Wheeler said he was waiting for his nephew to get back from the store when he heard gunshots Thursday. Wheeler, 62, said one of the bullets struck a speaker that he had sitting on one of the armrests of his wheelchair.
“I was waiting for my nephew to bring some chips.” Wheeler said. “I feel lucky.”
Benjamin Medrano, a 27-year-old neighborhood resident, said he was working from home when he heard about a dozen gun shots outside of his window. When he walked down the street with his dog, he saw police and fire officials crowding around the area near North Capitol Street and New York Avenue.
Families peered behind police tape. Sirens flashed. He said he saw a woman screaming, concerned that her son was involved in the incident.
This was the second time in less than two months that Medrano had walked his dog by an active crime scene in his neighborhood. In August, he was near O and First streets when he heard about “eight to 10” bangs and saw firetrucks racing toward him. Two people were killed and three others were injured in that incident.
On Thursday, Medrano said he texted his partner: “We have to find a way to get out of this area.” | 2022-10-06T20:26:28Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Four wounded, one critically, in shooting in NW, D.C. police say - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/06/north-capitol-street-shooting/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/06/north-capitol-street-shooting/ |
Former Virginia priest found not guilty of child sexual abuse
A retired Catholic priest who for a time oversaw the Arlington diocese’s efforts to protect children on Wednesday was found not guilty of sexually abusing a child two decades ago.
Terry Wayne Specht, 69, of Pennsylvania was found not guilty by a jury in Fairfax County of one felony count of aggravated sexual battery of a child younger than 13, court records show. Investigators claimed the assault took place in 2000, according to an indictment, when Specht was chaplain and assistant principal at St. Paul VI Catholic High School.
Former Va. priest responsible for protecting children charged with child sexual abuse
Dawn Butorac, Specht’s attorney, said she thought the jury had reached the correct decision.
“It was obvious to me that Mr. Specht was not guilty, and the prosecution should not have even brought the case,” Butorac said. “They put a man who has dedicated his life to service of his community, both in the Navy and as a priest, in jeopardy by threatening his liberty.”
The Virginia Attorney General’s Office began investigating the matter in 2019 after someone called a hotline to allege that they had been abused. Specht was charged in late 2021.
“While disappointed in the outcome, the attorney general is proud of his team for fighting for victims,” said Victoria LaCivita, a spokeswoman for Attorney General Jason S. Miyares (R). “There are many difficulties that come with prosecuting decades-old sexual assault cases, and our team worked diligently to support this victim and provide them a voice.”
Virginia priest who headed child protection office is accused of abuse
Specht was director of the Arlington Catholic Diocese Office of Child Protection and Safety starting in 2004, and held the role until 2011. As part of that job, he was responsible for policy and instruction but did not oversee sexual abuse investigations or assign priests to churches, a diocese spokeswoman has said previously.
While working at the diocese in 2012, Specht was accused of sexually abusing a teenage boy in the late 1990s at St. Mary of Sorrows Church in Fairfax County.
Specht was placed on administrative leave after that accusation. He ultimately took medical retirement and stopped working as a priest, officials with the diocese said. He denied those allegations at the time and was never charged.
The Arlington diocese said in a news release that Specht will not return to ministry.
“Father Specht was found not guilty, I nevertheless convey my heartfelt and sincere sorrow to anyone who has suffered sexual abuse,” Bishop Michael F. Burbidge said.
The diocese said it will continue to have a zero-tolerance policy for abuse. The diocese also said it was committed to training its clergy, staff and volunteers to identify and report instances of abuse. | 2022-10-06T20:26:34Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Former Va. priest found not guilty of child sexual abuse - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/06/terry-specht-not-guilty-abuse/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/06/terry-specht-not-guilty-abuse/ |
Meet Mario, voiced by Chris Pratt and sounding exactly like Chris Pratt
By Jhaan Elker
Gene Park
Films have often been rupture points for mimetic breakthroughs on the internet. They’re like volcanoes that erupt, shifting the meme landscape to its chaotic whims. The 21st century has already seen several such eruptions. “Shrek.” “Bee Movie.” And now, very likely, the Mario movie starring Chris Pratt.
After a surprise announcement earlier this week, Nintendo debuted the first trailer to its upcoming film, “The Super Mario Bros. Movie,” a film based on the video game character and series that one could argue is most responsible for the success of the video game industry after a single, groundbreaking title in 1985.
The trailer features Bowser — with an unsurprisingly spirited performance by Jack Black — attacking the nation of penguins, who famously appeared in the level Cool, Cool Mountain in “Super Mario 64.” In a fight that’s over in seconds, Bowser asks who could dare challenge him. Enter Mario — voiced by Chris Pratt with all the passion of a Chris Pratt character, sounding exactly like Chris Pratt and not at all like the chirpy, “woo hoo” voice of the games, where he is voiced by Charles Martinet.
“It’s been a lifelong dream of mine to become Mario,” said Chris Pratt, with a straight face, in a statement aired before the trailer.
The film appears to show Mario’s first arrival to the Mushroom Kingdom, mirroring the “isekai” tradition of Japanese science fiction storytelling, where a stranger from another land magically teleports into another unfamiliar world for adventure. The trailer ends with his twin brother Luigi, voiced by Charlie Day (though we’ve yet to hear the character utter a sentence), being chased by ghoulish Dry Bones, a nod to the character’s starring role in the cartoon horror series Luigi’s Mansion.
The trailer follows the release of the movie’s first official poster, which has been heavily scrutinized by fans. Its granted a first look at the Mushroom Kingdom’s warp pipe infrastructure, and prompted a public outcry in some corners: Fans called on Nintendo and Illumination, the studio working on the film, to increase the plumber’s should-be-extraordinary derriere.
The voice cast was unveiled last year by series creator Shigeru Miyamoto in a very matter-of-fact presentation, and internet denizens erupted in laughter and shock as soon as Pratt’s smoldering headshot appeared on screen. The subsequent reveals of the rest of the cast, including Keegan-Michael Key as Toad, only added to the surreal nature of the announcement.
Of additional note is the inclusion of Donkey Kong (Seth Rogen) and Cranky Kong (Fred Armisen) in the cast, two Mario-adjacent characters who have spun off their own successful franchise. While it’s not that implausible for these two to appear in this film — they frequently appear in Mario spinoff games — the Kongs’ appearance has fans speculating as to Nintendo’s intentions.
Nintendo’s latest acquisition, CG production company Dynamo Pictures, was officially renamed Nintendo Pictures earlier this week. Nintendo has admitted to having a hands-off approach to previous movie iterations of its intellectual property. “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” trailer appears to mark the first instance of direct control by Nintendo over a cinematic venture. | 2022-10-06T20:47:41Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Nintendo debuts Super Mario Bros. Movie trailer - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2022/10/06/mario-movie-trailer-chris-pratt/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2022/10/06/mario-movie-trailer-chris-pratt/ |
The Checkup With Dr. Wen: Who should get a polio booster?
Jonas Salk, developer of the polio vaccine, holds a rack of test tubes in his lab in Pittsburgh in October 1954. (AP)
While most reader questions continue to be about covid-19, a number of people have been writing to ask about polio in light of its reemergence in the United States.
“If you got the polio vaccine as a child or young adult, are you still protected now?” asks Grayce from Tennessee.
John from Missouri wants to know whether he should get a polio booster. “I just came back from visiting relatives in New York City. Since there’s a polio outbreak there, should I go ahead and get an additional polio shot?”
The short answers to Grayce and John are yes and no. Yes, the polio vaccine is one that lasts many years, probably your entire lifetime. If you were fully vaccinated, meaning you completed your entire polio vaccine series, you are well protected against severe illness, including the terrifying possibility of paralytic polio.
But you are not necessarily protected against infection. This requires a bit of explanation. Until the late 1990s, the dominant vaccine given in the United States was the oral polio vaccine (OPV). One key benefit of OPV is ease of administration, because there are no needles involved. It also reduced the likelihood of not only severe illness but also asymptomatic infection and, therefore, transmission to others.
But there is a significant downside to OPV: It uses a weakened form of the poliovirus to stimulate immunity. That weakened live virus could be shed by someone who just received OPV and, in rare circumstances, can infect an unvaccinated person.
That’s why OPV was swapped out in favor of the inactivated polio vaccine (IPV) in 2000. Since then, only IPV is given in the United States. It does not contain live virus, so there is no danger of infecting others. It’s still more than 99 percent effective against preventing paralytic polio.
But IPV does not prevent infection, so someone who is vaccinated with IPV could be a carrier who transmits the poliovirus to others. A person who is vaccinated won’t be affected, but an unvaccinated individual exposed to poliovirus could be at risk for severe outcomes.
To John’s question, there is no need for most vaccinated Americans to receive a booster shot at this time. There are very limited circumstances under which fully vaccinated people are recommended to receive a booster — for example, if they had direct contact with someone who has polio. But just having visited New York City is not one.
The No. 1 call to action affects people who have not been vaccinated or have not completed their polio vaccine series. This is particularly important if they live around Rockland County, N.Y., where there was a case of paralytic polio in July. But everyone should make sure they are fully vaccinated against this dangerous disease.
“I don’t have records of my immunization, but I recall my parents saying that they didn’t believe in vaccines,” Roxanne from New Jersey writes. “I’m in my 60s. Should I still get my polio vaccine?”
Yes, and I would advise that Roxanne speak with her primary-care physician about this soon. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has guidelines for adults who are being vaccinated for polio for the first time. People who cannot verify past vaccinations and suspect they might not have received the polio vaccine should get it now. They should also speak with their physician about what other vaccinations they have missed and will need to make up.
“I had two Johnson & Johnson coronavirus vaccinations. The last one was seven months ago. I care for my 87-year-old mom and my 90-year-old aunt, both of whom have health issues. They each have had two Pfizer vaccines and a booster, and the new booster and the flu shot. Am I eligible to get the new booster now having had only two J&Js? I thought I read somewhere that you needed a prior Pfizer booster to qualify to get this new bivalent booster? I want to keep my two family members as safe as I can.” — Karen from California
You are eligible for the new bivalent booster. The CDC’s new booster guidance simplifies prior recommendations, including for J&J recipients. The number of boosters that adults have previously received no longer matters, nor does the type of shot given. As long as you are fully vaccinated (meaning with at least two doses of Pfizer or Moderna or one dose of J&J), you can receive the new bivalent booster.
“I have four grandchildren, all toddlers to 3 years old. Their parents are hesitant to get them vaccinated because they say that the latest variant is so easily contracted, vaccine or not, mask or not. Preschools vary in their covid requirements, and neither schools nor children can be counted on to follow any particular protocols, so why bother? This concerns me, but I have no real argument to defend why vaccinating kids is of any benefit, and I wonder whether there is one. Please advise.” — Susan from California
Your grandchildren’s parents are right in some respects, though I come to a different conclusion with the same facts. They are right that the omicron subvariants are extremely contagious and hard to avoid. It’s also true that many schools have removed virtually all mitigation measures and most are not requiring masks.
I think these realities make a stronger argument in favor of vaccination. Since the beginning of the pandemic, we have talked about layers of protection. Consider the analogy of cold weather: You wear multiple layers to keep warm, and when some layers are removed, others need to be added.
If mitigation measures such as masks, distancing and quarantining are no longer in place, then vaccination becomes more important. Studies consistently show that vaccines reduce the risk of contracting the coronavirus and, most importantly, reduce the risk of severe illness. And while children are less likely to become severely ill compared with older adults, they can and do become very sick. A child being hospitalized is traumatic and hugely disruptive to the family, and if vaccines can reduce that risk — even if it’s small — then it is worth it.
That has been my thinking. As soon as vaccines were authorized for their age group, I got my two kids, ages 2 and 5, vaccinated. For us, vaccination has been key to the peace of mind needed to resume pre-pandemic activities. I hope your grandchildren’s parents will consider this rationale.
“I recently finished a six-day course of prednisone. How long do I need to wait until I get my bivalent booster?” — R from Virginia
Prednisone, a steroid, can suppress your immune system when taken over a long period of time. A six-day course is short. There is no specific recommendation to wait to get your coronavirus booster following a short course of steroids.
I enjoyed this NPR audio piece by Allison Aubrey. She interviewed a 59-year-old man who integrated food and nutrition into his medical care. By overhauling his diet, he lost 55 pounds and reversed his Type 2 diabetes. “Food can be medicine,” the man said. Indeed, access to healthy food, safe and affordable housing and quality education all contribute to good health.
New data published by the CDC shows that more adults are getting care for mental health. Nearly 22 percent of adults received mental health treatment in 2021, up from about 19 percent in 2019. The increase in treatment is primarily driven by adults under age 45. Women were also more likely to receive mental health care compared with men. In 2021, 29 percent of women reported getting mental health treatment, compared with 18 percent of men.
A study published in BMJ Medicine examined whether vaccination alters women’s menstrual periods. Researchers found that, shortly after vaccination, women experience about a one-day delay in their periods compared with those who did not get vaccination. This validates anecdotal reports of a link between vaccination and menstruation. The study found also that just one cycle after vaccination, their periods return to normal. Many other studies have confirmed that there is no link between vaccination and subsequent fertility. | 2022-10-06T21:05:16Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Who should get a polio booster? Here's some guidance. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/06/polio-vaccine-booster-guidance/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/06/polio-vaccine-booster-guidance/ |
Two decades after playing ‘spoiler,’ Ralph Nader fights for Democrats
Ralph Nader on Capitol Hill in October 2019. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)
For first time in his 88 years, Ralph Nader is campaigning for the Democrats, not against them.
The legendary consumer advocate and four-time presidential candidate will never be forgiven by many Democrats for costing Al Gore the presidency in 2000 by playing the spoiler (a label that still infuriates Nader) on the Green Party ticket. Back then, Nader liked to say: “The only difference between the Republican and Democratic parties is the velocities with which their knees hit the floor when corporations knock on their door.”
It’s not that Nader suddenly likes Democrats. It’s that Democrats are the only thing standing in the way of an authoritarian takeover of the United States — and this is no time to be carping over trifles. “What’s different now is in 2000 there wasn’t a fascist drive coming over the horizon,” he told me this week. “Right now, we’re dealing with the greatest menace to a modest democratic society since the Civil War.”
And so, earlier this year, Nader got together with Mark Green, a left-wing former Democratic politician from New York, and about 20 progressive activists, writers and academics, to form an organization called Winning America, which just produced a lengthy set of recommendations for Democrats titled “Crushing the GOP, 2022.”
“Ralph once said he’d be a Democrat when the Martians invade,” said Green, who has known Nader for half a century. “They invaded and they’re here and they’re a few inches away from engaging in a fascist takeover of our few-century democracy.” He said that Nader’s father, a Lebanese immigrant, had told his son not to join either major political party because “they’re both bad.”
But such bothsidesism no longer applies. The new incarnation of Nader’s Raiders want Democrats to “punch back” against “the worst GOP in history — serially corrupt, violence-prone, anti-labor as well as compulsively dishonest and authoritarian.” They write: “Unless Democratic nominees tell a story about what 2023 and 2025 would look like if reactionary Republicans return to power — ending Obamacare, urging higher taxes on 75 million people, corporatizing Social Security and Medicare, shredding the social safety net/regulatory protections, jailing girls after abortions, overturning Marriage Equality, spurring more MAGA mobs threatening officials under (again) an outlaw president — the minority party will try to coast to victories by simply blaming Biden, Blackness and Wokeness (whatever that means).”
Nader gained fame in 1965 with his publication of “Unsafe at Any Speed,” and his storied career included such triumphs as inspiring the creation of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration and the Consumer Product Safety Commission, and passage of the Safe Drinking Water Act and the Freedom of Information Act.
But then he turned to third-party and independent presidential runs in 1996, 2000, 2004 and 2008. In Florida in 2000, Nader won 97,488 votes; if even a tiny fraction of those left-leaning voters had gone instead to Gore, who lost Florida by 537 votes, the Democrat would have won the state and the presidency.
Nader lost his relevance after that — he still complains that Democratic officials won’t call him back — and he still insists he’s not to blame for electing George W. Bush. But he’s starting to make peace with the “spoiler” brand. “I’ll forgive the Democrats for scapegoating me,” he said.
His latest collaborators — figures such as Green, the American Prospect’s Robert Kuttner, former Texas official Jim Hightower, tax writer David Cay Johnston, Color of Change’s Heather McGhee, Greenpeace’s Annie Leonard, Medicare-for-all advocate Steffie Woolhandler — are generally older, and overall Whiter, than the party’s activist core. But some elected Democrats are welcoming the gesture from the old gadfly. Prominent House Democrats Hakeem Jeffries (N.Y.), Jamie Raskin (Md.), Jim McGovern (Mass.) and John Larson (Conn.) sent Winning America’s recommendations to their peers in a “Dear Colleague” letter last month.
The recommendations — essentially a hard-edged economic populism — aren’t revolutionary. But the peace offering from a guy who spent most of his long career quarreling with Democrats shows how enormous the stakes are in the midterm elections.
When I spoke with Nader, still sharp in his ninth decade, I sensed a tinge of regret about his role in the outcome of the 2000 election. “What I knew was historically little parties launched great ventures — anti-slavery, women’s suffrage, labor, farmer — and they never were elected, but they pushed one or the other of the two parties,” he said. But it didn’t work.
“This is another way of approaching it,” he continued. “After 2000, my Democratic friends said, ‘Ralph, look, why don’t you work with the party?’ … Okay, so we’re now working with the party.”
That change of heart might be 22 years late, yet it has never been more urgent. | 2022-10-06T21:05:28Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Ralph Nader, 88, fights for Democrats for the first time - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/06/ralph-nader-finally-supports-democrats/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/06/ralph-nader-finally-supports-democrats/ |
What the West is still getting wrong about the rise of Xi Jinping
A video at the Museum of the Chinese Communist Party in Beijing on Tuesday features Chinese President Xi Jinping. (Bloomberg News)
In fact, viewing China on the eve of the pivotal 20th Party Congress, I am struck by how little that line of analysis captures what has actually happened in China over the past decades. China has gone through profound economic and social changes. Its per capita GDP has gone up almost thirtyfold since the start of economic liberalization in 1978. Mass education and urbanization have changed the face of the country. Hundreds of millions Chinese are now middle class, use the most cutting-edge tools of the information revolution and have considerable freedom to own property, start businesses and change their places of residence, all previously forbidden.
It is precisely in response to these massive changes that Xi Jinping has launched his program of repression and centralization. When Xi came to power in 2012, he determined that economic liberalization was actually transforming China profoundly — in a bad way. He believed that the Communist Party was on the verge of becoming irrelevant in a society dominated by capitalism and consumerism. So he cracked down in every sphere imaginable — attacking the private sector, humiliating billionaires, reviving Communist ideology, purging the party of corrupt officials and ramping up nationalism (mostly anti-Western) in both word and deed.
In this regard, Xi follows a familiar pattern. In dictatorships where liberalization and growth have produced a middle class, the regime’s first response is to maintain its hold on power. In the era when South Korea and Taiwan were still autocracies, economic liberalization there gradually led to a growing middle class and calls for greater political freedom — prompting the regimes to crack down, often violently. Yet repression did not work and eventually gave way to democracy.
The real question to ask is why China’s response to the changes unleashed by its market opening has been so successful. Why has Xi Jinping’s campaign of repression worked where other East Asian ones did not? The answer lies in a brilliant 2021 essay by China scholar Minxin Pei. Pei points out that China is almost unique in the world today. Nearly every country with a per capita income higher than China’s is either a democracy of some sort or an oil and gas dictatorship. (Petrostates enable a country to get rich without having to modernize its economy or society, because all it has to do is dig in the ground for natural wealth.) Why is China the great exception?
Pei revives an old distinction between authoritarian and totalitarian regimes. In the former, government is repressive but not all-encompassing. In the latter, such as China and the Soviet Union, the state dominates all spheres of life and does not allow an independent civil society to develop. The Chinese Communist Party dominates everything in China. When a social movement rises outside of the party, such as the Falun Gong, the party views it as a mortal threat and shuts it down.
At the heart of Xi Jinping’s worldview is his fear regarding the demise of Soviet communism. Xi expressed the view that this happened because the party leaders there lost faith in their ideology and their movement. He sees Mikhail Gorbachev as a foolish reformer who opened up the political system only to see the whole country collapse. The lesson: double down on Leninist party control.
In the conditions of a totalitarian state, Pei points out, the changes produced by economic growth lead to the need for more and more repression — producing, in China (and I would add Russia), a reversion to neo-Stalinism. Vladimir Putin and Xi are similar in recognizing that too much contact and commerce with the West can undermine their rule, inspiring them to search for ways to make their countries less dependent on the West and to consolidate their personalized rule.
The problem for Xi is that he is steering China on a very dangerous path. The state is now dominating the economy again and growth has slowed considerably. Enterprising Chinese businessmen are moving to Singapore and elsewhere. Areas of Chinese society that were once lively and innovative are closing down. Meanwhile, international hostility toward Xi’s expansionism is growing. Pei points out that the neo-Stalinist model bottles up all the forces of change, leaving only one door open — revolution.
As Pei notes, by 2035, China will have about 300 million college graduates. Will they be content to live quietly under Xi’s reign of repression?
Opinion|China is coming for video games. Companies and players should be wary. | 2022-10-06T21:05:52Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | What the West is still getting wrong about the rise of Xi Jinping - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/06/xi-jinping-crackdown-china-economy-change/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/06/xi-jinping-crackdown-china-economy-change/ |
Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss, a Trump appointee, must decide whether to charge the son of the current president
Hunter Biden, the son of President Biden, speaks to guests during the White House Easter Egg Roll on the South Lawn of the White House on April 18 in Washington. (Andrew Harnik/AP)
Asked about the case, Chris Clark, a lawyer for Hunter Biden, accused investigators of leaking information. “It is a federal felony for a federal agent to leak information about a Grand Jury investigation such as this one,” Clark said in a written statement. "Any agent you cite as a source in your article apparently has committed such a felony. We expect the Department of Justice will diligently investigate and prosecute such bad actors. As is proper and legally required, we believe the prosecutors in this case are diligently and thoroughly weighing not just evidence provided by agents, but also all the other witnesses in this case, including witnesses for the defense. That is the job of the prosecutors. They should not be pressured, rushed, or criticized for doing their job.”
Inside Hunter Biden's multi-million-dollar deals with a Chinese energy company
Biden will ask Trump's U.S. attorneys to step down, with a few exceptions
From the archives: How Ukraine put Trump and Biden on a collision course | 2022-10-06T21:06:11Z | www.washingtonpost.com | In Hunter Biden probe, agents see evidence of tax, gun-purchase crimes - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/10/06/hunter-biden-tax-gun-charges/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/10/06/hunter-biden-tax-gun-charges/ |
An early voting poll site on Feb. 14 in San Antonio. (Eric Gay/AP)
There is a middle ground between “polls are useless” and “polls will tell us exactly what will happen in an election.” As it happens, most pollsters sit in that middle ground, recognizing both that polls have utility and that using them to figure out who’s going to win a close race is generally a fool’s errand.
Yet it’s hard to resist the allure of a new poll. It seems so concrete! So-and-so is up 4 points in Whatever State! Sure, there’s something about margins of error tucked at the bottom of the articles about the poll, but having a concrete margin to consider satisfies our well-cultivated thirst for having some quantitative understanding of who’s winning a race. To some extent, polls fill the space in the weeks before an election in the same way that returns do on election night; they give us a way to talk about what’s happening in the period before we actually really know.
Polls, though, are more useful. The trick is to not focus on individual polls as though they are comparable and indicate movement. News outlets that tout one candidate being up by 3 points in a poll on Monday and the other candidate up by 2 in another poll on Tuesday are doing their readers a disservice, however useful for getting people to click.
To understand what’s happening in a race, it’s useful to adhere to two simple guidelines:
More polls are better than fewer polls, and
Polling averages are better than individual polls
We can illustrate this fairly easily.
Imagine an election in which we track a candidate’s support over the last 10 weeks of a campaign. Behind the scenes, as you’re reading, your device has generated both beginning and ending margins of support for this candidate and dozens of polls tracking the candidate’s position over time.
For the sake of ease-of-use, each of those polls has a margin of error of +/- 4.5 points. Some (indicated in purple) are from pollsters allied with the candidate and may therefore overstate support. Some (indicated in orange) are from pollsters allied with the opponent.
Let’s begin by evaluating just a handful of the polls. Watch as they’re added to the graph below.
Infrequent polls for 10 weeks
SHOW POLLS
Consider not only where they are — above the middle horizontal line means the candidate has a lead, for example. But also consider how they unfold. What you’re seeing is randomly generated, but there is probably a one-two set of polls in which there’s sharp movement. Imagine how that might be covered: The candidate’s support has crumbled/surged! We have a whole new race on our hands.
If we apply a polling average (here, no more complex than one that averages any polls in the prior 10 days), things are smoothed out a bit. But since we have so few polls, things might still be a bit vague.
Polling average of infrequent polls
Now let’s look at all of the polls generated in the background. What’s shown below is not really representative of any race besides maybe a presidential contest. There simply aren’t dozens of polls like this in a statewide or House contest. But, you know. This is an experiment!
Frequent polls for 10 weeks
You should have a better sense here of how the actual election is going. But perhaps not! And, again, consider how the surfeit of polls allows for cherry-picking: there are enough polls that you can simply elevate the ones you want to tell your desired story. (Campaigns do this all the time.)
Finally, let’s overlay a polling average.
Polling average of frequent polls
What’s important about that average is how it smooths out the outliers. This is the point, really; if you have a poll that is plus 10 and one that’s minus 2 and one that’s plus 3, the average is about plus 4 — probably closer to the actual level of support.
Even here, there may be sudden jumps up and down dependent on the emergence of new polls. How would those be reported?
Of course, it’s also important to remember that how an election looked two weeks ago isn’t how it looks now. That’s why, in the experiment, we had a starting point and an ending point. The level of support probably changed! And, with it, the poll results, which, in our idealized scenario, are tied to the actual level of support.
Now for the reveal. Here’s what the actual level of support was over the course of those 10 weeks — what an election with 100 percent turnout would have measured on any given day. If you scroll back up, you’ll see that we added this final line to the previous graphs.
The (randomly generated) scenario
Notice which graph has the most fidelity to the actual level of support. The sporadic polls might occasionally land on the line, but there are probably a lot of dots at considerable distance. The frequent-polls graph probably tracks with the actual-level line (the dark green one), but the average is probably more consistently close to the actual level of support.
If you’d like, you can click the start over button and run through the whole experiment again. Normally, a ton of polls will give you an average that’s close to the actual result. Sometimes, it won’t.
This is oversimplified, of course. For one thing, it assumes that the polls are consistently effective at measuring support, which isn’t always the case. But it reinforces that an average of more polls is more useful than individually considering isolated ones.
In other words, remember that just because two polls show that a race flipped 10 points in three days doesn’t mean it actually did. The best measure of who will win an election remains the actual election results. And, just to cover all of our bases — the complete results, not the results shown on cable television with 1 percent of precincts reporting.
The latest: Federal agents see chargeable tax, gun-purchase case against Hunter Biden | 2022-10-06T21:06:23Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The perils of cherry-picking polling, illustrated - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/06/elections-polling/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/06/elections-polling/ |
Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.), the former president of a small university in Nebraska, has been named the sole finalist to be the next president of the University of Florida, the school announced Thursday.
The lawmaker said he wants to return to academia as the country is rethinking “the radical disruption of work” following the pandemic.
“UF is the most important institution in the nation’s most economically dynamic state," he said in a statement. “Washington partnership isn’t going to solve these workforce challenges — new institutions and entrepreneurial communities are going to have to spearhead this work.”
“If UF wants to go big, I’m excited about the wide range of opportunities,” Sasse added.
If Sasse eventually accepts the position, Nebraska’s Republican Gov. Pete Ricketts will appoint a successor under state law.
Sasse is expected to resign later this year once the review process takes place and pending final approval of the board, according to a person close to him who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations. Since he is the only finalist, he is expected to be approved.
Sasse was elected to the Senate in 2014 while serving as president of the Lutheran-affiliated Midland University, which he had led since 2010. He ran as a vocal critic of the Obama administration, specifically the Affordable Care Act.
Once viewed as a powerful voice of dissent within the GOP during the earliest years of the Trump presidency, Sasse, 50, eventually became less vocal as it became clear his constituents and his party’s politics were closer line with the former president’s.
Sasse was easily reelected in 2020, but far less vocal following years of disagreement with Trump and other party leaders.
Before becoming a lawmaker, Sasse worked with several Christian organizations including the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals (ACE), where he was executive director, and multiple federal government agencies including the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, where George W. Bush nominated Sasse to be assistant secretary for planning and evaluation.
Sasse was born and raised in Nebraska before heading to Harvard University for his undergraduate studies. He went on to earn his doctoral degree from Yale University where he studied the intersection of faith and politics in the two major political parties.
Noted: Trump’s super PAC booked $1.3 million in ads for Ohio, Pennsylvania | 2022-10-06T21:06:29Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Sen. Ben Sasse named sole finalist for University of Florida presidency - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/06/sasse-university-florida/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/06/sasse-university-florida/ |
Democrats’ gas price problem
President Biden delivers remarks virtually during his meeting with his economic team to discuss lowering gas prices in July. (Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post)
Democrats’ electoral fortunes have improved significantly in recent months. And while it appears the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade is the biggest reason, the coinciding drop in gas prices surely didn’t hurt.
But just as the party appeared primed to take advantage of that in the midterm elections, which are just a month away, the problem rears its ugly head again. And Democrats are clearly quite concerned.
Just how concerned should they be?
Gas prices had already been rising for the past two weeks, after 98 days of consecutive declines over the summer, to a national average of about $3.87 per gallon. And on Wednesday came the extremely unwelcome news from the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and its partners (including Russia) that they will trim oil production by 2 million barrels per day. The move is expected to increase prices by reducing supply.
Precisely what impact that could have at the pump over the next month, specifically, isn’t clear. The move doesn’t take effect until next month (the election is Nov. 8), and the director of the White House’s National Economic Council, Brian Deese, downplayed the impact Thursday. Deese said that, “certainly, the impact on production will be significantly lower than that headline that [OPEC Plus] announced.”
But even before then, the announcement could have an impact in other ways. And both the White House and congressional Democrats responded to the news with a torrent of denunciations and proposals that suggest they feel real urgency.
The White House had waged an extensive campaign to prevent OPEC Plus from making this move. President Biden also met with Saudi leaders this summer, despite having previously pledged to turn the country into a “pariah” for the murder of Jamal Khashoggi. (Biden has claimed that trip wasn’t focused on oil — including this week, as he batted away the idea that the trip failed — but there’s little question that was a large part of it.)
When OPEC Plus announced the move, the White House quickly seemed to float the type of clash with the Saudis that Biden once promised. It suggested Congress could “reduce OPEC’s control over energy prices” — apparently a reference to repealing the organization’s antitrust protections, which would very likely inflame relations with the Saudis and others.
Over the next 24 hours, other Democrats joined in.
Following a Wall Street Journal report that the United States might ease sanctions on Venezuela to allow its oil to flow to the United States and Europe, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said it had become clear that “our policy of sanctioning and isolating [Venezuelan President Nicolás] Maduro hasn’t worked.”
(Biden on Thursday did leave open the possibility of lifting sanctions on Venezuela, but said it would have to do “a lot” in return.)
Others suggested various other legislative responses, including moving U.S. troops and missile defense systems out of Saudi Arabia and into the neighboring United Arab Emirates.
Many of the denunciations focused on the war in Ukraine — arguing OPEC Plus’s move was a boon to Russia, which could use higher gas prices to fund its war. But plenty of others pitched this more as a deliberate attack on American consumers.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) called it “a blatant attempt to increase gas prices at the pump that cannot stand.”
And Senate Majority Whip Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.), in perhaps the most pitched comments yet from a U.S. official, accused the Saudis of “conspiring [with] Putin to punish the U.S. [with] higher oil prices.”
Democrats haven’t explicitly tied OPEC and its allies’ move to the upcoming U.S. election, but looming in the background is the former Republican president’s significantly cozier relationship with the leaders of Russia and Saudi Arabia.
And the Biden administration has made clear the domestic impact is high on its list of immediate priorities. On Tuesday, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre had said, “We’re not considering new releases from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve,” after Biden had previously tapped it. But both Wednesday and Thursday, the White House said that it was on the table.
As for how much Democrats should fear the electoral impact, it’s difficult to say with certainty.
There’s little question that higher gas prices are bad for the president and his party, even as politicians exert little influence over them. Not only is it perhaps the most readily apparent economic indicator for many American consumer and voters — a regular reminder of inflation — but it has downstream effects on the economy, as well. A continued rise in gas prices would only increase the already prevalent fears of a recession.
John Sides looked at this back in 2012 — when gas prices were higher than they are today, if you adjust for inflation — and he detailed a number of scenarios based on historical data. A 70-cent increase in gas prices over three months, his model suggested, would have meant a five-point drop in Barack Obama’s approval rating and a 1.2-point decline in his vote share in that year’s reelection campaign. A more modest 40-cent increase would have cost Obama 2.8 points off his approval rating and about 0.7 points in the election.
Those sound like relatively small shifts. But consider how closely decided the battle for the House and Senate appear to be right now: Even a one-point shift could be decisive for both.
There’s also the fact that these impacts could be felt differently depending on where you live. The rise in prices in recent weeks has so far been quite region-specific — i.e. spiking in states like Arizona, Nevada, Ohio and Wisconsin but remaining relatively flat in Georgia, North Carolina and Pennsylvania. (Each of these states is home to a key Senate contest.)
Sides and others who have studied this dynamic have also emphasized that it’s difficult to completely isolate gas prices, given how interconnected they are with the rest of the economy. His model assumed everything else held constant, but that’s not how things really work.
And even if the impact of OPEC Plus’s decision isn’t that large, it comes at a time when prices had already been rising — and during a season when gas prices had been expected to rise, as The Post’s Evan Halper reported as far back as July.
Democrats would rather keep the election focused on other things, but all of these proposals aside, that’s something that’s largely outside their control right now.
The latest: Sen. Sasse named sole finalist to be next University of Florida president | 2022-10-06T21:13:53Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Democrats’ gas price problem - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/06/biden-democrats-gas-mideterms/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/06/biden-democrats-gas-mideterms/ |
USAID chief makes case for rebuilding Ukraine
KYIV — Samantha Power, head of the U.S. Agency for International Development, visited Kyiv on Thursday and highlighted American funding for efforts to rebuild Ukrainian infrastructure, resurrect a damaged economy and other initiatives designed to blunt the effects of a punishing war with Russia.
The visit by the USAID administrator marked the first high-level American delegation to the Ukrainian capital since Russia announced its illegal annexation of vast swaths of eastern and central Ukraine last week.
During a day-long stop, Power met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, toured U.S.-funded reconstruction and agriculture projects, and met with local journalists and entrepreneurs. Throughout, she made the case for the value of America’s nonmilitary assistance to Ukraine, which has totaled some $10 billion since Russian President Vladimir Putin launched his invasion on Feb. 24.
“What’s at stake here is whether freedom-loving people get to decide for themselves how they live, under whom they live, whether they get to choose their own leadership, whether they get to live their national identity, their culture, speak their language,” she said. “The essence of the values that define civilization are at stake in this conflict … U.S. support for this cause is so worth it.”
Power toured a residential area of Kyiv struck by Russian missiles earlier this year, where USAID is funding the repair and upgrade of damaged pipes that knocked out heat and hot water for nearly a dozen apartment buildings and several schools.
Speaking alongside partially reconstructed buildings, Power said the United States would provide an additional $55 million for winterizing Ukrainian homes and buildings.
“This matters a lot as we head into winter, as Ukrainians worry a lot about what winter will bring, as Putin seeks to weaponize energy and heat, in a sense to weaponize winter, in the same way that he has weaponized food and attempted again to inflict violence and inhumanity on people of this country,” she said.
Power also visited an agricultural area outside of Kyiv where USAID is funding a program that supports the use of drones in farming in Ukraine, traditionally known as the breadbasket of Europe.
Valerii Iakovenko, founder of DroneUA, said the application of pesticides by drone enabled larger crop yields because it did not damage plants like other means of application and, since the onset of the war, had reduced farmers’ risk of land mine injuries.
Farmers told Power about the setbacks they had faced because of the war, including damage under Russian occupation and the need to scramble to find alternate export routes. U.S. officials are hoping that a deal brokered by Turkey in July, which permitted Ukraine to resume the export of grain via the Black Sea following a prolonged Russian blockade, can be extended before it expires later this month.
She linked the challenges faced by Ukrainian farmers to a spiraling food security crisis that was dramatically worsened by the war. In August, an initial shipment of Ukrainian grain arrived in the Horn of Africa, where a severe drought has contributed to a hunger crisis.
The fruit of the Ukrainian farmers’ labor, Power said, “makes a world of difference for people very, very far away.”
The United States is surging military and civilian assistance to Ukraine as a series of other global forces, including drought, flooding, and rising prices for commodities and shipping, have intensified humanitarian needs and stretched aid dollars. In Yemen, for example, the World Food Program has struggled to secure adequate funding at a time when more than 2 million children require assistance for acute malnutrition.
Power noted recent steps by the Biden administration to staunch those problems, including a new commitment announced by President Biden last month of $2 billion in additional U.S. emergency aid.
“I do look at a global set of global crises that are interlocking,” she said. “Having said that, every war that can be brought to an end makes that global picture one with fewer displaced people. Any time you can take a war situation and it moves from the war ledger to the post-war ledger, there’s a whole different set of challenges.”
“But that is the path that Ukraine wants to be on, and everything we do we do with an eye to accelerating the day in which peace comes to this country,” she added.
Power’s visit was not announced ahead of time. Unlike other world leaders who have made visits to Ukraine to show their support, Biden has not traveled to the country since the war began. | 2022-10-06T21:40:05Z | www.washingtonpost.com | USAID chief makes case for rebuilding Ukraine - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/10/06/usaid-chief-makes-case-rebuilding-ukraine/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/10/06/usaid-chief-makes-case-rebuilding-ukraine/ |
The incident underscores the lengths to which some Russians have gone to avoid being called up as Ukraine’s military inflicts heavy losses
Russian President Vladimir Putin and Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu attend a military exhibition in Moscow in August. (Maxim Shemetov/Reuters)
The two appeared this week at a beach near Gambell, a tiny community on the northwest tip of St. Lawrence Island about 40 miles from mainland Russia, where they reported having fled “to avoid compulsory military service,” a spokesperson for Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) told the Associated Press. | 2022-10-06T22:01:54Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Russians flee by boat to Alaska after Putin’s military mobilization - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/10/06/russians-flee-alaska/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/10/06/russians-flee-alaska/ |
With DACA’s demise imminent, Congress must finally step up and save ‘dreamers’
DACA supporters rally in Los Angeles in November 2019. (Mario Tama/Getty Images)
Yet another court has ruled unlawful the Obama-era protections for “dreamers,” or immigrants in the United States without authorization who were brought here as children. The program looks increasingly likely to get struck down within the next year. Congress must stop dithering, stop finger-pointing and finally provide a permanent legal fix for these sympathetic young immigrants.
They are here on borrowed time.
For decades, Congress has hemmed and hawed over the dreamers’ fate. For most people in this unlucky population, the United States is the only country they have ever known, the only culture they are conversant in, and the only economy they have invested in. But, through no fault of their own, they don’t have formal status, just a patchwork of protections that are under constant legal threat.
Catherine Rampell: This 'dreamer' is saving lives during the coronavirus pandemic. She wants a chance at normal life.
Many immigration issues are divisive. Protecting dreamers is not. Virtually every poll conducted on the subject finds that Americans of all political persuasions favor granting dreamers some form of permanent legal status, including a path to citizenship. Even Trumpers are on board, surveys show. Faith groups, law enforcement officials, employers, national security experts and other major constituencies besides typical bleeding-heart immigration advocates have urged Congress repeatedly to grant these young immigrants greater legal certainty.
Unfortunately — as is the case on so many issues — Congress has abdicated its responsibility to act. Instead, the executive branch has been tasked with devising temporary workarounds.
In 2012, the Obama administration announced a sort of Band-Aid solution, known as the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. DACA offers some of these young immigrants access to (temporary) work permits and protections from deportation, which must be frequently renewed. Eligibility extends only to those who meet certain age and educational requirements, have lived here continuously since 2007 and pose no threat to public safety, among other conditions.
This program was generally expected to be a stopgap while Congress worked on broader immigration reforms or at least a pathway to citizenship for dreamers; so far, neither has materialized.
In the decade since it was introduced, DACA has weathered multiple legal challenges — including from a coalition of red states led by Texas, as well as attempted repeal by President Donald Trump. For now, the program remains mostly intact while the red-state challenge wends its way through the courts. But DACA’s days look numbered.
Catherine Rampell: On DACA, the Supreme Court saved Trump from himself
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit ruled on Wednesday that the original DACA program is illegal because there was no “clear congressional authorization” for it. The judges sent the case back to a lower court for further review of some recent revisions to the program. But based on this latest ruling, even the updated version of DACA is expected to get struck down. (The 5th Circuit judges declared DACA to be “manifestly contrary” to federal immigration law.) The case might well reach the Supreme Court this term or next, at which point many legal experts anticipate the court’s conservative majority will terminate the program.
Exactly what this might mean for the 600,000 current DACA recipients is unclear — that is, how quickly they would be forced out of their jobs or subject to deportation orders. Mass confusion and chaos, at minimum, are almost certain for these immigrants and their families — as well as the communities that rely on them as workers, bosses, entrepreneurs, congregants, neighbors and friends.
With DACA’s demise possibly imminent, will Congress finally be motivated to intervene and pass a more permanent solution?
Templates for fixes abound. Various popular legislative efforts, including the so-called Dream Act, have been kicking around Congress since at least 2001. Democratic lawmakers overwhelmingly support passing such a bill, but they don’t have enough votes on their own to get it through the Senate, given procedural rules requiring 60 votes.
Some Republican lawmakers have endorsed granting permanent legal status to dreamers, but not enough of them have been willing to cooperate on a fix — despite widespread support among their own constituents. Maybe these lawmakers are too cowardly to take a stand; or perhaps they want to hold on to dreamers as a bargaining chip for other concerns. The result is that this issue, and dreamers’ precarious livelihoods, continue to volley back and forth between the executive branch and the judiciary.
This is hardly the only immigration issue on which Republican politicians have complained about executive overreach yet been reluctant to exercise their own powers. Other vulnerable, sympathetic populations of immigrants — such as the Afghan allies who were temporarily “paroled” into the United States — are stuck in their own legal limbo unless and until Congress acts.
But it’s always easier for politicians to grandstand over everyone else’s immigration policy choices than to produce solutions of their own. | 2022-10-06T22:28:06Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | With DACA’s demise imminent, Congress must finally step up and save dreamers - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/06/daca-court-ruling-congress-must-protect-dreamers/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/06/daca-court-ruling-congress-must-protect-dreamers/ |
The museum has underdone extensive renovations and upgrades
By Michael E. Ruane
An X-wing fighter from the Star Wars movie universe hangs from the ceiling outside of the planetarium at the National Air and Space Museum. (Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post)
Nearby, the 1909 Wright brothers flier — the world’s first military airplane — still has oil stains on its fabric wings near the engine and the big bicycle chains that turned the propellers.
And in another museum gallery, fragments of the Wrights’ original 1903 flier that were taken to the moon in 1969 sit like sacred relics in a small case.
These and other treasures were unveiled Thursday at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum, which reopens its west wing to the public Oct. 14.
The renovated wing is packed with glorious old standards — the 1929 Ford TriMotor, nicknamed the “Tin Goose”; the sleek, gray Boeing 247-D airliner from 1933; and the shiny twin-engine Douglas DC-3, which flew from the 1930s to the 1950s.
Newly presented is German aviation pioneer Otto Lilienthal’s elegant Standard Glider, an antique version of the modern hang glider.
Lilienthal was known in his day as “the Flying Man.” He was killed in 1896 when a gust of wind upended the glider he was flying. It fell to the ground from 50 feet, and Lilienthal broke his spine. He died the next day in a Berlin hospital.
Her death brought a benefit, however. “That incident, which was highly publicized, started to get people to put seat belts in airplanes,” senior museum curator Peter Jakab said.
“I can’t tell you how excited and pleased we are to be at this moment,” he said. “This is an early glimpse … of what we’re going to unveil to the American public here a week from tomorrow.”
He said more than 350 million visitors had come through the museum since it opened in 1976. And it was “worn out.”
“Almost half the artifacts … are in the building for the first time,” he said, including the red and white T-38 jet hanging above him that was flown by the late aviation hero Jackie Cochran, the first woman to break the sound barrier.
“Our real measure of success, I think, will be when” visitors return home and say to friends, “you … must see it,” Browne said.
Another object newly on display is Chesley Bonestell’s 1957 painting, “Lunar Landscape,” a dramatic portrait of what the surface of the moon was thought to look like.
“It has not been seen in public since 1970,” said Michael J. Neufeld, a senior curator in the museum’s space history department. “It took a major restoration to bring it back.
“It shows a giant depiction of the moon as we thought it would be before the space race,” he said. “It turned out that what we expected the moon to look like, which was very razor sharp mountains and everything, was not what it turned out to be once we actually landed spacecraft on it.”
Instead, the surface “had been eroded by micrometeorites,” he said. “The constant rain of space rocks and dust had worn everything down and smoothed everything out, which is not what we expected to find.”
“Spacecraft 107, alias Apollo 11 … The Best Ship to Come Down the Line. God Bless Her …” | 2022-10-06T22:58:43Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Smithsonian Air and Space Museum to reopen after renovations - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/06/smithsonian-air-space-museum-reopen/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/06/smithsonian-air-space-museum-reopen/ |
Canadian police say mass stabbing suspect acted alone, killed brother
A Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer speaks with a reporter outside Rosthern, Saskatchewan, on Sept. 7. Canadian police arrested Myles Sanderson in the stabbing deaths of multiple people in Saskatchewan after an almost four-day search. (Heywood Yu/The Canadian Press/AP)
TORONTO — Canadian police said Thursday that they now believe one man, Myles Sanderson, did all the killing in the mass stabbing that shook rural Saskatchewan last month, including that of his brother, Damien, whom police had previously identified as a suspect.
Rhonda Blackmore, assistant commissioner of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in Saskatchewan, said evidence suggests that Damien Sanderson, 31, helped plan the attacks at the James Smith Cree Nation and nearby village of Weldon that left 11 dead in one of Canada’s deadliest mass killings.
But “Myles Sanderson committed all of the homicides alone,” she said at a news conference in Regina. “RCMP believes it is important to clarify Damien’s involvement in the sequence of these events to demonstrate our continued commitment to transparency to the victims and families of those affected, and to the public.”
Police initially identified both brothers as suspects in the Sept. 4 attacks that left 18 injured, a province reeling and far more questions than answers.
Damien Sanderson was found dead at the James Smith Cree Nation with injuries that authorities had said did not appear to be self-inflicted.
Authorities apprehended Myles Sanderson, 32, on the side of a highway near Rosthern, roughly 80 miles southwest of the Indigenous community, after an almost four-day search. They said he went into medical distress shortly after he was taken into custody. He was taken to a hospital, where he died.
Canada stabbings suspect has died in custody, police say
The victims of the attacks ranged in age from 23 to 78. All but one were from the James Smith Cree Nation.
Separately on Thursday, the Parole Board of Canada and Correctional Service of Canada said it would create a “national board” to investigate the circumstances surrounding Myles Sanderson’s release from federal custody.
Sanderson had 59 convictions as an adult and was serving a four-year, four-month sentence for charges including assault and robbery, according to records from the Parole Board of Canada.
He was given a statutory release in August 2021. Canadian law requires that some federal offenders who have served two-thirds of their sentences be released from prison and placed under supervision in their communities.
Myles Sanderson’s statutory release was canceled in November after he was not honest with his parole supervisor about violating its conditions. That decision was canceled in February, and he was released again. In May, he did not report to his parole officer and was declared “unlawfully at large.”
Family members celebrate loved ones, describe horror of stabbings
Saskatchewan’s chief coroner has ordered two public inquests into the attack, including into the circumstances of Myles Sanderson’s death. He has said that “very preliminary autopsy” results show that he did not die of blunt force trauma.
Damien Sanderson’s wife, Skye, told Global News that she called police the day before the rampage to report him and his brother, after Damien had taken her car. She claimed that while police returned her car that night, they did not conduct an exhaustive search for the brothers.
The RCMP have largely refused to provide updates on their investigation, saying they can’t reveal details before the coroner’s inquests begin next year.
But on Thursday, Blackmore said the RCMP had received a call about a stolen car on the James Smith Cree Nation the day before the attack and later located it in front of a residence on the reserve. She said officers searched the residence and asked three of the men inside for their identities.
Blackmore said the investigation has determined that Damien Sanderson, who was wanted for assault, provided a false name to the officers. She said the photograph that police had of him was out of date.
Blackmore said the brothers were selling drugs in the community the day before the rampage and had been involved in three violent altercations. She said none of those incidents were reported to police before the mass stabbings.
Blackmore said the chief coroner was aware she was providing the update.
“We felt it important to address some of this information to balance both the interest of the family and the victims as they work on healing from this incident … as well as information for the public so they have answers to the questions that are being raised,” she said. | 2022-10-06T23:11:45Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Canadian police say Myles Sanderson acted alone in mass stabbing attack - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/06/canada-saskatchewan-stabbing-damien-sanderson/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/06/canada-saskatchewan-stabbing-damien-sanderson/ |
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