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FILE - In this Aug. 11, 1936, file photo, America’s Jesse Owens, center, salutes during the presentation of his gold medal for the long jump, alongside silver medalist Luz Long, right, of Germany, and bronze medalist Naoto Tajima, of Japan, during the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin. The silver medal captured by Luz Long, the German long jumper who befriended Jesse Owens at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, sold at auction for $488,000, a sum the auction house said was a record price for a publicly sold second-place prize. (AP Photo/File) (Uncredited/AP) | 2022-10-18T15:49:07Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Luz Long's Olympic silver auctioned for nearly $500K - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/olympics/luz-longs-olympic-silver-auctioned-for-nearly-500k/2022/10/18/7f88b520-4ef8-11ed-ada8-04e6e6bf8b19_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/olympics/luz-longs-olympic-silver-auctioned-for-nearly-500k/2022/10/18/7f88b520-4ef8-11ed-ada8-04e6e6bf8b19_story.html |
Your body is a big protein shake that smells like stinky feet for hungry mosquitoes, a new study has found
New research shows why some people are mosquito magnets. (Video: Kevin Ambrose for The Washington Post)
Mosquito-borne diseases impact about 700 million people per year, and experts expect that number to increase as global temperatures rise, said Jeff Riffell, a professor at the University of Washington and a mosquito expert who wasn’t involved in the research. The A. aegypti mosquitoes are known to live in tropical or subtropical climates, but the insect now breeds year-round in the District and parts of California.
How to get rid of mosquitoes, and other tips for dealing with these pesky insects
The study found that people like subject 33, who have higher levels of compounds called carboxylic acids on their skin, are more likely to be a “mosquito magnets,” Vosshall said. | 2022-10-18T15:49:25Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Why do mosquitos bite some people more than others? It's how you smell. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2022/10/18/why-mosquitos-bite-some-people/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2022/10/18/why-mosquitos-bite-some-people/ |
The challenge of building a social network around right-wing grievance
The right keeps pushing the idea that lies and bigotry are ‘conservative’
The Parler social network app logo on a cellphone screen with a picture of Kanye West in the background. (Chris DELMAS / AFP)
There’s an odd aspect to the announcement on Monday that Ye, the musician born Kanye West, plans to buy the social media platform Parler. It’s not just that the company’s current CEO is the husband of conservative commentator Candace Owens, a longtime friend of Ye’s. But the announcement was framed in a way that reveals an awful lot about why the political right is chafing at existing social media platforms.
The announcement includes a quote from Ye: “In a world where conservative opinions are considered to be controversial we have to make sure we have the right to freely express ourselves.” That’s followed by commentary from the company, arguing that the purchase “will assure Parler a future role in creating an uncancelable ecosystem where all voices are welcome.”
Ye wasn’t canceled by Instagram or Twitter, mind you. He simply shared explicitly antisemitic comments that the platforms decided to remove in keeping with their policies about hate speech. Owens tried to defend Ye’s original post about going “death con 3″ on “JEWISH PEOPLE” by suggesting, among other things, that the apparent reference to DEFCON indicated Ye was going on defense, not offense. The days since have made clear that Ye wants to be seen as actively battling against perceived Jewish agents of control — a centuries-old staple of antisemitic rhetoric.
But he and Parler frame this as “conservative opinion” and simply a “voice” that should be made welcome. And that gets at the heart of the push in recent years to cast mainstream platforms as biased against the right: restrictions on misinformation and hate speech are opportunistically conflated with “conservative speech” — by the right itself.
There was a time when Twitter and Facebook and other technology companies didn’t do much to police the content on their platforms. That came to a head in 2016, overlapping with the highly contentious presidential election. Donald Trump deployed social media in a far different way than had politicians in the past, using it as a tool for punishing his opponents and exciting his base. He helped an undercurrent of hate and aggression became mainstream on social media; he elevated racist, antisemitic and explicitly false content.
At the same time, Russia was trying to stir up political tensions in the U.S. using both paid ads on the networks and sock-puppet accounts. The effects were likely minor, but the effort highlighted how weak the control mechanisms were on Twitter and Facebook’s content.
In the years that followed, those platforms and others (like YouTube, owned by Google, and Instagram, owned by Facebook parent Meta) created policies aimed at reducing toxicity and misinformation. Twitter, for example, implemented a system in which people who had been repeatedly muted or blocked by other users were less visible on the platform in an effort to reduce abuse. The companies began bolstering their content policies and enforcing them.
And then people started to notice. Right-wing users who had been subjected to Twitter’s restrictions began suggesting it was not because of their behavior but because of their beliefs — just as Ye argued in that Parler announcement. An idea that conservatives were being “shadowbanned” took root, amplified by prominent allies of then-President Trump’s. Donald Trump Jr., for example, leaned into the idea that he was being unfairly targeted, both because his posts (like one comparing migrants to zoo animals) were removed and because he didn’t always know how the platforms worked. Always attuned to the utility of grievances within his base, The president elevated the idea, even inviting right-wing social media users to the White House for a “summit.”
“Never before have so many online journalist and influencers and that is exactly what you are, you are journalists and you are influencers come together in this building to discuss the future of social media,” he told them. “Each of you is fulfilling a vital role in our nation. You are challenging the media gatekeepers in the corporate sensors to bring the facts straight to the American people and that is what you are doing.”
That framing is appealing, certainly, but it’s hard to defend in the context of the voices facing repercussions. While there’s no question there are times when social media platforms are overly aggressive in policing content, there’s also no question there are times when it is less aggressive than might be warranted. Sometimes the content being hidden or removed is content that violates standards that conservatives consider unfair or overly political, like “deadnaming” trans people. Often, though, it’s for more traditional hateful behavior: threats, racism, antisemitism, other abuse. For those muffled for the latter reasons, it’s appealing to pretend it’s for the former one.
Over time, Trump and his allies cast social media companies in increasingly broad terms, recognizing them as a useful foil, an emblem of how the Liberal Elites wanted to silence Real Americans. The 2020 election only heightened his effort, both from the decision of Facebook and Twitter to reduce sharing of a New York Post story about Hunter Biden’s laptop — a reaction to concerns about Russian influence in 2016 — and because platforms were increasingly aggressive in labeling or hiding Trump’s rhetoric. After the election, Trump’s feeds were a ceaseless parade of falsehoods about fraud. And then the Capitol riot happened, and that was that.
At Trump’s social media summit, he presented examples of political speech being restricted on Twitter. Those examples, though, centered not on censorship but on monetization. Twitter was blocking ads that violated its terms of service, but still allowing the content to be shared on the site.
Which brings us to Alex Jones. Last week, a jury determined that the right-wing radio host should pay nearly $1 billion to the families of children murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012. Jones had repeatedly insisted the mass shooting was a false flag, using his claims to bolster his audience and, in turn, sell them stuff. This was on top of a range of other bizarre and obviously false claims Jones made about politics and culture over the years, part of his strategy of building a business on top of heightening people’s fears and conspiratorial thinking.
The Jones verdict was hailed as a victory for accountability in many circles; this was a guy who lied about dead kids to make money, after all. But in some circles on the right, he was presented as a victim, as a conservative voice being targeted for his politics.
“In a polarized nation, angry voters are willing to believe almost anything about their political opponents,” David French wrote in the Atlantic in response to the backlash. “They’re hungry for ‘news’ that reinforces their convictions that their political enemies aren’t just wrong; they’re evil. The fabrication-industrial complex is lucrative.”
Lucrative in political terms, certainly; Trump has built a robust mechanism for turning lies into power. But French obviously also means financially lucrative, which it has been.
Jones, for example, was booted from those platforms several years ago, but his audience had been built, and he already had other vehicles for sharing his content. So he still had an audience to which he could sell useless nutritional supplements and survival gear, as Zeynep Tufekci wrote for the New York Times. And that’s a core challenge: how do you make it unprofitable to be relentlessly dishonest? How do you prevent what journalist Charlie Warzel describes as “walled off, subscription/store-driven ecosystems where they can lie and monetize it all with impunity”?
Here, too, the prospective value is not only in money but in power and attention. Truth Social exists in part as a moneymaking venture (see recent stories about jockeying for shares) but primarily as a walled-off ecosystem for Trump’s false political claims. Ye wants Parler as a place where he can keep agitating about Jewish people because he apparently sees value in the attention that generates. They, like Jones, want to sell something to people and don’t want anyone intervening to tell them its dangerous or irresponsible or unacceptable. It’s not clear that much of an audience will follow, but the impulse seems obvious.
Because nothing motivates as effectively as partisanship, when content is constrained by platforms — including antisemitic content or lies about the election or threats or abuse — it is cast not as a response to behavior but as a response to ideology. With the effect that it’s Trump and Ye and their allies who are using the word “conservative” to describe going “death con 3 on Jewish people” or elevating false claims about who won the presidential election.
Now they’re building their own communities to be able to say those things to their hearts’ content. Just like Alex Jones. | 2022-10-18T15:50:46Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The challenge of building a social network around right-wing grievance - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/18/kanye-right-wing-social-media/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/18/kanye-right-wing-social-media/ |
Herschel Walker doubles down on 'prop’ badge in campaign video with sheriff
Republican Senate candidate Herschel Walker campaigns on Sept. 7 in Emerson, Ga. (Bill Barrow/AP)
Georgia Republican Senate nominee Herschel Walker is doubling down on his claims that a sheriff’s badge he flashed during a debate Friday is real and not a prop, despite earlier reporting that debunked Walker’s claims that he worked in law enforcement.
In a video posted by his campaign Monday night, Walker poses with Johnson County Sheriff Greg Rowland and once again holds up the badge that he produced in his only debate so far against his Democratic opponent, Sen. Raphael Warnock.
“This is my sheriff, Sheriff Rowland,” Walker says in the video, putting his arm around Rowland.
“Yes," Rowland replies, while also holding up his own similar-looking badge. “If Herschel’s badge is a prop, then I guess this badge I wear every day to protect the citizens — I guess it’s a prop also. But these are real badges. And I gave this to my friend for all he’s done for this country and this county.”
“And let me tell you I’m gonna always, always stand behind our men and women in blue, so God bless,” Walker concludes.
During Friday’s debate, Warnock said that Walker had “pretended to be a police officer,” a reference to claims by Walker about working with the FBI and a local police department. Rather than verbally responding, Walker pulled out the badge — which apparently is honorary in nature — drawing a rebuke from a moderator for using a prop, which was not allowed under debate rules.
“I am — work with many police officers,” Walker said on stage.
The incident triggered a torrent of memes, ridicule and renewed scrutiny over Walker’s past claims. “The Daily Show” host Trevor Noah joked on Monday that Georgia voters could just give Walker a certificate that says “honorary senator” instead of actually electing him to the Senate.
“He won’t know the difference!” Noah declared.
In an interview with NBC News, which was conducted over the weekend and aired Monday, Walker defended the badge as “legit.”
“This is from my hometown. This is from Johnson County, from the sheriff from Johnson County, which is a legit badge,” Walker said. “Everyone can make fun, but this badge gives me the right … if anything happened in this county, I have the right to work with the police in getting things done.”
Walker’s past claims about working in law enforcement — including that he was an FBI agent — have already been examined closely and found to be untrue. According to an Atlanta Journal-Constitution review of dozens of Walker’s past speeches, Walker has at various points claimed to work with the Cobb County Police Department, told police in Texas that he was “a certified peace officer,” and said he has “been in criminal justice all my life.”
A spokesman for the Cobb County Police Department told the Atlanta newspaper then, and later confirmed to The Washington Post, that it has no record of working with Walker. A campaign spokeswoman said at the time that Walker had led “women’s self-defense training, participating in the FBI Academy at Quantico” and also held the title of “honorary deputy” in Cobb County.
The title of “honorary deputy” holds no power at all and is seen as a “political token” for people supportive of the sheriff who might want to get out of a traffic ticket, former DeKalb County district attorney J. Tom Morgan (D) told The Post in June.
“It absolutely means nothing,” he said. “It’s the equivalent of a junior ranger badge.”
The police badge incident did briefly take some of the spotlight off Walker’s other controversies, namely reports that he paid for an ex-girlfriend’s abortion and later offered to pay for her to have a second one. Walker, who has campaigned against abortion rights under any circumstances, has denied those reports. In the NBC interview, he acknowledged giving a $700 check to his then-partner in 2009 but continued to deny the woman’s claim that the money was provided to pay for an abortion.
On Monday, talking to reporters as he voted early in the race in Atlanta, Warnock cited the episode with the badge and several other examples of Walker embellishing his past that have been documented in news stories.
“He … claimed to be a police officer. He’s not,” Warnock said. “Claimed to work for the FBI, clearly did not. Claimed to be a college graduate, he’s not. Claimed to be a valedictorian of his class, he was not. Claimed to have 800 employees in his business, he has eight. Claimed to have started a business that does not even exist. So I guess he expects the people of Georgia now to hallucinate and imagine that he is also a United States senator. He’s clearly not ready.”
“The people of Georgia deserve a serious person to represent them at serious times,” Warnock said. “I’m committed to doing that work. I’ve been very transparent about my life.”
Analysis: Professor Obama’s lesson plan for Democrats | 2022-10-18T16:16:53Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Herschel Walker doubles down on 'prop’ badge in campaign video with sheriff - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/18/walker-georgia-senate-sheriff-badge/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/18/walker-georgia-senate-sheriff-badge/ |
The coveted award includes a $7,500 check and the chance to compete for the National Teacher of the Year award
D.C.’s Teacher of the Year, Jermar Rountree, poses with his sister Tamia Nelson in October 2020. (Samantha Novak)
In a surprise ceremony at Center City Public Charter School’s campus in Brightwood, a physical education teacher was named D.C. Teacher of the Year.
Each year, educators across the city vie for the coveted award, which comes with a $7,500 check and the chance to compete for National Teacher of the Year in a contest run by the Council of Chief State School Officers. Jermar Rountree, 38, received this year’s honor.
“It was a complete surprise,” said Rountree, who was recognized in a ceremony Monday morning. He thought he was attending a science event, he said.
But when D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D), who was speaking at the campus, asked whether Rountree was in attendance, he knew something was up.
“It’s still kind of surreal,” Rountree said in an interview. “As an educator, you look forward to someday being in this position. To actually have it happen is an amazing thing.”
Rountree has been teaching physical education for 16 years, the past six at Center City-Brightwood. It is a slight departure from his college aspirations, when he had hopes of becoming a history teacher.
Pre-K teacher Dominique Foster is named D.C.’s 2022 Teacher of the Year
But, in his last semester at Western Connecticut State University, Rountree said a professor helped him discover that his real passion was in health education. He started his career in Danbury, Conn., working with children at the YMCA. At that time, he also started a business teaching day-care workers how to provide physical education to their students.
Rountree relocated to the District in 2012 and began teaching at D.C. Prep Public Charter School in Northeast Washington. He joined Center City in 2016.
Since then, Rountree has hosted health-centered events for students and families. His program includes fitness classes, a fun run and swimming programs for middle school students. Within the Center City network, which includes six charter schools in neighborhoods throughout the city, Rountree serves as the District teacher lead for the physical education and health department.
He has also led the Physical Education Cadre at the Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE), which evaluates health curriculums for elementary and secondary students citywide.
But Rountree thinks his everyday contributions are what make the difference. In the mornings, he greets each child by name, and that includes siblings who attend different schools, he said. His P.E. classes feature restorative circles and mental health check-ins. All students — from 3-year-old prekindergartners to teenage eighth-graders — are encouraged to be themselves in his class, he added.
‘My students are brilliant': Meet the D.C. teacher of the year and one of the four finalists for the top national honor
Students recite a motto during every class period: “Respect yourself, respect others and respect our space and things,” Rountree said. “It sets a reminder in my class that we are all in this together.”
In Rountree’s class, mental health is as much a focus as physical health — particularly as students continue to adjust after returning to school from online learning, when balled-up socks had to take the place of real baseballs and basketballs during virtual P.E. “One of the things I incorporated this year is we talk a lot about what stresses our kids out,” Rountree said, adding that he tries to give students the opportunity to advocate for themselves.
Rachel Tommelleo, Center City’s principal, said Rountree is a model in the community of more than 250 students.
“He is respectful, patient and always super positive. He is the type of teacher who understands the importance of building strong relationships with students and their families across all grade levels and works very hard to do so,” Tommelleo said in a statement. “Our school is an amazing place to grow and learn because of teachers like Coach Rountree.”
In addition to the $7,500 award, Rountree will receive $2,500 to travel to conferences and workshops during his year-long term as D.C. Teacher of the Year.
OSSE will make $1,500 awards to three other finalists: Alex Clark, a health and physical education teacher at Dunbar High School; Brandyn Marshall Poole, a mathematics teacher at Center City PCS-Trinidad; and Luz Mireya Pelaez Lopez, a pre-K dual language teacher in the Spanish immersion program at Marie Reed Elementary School. | 2022-10-18T16:47:21Z | www.washingtonpost.com | P.E. teacher Jermar Rountree named 2023 D.C. Teacher of the Year - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/10/18/dc-teacher-of-the-year/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/10/18/dc-teacher-of-the-year/ |
The six-bedroom, five-bathroom was the site of one of the nation’s first vineyards
This nineteenth century home tucked away on the quiet streets of Cleveland Park was once owned by John Adlum, known as the “father of American viticulture” – or so the story goes. According to legend, Adlum, who joined the Revolutionary War two days after the signing of the Declaration of Independence at age 17, began one of the new nation’s first vineyards on this property.
The truth is murkier. While Adlum did own 200 acres of land in what is now Cleveland Park, Van Ness and Forrest Hills, he never lived in this farm house – in fact, it wasn’t built until 1845, nine years after his death. The location of Adlum’s home is unknown, though it may have been the site of the nearby community garden.
This is not to say that Adlum did not procure wine from the property. In his memoir, he wrote about being one of the first viticulturists to produce wine with grapes native to the area rather than fermenting European varieties. His goal, he wrote, was to “exhibit to the Nation a new source of wealth, which had been too long neglected.”
Even President Thomas Jefferson, himself a winemaker, was a fan of Adlum’s product. He wrote a letter to Adlum in 1809 regarding a sampling of Adlum’s Maryland-produced wine, which a congressman had gifted him.
“This was a very fine wine, and so exactly resembling the red Burgundy of Chamberlin, (one of the best crops) that on a fair comparison with that, of which I had very good on the same table, imported by myself from the place where made; the company could not distinguish the one from the other.”
Adlum’s D.C. property remained in his family well into the 1900s, though “the Vineyards,” as he titled it, was divided among his descendants. Adlum’s son-in-law, Assistant Attorney General Henry Hatch Dent, constructed the 1845 home now known as Springland, and it has seen some notable occupants in its 177-year existence, according to its historic designation.
This includes Dent’s daughter, Adlumnia Dent, who married minister and philosopher James McBride Sterrett. A professor at Columbian College, which became George Washington University, he wrote several books on Hegelian idealistic philosophy during his residence. He also founded All Souls Church, which still stands high above the intersection of Mount Pleasant, Adams Morgan and Columbia Heights neighborhoods. Their children, who grew up in the home, included William Dent Sterrett, who was a major developer in Cleveland Park (and built most of the homes on the surrounding streets) and Henry Hatch Dent Sterrett, who was the last family member to own the home in adulthood and followed his father to become a minister.
The six-bedroom, five-bathroom house sits on over an acre of land. The main level features a grand foyer with peachy walls and is flanked by a library on one end and a receiving room on the other. The dining room and living room open to a veranda that overlooks the expansive property and private garden. A metal storage rack hangs above the country kitchen, and the family room is lit by oversized windows in the day and (perhaps) by a fireplace in the evening.
On the second level, the primary bedroom, including a walk-in closet, sits next to an en-suite bathroom with dual vanities and a double-headed steam shower. Three other bedrooms on the floor share a bathroom and central laundry room.
The lower level has a recreation room, a guest bedroom, heated tile floors, a second bedroom (currently used as a home gym) and additional storage space. Multiple rear exterior doors lead to a fenced backyard.
There are two covered patios in the backyard, one of which leads into the backyard and the other to the main floor. A separate structure next to the house is used as a one-car garage. In the front of the house, a circular gravel stretches 3,600 square feet.
Concealed behind Sidwell Friends School, Springland is within walking distance to neighborhood shops and restaurants in Cathedral Commons and Cleveland Park, the Cleveland Park Metro stop and newly renovated Hearst Park, which includes a public swimming pool.
A small community, Springland Farm neighbors take pride in the area’s history and present community. While today’s residents may not personally recall the vineyard that once sprawled upon their properties, they remember Adlum’s contributions to the birth of the American wine industry – and how it began where they now live.
“What is life to a man that is without wine?” Adlum wrote in his 1823 book on winemaking. “It was made to make men glad. Moderately drank, and in season, bringeth gladness of the heart, and cheerfulness of the mind.”
Price here
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Listing agent: Michael Rankin TTR Soethby’s International Realty | 2022-10-18T17:00:24Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Historic farmhouse in NW DC on the market for $5 million - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/10/18/historic-farmhouse-nw-dc-market-5-million/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/10/18/historic-farmhouse-nw-dc-market-5-million/ |
Candace Owens and Kanye West’s relationship, explained
Both wore “White Lives Matter” shirts at a recent fashion show, and Ye is buying Parler, whose CEO is Owens’s husband
Ye and Candace Owens attend the premiere of Owens's documentary “The Greatest Lie Ever Sold” Wednesday in Nashville. (Jason Davis/Getty Images)
The story of his nearly two decades of fame is punctuated by news-making partnerships. Back in the old days there was Kanye and Jay-Z, Kanye and Cudi. For a time, there was Kanye and Virgil — as in Abloh, the fashion designer who was his fellow intern at Fendi and later became creative director of his agency, Donda. And of course, for nearly a decade, Americans were inundated with Kanye and Kim (and their brood of eccentrically named kids).
Now, a newer partnership gets its moment of scrutiny: Kanye and Candace.
Candace Owens, the 33-year-old conservative activist, talk show host and provocateur, has lurked around the margins of Ye’s stardom for a few years now. Recently she has stepped in to share the spotlight. Earlier this month, the Chicago-born, 45-year-old rapper and designer formerly known as Kanye West — who has legally changed his name to Ye — hosted a fashion show in Paris at which he and Owens both sported long-sleeved shirts with “White Lives Matter” emblazoned on the back. Soon afterward, when Ye was suspended by Instagram and Twitter for an antisemitic post, Owens came to Ye’s defense, insisting that “no honest person” would really find his words antisemitic. And finally, on Monday, Ye announced his plans to purchase Parler, a social network popular among conservatives. Its CEO is George Farmer — whom Owens married in 2019 at Trump Winery in Charlottesville.
It’s tricky to disentangle Ye’s friendship with Owens from his hard pivot into conservative politics. In late November of 2016, he said onstage that he would have voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 election, had he actually voted. He met with the then-president-elect in December 2016 to discuss “multicultural issues,” and the two seemed at the time to have established a friendly rapport.
It was 2018, though, that marked the public launch of Ye’s mutual-admiration relationship with Owens. In April of that year, Ye tweeted that he loved “the way Candace Owens thinks.” At the time, Owens was the communications director for the student-focused conservative nonprofit Turning Point USA. Days later, Owens and a MAGA-hat-wearing Ye paid a visit to TMZ headquarters together — where the latter made his incendiary, now-infamous off-the-cuff remark that slavery was “a choice.”
“When all of this happened, the immediate reaction coming from most of his loyal Black fans — and coming from many non-Black fans who happen to be liberal or Democratic — was a lot of people were hurt by it,” says Joshua Wright, who teaches history at Trinity Washington University and wrote the recent book “ ‘Wake Up, Mr. West’: Kanye West and the Double Consciousness of Black Celebrity.”
“There was a lot of talk about Kanye West and ‘the sunken place,’ and people were comparing it to the movie ‘Get Out,’ ” which depicts a world in which a Black person’s consciousness can be sent into limbo while their body is inhabited by a White person. Multiple prominent Black radio hosts, Wright notes, said at the time that they would stop playing Ye’s music.
Of course, at the same time, “The comments turned off one segment of the population who loves him, but brought him a brand-new crowd of fans who may not have paid attention to him in the past,” Wright says. “In recent years Kanye has been more in the Christian circles, and really tight with the southern Evangelical church base. A lot of those people tend to be Trump supporters. They tend to be conservative.”
That fall, things briefly soured between Ye and Owens. Many outlets reported that Ye had designed T-shirts for Owens’s “Blexit” campaign urging Black voters to leave the Democratic Party. Owens herself told Page Six, “I am blessed to say that this logo, these colors, were created by my dear friend and fellow superhero Kanye West.” Ye, however, denied his involvement in a tweet: “I introduced Candace to the person who made the logo and they didn’t want their name on it so she used mine,” he wrote. “I never wanted any association with Blexit. I have nothing to do with it.”
My eyes are now wide open and now realize I’ve been used to spread messages I don’t believe in. I am distancing myself from politics and completely focusing on being creative !!!
— ye (@kanyewest) October 30, 2018
“Kanye has had this pattern I’ve noticed in recent years: being close with people, falling out with those people, sometimes having really bad public spats with those people, and then — maybe he wants to say it’s his Christianity or whatever — he makes up with these people,” Wright says. “He and Jay-Z had a famous falling-out. He and Drake had a famous falling-out. But they patched everything up.”
Indeed, Owens apologized in a statement. (“I never once said that Kanye designed the T-shirts for BLEXIT,” she wrote. “I would like to publicly apologize to him for any undue stress or pain the effort to correct that rumor has caused him, his business relationships, or his family.”) The following month, Ye tweeted a photo of a copy of Owens’s new book.
This year, nearly 12 months into Ye’s process of becoming legally divorced from Kim Kardashian, Ye once again made headlines when he claimed Kardashian West was keeping him from seeing their four children and accused her of putting their eldest daughter on social media against his will. (Kardashian West responded in a post immediately afterward that “as the parent who is the main provider and caregiver for our children, I am doing my best to protect our daughter while also allowing her to express her creativity in the medium that she wishes with adult supervision — because it brings her happiness.”)
Owens came to Ye’s defense, tweeting: “Kim is wrong on this one. … It’s actually Kanye that is trying to protect his daughter in this regard Andy Kim is spinning this as ‘obsession’ and ‘control.’ ” And on Wednesday, two days after the social media posts that got his account banned from Twitter, Ye attended the Nashville premiere of Owens’s documentary project “The Greatest Lie Ever Sold: George Floyd and the Rise of BLM.” A few days afterward, discussing the film on a podcast, Ye declared that Floyd had died in 2020 from fentanyl use, not police brutality.
(Former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was convicted of Floyd’s murder, and while autopsies showed that Floyd had a large amount of fentanyl in his system, medical experts and witnesses testified that Floyd was the victim of a homicide, not an overdose. Floyd’s family is considering suing Ye over his claims.)
Of course, Ye’s recent spate of controversial headlines are just the latest in a career more or less made out of them — and his recent cozying-up to far-right figures such as Owens and Trump himself perhaps could have been predicted. The way Wright sees it, Ye’s conservative politics were hiding in plain sight from early on. “Going all the way back to his first album, ‘The College Dropout,’ there are things he says on pretty much every album that have some conservatism in it,” Wright says. “Now we can look … and say, ‘Oh,’ but back then we didn’t see it.” (Indeed, like many of today’s Republican elected officials, “The College Dropout” casts a skeptical eye toward the importance of higher education in America.)
Plus, Wright says, Ye’s outspokenly contrarian, against-the-grain opinions are in part what’s made him successful since the beginning — making Owens a sort of kindred spirit in the moment. “If everybody says it’s raining or cold outside, Kanye says no, it’s sunny,” Wright says. “Everybody loved Kanye when he said ‘George Bush doesn’t care about Black people.’ He had everybody cheering him on,” amid the then-president’s much-criticized handling of the Hurricane Katrina recovery. But then, after a palpable shift in cultural and political power, “everybody loved Obama, so he had to love Trump.” (The Washington Post has put in a request for comment to representatives for both Owens and Ye.)
Owens is also known for her provocative stances: She has stated her opposition to coronavirus protocols such as mask and vaccination mandates and promoted a variety of conspiracy theories — including that the protests after Floyd’s death were funded by George Soros and that the 2020 election was “rigged.”
“Candace always says things that a large majority of the Black masses — as well as young liberals, White liberals, everyone else who may love Kanye — would disagree with,” Wright adds. “Kanye is a contrarian, and she’s a contrarian. They’re both controversial. Lightning rods.”
Still, Wright disagrees with those who prophesize that Ye’s close relationship with Owens will permanently knock him out of the good graces of the American public. “If enough time passes — and maybe he makes another good album, some good fashion, whatever — I think there will be excitement,” Wright says. “A pretty large segment of the population probably will forgive him and get over it.” | 2022-10-18T17:17:49Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Candace Owens and Kanye West’s relationship, explained - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/10/18/candace-owens-kanye-west/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/10/18/candace-owens-kanye-west/ |
The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite has lost a third of its value, public-offering volume has plummeted over 90%, and the majority of last year’s IPO crop is underwater. All the signs are there for any right-minded chief executive to hold off on a share sale. Yet Intel Corp. is bringing Mobileye Global Inc. to market, making CEO Pat Gelsinger look desperate.
Five years after buying and delisting the company for $15.3 billion, Intel is putting it up for sale again with a price tag of $16 billion. That’s an embarrassing discount to the $50 billion value that had once been floated, and little more than half the $30 billion that was being discussed just a month ago.
In normal times, an offering for the Israeli developer of self-driving technology would be highly sought after. Electric vehicles and driverless cars are expected to be the technology industry’s growth driver for the next decade. Mobileye, which makes software and designs chips, is at the center of that boom with a lucrative business model.
Rather than jump into making cars alongside a growing list of new entrants — like Lordstown Motors Corp. and Rivian Automotive Inc. — Mobileye can minimize its capital costs while building a competitive moat. An early pioneer of advanced driver assistance systems, which help avoid collisions and boost safety, the Jerusalem-based business is now found in more than 125 million vehicles globally, and expects to double that by 2030.
That makes its approach similar to Microsoft Corp.’s Windows in the PC era and Alphabet Inc.’s Android for mobile phones — handle the core software so the branded hardware clients can focus on building the end product. To be sure, there’s plenty of competitors including Nvidia Corp., Qualcomm Inc., Robert Bosch GmbH and Denso Corp. But the pie is growing, and so is Mobileye’s revenue — up 43% last year.
With such hot prospects, and the knowledge that bear markets don’t last forever, Gelsinger would be wise to hold off until the weather clears. Yet he’s intent on sailing through the storm, with his investors strapped to the mast.
“Given the way their own business is currently trending,” Intel likely needs the money it will receive from the deal, analysts at Bernstein wrote. The company has committed to spending record amounts of money — including $23 billion this year alone — to build new chip factories in order to catch up with rivals Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. and Samsung Electronics Co., yet its PC business is in a funk and layoffs may be on the cards.
Gelsinger has previously said that Intel doesn’t need the money that the IPO would generate, which is a good thing because the offering of a 5.8% stake will raise around $800 to $900 million — equivalent to about two weeks of capital expenditure.
Instead, among the reasons for proceeding are giving the company a higher profile and attracting more business. That’s a bizarre explanation given that Intel spends $1 billion a year on advertising,(1)almost as much as Mobileye creates in revenue. If it wanted to help boost Mobileye’s profile, Intel could throw just a little cash its way.
One argument to be made for proceeding is to give Mobileye investors an upside — take a punt now, and you’ll be richly rewarded when the market turns around. And if that’s the case, then it’s worth remembering that while Mobileye is selling 46 million class A shares, Intel is holding onto all of its Class B shares, which amounts to 99.4% of the voting power of common stock and 94.2% of total shares. So perhaps the strategy is to dole out a little to the market in bad times, and then follow up with a more fruitful secondary offering sometime later.
Whatever the reason, Intel is giving off vibes of desperation. Its investors may be willing to cop the discount, but they’d be wise to remember that the company is leaving money on the table at a time when the payoff from their big chip plans is in doubt.
• Intel’s Paying a High Cost for Its Towering Ambition: Tim Culpan
• Porsche and Volkswagen Have the Worst Timing: Chris Bryant
(1) See Note 6 of its 2021 Form 10-K | 2022-10-18T17:17:52Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Intel’s Mobileye IPO Looks Desperate and Needy - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/intelsmobileyeipo-looksdesperate-and-needy/2022/10/18/0f901d52-4efe-11ed-ada8-04e6e6bf8b19_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/intelsmobileyeipo-looksdesperate-and-needy/2022/10/18/0f901d52-4efe-11ed-ada8-04e6e6bf8b19_story.html |
By Sophia Solano | Oct 18, 2022
This nineteenth century home tucked away on the quiet streets of Cleveland Park was once owned by John Adlum, known as the “father of American viticulture” – or so the story goes. According to legend, Adlum, who joined the Revolutionary War two days after the signing of the Declaration of Independence at age 17, began one of the new nation’s first vineyards on this property. The truth is murkier.
Townsend Visual
The 1845 farm house was built on land once owned by John Adlum, a Revolutionary War veteran who started one of America's first vineyards.
The foyer features a staircase leading to the upper level.
The family room is lit by oversized windows and a fireplace.
The dining room has built-in storage.
The master bedroom has a walk-in closet.
In the master en suite bathroom, there are dual vanities and two steam shower heads.
The long second story balcony overlooks the backyard.
Another covered, outdoor balcony sits on the side of the house.
The circular gravel stretches 3,600 square feet.
In Northwest Washington, a small community flourishes where grapes once did | 2022-10-18T17:17:52Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Historic farmhouse in NW DC on the market for $5 million - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/interactive/2022/historic-farmhouse-nw-dc-market-5-million/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/interactive/2022/historic-farmhouse-nw-dc-market-5-million/ |
Russian opposition activist Vladimir Kara-Murza sits on a bench inside a defendants' cage during a court hearing in Moscow on Oct. 10. (Natalia Kolesnikova/AFP via Getty Images)
PRETRIAL DETENTION CENTER NO. 5, MOSCOW — I wondered about the long faces of prison guards as they escorted me from my prison cell to the interrogation room last week. It was supposed to be a routine meeting. The chief investigator on my case, Andrei Zadachin, had told my lawyers he was going to present the final indictment, unifying my two previous charges: for publicly denouncing Vladimir Putin’s war crimes in Ukraine (in official Kremlin-speak, “spreading deliberately false information about the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation”), and for organizing a conference in support of Russian political prisoners (“carrying out the activities of an undesirable organization”).
These two charges were indeed included in the final indictment that Zadachin laid out on the table after some usual good-humored small talk — along with the third that overshadowed them all. The words “high treason” stood out immediately on the first page. Even my seasoned attorneys Vadim Prokhorov and Olga Mikhailova — who worked for many years with, respectively, Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov (who was assassinated in 2015) and the poisoned and now imprisoned Putin opponent Alexei Navalny — seemed baffled as they delved into the text.
They had reason to be. My case marks the first moment in post-Soviet Russia when public criticism of the authorities is officially clarified as “treason.” The three counts in the indictment are my address to the NATO Parliamentary Assembly about the illegitimacy of Putin’s term-limit waiver; my speech at the Norwegian Helsinki Committee award ceremony for Russian historian and political prisoner Yuri Dmitriev discussing repression in Putin’s Russia; and my testimony before the U.S. Congress’s Helsinki Commission on the pervasive media censorship imposed by Putin to hide the war crimes his forces are committing in Ukraine.
Alexei Navalny: This is what a post-Putin Russia should look like
According to the indictment, my speeches “threatened the security and constitutional order of the Russian Federation,” “damaged the international reputation of the Russian Federation,” and gave Russia an “image as an aggressor state in the eyes of the international community.” (While flattered by the Investigative Committee’s assessment of my influence, I must admit that Putin has done a far better job on all three counts than I ever could.) And, unlike what is customary in actual treason cases, no foreign country benefited from my actions — the alleged subject instead is the Free Russia Foundation, a U.S.-registered pro-democracy nongovernmental organization founded and led by Russian activist (and citizen) Natalia Arno.
One would be hard-pressed to find precedents even in post-Stalin Soviet times when the authorities indicted dissidents as “traitors.” Among the best-known opponents of the Communist regime, such charges were leveled only against Nobel Prize-winning writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn before his expulsion to West Germany in February 1974, and against Anatoly (now Natan) Sharansky, a leader of the Jewish refusenik movement and co-founder of the Moscow Helsinki Group, in 1977. In Sharansky’s case, even the Soviet KGB felt the need to allege that he had disclosed “military secrets” by publishing refuseniks’ places of employment to substantiate the accusation of “treason.” The current Russian government seems to feel no need for such formalities.
The news of my indictment spread quickly throughout our prison. One inmate, a prominent banker, came up to me in the corridor to shake my hand. “Aren’t you afraid?” I asked. “I am proud,” he responded. Others — especially older prisoners who remember the Soviet era, when the charge of treason carried the death penalty — looked at me with sympathy, as one views a condemned man. Under the Russian Criminal Code, each count of treason carries up to 20 years of imprisonment — this in addition to 14 years on my two previous charges.
I won’t lie: It’s not a pleasant feeling to see such apocalyptic numbers in the indictment with my name at the top of the page. Worst of all was the thought of how my wife and our three children would take this news. I had no way of knowing: For many months now, I have not been allowed to even hear their voices on the phone. Adding significant insult to a very real injury was the accusation of “betraying” the country I love — coming from the people who really are destroying its future, its reputation and its standing in the world.
But what really helps — apart from the knowledge that I am right and they are wrong — is my background as a historian. Why? Because all of this has happened before, and we know how it will end. Aggressive wars launched by Russian and Soviet rulers for domestic political purposes — from the Crimean War of the mid-19th century to the misnamed “small victorious” Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905 to the invasion of Afghanistan in the 1970s and 1980s — ended up backfiring badly on their masterminds, who managed to turn both their own people and the world against them. This war will be no different — and it is remarkable how diligently Putin is stepping into the same traps that caught his predecessors.
The great Russian historian Vasily Klyuchevsky once said that “history doesn’t teach anyone anything — it only punishes for lessons not learnt.”It won’t be long before Putin finds out just how true these words really are.
Opinion|Vladimir Kara-Murza from prison: In Putin’s Russia, dissent is now ‘treason’ | 2022-10-18T17:18:40Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Vladimir Kara-Murza from prison: In Putin’s Russia, dissent is now ‘treason’ - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/18/vladimir-kara-murza-putin-treason-indictment/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/18/vladimir-kara-murza-putin-treason-indictment/ |
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) arrive for an unveiling ceremony of a statue depicting former President Harry S. Truman in the Capitol Rotunda on Capitol Hill on Sept 29, 2022, in Washington, D.C. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) is signaling that if Republicans win the House majority in next month’s midterm elections, the GOP is likely to oppose more aid to Ukraine in its war with Russia.
Since the invasion in February, the majority of congressional Republicans and Democrats have united in authorizing billions of dollars in U.S. military and humanitarian assistance to Kyiv as a geopolitical and moral stand against Vladimir Putin’s aggression.
McCarthy, who could be House speaker if Republicans triumph, indicated that could end in a GOP-led House.
“I think people are gonna be sitting in a recession and they’re not going to write a blank check to Ukraine," he recently told Punchbowl News. “They just won’t do it.”
McCarthy suggested that Americans want Congress to focus on issues closer to home.
“There’s the things [the Biden administration] is not doing domestically,” he said. "Not doing the border, and people begin to weigh that. Ukraine is important, but at the same time it can’t be the only thing they do, and it can’t be a blank check.”
The United States has authorized upward of $60 billion in aid to Ukraine, with more than $18.2 billion in security assistance given since January 2021. The Senate voted to finalize more than $40 billion in new military and humanitarian assistance in May with Republicans being the only lawmakers voting against that package -- the largest investment in Ukraine thus far.
On Friday, the U.S. announced an additional $725 million in security assistance for Ukraine, including more ammunition for high mobility rocket systems, or HIMARS, as well as precision-guided artillery rounds, anti-tank weapons and humvees, according to a Pentagon statement.
While most of the congressional leadership, most notably Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), have been steadfast in support for Ukraine, voters in several states could send Republicans to Washington in January eager to oppose aid. The number of those wary of foreign aid and adherents of former president Donald Trump’s “America First” agenda are expected to grow in the next Congress.
In September, J.D. Vance, the venture capitalist and author who is locked in a close race for the U.S. Senate seat from Ohio, said he wants “the Ukrainians to be successful” but not because of continued U.S. funding.
“I do think that we have to get to a point, and this is where we do disagree, we’ve got to stop the money spigot to Ukraine eventually,” he told Toledo, Ohio’s ABC affiliate. “We cannot fund a long-term military conflict that I think ultimately has diminishing returns for our own country.”
Vance added, “I think we’re at the point where we’ve given enough money in Ukraine, I really do. ... The Europeans need to step up. And frankly, if the Ukrainians and the Europeans, more importantly, knew that America wasn’t going to foot the bill, they might actually step up.”
“Under Joe Biden, it’s always America last,” he said in a video he tweeted. “Let’s be clear about what this means. It means no cease-fire. It means another foreign war where we pay for everything. Many more thousands of people will die. There’s no resolution, no end in sight. The risk of course is that a proxy war can escalate into an all-out nuclear war between nuclear powers.”
In New Hampshire, Republican Senate candidate Don Bolduc said last week that more spending isn’t the answer to improving conditions in Ukraine.
These Republicans could join Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who in May temporarily held up $40 billion in aid to Ukraine, saying, “you can’t save Ukraine by dooming the U.S. economy.”
The loudest voices on the right on the issue, such as Fox News’s Tucker Carlson, have been outspoken in questioning aid to Ukraine.
The Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in September posted, then deleted, a tweet that echoed Kremlin language and called for a halt to “gift-giving to Ukraine.” It later issued a statement reaffirming its stance on U.S. assistance. “We must oppose Putin, but American taxpayers should not be shouldering the vast majority of the cost,” it said.
McCarthy’s comments drew an incredulous response from Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.), who tweeted at McCarthy, “what in the absolute bloody hell is happening to @GOPLeader.”
Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has warned that if the GOP wins the House, help for Ukraine would be in jeopardy.
“I just see a freight train coming, and that is Trump and his operation turning against aid for Ukraine," he said on MSNBC. “House Republicans, if they were to take the majority, being preternaturally against anything Joe Biden is for — including the war in Ukraine -- and there being a real crisis where the House Republican majority would refuse to support additional aid to Ukraine.” | 2022-10-18T17:18:52Z | www.washingtonpost.com | McCarthy signals GOP-led House unlikely to approve more aid to Ukraine - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/18/house-republicans-ukraine-mccarthy/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/18/house-republicans-ukraine-mccarthy/ |
Dawn Staley wore a “We Are BG” pin at the Women's Sports Foundation's Annual Salute to Women in Sports on Oct. 12. (Julia Nikhinson/AP)
Brittney Griner turned 32 Tuesday, spending the occasion on Day 243 of her detainment in Russia not with cake and presents but alone as family, friends, fellow athletes and coaches launched a #WeAreBG campaign seeking her return to the United States.
“I’ve felt every moment of the grueling seven months without her,” Griner’s wife, Cherelle, said on wearebg.org, a website where supporters can post messages to Brittney Griner.
In a message released by her lawyer to CNN, Griner said: “Thank you everyone for fighting so hard to get me home. All the support and love are definitely helping me.”
Griner, a two-time Olympic gold medalist and star with the WNBA’s Phoenix Mercury, has been imprisoned since her arrest Feb. 17 on charges of entering Russia (where she has played during the WNBA’s offseason) with vape cartridges containing 0.702 grams of cannabis oil. She was sentenced to more than nine years in prison Aug. 4 and waits for a diplomatic exchange of prisoners or other resolution of her situation to allow her to return home.
In May, the U.S. State Department changed her classification to “wrongfully detained,” meaning the government would seek her release. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov spoke by telephone in late July about a U.S. proposal to secure the release of Griner and Paul Whelan, a former U.S. Marine serving a 16-year sentence in Russia, but neither side reported progress in what Blinken described as “a frank and direct conversation.”
Since then, there has been little information on the case and State Department spokesperson Ned Price confirmed last week via CNN that the U.S. Embassy in Russia has had no consular access to Griner since early August. Her legal team is expected to appeal her conviction Oct. 25 in a Moscow court.
“I think of her every day,” Sandy Brondello, the New York Liberty coach who was with Griner’s Mercury team from 2014 to 2021, told ESPN. “Not just the great player she developed into. She has this amazing laugh, which I can’t wait to hear again.”
Dawn Staley, the South Carolina coach who formerly coached USA Basketball, said: “There is such a human side to BG that a lot of people on the outside don’t know. I wish that a lot of people were able to see that and could express themselves with the honesty that Brittney does.”
Breanna Stewart, a Team USA teammate, tweeted: “We are not a family without #BrittneyGriner. It’s time to BRING HER HOME. #WeAreBG. Today marks eight months of her Wrongful Detention. She needs her family now more than ever. BG — we have not forgotten you, and we will not rest until you’re home.”
BG - we have not forgotten you, and we will not rest until you’re home. pic.twitter.com/gVJAXByU34
Tennis legend Billie Jean King also tweeted support.
The WNBA promised, “we will not forget about you and we will not stop fighting for you,” in a tweet. “The W won’t be the same until you’re home.” The Women’s National Basketball Players Association echoed that, tweeting: “We are not The 144 without #BrittneyGriner. It’s time to BRING HER HOME. #WeAreBG. Today marks eight months of her Wrongful Detention. BG — we have not forgotten you, and we will not rest until you’re home.”
In early October, Cherelle Griner told Gayle King of “CBS Mornings” of the toll detainment has taken on the basketball star, as revealed in conversations with her.
Cherelle Griner said she has twice spoken with Griner on the phone since her detainment. After the first call, she felt Griner was doing well and that “we can survive this.” After the second, she felt the detainment had so worn on Griner’s mental health that Cherelle cried for “two, three days straight.”
“It was the most disturbing phone call I’ve ever experienced. … You could hear that she was not okay. You know if you think about a person suffering and when they have suffered to a max, like you could hear that she was at the max that day.” | 2022-10-18T17:19:29Z | www.washingtonpost.com | On Brittney Griner's birthday in Russia, supporters seek her release - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/18/brittney-griner-birthday/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/18/brittney-griner-birthday/ |
Maryland quarterback Taulia Tagovailoa was injured during Saturday's game against Indiana. (Darron Cummings/AP)
Maryland starting quarterback Taulia Tagovailoa avoided a serious knee injury, but his ability to play this weekend against Northwestern will be a game-time decision, Coach Michael Locksley said Tuesday. Tagovailoa reaggravated a sprained MCL, which he initially suffered Sept. 24 against Michigan. Tagovailoa had to leave the Terrapins’ win at Indiana on a cart after he took a hit to his right leg, a scene that prompted concern he had suffered a more significant setback.
“He was able to make it back after the Michigan game with the same injury,” Locksley said, referencing how the quarterback didn’t miss time after his previous knee injury. “It’s all about how his body feels and recovers. We’ll continue to do the things necessary to keep his safety and health at the front of our decisions.”
If Tagovailoa cannot play against the struggling Wildcats, the Terps (5-2, 2-2 Big Ten) will turn to backup Billy Edwards Jr., a redshirt freshman transfer from Wake Forest. The Burke, Va., native entered the game against the Hoosiers after Tagovailoa’s injury early in the fourth quarter, and he lifted Maryland out of a narrow deficit to a 38-33 victory. When Tagovailoa first injured his knee in the loss against Michigan, Edwards stepped in and led the Terps on a late touchdown drive.
Since then, Tagovailoa has worn a knee brace, and Locksley said he was “very thankful” for the brace, indicating that it protected the quarterback from a more serious injury.
Tagovailoa has thrown for 2,001 yards with 13 touchdowns and five interceptions. His 285.9 passing yards per game ranked third in the Big Ten. At 34.6 points per game, the Terps have the third highest-scoring offense in the conference.
As the Terps’ starter the past three seasons, Tagovailoa has been a durable, steady option at quarterback, a position that, for Maryland, had been plagued by a decade of injuries and instability. From 2010 to 2019, Maryland had 25 in-season starting quarterback changes. Only once during that stretch did the Terps have the same starter all season (C.J. Brown in 2014). After Tagovailoa arrived, he ushered in an era of newfound continuity.
Tagovailoa missed one game during the 2020 season but started all the others. Despite scares this season — a cramp late in the win at Charlotte and rib and knee issues in the loss at Michigan — he returned the following week each time. Tagovailoa has also dealt with the emotional toll of seeing his brother Tua’s scary concussion two days before he led Maryland to a win against Michigan State.
As Tagovailoa has improved under Locksley, so has the program. He led the Terps to a 7-6 season in 2021, the first time Maryland finished with a winning record since 2014. The team seems poised to improve upon that mark this year.
With the Terps, Tagovailoa has broken school records and is approaching the program’s record for career passing yards. Tagovailoa’s 6,872 yards at Maryland are second in the school’s history, behind only Scott Milanovich (7,301). Last season, Tagovailoa broke the school’s season-single passing record with 3,860 yards. His climb on the record lists could be paused, but the Terrapins have at least received encouraging news that he may return to the field soon. | 2022-10-18T17:19:35Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Taulia Tagovailoa has sprained MCL, is game-time decision vs. Northwestern - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/18/taulia-tagovailoa-injury/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/18/taulia-tagovailoa-injury/ |
British Prime Minister Liz Truss makes a statement outside 10 Downing Street in London on Sept. 8 after the death of Queen Elizabeth II. (Hollie Adams/Bloomberg News)
To become president of the United States, Joe Biden had to win a majority of electoral votes, something he accomplished by securing 81.3 million of 158.6 million votes cast nationally.
To become prime minister of the United Kingdom, Liz Truss had to hit a slightly lower bar: earning a bit under 36,000 votes of 51,000 cast in the South West Norfolk parliamentary district in 2019. Well, that and winning about 81,000 of the 142,000 votes cast by members of her Conservative Party as they sought to replace Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who resigned after a cascade of scandals.
Truss, in other words, was not elected by the people of the United Kingdom to be prime minister. She was elected to Parliament and then selected from her party to be prime minister, given the Conservative majority in the British House of Commons. It’s as though House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) automatically became president after the speaker election in 2021.
That distinction is important. Johnson’s resignation is a reminder that Truss’s position is more tenuous than is Biden’s; she’s more an occupant of a position than is the case with Biden. That’s also because Truss didn’t run for prime minister. There was not a months-long primary campaign cementing her as a leader of her party followed by a months-long, contentious general election. There are not many Britons with a personal investment in her success in the way there is with Biden or with, say, Donald Trump.
So we see something in Britain that would be hard to imagine here: a public that broadly views Truss negatively, including members of her own party.
On Tuesday, YouGov released new polling showing that only 10 percent of the country now view Truss favorably (or, as they spell it, “favourably”). On net — the favorable minus unfavorable percentages — Truss is at a staggering minus-70, down from the already-bad minus-59 she saw earlier this month. Her numbers are so low because only 20 percent of Conservatives view her favorably at this point, down from 30 percent two weeks ago.
Can you imagine? Since 2017, Trump’s favorability among Republicans has never fallen below 80 percent in YouGov polling. Biden’s has never been under 70 percent among Democrats since 2018, and that was back during his party’s contentious primaries.
This is clearly in part because their elections were centered on them as individuals. When Trump twice faced impeachment, his party rallied to his defense despite the fact that his ouster would, like Johnson’s, simply result in a new Republican president.
But, of course, it was also because partisanship is so sharp in the United States. Removing Trump was framed as a partisan attack, intentionally. To see him removed for his effort to pressure Ukraine or for his role in prompting the Capitol attack was letting Democrats beat Republicans, and that, coupled with the fervency of Trump’s support, made pushing back on the impeachment efforts essential. Look what’s happened to Republicans who bucked the party here and supported impeachment: Most chose not to run for reelection or lost their primaries.
There’s another factor here, too. British prime ministers serve indefinitely bounded terms. There’s no expectation of serving two or four years; as long as their party holds a majority in Parliament and the prime minister is selected to lead the party, they can serve in that position. Or as soon as their party loses the majority or they lose the confidence of their supporters, that’s it. When Johnson flirted with sticking around despite losing Conservative support, it triggered broad backlash. He ended up resigning. There was no push to let him stick around to the end of his term since no such boundary existed.
One reason that Truss has lost the confidence of her party, certainly, is that she is damaging it politically. YouGov also asks British voters how they would vote in a hypothetical parliamentary election, a question that’s generally akin to American generic-ballot polling. In the weeks after the death of Queen Elizabeth II, there’s been a massive shift to the left-leaning Labour Party. The week Truss became prime minister, Labour had a 15-point lead in that polling. It has now nearly doubled.
Trump never did that sort of damage; Biden is unlikely to either. Yes, Democrats won majorities in the House and Senate during Trump’s term in office, but narrow ones. Republicans will likely take the majority in the House in three weeks’ time — but also narrowly. This, again, is a measure of the extent of partisanship in the United States and how that partisanship helps reduce political costs for parties and politicians.
Truss may not be prime minister by the time the U.S. midterm elections arrive on Nov. 8. Replacing her would be a black eye for her party, but it might also quickly turn around perceptions of her party and her party’s view of itself.
That Truss is unpopular is bad for the Conservative Party and, certainly, bad for Truss. But that she’s unpopular with her own party — and that her position is seen as dependent on performance even with her base — is probably good news for British democracy. | 2022-10-18T17:52:38Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The good news for British democracy is that no one likes Liz Truss - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/18/britain-truss-conservative/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/18/britain-truss-conservative/ |
McCarthy’s striking warning signal on GOP and Ukraine aid
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) meets last month in his office with former House speaker Newt Gingrich and former Trump White House adviser Kellyanne Conway. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
After Russia invaded Ukraine in February, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) sought to out-hawk President Biden and the Democrats.
He complained that Ukraine hadn’t gotten enough help in advance and baselessly ventured that Russia “probably” wouldn’t have attacked if it had been provided with more weapons. He also pushed for the United States to provide aircraft to Ukraine when the Biden administration viewed that as impractical and of limited utility.
In a new interview, though, McCarthy is singing a significantly different tune. He says that if Republicans win back Congress, we shouldn’t take for granted that the U.S. will send further military aid to Ukraine.
“I think people are gonna be sitting in a recession and they’re not going to write a blank check to Ukraine,” McCarthy told Punchbowl News. “They just won’t do it. … It’s not a free blank check. And then there’s the things [the Biden administration] is not doing domestically. Not doing the border and people begin to weigh that. Ukraine is important, but at the same time it can’t be the only thing they do, and it can’t be a blank check.”
A few points.
First: This statement does not so much rule out future military aid to Ukraine as suggest it might be more limited and difficult to obtain. But whether that’s because certain Republicans might demand budget offsets or simply don’t want to send as much money overseas, the practical effect is a GOP leader warning that Congress could soon get quite a bit stingier if his party is in charge.
The second is, as Punchbowl notes, this could double as a ploy to force the Biden administration’s hand. If there’s legitimate fear that a GOP-run Congress could stand in the way of more fulsome aid to Ukraine, it could prompt the currently Democratic-controlled Congress to pass a major bill in the lame-duck session, extending military aid. McCarthy spoke about this issue in terms of what his party might do rather than, necessarily, what he would personally advocate. And to the extent he wants Ukraine fully funded, he could be sending a signal that it’d be best to not leave it to the mercy of his own unwieldy conference.
Either way, though, it’s a remarkable bit of expectation-setting — particularly as evidence increases of Ukraine’s success in warding off the Russians.
Congress has thus far passed more than $60 billion in aid for Ukraine — twice in smaller packages attached to government spending bills, and once in a $40 billion package back in May.
At the time, just 57 House Republicans voted against the package. But the signs of potential recalcitrance soon emerged.
Donald Trump criticized Congress’s decision to send $40 billion, while suggesting it should be more focused on a baby-formula shortage. And when the Biden administration requested another $12.3 billion last month, the fiscal hawks and “America First” crowd began to assert themselves. Some prominent conservative groups like Heritage Action outright said they opposed the package. The Conservative Political Action Committee also recently tweeted, “When will Democrats put #AmericaFirst and end the gift-giving to Ukraine?” before deleting the tweet and watering down its sentiment.
The House’s No. 2 and 3 Republicans declined to commit to keeping the aid flowing next Congress, with No. 2 Steve Scalise (R-La.) emphasizing more “accountability” for the money and the need to invest in our own defense, such as the Pacific fleet, with China looming. The No. 3, Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), noted that this would be a decision for whomever is elected to be in the next Congress.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) struck a different tone, though, emphasizing this was a bipartisan issue and downplaying the possibility that Republicans would stand in the way of continued aid.
“There are a few voices on the right that seem to oppose the war, but the vast majority of us, certainly including myself, think defeating the Russians in Ukraine is high-priority,” McConnell told Defense News.
The comments from McConnell’s House counterpart, then, are perhaps the biggest acknowledgment to date that the willingness of the GOP could be a stumbling block. And they reflect the uneasy political choices that would await McCarthy should he become speaker.
The American people are overwhelmingly in Ukraine’s corner, but while critics of the aid have been few and noisy (see: Tucker Carlson), they are increasing in number.
A Pew Research Center poll last month showed a majority of Americans said the current level of aid was either “about right” (37 percent) or “not enough” (18 percent). But the percentage saying it was “too much” rose from 7 percent in March to 12 percent in May to 20 percent in September. Among Republicans and Republican-leaning voters, 32 percent said it was “too much” — up from just 9 percent when the war began.
That trajectory — combined with the party’s flirtation with NATO skepticism and occasional warming to Putin — would suggest it might not be long before a substantial portion of the party (and likely a disproportionately outspoken one) could oppose continuing to fund Ukraine at the levels we have been.
Throw in the possibility that Trump takes a keener interest in the issue — an approach that would align with not just his “America First” mantra but also his cozying up to Vladimir Putin — and that he might run for president, and it’s not difficult to see why McCarthy won’t or can’t commit to further aid.
But withholding aid would also be a pretty stunning decision, should Ukraine continue to look like it has a fighting chance. Which is perhaps why McCarthy is forewarning everyone involved. | 2022-10-18T17:52:39Z | www.washingtonpost.com | McCarthy’s striking warning signal on GOP and Ukraine aid - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/18/mccarthys-striking-warning-signal-gop-ukraine-aid/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/18/mccarthys-striking-warning-signal-gop-ukraine-aid/ |
‘Oh, those are so top secret,’ Trump said at one point, undermining his frequent claims that none of the material he took after leaving office was sensitive
Then-president Donald Trump meets with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un at the North Korean side of the border at the village of Panmunjom in a demilitarized zone, on June 30, 2019. (Susan Walsh/AP)
In December 2019, after then-President Donald Trump had shared with journalist Bob Woodward the fawning letters that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un had written to him, the U.S. leader seems to acknowledge he should not be showing them around.
The new details also provide further evidence of Trump’s abiding obsession with the Kim letters, which he often bragged about and would show off to friends. The English translations of the letters, which Woodward first made public in his 2020 book, “Rage,” shows page after page of pen-pal niceties — birthday tidings, “best wishes” for friends and family — between the then-president and the autocratic leader of one of the world’s most repressive regimes.
The audiobook, which comes out next Tuesday, contains 19 raw and lengthy interviews Woodward conducted with Trump between fall of 2019 through August 2020 for “Rage,” as well as one interview he conducted with a fellow Washington Post reporter in 2016. The interviews, Woodward says in his introduction, were edited only for clarity.
During the December 2019 interview, Trump asks Woodward what he did with the letters he had provided him at that point, asking if he made “a Photostat of them or something” — apparently referring to a photocopy.
In an interview with The Post ahead of the audiobook’s release, Woodward said Trump helped set him up with an aide in the West Wing, who supervised as Woodward — who had been given both the English translations and original Korean versions of Kim’s letters to Trump — handled the documents and dictated them all into his tape recorder.
Later, after Trump agreed to share his letters to Kim, Woodward said he returned to a West Wing office, where an aide again watched as he read the new set of letters into his tape recorder.
In the interview, Woodward also said he observed no classified markings on any of the letters he was given, though U.S. officials have indicated that they were classified documents.
In an aside in the audio book, Woodward describes “the casual, dangerous way that Trump treats the most classified programs and information, as we’ve seen now in 2022 in Mar-a-Lago, where he had 184 classified documents, including 25 marked ‘Top Secret.’”
That was in reference to Trump implying there was a secretive weapons system he controlled. “I have built a weapons system that nobody’s ever had in this country before,” Trump said in an interview, before referring to Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping. “We have stuff that you haven’t even seen or heard about. We have stuff that Putin and Xi have never heard about before.”
Trump’s long obsessions with strongmen leaders — and Kim in particular — comes through in the interviews. Throughout their conversations, Trump repeats the false claim that former president Barack Obama tried 11 times to reach Kim with no success.
Woodward points out that Trump’s own military advisers have warned him that Kim “lies through his teeth to you,” and that Obama made no attempts to speak with Kim himself.
“Kim Jong Un gave you bad information on that,” Woodward tells Trump at one point. “I don’t think that’s true.”
But Trump is not persuaded, choosing to believe Kim over his own advisers.
“Obama called 11 times,” Trump insists. “They showed me the records in Korea. I’m very close to this man. Very close.”
In a later interview, Trump boasts that he averted a war with North Korea, again repeating his false claim about Obama and choosing to believe Kim over his own military team: “Obama wanted, 11 times he tried,” Trump says. “Kim Jong Un told me. Eleven times.” | 2022-10-18T17:52:39Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Trump knew Kim letters were classified, according to new Woodward audiobook - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/18/trump-kim-woodward-top-secret/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/18/trump-kim-woodward-top-secret/ |
(Photos by Justin Tsucalas for The Washington Post; food styling by Nicola Justine Davis for The Washington Post)
Creamy Shrimp Pasta Salad
The cover of “Nana’s Creole Italian Table” is a close-up photo of what we in New Orleans would call red gravy.
I can almost smell the thick tomato sauce speckled with flecks of onion, garlic and herbs. How many times did I watch my Sicilian grandmother make such a sauce? How many times have I made it myself?
Quality over quantity: How to throw together a spectacular pasta salad
Liz Williams, founder of the Southern Food and Beverage Museum in New Orleans, explores the evolution of dishes like this in her first cookbook, which is part historical journey and part memoir.
It tells the tale of her Sicilian relatives, who, like mine, were among the more than 4 million Italians who immigrated to the United States in the late 19th and early 20th century. Most of the Sicilians came through New Orleans.
African, French and Spanish influences on New Orleans food are widely known, Williams said. But outside the city, the Italian flavor — let alone Sicilian — often is overlooked.
“When you read books about Italian food and Italian history in America, they almost never mention New Orleans,” she said. Many readers are surprised to learn there was a “Little Palermo” neighborhood in the French Quarter.
“What’s been gratifying,” she said, “is to have people tell me — people who are not of Sicilian heritage — how they identified with the story of the book, if not necessarily the food. … The immigrant story repeats itself in the same way over and over.”
Immigrant food can be a time capsule, she said.
“You have this huge number of people who are born here, or the little children who are born there but grow up here. They learn what it means to be Sicilian from their elders, and then 30 years later, 50 years later, Sicily remains, in their minds, what it used to be.
Make a big batch of pantry-friendly tomato sauce for a leg up on dinner all week
“We have food that we still eat here that they don’t eat in Sicily anymore. All of us here have an idea of what Sicily is based on something frozen in time. We say, ‘Oh, this is Sicilian.’ Well, it’s not. It’s New Orleans Sicilian. … That happens with many immigrants.”
Of the recipes included, about 80 percent reflect her family’s regular menus, she said, but they also reveal how food evolves. Fried eggplant served with a marinara sauce is an example.
“I couldn’t leave that out … because we ate it all of the time. It was one of my mother’s appetizers for any kind of party she gave. They make rounds of eggplant in Sicily, but here she made them in sticks.
“The sticks are eaten with Béarnaise sauce at Antoine’s” restaurant in New Orleans, Williams said. “My mother is gone, so I can’t ask her if she made them as sticks because she ate them that way at Antoine’s. It makes you think about the social invention that is cuisine.”
Williams’s mother’s story shares commonalities with my own mother’s. Both were born in New Orleans to immigrant parents, so each had a foot in both worlds. Both longed to be “American.” And both married a non-Sicilian. (Her family referred to that man as “the American,” and his preferences influenced her mother’s cooking, resulting in red beans and rice and gumbo on the table.)
Of the Creamy Shrimp Pasta Salad featured below, she said: “This is what my father ate, and my mother made it.”
“Look at what goes in it,” she said, noting the Parmesan, garlic, anchovies, shrimp, tomatoes and pasta. “That’s so Sicilian, but it totally evolved into this American thing.”
Williams, who founded the nonprofit Southern Food and Beverage Museum in 2004, has worked for decades to ensure that recipes and foodways, with all of their origin stories, context and evolution, are kept alive.
SoFab, which is now part of the National Food & Beverage Foundation, offers museum exhibits, tours, classes and food culture events. In October, it opened the SoFab Research Center at Nunez Community College in Chalmette, La., with more than 40,000 culinary books, thousands of menus, pamphlets and artifacts.
By marrying practical and hands-on experiences with the academic, Williams said, the foundation is working to give people a more grounded experience and understanding.
She hopes her cookbook will do that, too, but she also decided to write it for very personal reasons.
“I really wanted my grandchildren, as they were growing up, to know something about their heritage that they couldn’t possibly experience because all of these people are gone.”
Like so many of us who cook our family’s food, Williams worked from memory.
“I learned by cooking with my grandmother and my mother. There was no handwritten recipe that got handed down to me. They had me in the kitchen from the time I was big enough to stand.”
When she was making a big batch of cookies, her grandmother would dump the flour on the table. Depending on how much she had — 3 pounds, 5 pounds — and the weather (“She’d put her hand in the air and decide what the humidity was”), she’d adjust the recipe on the fly.
How to make a family cookbook, filled with recipes from your favorite people
Williams’s advice to others who want to pass those family recipes to the next generation: “Take the time to actually measure. … Every time you make something, you say, this time I’m going to write it down. Make sure your children and grandchildren are cooking with you. Even if they are just in the kitchen and you’re putting little things in their mouths to keep them there.”
Use real semolina pasta, such as De Cecco brand, to avoid a mushy pasta salad. The salad can be made with shrimp, as directed, but is also great with crabmeat, crawfish tails or any combination. Be sure to lightly salt the pasta. The anchovies, the cheese and, depending on how it is prepared, the seafood already may be salty.
NOTE: To cook the shrimp, bring a medium pot of generously salted water to a boil. Add the shrimp and return to a boil. Lower the heat to medium-low and poach the shrimp until pink and curled, 2 to 3 minutes. Test a shrimp to see that it is done and opaque throughout, then drain. Cooking time may vary with the size of the shrimp.
Make Ahead: The dressing can be made up to 2 days in advance.
The dressing
1/2 cup (2 ounces) finely grated Parmesan cheese
2 cloves garlic, minced, finely grated or pressed
Juice of 1 lemon, or more as needed
2 oil-packed anchovies
The salad
1 1/2 pounds large shrimp (26/30), cooked, peeled and deveined
1 pound pasta, such as farfalle, cooked al dente
1 pint cherry tomatoes, halved
1 orange bell pepper (7 ounces), coarsely chopped
1 yellow bell pepper (7 ounces), coarsely chopped
1 cup (4 ounces) tightly packed fresh Italian parsley leaves, coarsely chopped
1/2 cup fresh basil leaves, coarsely chopped, plus more for garnish
Make the dressing: In a small bowl, whisk together the mayonnaise, Parmesan, garlic and lemon juice until combined. Mash the anchovies with the side of a knife, and stir them into the dressing. If the mixture is too stiff, add more lemon juice.
Make the salad: In a large bowl, combine the shrimp, pasta, tomatoes, bell peppers, parsley and basil. Pour over the dressing and toss to coat. Taste, and season with salt and pepper as needed. Top with a few basil leaves and serve, family-style.
Per serving (1 generous cup), based on 9
Calories: 481; Total Fat: 20 g; Saturated Fat: 3 g; Cholesterol: 136 mg; Sodium: 764 mg; Carbohydrates: 50 g; Dietary Fiber: 4 g; Sugar: 4 g; Protein: 23 g
Adapted from “Nana’s Creole Italian Table” by Liz Williams (Louisiana State University Press, 2022). | 2022-10-18T18:10:03Z | www.washingtonpost.com | This creamy shrimp salad recipe has Sicilian roots by way of New Orleans - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/food/2022/10/18/shrimp-pasta-salad-recipe/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/food/2022/10/18/shrimp-pasta-salad-recipe/ |
Florida citrus struggles after Hurricane Ian
Many parts of Florida’s agriculture were impacted after the hurricane hit the state on September 28.
Fifth-generation farmer Roy Petteway looks at the damage to his citrus grove from the effects of Hurricane Ian on October 12 in Zolfo Springs, Florida. (Chris O'meara/AP)
The thousands of oranges scattered on the ground by Hurricane Ian’s fierce winds are only the start of the disaster for citrus grower Roy Petteway.
The fruit strewn on his 100-acre grove in central Florida since the storm swept through will mostly go to waste. In addition, the flood and rain waters weakened the orange trees in ways that are difficult to see now.
Citrus is big business in Florida, with more than 375,000 acres in the state devoted to oranges, grapefruit, tangerines and the like for an industry valued at more than $6 billion annually. Hurricane Ian hit the citrus groves hard, as well as the state’s large cattle industry, dairy operations, vegetables like tomatoes and peppers, and hundreds of thousands of bees essential to many growers.
The University of Florida estimates that about 380,000 known bee colonies were in the path of Hurricane Ian as it bisected the state. The storm not only damaged the beehives, but it also blew off blossoms, leading some bees to raid other colonies for the honey they need to eat.
“If you eat, you’re part of agriculture,” Petteway, a fifth-generation Floridian, said during a tour of his groves. “We were anticipating a very good crop this year. Sadly, there’s nothing we can do about it. It’s just a devastating thing.” | 2022-10-18T18:10:04Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Florida citrus struggles after Hurricane Ian - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/kidspost/2022/10/18/florida-citrus-struggles-after-hurricane-ian/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/kidspost/2022/10/18/florida-citrus-struggles-after-hurricane-ian/ |
Born to build: New books show how and why humans create structures
Colorful illustrations help tell the stories of buildings, bridges and more.
By Abby McGanney Nolan
Whether scraping the sky, burrowing into the ground, or connecting one piece of land to another, structures need to be stable and secure to last even a year. Here are three books that look at the history of man-made buildings, tunnels, bridges and more from three different perspectives. The first focuses on the world’s most widely used building material. The second explains how some of the world’s most formidable structures have been designed and constructed. The last explores why humans have built — and keep building — structures that are taller and taller.
Concrete: From the Ground Up
By Larissa Theule; illustrated by Steve Light
This fun and informative book explores the long-but-interrupted history of one of the tougher substances around. A mixture of stone, sand, water and cement (itself a combination of limestone and clay), concrete was used by the Romans to make structures that remain impressive achievements today: aqueducts that brought fresh water into cities; the massive oval amphitheater called the Colosseum; and the temple known as the Pantheon that Emperor Hadrian ordered rebuilt with a huge concrete dome. But, as author Larissa Theule points out, “the recipe for Roman concrete was lost” after the Roman Empire fell in the fifth century.
Concrete was revived in the 19th century after an engineer figured out how to use it to build a lighthouse that could withstand storms and fires. The invention of reinforced concrete, which has steel rods running through it, led to skyscrapers, bridges, large-scale projects (such as the Hoover Dam in the 1930s) and architectural wonders such as the Sydney Opera House.
Theule’s explanations are clear and concise, while Steve Light’s illustrations are playful even when they’re showing off the solidity and magnitude of concrete creations.
How Was That Built? The Stories Behind Awesome Structures
By Roma Agrawal; illustrated by Katie Hickey
Ever wonder how towers withstand strong winds, or how bridges outlast earthquakes? In this spectacular tour, award-winning engineer Roma Agrawal presents structures from around the world that have been designed to withstand the test of time compression, tension and other forces of nature.
Well-matched by Katie Hickey’s colorful and detailed illustrations, Agrawal’s text features famous structures, such as the Brooklyn Bridge, as well as less-visited ones, such as the movable Halley VI research station in Antarctica.
She delves into a wide variety of building challenges and shows how they were addressed by architects, structural engineers and mechanical engineers. In the case of the Brooklyn Bridge, it was the brilliant wife of the chief engineer who completed the project.
Agrawal explains everything — from soil, materials and machines to human labor and ingenuity — with an expert’s enthusiasm. She will get you thinking about the most imposing structures in the world, but also the buildings you see every day and the ones that will be built in the decades to come.
Why Humans Build Up: The Rise of Towers, Temples and Skyscrapers
By Gregor Craigie; illustrated by Kathleen Fu
Packed with photos and illustrations, this book covers structures from different regions but also considers the downsides of building up. Author Gregor Craigie presents 11 reasons tall edifices have been constructed, including security, spirituality, luxury and efficiency, and describes how several structures in each category were made. They range in time from the Tower of Jericho (made from rough stones covered in mud plaster around 8300 BC) to more recent buildings such as the Brock Commons Tallwood House (finished in 2017) on Canada’s West Coast. Tallwood House, which was the tallest mass timber structure when it opened, is featured in the book’s last chapter. Titled “Sustainability,” it discusses the efforts of engineers, architects and city planners to reduce energy use, promote natural cooling and heating systems, and preserve the wild areas of the world. | 2022-10-18T18:10:04Z | www.washingtonpost.com | New kids books show how and why humans build structures - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/kidspost/2022/10/18/kids-books-buildings-construction/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/kidspost/2022/10/18/kids-books-buildings-construction/ |
Man accused of killing four fellow tenants in Northern Virginia house
Prince William County police officers at a house in the Woodbridge, Va., area where four people were found slain Monday. (Scott Taetsch for The Washington Post)
A Prince William County, Va., man was charged Tuesday with killing four fellow tenants, at least three of whom were shot, in what police called “a domestic related” attack in the rented house they shared in the county’s Woodbridge area.
The violence occurred Monday in a small house in the 5200 block of Mansfield Court, where a recently married couple in their 40s, along with a 19-year-old woman described by police as their daughter, and a fourth tenant were found dead shortly after 4:30 p.m. in rooms “throughout the home,” Police Chief Peter Newsham said at a news briefing.
Another tenant, David Nathaniel Maine, 24, has been charged with four counts of second-degree murder and other crimes, according to Newsham. The chief would not elaborate on the “domestic” issue, but he said Maine was involved in a “relationship” with yet another tenant, a man who was not at home when the gunfire began.
“That person is fully cooperating with us,” the chief said, without identifying the man or specifying the nature of his relationship with Maine. “He, that person, has provided us very valuable information, been very cooperative, and is also very distraught about what happened in his home.” Newsham added, “We’re still trying to nail down the motive in this case.”
Four people found fatally shot in Prince William County, Va., home
The dead were identified as Miguel Duran Flores, 44; his wife, Kelly Victoria Sotelo, 42; Karrie Ayline Sotelo, 19, whom Newsham said was their daughter; and a fellow tenant, 36-year-old Richard Julio Jesus Revollar Corrales. Police said Monday that all four had been shot, but Newsham said Tuesday that at least three were shot. The fourth person’s cause of death will be determined by an autopsy, he said.
The man with whom Maine had a relationship was “another family member who also resided at the residence and was not present during the incident,” police said in a statement. “The investigation revealed an altercation occurred inside the home” before the gunshots.
As of Tuesday morning, Maine had not entered pleas in court, online records showed. The owner of the house listed in public records could not immediately be reached for comment.
The police chief said evidence indicates that Karrie Sotelo was shot first, then the married couple and Revollar Corrales, whose room was in the basement. A seventh person, described by police as a child, also lived in the house but was not at home when the shootings occurred, the chief said.
“The only word that I can use to describe it is ‘senseless,’ ” Newsham told reporters. Standing outside the house, he said: “Absolutely senseless that someone would take four lives. … Anyone who was out here [Monday] night knows that there was a huge group of friends and family members who were gathered and they were completely distraught.”
The gun that investigators think was used in the killings was found inside the house, the chief said. Although he declined to describe the weapon, he suggested that the gun did not make a lot of noise. Asked about neighbors’ statements that they did not hear gunshots, Newsham said, “I think that’s fair, that neighbors did not hear something, because of the weapon that was used.”
Newsham said Maine called police after the gunfire to report the shootings and said that people were dead in the house. When officers arrived at the residence, a door was ajar and Maine was not inside, Newsham said, adding, “He had left the home but had not gotten far.” While being questioned by detectives, Maine “said that there were shots fired into the home” from outside, according to the chief.
“The information given is inconsistent with what actually happened, so he may have been trying to elude police, is my guess,” Newsham said. | 2022-10-18T18:18:51Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Man accused of killing four fellow tenants in Northern Virginia house - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/18/arrest-four-fatally-shot-virginia/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/18/arrest-four-fatally-shot-virginia/ |
D.C. elected official charged with involuntary manslaughter
A D.C. elected official was indicted for involuntary manslaughter Tuesday after a DUI-related car crash in Virginia earlier this year, prosecutors said.
Around 9:30 p.m. on March 5, 32-year-old District resident Devon Lesesne was driving eastbound on I-495 near Telegraph Road when his vehicle struck another one that was on the road shoulder with a flat tire and its hazard lights blinking, Fairfax County Commonwealth’s Attorney Steve Descano said in a statement. Lesesne is a D.C. advisory neighborhood commissioner in Ward 8.
The disabled vehicle’s owner, Katherine Aileen Reyes, 20, died at the scene, the statement said.
On Tuesday, prosecutors said Lesesne was indicted on a charge of involuntary manslaughter, a felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison.
Descano’s statement said the crash was “a tragic incident that could have been avoided.”
“Our hearts break for the family of this young woman,” the statement said. “There are no winners in this situation.”
Lesesne’s attorney did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Today, CA Descano announced the indictment of a 32-year-old Washington, D.C. resident for manslaughter in a DUI-related fatal car crash earlier this year. pic.twitter.com/zRXTREKf4R
— Fairfax County Commonwealth's Attorney Descano (@FairfaxCountyCA) October 18, 2022 | 2022-10-18T18:18:57Z | www.washingtonpost.com | D.C. elected official charged with involuntary manslaughter - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/18/fairfax-involuntary-manslaughter/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/18/fairfax-involuntary-manslaughter/ |
A K-9 police officer is seen at Gallery Place station on Jan. 17, 2018, in D.C. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)
One D.C. police officer was fired after he was found guilty of exposing his genitals to women in a grocery store parking lot. Another was terminated after her guilty plea in a case involving child abuse. Yet another officer was fired after he was found guilty of using unnecessary force on a handcuffed prisoner. It is troubling to think that these officers ever patrolled the streets, but it is horrifying that they and dozens of others fired for cause ended up getting rehired and rewarded with thousands of dollars in back pay.
A report by D.C. Auditor Kathy Patterson has put a spotlight on a longstanding problem that is not unique to D.C.: Police departments find it hard to fire officers engaged in misconduct and even criminal activity. A long line of D.C. police chiefs has complained about how outside arbiters overruled their decisions to terminate problem officers. A 2017 Post investigation found that departmental missteps, such as missing deadlines, resulted in the officers’ return. The recent auditor’s report found the department has made some improvements in its procedures — but that it was still forced to take back officers at a high cost to the city.
Between October 2015 and April 2021, according to the audit report, the D.C. police department had to reinstate 37 officers it had terminated, coughing up $14.3 million in back pay. While the department’s failure to meet deadlines and follow procedures were factors, the auditors found that the most common reason for reinstatement was that a third-party arbitrator thought termination was an excessive punishment for an officer’s misconduct. Those conclusions are mind-boggling, considering that 17 of the 37 officers were fired because of wrongdoing that the department considered a threat to safety, such as physical and sexual violence and mishandling firearms. “We have had individuals come back on the force who a reasonable man or woman in the street would say, ‘I don’t want that person carrying a gun on my behalf,’ ” said Ms. Patterson.
Third-party arbitration has long been a part of the disciplinary process for D.C. police and other departments; it is often embedded in collective bargaining contracts. But the D.C. Council, reacting to the call for reform in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, enacted emergency legislation that effectively eliminated arbitration in disciplinary procedures. That action, which the council should make permanent, was a step in the right direction. But city officials should do more to reform a byzantine system that sets common sense on its head. The use of Adverse Action Panels, trial boards composed of high-ranking officers whose findings often prove to be determinative, creates a disciplinary regime that relies on colleagues judging their colleagues. “Every part of this process needs to be fixed,” said Ms. Patterson. The D.C. Council and the mayor should do so — immediately. | 2022-10-18T18:49:39Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Why D.C. and other police departments rehire fired police - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/18/dc-rehire-fired-police-officers-misconduct/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/18/dc-rehire-fired-police-officers-misconduct/ |
Protesters flee during clashes with police in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, on Monday. (Johnson Sabin/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)
Haiti’s descent into anarchy accelerated, predictably, after its president’s assassination 15 months ago. Only now, finally, is the Biden administration throwing its weight behind international intervention — sending in a force that would presumably include U.S. personnel in some capacity. That stance, too long in coming, is justified on humanitarian grounds and dovetails with the United States’ own interests. It also sets the stage for a risky and possibly violent insertion of police or soldiers in a country where armed criminal gangs have made the capital city a lawless dystopia.
In backing an intervention, Washington and its allies must calibrate the deployment to meet the undeniable dangers. President Biden and other key leaders should make the case that the perils of acting are outweighed by the urgency of containing a security and public health emergency that threatens hundreds of thousands of lives.
The United States and Mexico introduced a resolution at a special session of the U.N. Security Council on Monday, urging what the U.S. envoy to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, called “a limited carefully-scoped non-UN mission led by a partner country with the deep, necessary experience.” The draft echoes a similar recent proposal aimed at reinforcing the Haitian police from U.N. Secretary General António Guterres, who on Monday called Haiti’s crisis “nightmarish.”
The immediate trigger for action is that gangs in Port-au-Prince, the capital, have blockaded the country’s biggest fuel terminals and severed roads, meaning hospitals, schools, food outlets and banks can no longer provide basic services. Water supplies are also breaking down, and a cholera outbreak that began several weeks ago is spreading, with no effective public health system to contain it.
Haiti, long the Western Hemisphere’s poorest country, is now in free fall. According to the U.N., nearly half of Haiti’s 11 million people face “acute hunger,” including 1.8 million at risk of a food “emergency.” In Cité Soleil, a sprawling slum in the capital, 19,000 people face a food “catastrophe.”
Virtually anyone who can leave the country has done so, often making their way to the U.S. southern border. Others will surely make desperate attempts to follow, despite the deployment of a large U.S. Coast Guard vessel just offshore. This cannot continue.
The U.S. Agency for International Development has sent what it calls an “elite” disaster response team to Haiti — of seven individuals. That is inadequate. What’s needed is a highly prepared force — police experienced in urban environments are preferable to troops trained to kill. The first priority should be to reestablish access to fuel facilities and reopen transportation links. That will mean suppressing gangs now in charge, which are allied with powerful Haitian commercial clans. It would be useful if international public health workers quickly followed, with expertise and supplies to alleviate hunger and stop cholera from spreading.
Beyond that, Haiti needs a longer-term multinational peacekeeping force, without which there will be no possibility of future elections or a legitimate Haitian government — the preconditions of durable stability.
Since President Jovenel Moïse was assassinated in July 2021, we and other observers have warned of a humanitarian meltdown absent swift international action. Dire consequences materialized rapidly; they are no longer ignorable. | 2022-10-18T18:49:45Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | At last, the U.S. edges toward intervening in Haiti - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/18/us-haiti-biden-intervention/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/18/us-haiti-biden-intervention/ |
The NFL announced it will add a Black Friday game to be streamed by Amazon in 2023. (AP Photo/Kamil Krzaczynski)
The NFL announced Tuesday that its schedule is growing, along with its streaming ambitions. The league will begin playing a Black Friday game the day after Thanksgiving in 2023, and Amazon will broadcast it.
Amazon is in its first season streaming Thursday Night Football, paying more than a billion dollars for the exclusive rights to the weekly contest. The NFL’s first foray into exclusively streaming some of its games has been mostly a logistical success. The production has been seamless, even if there is some anecdotal evidence that some viewers have struggled with the picture quality. The network’s first telecast this season between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Los Angeles Chargers was watched by nearly 12 million people on Prime Video.
Hans Schroeder, executive vice president and chief operating officer of NFL Media, said the game could become a yearly feature on the NFL calendar.
Amazon is looking to sports to bolster the value of its Prime membership, which was first introduced for faster shipping but now includes a streaming service filled with live sports and original entertainment. The company said that during the Chiefs-Chargers game, Prime drew more new sign-ups in the United States than any other three-hour period in its history.
Black Friday is one of the biggest shopping days on the calendar, creating potential cross-promotion for Amazon.
“It’s a day when millions and millions visit our site,” said Marie Donoghue, Vice President of Global Sports Video at Amazon. “We will start with the customer first, so they are coming first and foremost to watch a football game, to the extent we can serve them and potentially delight them. When they also have their ... shopping obviously that’s something we’ll work through with the NFL.”
Amazon owns exclusive rights to some New York Yankees games and the Premier League in the United Kingdom, and held talks with other leagues, including the Big Ten and Formula One, before they signed deals with traditional media companies. (Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos, owns The Washington Post.)
For the NFL, the Friday game is a further expansion of its schedule, demonstrating the power of the country’s most popular TV property. The league has added games on Christmas, a day that was once reserved as a showcase for the NBA. It also expanded its regular season to 17 games a year ago and expanded the playoff format.
Schroeder declined to comment on the terms of the deal but said it was a component of the 10-year deal that Amazon signed with the league last year. | 2022-10-18T19:32:50Z | www.washingtonpost.com | NFL, Amazon will team up for a Black Friday game in 2023 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/18/nfl-black-friday-amazon/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/18/nfl-black-friday-amazon/ |
New allegations surface about Bill Murray’s on-set misconduct
Actor Bill Murray attends the 94th Academy Awards in March. (Valerie Macon/AFP/Getty Images)
New allegations of Bill Murray behaving inappropriately on sets have continued to surface in the wake of a report about “Being Mortal,” the production suspended in April when a complaint was filed against the actor.
Last week, the media company Puck published an article alleging that Murray, 72, had kissed and straddled a “much younger woman” working with him on the Atul Gawande adaptation helmed by first-time feature director Aziz Ansari. Murray said his actions toward the production staffer were “jestful,” according to Puck, whereas she interpreted the unwanted behavior as sexual and filed a complaint.
The Puck article added that another staffer who witnessed the encounter also filed a report, and that the incident eventually reached Searchlight Pictures, which halted production on the film. It has not resumed. At the time, Murray publicly described what had happened as a “a difference of opinion.” According to Puck, he paid the woman just over $100,000 to settle the matter and maintain confidentiality.
Searchlight has not returned The Washington Post’s request for comment, nor has Murray’s attorney.
The day after the Puck report, HarperCollins released actress Geena Davis’s memoir “Dying of Politeness,” which coincidentally contains multiple allegations against Murray. Davis writes that while she and Murray were working on the 1990 film “Quick Change,” he “insisted” on using a massage device on her when they first met despite her saying she did not want him to: “He wouldn’t relent,” she recalls in the book.
Davis also describes Murray, who co-directed the film, screaming at her in front of “more than 300 people.” She says she felt uncomfortable during their joint appearance on “The Arsenio Hall Show,” when he tried to pull down her spaghetti strap. The actress recently told People magazine that she shared the anecdotes because “I figure it’s sort of rather universally known that he could be difficult to work with.”
“I don’t feel like I’m busting him in a way that will necessarily shock him,” she continued. “I think he knows very well the way he can behave.”
While dropping in Thursday on SiriusXM’s “Jim Norton and Sam Roberts” show, comedian Rob Schneider recalled the time a filmmaker told him it was hard to know “which Bill Murray you’re going to get.”
“The nice Bill Murray?” Schneider continued. “Or the tough Bill Murray?”
Schneider, who was on “Saturday Night Live” in the 1990s, expanded on his own experiences with Murray, a former SNL cast member who returned as host during Schneider’s stint. Murray “absolutely hated us — I mean, seething,” Schneider said, noting that Murray especially disliked Chris Farley and Adam Sandler.
The same day Schneider went on the show, actor Seth Green claimed on the YouTube show “Good Mythical Morning” that Murray dropped him into a trash can backstage at SNL when Green was 9 years old.
Green said Murray was hosting the episode and allegedly became upset upon seeing Green, who appeared in a sketch, perched on the arm of a piece of furniture that Murray had deemed “my chair.” Green said he refused to move from where he was seated, upon which Murray “picked me up by my ankles, held me upside down … dangled me over a trash can and he was like, ‘The trash goes in the trash can.’ ”
“I was screaming, and I swung my arms, flailed wildly,” Green continued. “He dropped me in the trash can, and the trash can falls over. I was horrified. I ran away, hid under the table in my dressing room and just cried.”
Murray has faced allegations of on-set misconduct before, most prominently by his “Charlie’s Angels” co-star Lucy Liu. While on a Los Angeles Times podcast last year, Liu remembered Murray lashing out at her over a rewritten scene in the 2000 film, despite the fact that she “had probably the least amount of privilege in terms of creatively participating [in such decisions] at that time.” She said he began to “sort of hurl insults” at her during rehearsal, and that his language was “inexcusable and unacceptable.”
“I stood up for myself, and I don’t regret it,” she continued. “Because no matter how low on the totem pole you may be or wherever you came from, there’s no need to condescend or to put other people down.”
Searchlight has not publicly commented on whether production will restart on “Being Mortal” after the situation with Murray. Actress Keke Palmer, also a star in the film, recently said she hopes it will but acknowledged — without naming Murray — that the script would probably require “a major rewrite.”
“If somebody could figure it out, it would be Aziz,” she told Variety at an Academy Museum event held Sunday. “Obviously we got cut short at a certain point, but I will say that I am pretty devastated. It’s an amazing film. If there is some way to be able to complete [it], salvage it, I would want to do it.” | 2022-10-18T20:07:33Z | www.washingtonpost.com | New allegations about Bill Murray's on-set misbehavior surface - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/10/18/bill-murray-allegations-being-mortal/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/10/18/bill-murray-allegations-being-mortal/ |
What we know about the discovery of 4 dismembered bodies in Oklahoma river
Four men’s bodies were discovered dismembered in a river in Okmulgee, Okla., on Monday. Clockwise from top left: Billy Chastain, Alex Stevens, Mike Sparks and Mark Chastain. (Okmulgee Police Department / AFP/Getty Images)
Oklahoma authorities are searching for answers in the murders of four friends who were shot, dismembered and dumped into a river in what the local police chief called “a very violent event.”
The men — Billy Chastain, 30; Mark Chastain, 32; Mike Sparks, 32; and Alex Stevens, 29 — were reported missing last week in Okmulgee, a city of about 11,000 that lies 38 miles south of Tulsa. All four lived in Okmulgee, and the Chastains were brothers, police Chief Joe Prentice said.
Investigators spent several days scouring the area before discovering remains identified Monday as the missing men. Prentice said the four were believed to be planning “some type of criminal act” before they vanished. A person of interest was taken into custody Tuesday morning in Florida on a charge of grand theft of a motor vehicle, but is not facing charges connected to the deaths.
Prentice said during a Monday news conference that he has assured the families of the four that police will get to the bottom of what happened.
“We have worked around-the-clock all week, we were out all weekend, and we will continue to work at the same pace that we’ve been working to try to find out exactly what happened to their loved ones and who did it,” the police chief said.
Here’s what to know about the case.
Who is the person of interest in the case?
Investigators have been looking to speak with Joe Kennedy, 67, who is considered a person of interest but not currently facing charges in the killings. He owns a salvage yard next to property where Prentice said, without elaborating, that “evidence of a violent event was discovered.”
Kennedy was “cooperative; he was not antagonistic” during a previous conversation with authorities, the police chief said. Kennedy denied knowing the four men and later vanished. Prentice said Kennedy was reported missing Saturday and could be suicidal. His blue PT Cruiser was discovered abandoned behind a business in Morris, Okla.
On Tuesday, the Okmulgee Police Department announced Kennedy was in custody in Daytona Beach Shores, Fla. The agency said he was arrested in a vehicle reported stolen to the Okmulgee County Sheriff’s Office on Monday.
Online case records show Kennedy is facing a felony charge of grand theft auto in Volusia County, with his first appearance scheduled Wednesday. He did not have an attorney listed.
Okmulgee police said a warrant had also been issued for Kennedy’s arrest in connection with a 2012 shooting.
“The District Attorney and the Sheriff will begin the process of getting Kennedy back to Okmulgee County,” the police department said. “The murder investigation is ongoing and investigators continue to follow leads every day.”
How and when did the men go missing?
The four men gathered the evening of Oct. 9 at a residence associated with Billy Chastain and left on bicycles, Okmulgee police said in a news release. When the men failed to return to their homes that night, relatives reported them missing.
They told reporters it was not like them to disappear.
“None of this makes sense,” Mark Chastain’s wife, Jessica, said in a Friday interview with Insider. “I’m numb, I’m lost, I’m confused. It’s like I am trying to put a puzzle together with no pieces.”
Authorities ran down tips and traced data from Mark Chastain’s phone, which allowed them to follow some of the group’s movements. The men had visited a salvage yard and a local gas station before going to a second scrapyard. At that point, the phone either died or was turned off.
During the Monday news conference, Prentice said authorities determined that the men intended to commit a crime based on a witness who described being invited to “hit a lick big enough for all of them.”
“That is common terminology for engaging in some type of criminal behavior,” he said. “But we do not know what they were planning or where they planned to do it.”
What do we know about the discovery of their bodies?
On Friday afternoon, a passerby called police after noticing something suspicious in the Deep Fork River. Officers arrived to find “what appears to be body parts protruding from the river,” the police chief said.
“Currently, we have more questions than answers,” Prentice had said during a Friday news conference, prior to the identification of the remains.
The body parts were visible from a bridge. The police chief said there were multiple pieces, which had to be carefully retrieved. He noted that “whenever water is involved, it makes it more difficult to identify evidence.”
It was not until Monday that authorities confirmed the bodies belonged to the missing men. Prentice said each was shot.
“All four bodies were dismembered before being placed in the river, and that is what caused difficulty in determining identities,” he said.
Neither the men’s bikes nor the gun used to kill them have been found.
What have the families said?
In her interview last week with Insider, Jessica Chastain said three of the four men were fathers, adding, “These men have families that are worried sick about them.”
She said her own children “cry for their daddy.”
After the remains found in the river were identified, the police chief said he spoke to the families. He described them as “very distraught.”
“I think that they had already resolved themselves that this was their loved ones,” he said, “but the additional information about dismembering was obviously a shock.”
“A lot of work” is how Prentice put it.
Investigators are waiting for cellphone records and additional surveillance footage. They are still receiving tips and talking to people, and they are asking anyone with information to come forward.
With the case now a murder investigation, Prentice said police will be more limited in what they can share, so as to “protect the integrity of the investigation.” | 2022-10-18T20:11:54Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Bodies of 4 friends found dismembered in Oklahoma river: What we know - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/10/18/oklahoma-river-dismembered-bodies/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/10/18/oklahoma-river-dismembered-bodies/ |
Marcus by Goldman Sachs won’t ever be a household name. The idea that one of Wall Street’s most elite names could build a popular brand for ordinary workers was perhaps always fanciful, but Chief Executive Officer David Solomon has finally come to that conclusion.
The bank admitted it would stop chasing masses of new customers for its online bank when it reported third-quarter results on Tuesday and confirmed a fairly cosmetic reorganization of its businesses.
Both moves reflect Goldman’s troubles in hitting Solomon’s bigger strategic goal, set out at the bank’s first-ever investor day in early 2020: rebalancing revenue away from volatile investment banking and trading and instead building more reliable, steady income, which investors value more highly.
The swings and roundabouts of markets were highlighted by all the big banks’ recent results. Goldman’s investment banking revenue in the third quarter was less than half what it reported a year earlier, similar to rivals, while equities trading was down 14%. These numbers still beat analysts’ expectations, as did its huge jump in bond, currency and commodities trading revenue.
Still, nearly three years after Solomon’s vision to change Goldman was laid out, the bank has failed to make much headway. The simplest way to assess this is to set the bank’s revenue from investment management and net interest income, which are obviously repeatable, next to all other revenues. The more attractive, steady revenue was about 28% of the group total in 2018 but shrank in the last couple of years when investment banks enjoyed a dealmaking and trading boom. In the first nine months of 2022, fee and interest revenue has become nearly 34% of the group total, but mainly because the investment banking business has hit the skids due to war in Europe and the volatility caused by rising interest rates.
There’s a more detailed way of calculating the split, which very slightly shifts the balance in favor of steady revenue for the past five years, although this year it makes a bigger difference. Doing it this way lifts fee and financing revenue so far in 2022 to 41%, which is likely because it takes greater account of Goldman’s equities and fixed-income financing businesses.
Either way, Goldman shareholders haven’t shared Solomon’s vision. The bank had a banner year in 2021 with record revenues, record profits and a return on equity of 23%, well ahead of the bank’s 13% target. And yet the bank’s shares have lagged behind those of rivals like JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Morgan Stanley throughout much of Solomon’s tenure. When Solomon started as CEO in October 2018, Goldman shares were worth one times book value forecast 12 months ahead; today’s valuation is almost exactly the same.
So will Goldman’s reorganization from four divisions into three change this? I think the answer is maybe, but not very quickly.
The bank aims to generate $10 billion a year in asset-management fees from its new combined asset- and wealth-management unit and maybe another $10 billion in interest from financing activity in the combined investment banking and global markets unit. Those would be worth just less than 50% of average group revenue for the past five years: Assuming overall revenue grows, Goldman will still be skewed toward the transactional.
The third new division is also meant to provide long-term, reliable revenue from a collection of technology businesses under the heading of “platform solutions.” It includes transaction banking, the credit-card partnerships Goldman has with Apple and General Motors, and its recently acquired GreenSky home-improvement financing business.
The main benefits of putting all these together seem to be to have all the investment-hungry businesses of the future in one place, which could make Goldman’s technology spending more efficient. It will also conveniently take those costs out of the other two divisions and so bolster their profits. Eventually, the aim is that these businesses will tip the overall balance in favor of steady revenue. When Goldman reports full-year results and holds another investor day next February, the details and targets for this should be made clearer.
Marcus, the consumer business, isn’t in this group. The not-so-popular online bank is being folded into the more suitably elite wealth division. Solomon won’t ditch the consumer arm, but he is absolutely narrowing its focus. This will cut out the marketing and customer acquisition costs that have helped fuel reports of heavy losses.
Solomon admitted on Tuesday’s earnings call that investors had not been excited by Marcus and that had played a part in the decision to pull back from grander ambitions. He has at least grasped the nettle of disaffection among other Goldman staff members and shareholders. But in truth, this change won’t make a huge difference to the bigger picture. Goldman’s efforts to find a new balance still have a lot more to prove.
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• Bank of America Is Winning the Slow and Steady Game: Paul J. Davies | 2022-10-18T20:20:56Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Goldman Is Faltering on Its Revenue Balancing Act - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/goldman-is-faltering-on-its-revenue-balancing-act/2022/10/18/7e8ac69a-4f16-11ed-ada8-04e6e6bf8b19_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/goldman-is-faltering-on-its-revenue-balancing-act/2022/10/18/7e8ac69a-4f16-11ed-ada8-04e6e6bf8b19_story.html |
Actor Colin Farrell, left, filmmaker Martin McDonagh, center, and actor Brendan Gleeson pose for a portrait to promote “The Banshees of Inisherin” on Tuesday, Oct. 11, 2022, in New York. (Matt Licari/Invision/AP)
NEW YORK — “Time be flyin’,” it’s said in Martin McDonagh’s “The Banshees of Inisherin." It’s a sentiment shared by McDonagh and his two stars, Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson, who have reteamed 14 years after McDonagh’s pitch-black feature debut, “In Bruges.” | 2022-10-18T20:22:05Z | www.washingtonpost.com | McDonagh, Farrell, Gleeson get 'Bruges' band back together - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/mcdonagh-farrell-gleeson-get-bruges-band-back-together/2022/10/18/b5328ea4-4f1f-11ed-ada8-04e6e6bf8b19_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/mcdonagh-farrell-gleeson-get-bruges-band-back-together/2022/10/18/b5328ea4-4f1f-11ed-ada8-04e6e6bf8b19_story.html |
Chicago parish stands by popular pastor after latest abuse allegations
The Rev. Michael Pfleger has long been known for his preaching and activism against gang violence and injustice
The Rev. Michael Pfleger addresses supporters and media in May 2021 outside the Faith Community of St. Sabina in Chicago’s Auburn-Gresham neighborhood. (Emily McFarlan Miller/RNS)
A prominent Catholic parish in Chicago denounced abuse allegations against its popular pastor and demanded that an investigation into those allegations be resolved quickly.
“God would not have blessed this ministry for over 40 — close to 50 years — if something dark needed to come to light,” Kimberly Lymore, associate minister at St. Sabina Parish, said during a service Sunday.
The Rev. Michael Pfleger, the longtime pastor of the predominantly Black congregation, has been temporarily removed from ministry after the Archdiocese of Chicago received an allegation of abuse against him. The alleged abuse of a minor — which comes less than two years after Pfleger was cleared of separate abuse accusations — is more than 30 years old, according to a letter from the diocese.
Known for his dynamic preaching and activism against gang violence and injustice, Pfleger, who is White, has led St. Sabina since the early 1980s and is one of the best-known clerics in Chicago.
“Let me be clear, I am completely innocent of this accusation,” Pfleger wrote in a letter to the parish, which was read during the Sunday Mass. “While I am confident that the new allegations will be determined to be unfounded this process is so unfair and painful to me and to the community I serve.”
Pfleger stepped down in January 2021, after two brothers accused him of abusing them 40 years earlier when they were minors, but he was reinstated that May after a decision by an archdiocesan review board. Pfleger has denied all allegations.
Church members responded to his previous suspension over abuse allegations by staging rallies on his behalf and threatening to withhold donations to the archdiocese.
The popular priest is no stranger to controversy. He took a leave of absence in 2008 after criticizing then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton during a church service and was suspended in 2011 during a clash with then-Chicago Cardinal Francis George, who tried to reassign him.
Cardinal Francis George, who played key role in church response to sex-abuse scandal, dies at 78
At Sunday’s service, the Rev. Tom Walsh, who led Mass in the pastor’s absence, read a letter from Chicago Cardinal Blase Cupich.
“As is required by our child protection policies, the allegation was reported to the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services and the law enforcement officials,” Cupich wrote. “The person making the allegation has been offered the services of our Victim Assistance Ministry and the archdiocese has begun its investigation and we will do our best to keep you informed.”
After reading the letter, Walsh crumpled it up and seemed ready to discard it, then said, “Whoops, sorry.”
“Now let’s hear from the man,” he said, before having Lymore come up to read the letter from Pfleger, in which the priest criticized the archdiocese for treating accused priests as “guilty until proved innocent.” Lymore said the parish remained loyal to its pastor and committed to its ministry.
“Just as last time, we are going to continue to stand on faith,” she said, adding, “We are going to pray that this process will be quick.”
In an email, Lymore said she did not see Walsh crumple the cardinal’s letter and could not address his intentions. She also said in a phone interview that the church believes the allegations are part of a spiritual attack and not credible. During the service, church member Glenda Lashley prayed for the person making the allegations of abuse, that the person would be released from “whatever manipulation spirit is controlling them.”
A statement on behalf of Walt Whitman Jr., the director of the Soul Children of Chicago, a choir that rehearses at St. Sabina, was also read at the service, because the allegation of abuse involves someone who had been involved with that choir.
“Dr. Walter Whitman and the Soul Children denounce the recent allegation and support Father Pfleger as a man of integrity,” read the statement, which is posted on the parish’s Facebook page.
Mike McDonnell, a spokesman for SNAP, an abuse survivors network, said religious communities often rally behind popular and high-profile religious figures such as Pfleger and fail to take allegations against them seriously. He added that false allegations against clergy are extraordinarily rare.
McDonnell said he was dismayed at the response by St. Sabina.
“For any church official, any church administrator to dismiss allegations that have been brought forth or to treat them as a piece of trash shows how ignorant they are toward clergy sex abuse survivors and to the scandal itself,” he said.
During the service, Walsh turned his sermon into a full-throated appeal in support of Pfleger, comparing him to the biblical figure Moses. He urged the congregation to continue to pray for their pastor.
Then, he had the congregation turn to the web camera at the back of the church and raise their hands in prayer.
“Father Mike, this is your army,” Walsh said. “These are your warriors. This is the persistence of a people who believe in the power of God, who have faith and who want you to know that you’re not going to go through this alone.” | 2022-10-18T20:23:09Z | www.washingtonpost.com | St. Sabina backs Father Michael Pfleger after new abuse allegation - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2022/10/18/michael-pfleger-abuse-allegation-sabina/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2022/10/18/michael-pfleger-abuse-allegation-sabina/ |
A report on the role of social media in the shooting, which killed 10 people at a grocery store, also recommends penalties for those who share the broadcast
Drew Harwell
New York Attorney General Letitia James speaks during a news conference last month in New York. (Brittainy Newman/AP)
The New York attorney general on Tuesday called on the state legislature to pass new laws to deter the live-streaming of homicides, following an investigation that concluded the alleged gunman accused of killing 10 people in Buffalo was radicalized online and then used social media to plan and promote his rampage.
Attorney General Letitia James’s probe marks one of the most significant efforts by U.S. law enforcement to examine the role of the internet in a mass shooting after attacks in Uvalde, Tex., El Paso and Christchurch, New Zealand, drew public attention to the role of tech platforms in massacres. However, many of the recommendations made in a report on her office’s findings are likely to face challenges under the First Amendment, which gives Americans’ broad protections over how they express themselves online.
Only 22 saw the Buffalo shooting live. Millions have seen it since.
The 47-page report — based on thousands of documents subpoenaed from major tech companies and fringe social networks — concludes that the alleged shooter was “galvanized by his belief that others would be watching him commit violence in real time.” James (D) recommends that New York lawmakers criminalize the act of a perpetrator live-streaming a homicide, as well as impose civil penalties, such as fines, on people who share the shooter’s videos or images.
The alleged gunman broadcast his May attack on a grocery store in a predominantly Black neighborhood via the streaming service Twitch, and though the company removed the stream within a few minutes, copies of it rapidly spread online. The suspect has pleaded not guilty, facing charges of domestic terrorism and murder as a hate crime.
Just before Buffalo shooting, 15 users signed into suspect’s chatroom, says person familiar with review
The report recommends tech companies adopt live-streaming restrictions, including identity-verification requirements and streaming delays that could allow the platforms to restrict who broadcasts video or catch violent footage before it goes online. The report also calls for Congress to revise Section 230, the provision of law that shields tech companies from lawsuits over dangerous or hateful content that is shared on their services.
James said she met with the families of the Buffalo victims to share the report’s findings and said that urgent action is needed to hold online platforms accountable for allowing dangerous videos and posts to spread.
“The tragic shooting in Buffalo exposed the real dangers of unmoderated online platforms that have become breeding grounds for white supremacy,” she said in a news release. “We cannot wait for another tragedy before we take action.”
The report warns that the Buffalo suspect’s online writings and videos double as “an inspirational guide and instructional manual for the next mass shooter.” He kept a diary on the chat service Discord, where he detailed how he purchased equipment and allegedly configured the broadcast of the shooting.
The recommendations could face legal resistance in suggesting that anyone who transmits or distributes shooting images or videos could face “civil liability.” The report calls for “significant penalties sufficient to realize the goal of deterrence” against people who share the content “in concert with the perpetrator of a homicide” but does not detail how that group would be defined. After the Christchurch shootings, during which 51 people were killed, people on a fringe message board then called 8chan raced to save and re-upload the killer’s first-person video, including sharing strategies for which video-hosting sites would help keep it online.
As written, the rule could penalize online users for sharing links to publicly visible videos or reposting them, drawing concerns over First Amendment overreach. The report did not establish a clear framework for how such penalties or enforcement could work, including how officials would identify anonymous users or define improper use. After past shootings, some users online have defended sharing the videos by saying they wanted to expose the dangers of racist or otherwise extreme rhetoric or force people to reckon with reality.
Genevieve Lakier, a University of Chicago law professor who studies freedom of speech, said the proposal struck her as possibly unconstitutional because it raised “a lot of First Amendment red flags."
“If it’s something like incitement or threats, that’s one thing,” Lakier said. “But if you’re just circulating it in order for it to go viral, that’s not a threat, that’s just disgusting behavior. And the First Amendment protects a lot of disgusting behavior.”
In the report, officials said such videos “are an extension of the original criminal act and serve to incite or solicit additional criminal acts." They also equated the proposal with laws designed to crack down on child sexual abuse material, saying those videos are “integral to illegal conduct” because “without a market for CSAM material, there would be no motivation to create such material.”
But child sexual-abuse videos have none of the First Amendment protections that videos of violence do, Lakier said. And there is “very little evidence and low probability” that someone watching the video of a shooting will respond by inciting or soliciting further violence. The vagueness of the rule, she said, could lead to even broader restrictions on a variety of accepted speech.
The report’s recommendations warn that any restrictions on live-streaming “should be drafted in a manner that ensures conformity with the First Amendment.” The report says that there is “no societal benefit” to perpetrators sharing live streams of homicides, and that any law should aim to avoid levying penalties for videos that have “educational, historical or societal benefits.”
Policymakers around the world are increasingly trying to understand the link between social networks and extremism. Last month, the White House hosted a gathering on hate-fueled violence, where American tech giants announced a series of steps to limit the spread of hateful rhetoric. And the Biden administration last year signed onto the Christchurch Call, a global pledge by governments around the world and tech companies to address violent extremist content.
Yet some advocates for gun control have warned that the focus on social media in mass shootings is misplaced, as social media is available globally and the United States has uniquely high rates of gun violence compared with other countries. The report also highlights the need for stronger gun laws, but its focus is specifically on how the Buffalo suspect saw prior mass shootings, allegedly planned his own and disseminated his manifesto and broadcast. | 2022-10-18T20:24:03Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Buffalo shooting prompts call to criminalize livestreams of violence - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/10/18/buffalo-shooting-livestream-ny-attorney-general/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/10/18/buffalo-shooting-livestream-ny-attorney-general/ |
Former D.C. police officer Michael Fanone on Jan. 6 attack and its aftermath
Michael Fanone joins Washington Post Live on Tuesday, Oct. 18. (Video: The Washington Post)
Former D.C. police officer Michael Fanone has written a memoir with new details about his experiences defending the Capitol during the Jan. 6 riots and his conversations with lawmakers, including one on tape with House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.). Washington Post associate editor Jonathan Capehart speaks with Fanone about his new book, “Hold the Line: The Insurrection and One Cop’s Battle for America’s Soul,” and what lessons he sees for American democracy.
“I think that it was something extraordinary that spared my life on January 6th. I’m not the most religious person, I leave all the praying up to my mom... January 6th, it was brutal and it was incredibly violent. And many officers experienced similar experiences to mine... So, I feel lucky.” - Michael Fanone (Video: Washington Post Live)
“There’s a part of America that is just never going to accept the reality of January 6th and frankly, I don’t care. What I’m looking for is accountability. I feel like if there’s not accountability for those who are criminally culpable, then it’s just going to become part of our political playbook. And in future elections, when politicians or political parties don’t get their way, they’re going to resort to violence to intimidate others. And while that’s incredibly dangerous and clearly a threat to our democracy, I think what’s most dangerous is the majority of Americans that are just simply indifferent to what happened on January 6th.” - Michael Fanone (Video: Washington Post Live)
“Donald Trump engaged in an effort to defraud the American people… As a result of that effort, he's criminally culpable and that, that effort resulted in the violence on January 6th.” - Michael Fanone (Video: Washington Post Live)
Former D.C. Police Officer
Author, “Hold the Line” | 2022-10-18T20:24:17Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Former D.C. police officer Michael Fanone on Jan. 6 attack and its aftermath - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2022/10/18/former-dc-police-officer-michael-fanone-jan-6-attack-its-aftermath/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2022/10/18/former-dc-police-officer-michael-fanone-jan-6-attack-its-aftermath/ |
Kelly Ripa opens up in new memoir
Kelly Ripa has been in American living rooms for over three decades, first as a soap opera actor and, since 2001, as the co-host of the popular talk show “Live.” On Tuesday, Oct. 25 at 12:30 p.m. ET, Ripa joins Washington Post national arts reporter Geoff Edgers to discuss her new memoir, “Live Wire: Long-Winded Short Stories,” which recounts her long career, complex relationship with former co-host Regis Philbin and her struggles with mental health.
Author, “Live Wire: Long-Winded Short Stories” | 2022-10-18T20:24:30Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Kelly Ripa opens up in new memoir - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2022/10/25/kelly-ripa-opens-up-new-memoir/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2022/10/25/kelly-ripa-opens-up-new-memoir/ |
Americans agree democracy is at risk. They disagree vehemently on why.
Former President Donald Trump speaks at a Save America rally at Legacy Sports Park on October 9, 2022, in Mesa, Ariz. (Joshua Lott/The Washington Post)
There’s a fable to be written about a group of sailors who learn that their boat is taking on water. The crew divides into factions, each insistent that they understand the reason that the boat is sinking: One blames cracks in the hull, another broken bilge pumps. Instead of fixing the problem, their time is consumed with arguing over it. Eventually they’re just swimming there, sharks circling, fighting about who was right.
So it is with American democracy — though, happily, the ship for now remains afloat.
It’s been clear for some time that Americans see the country’s political system as endangered. Polling released this week by the New York Times and Siena College reinforces that point: 7 in 10 Americans believe that it is. In fact, there’s an unusual bipartisanship to the issue: 7 in 10 Democrats, Republicans and independents all share that same conclusion.
Of course, it’s easy to tell when the boat is taking on water; you need only check the moisture level of your shoes. What’s trickier is figuring out why and whether the problem can effectively be addressed. And there our expected partisan divide reemerges.
The pollsters asked respondents to summarize the threat in one or two words. Answers varied, but the most popular responses included government (including things like corruption and politicians in general), Republicans (including Donald Trump), Democrats (including Biden) and societal or political divisions (including polarization). There’s irony to 1 in 12 respondents pointing to political divisions, of course, given that those divisions are on immediate display in the other answers.
A quarter of Democrats, for example, identified Trump or the GOP. A quarter of Republicans identified Biden or the Democrats. The most common answer from independents was government and politicians more generally.
Then the pollsters asked about specific issues: Did, say, the mainstream media pose a threat to American democracy? If so, was that threat major or minor?
As it turns out, 84 percent of respondents said that, yes, the mainstream media posed a threat to democracy, including 6 in 10 who said it posed a major threat. That was the highest percentage of any of the 10 options the pollsters presented — in part because it was one of the few options for which there was bipartisan support.
In general, there were wide differences in what partisans viewed as a threat to democracy. Republicans were more likely to point to voting systems (vote by mail or voting machines) and Democrats were more likely to point to institutions like the Supreme Court or the Electoral College.
If we rank the options by the percentage of respondents who said it was a major threat to democracy, that pattern is more stark. Among Democrats, it’s Trump at 84 percent. About 4 in 5 Republicans said both the media and Biden were major threats to democracy.
Mainstream media (59%)
Donald Trump (84%)
Donald Trump (45)
Republican Party (57)
Joe Biden (78)
Supreme Court (48)
Democratic Party (66)
Federal government (33)
Electoral College (42)
Voting by mail (55)
Mainstream media (38)
Voting machines (32)
It’s impossible here not to point out how some of the answers work hand-in-hand. The mainstream media, for example, has been assiduous in pointing out that voting by mail is safe and unaffected by significant examples of fraud — something that runs contrary to Trump’s presentations of the 2020 presidential contest. Perhaps the argument is that voting by mail slows down vote-counting, leaving the system open to challenges from bad-faith actors like Trump who want to sow doubt about the legality of those ballots. But that seems unlikely. It seems more likely that the media’s insistence on the reality of what happened in 2020 is at odds with what Republicans want to believe, which then increases skepticism about the media. (In the Times-Siena poll, 6 in 10 Republicans identified Trump as the “legitimate winner” in 2020.*)
Not all of the reasons proffered to explain the sinking boat are actually possible causes.
Regardless, this helps explain why addressing the threat to democracy doesn’t translate into political energy. Yes, most people think the country is at risk, but there’s so little agreement on the cause that there’s no route to actually addressing the problem. If half the country thinks that we need to end mail-in voting and vote Republican, and the other half thinks we need to overhaul the Supreme Court and elect Democrats, there’s no possible agreed-upon solution for the agreed-upon problem.
Our best hope, then, is that somehow the boat isn’t sinking at all. Otherwise? Here come the hammerheads.
* Another 6 in 10 who’d heard of the film “2000 Mules” found it believable.
On our radar: Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin to rally with GOP election denier Kari Lake in Arizona | 2022-10-18T20:55:26Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Americans agree democracy is at risk. They disagree vehemently on why. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/18/democracy-risks-democrats-republicans/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/18/democracy-risks-democrats-republicans/ |
German Book Prize winner shaves head in solidarity with Iranian women
Author Kim de l’Horizon shaves their hair during the award ceremony at the Frankfurt International Book Fair 2022, in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, on Oct. 17. (Ronald Wittek/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)
When nonbinary author Kim de l’Horizon was announced the winner of the prestigious German Book Prize on Monday, they got up and hugged their friends, walked onstage, took a breath and said “Wow.”
De l’Horizon, who was awarded for their debut novel, “Blutbuch” (Blood Book), got choked up while thanking family and friends at the ceremony in Frankfurt.
“But this award is not just for me,” the author said, pulling out an electric razor. “I think the jury also chose this text to make a statement against hate, for love, for the struggle of all people who are oppressed because of their bodies.”
The audience began clapping as de l’Horizon shaved their hair. The prize is also “obviously for the women in Iran,” they said, prompting the suited-up crowd to give the author a standing ovation.
For more than a month, women in Iran have spearheaded nationwide protests against the government, defying the country’s conservative norms to face off against security forces over widespread human rights abuses.
The demonstrations began after a young woman died while in the custody of Iran’s “morality police” in the capital, Tehran. The unit said they detained 22-year-old Mahsa Amini for failing to properly wear a headscarf, a violation of the country’s strict Islamic dress code.
In response, Iranian women began removing their headscarves at protests and, in some cases, shearing off their locks. Soon, French actresses, Italian art museum-goers and a Swedish member of the European Parliament all joined in to publicly cut their hair in solidarity with Iranian women.
The jury lauded the book as one that “is in constant motion” and whose “every linguistic attempt … reveals an urgency and literary innovation.”
The novel’s narrator “searches for a language of their own,” the jury said in a statement. “What narratives exist for a body that eludes conventional notions of gender?”
The German prize, which includes an award of 25,000 euros, is awarded to the “German-language novel of the year.” | 2022-10-18T20:59:47Z | www.washingtonpost.com | German Book Prize winner shaves head in solidarity with Iranian women - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/18/german-book-prize-kim-lhorizon-blutbuch-iran-shave/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/18/german-book-prize-kim-lhorizon-blutbuch-iran-shave/ |
Benjamin Civiletti, attorney general amid Iran hostage crisis, dies at 87
He also oversaw investigations into scandals that roiled the Carter administration
Benjamin Civiletti takes the oath of office for Attorney General during a ceremony at the Justice Department on Aug. 16, 1979. (Anonymous/AP)
Benjamin Civiletti, who as attorney general advised President Jimmy Carter while the White House struggled over the hostage-taking of 52 Americans after the seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in 1979, died Oct. 16 at his home in Lutherville, Md. He was 87.
Mr. Civiletti had health problems related to Parkinson’s, said his wife, Gaile Civiletti.
On the world stage, Mr. Civiletti became the Carter administration’s envoy and confidant during the 444-day hostage crisis. He helped give Carter legal authority to seize more than $11 billion in Iranian assets and took the rare step of appearing in person before the International Court of Justice at The Hague to seek greater international pressure for release of the embassy captives.
At home, however, Mr. Civiletti was sometimes seen as at odds with the White House. The Justice Department opened politically sensitive investigations that included alleged banking improprieties by Carter’s budget director, Bert Lance; questions over payments by Libya to Carter’s brother, Billy; and reports of cocaine-and-sex parties at New York’s Studio 54 nightclub by Carter’s chief of staff, Hamilton Jordan.
Bill Carter, audacious brother of former president, dies
None of the probes led to convictions, but they further eroded Carter’s image and — in the case of Billy Carter — brought Mr. Civiletti into the political crosshairs after disclosures he privately discussed the investigation with the president. An investigation found no wrongdoing by Mr. Civiletti.
He moved into the top role at the Justice Department in August 1979 after the resignation of Griffin Bell. Three months later, on Nov. 4, 1979, Iranians students and others stormed the U.S. Embassy, eventually holding 52 hostages and parading some blindfolded before the public.
The Iranian mobs were angered that the deposed Western-backed ruler, or shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, was in the United States for medical treatment after fleeing Iran during the Islamic revolution that year. Iran’s new Islamic regime demanded the shah’s return to stand trial. (The shah died in July 1980 in Cairo while the hostage crisis was ongoing.)
The global outrage to the hostage-taking was swift, but the United States and its allies had little leverage over the Iranian revolutionaries led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. To underscore the U.S. desperation, Mr. Civiletti went in-person to the International Court of Justice — a task normally handled by lower-level Justice Department staff or others.
“If I come to you in anger, I also come to you with urgency,” Mr. Civiletti told the court in December 1979.
“What we are asking the court for is the quickest possible action to end the barbaric captivity and to save human lives,” he continued.
The court backed the U.S. appeal to free the captives, but Iran simply scoffed at the judgment. Across the United States, frustration sometimes turned to reprisals and protests against Iranian Americans even though many strongly opposed Iran’s new Islamist leadership. The ABC news show “Nightline” was launched to cover the hostage crisis.
A cartoon in the Chicago Tribune portrayed Mr. Civiletti addressing the International Court of Justice while an Iranian mullah rips away at his trousers.
Mr. Civiletti had the Justice Department race to get court orders and other legal frameworks in place to allow Mr. Carter to seize Iranian assets, including property and bank accounts. An executive order by Carter also halted Iranian oil imports.
The U.S. troubles mounted. On April 24, 1980, a military mission to free the hostages, Operation Eagle Claw, unraveled after problems grounded three of eight helicopters bound for a staging area in Iran. During the pullout, one chopper collided with a C-130 transport plane, killing eight service members.
The Eagle Claw debacle in the desert
The failure appeared to seal the political fate for Carter. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, who had opposed the military mission, resigned in protest. Carter was trounced by Ronald Reagan in the 1980 election. Iran then used the moment. It freed the hostages on Jan. 20, 1981, during Reagan’s inauguration. Mr. Civiletti stepped down as attorney general the previous day.
As assistant attorney general, Mr. Civiletti was involved in investigations of budget director Lance, who was Carter’s friend from Georgia facing allegations of corruption while previously heading a Georgia-based bank. Lance resigned as director of the Office of Management and Budget in 1977 before his federal indictment for alleged violating U.S. banking rules. He was acquitted in 1980.
Mr. Civiletti also investigated reports of public drug-and-sex binges by Jordan, Carter’s chief of staff, who liked to wink and nod at his party life reputation. “The president,” he told The Washington Post in 1978 with a smile, “has no idea how I spend my time.” A special prosecutor was appointed, but no criminal case was sought against Jordan.
The scandal that proved perhaps the most challenging for Mr. Civiletti involved the president’s brother, Billy, who had gained a measure of pop-culture fame as a bubba-style country boy who inspired a short-lived Billy Beer brand. The Justice Department took notice after disclosures that he visited Libya three times in 1978 and 1979 and received at least $220,000 from Libyan officials as part of talks over potential oil deals.
Both Billy Carter and Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi called the payments a loan, but the president’s brother was not registered as a “foreign agent” to properly report such transactions.
Mr. Civiletti acknowledged that he met with Jimmy Carter to inform him that his brother was under investigation, but he told a Senate committee that he did not discuss details of the case and violate conflict of interest rules. A report by a special Justice Department investigator, Joel Lisker, found no ethical breaches by Mr. Civiletti and called it a “tempest in a teapot.”
Billy Carter registered as a foreign agent and was not prosecuted. “Billy is no Watergate plumber,” syndicated columnist James Kilpatrick wrote. “He is a bumptious good ole boy.”
Baltimore ties
Benjamin Richard Civiletti was born in Peekskill, N.Y., on July 17, 1935, and raised in nearby villages where his father worked as a grocery store manager. He graduated from Johns Hopkins University in 1957 and received a law degree in 1961 from the University of Maryland law school.
Mr. Civiletti was an assistant federal prosecutor in Baltimore from 1962 to 1964 and then took a job with the Baltimore law firm of Venable, Baetjer and Howard (now Venable LLP), rising to become a partner leading civil and criminal litigation.
His work gained notice by Charles H. Kirbo, an adviser to Carter when he was governor of Georgia. When Carter won the 1976 presidential election, Kirbo recommended Mr. Civiletti for a Justice Department post. Mr. Civiletti began leading cases prosecutions ranging from white-collar crime to drug trafficking, and was later promoted to deputy attorney general.
In one of Mr. Civiletti’s first cases at Justice, he led investigations into illegal influence-peddling efforts by groups working for South Korea, including seeking to insert pro-Seoul statements in the Congressional Record.
“Those investigations are real man-eaters,” Russell T. Baker Jr., one of Mr. Civiletti’s assistants, said in 1977. “It’s rare that a guy comes in and inherits three cases like this.”
After the Carter administration, Mr. Civiletti returned to his former law firm in Baltimore, where he billed clients at premium rates of up to $1,000 an hour. “To some extent, it’s supply and demand,” Mr. Civiletti told the Baltimore Sun in 2006. “A good many people retire at 60 or 65. As you hang around, there are fewer of you available who have litigation experience, government experience, criminal investigation experience.”
He was part of a Maryland commission that recommended the state abolish capital punishment. A ban was signed by Gov. Martin O’Malley (D) in 2013.
In addition to his wife of 64 years, survivors include three children, Benjamin Civiletti, Andrew Civiletti and Lynne Civiletti Mallon; a sister; nine grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren. | 2022-10-18T21:30:15Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Benjamin Civiletti, attorney general amid Iran hostage crisis, dies at 87 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/10/18/civiletti-attorney-general-iran-dies/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/10/18/civiletti-attorney-general-iran-dies/ |
Xi wants China to eclipse the U.S. He could be his own worst enemy.
Chinese President Xi Jinping at the opening session of the national congress on Sunday in Beijing. (Lintao Zhang/Getty Images)
On Feb. 4, as the Winter Olympics were opening in Beijing, Xi Jinping hosted Russian President Vladimir Putin for a formalization of their shared project of throwing off America’s hegemony. With the world’s eyes fastened on China, they announced in a joint statement that a new era of “multipolarity” had arrived in which nations would respect one another and not meddle in one another’s business.
The first eight months of their partnership have not been good for the new sheriffs in town. From Beijing, Putin returned to Russia and immediately launched a war of staggering stupidity. Intending to reveal the West’s weakness by snatching Ukraine from under NATO’s nose, Putin instead galvanized and strengthened NATO while revealing that his military is a hollow husk. While the United States and its allies send state-of-the-art weaponry to Ukraine, Russia is seizing pacifists and reeling drunks from the streets of Moscow and St. Petersburg, pressing them into service without food or guns.
That leaves Xi. Like a newlywed who discovers on the honeymoon that her spouse collects human ears, the Chinese leader must have — to put it mildly — some regrets. But he put on a brave face at China’s Communist Party congress, where he is nailing down his near-dictatorial powers. The “helmsman,” as party propagandists describe Xi, reiterated China’s plans to eclipse the United States; no mention this time of his Moscow partner.
Opinion: Xi’s coronation portends a hard era for China and the world
You might call this story “When Bad Things Happen to Great Powers.” All hegemons, past and present, know how it goes. Indeed, the true test of a world-leading nation is not how it looks on its best days, with the Olympics for a backdrop. It’s how the nation handles the bad patches and periods of weakness.
This is where the United States has shined in history, and why, when the chips are down, most of the world prefers to be on America’s side. Annoying as it is to live in a world where one nation has an outsize portion of power, it’s less dangerous than a world in which power is always up for grabs.
The United States excels at comebacks. That’s what I’ve observed in my many years on the planet, which began a couple of weeks into John F. Kennedy’s presidency. Kennedy had been very narrowly elected on the promise to rectify the “missile gap” between the supposedly superior Soviet Union and weak old USA. During my boyhood, the United States caught up in space but bogged down in Vietnam and blazed with protest.
In the 1970s, we were made to dance like puppets by Saudi oil sheikhs, watched the economy flatline and sagged into a national malaise.
The United States was held hostage by Iran at the start of the 1980s and was fearful of falling behind Japan by the end of the decade. By the turn of the century, a guy in a cave was making videos promising to defeat us. Lately, it’s China that’s going to outpace America — if we don’t have a civil war first.
More than 60 years of threats and setbacks — and guess what? The United States is still the superpower on which friends rely and by which rivals measure themselves. What explains this? Geography plays a role, undoubtedly. If you could choose any piece of real estate on Earth for building a strong economy, you’d pick ours: abundant resources, fertile soil, moderate climates, multiple seaports, attractive scenery and so on.
That said, the bone-deep aversion to centralized power that inspirits the Constitution and hums in the background of all American culture makes this nation comparatively nimble in terms of noticing frailty, discussing failure and crowdsourcing improvement. We are more likely to make a hero or a billionaire of someone who strays from the herd than to make a political prisoner of him.
Open dissent often seems inefficient, much as groupthink can feel streamlined and muscular. But then something goes wrong, and it’s the dissenters, the freethinkers, who diagnose the problem and devise the solutions.
Xi doesn’t get this. He continues to consolidate his grip on power even as China enters a period of likely stagnation and deterioration. Xi is sitting on a debt bomb that he appears unable to disarm. His covid-19 policy has stalled China’s economy. (China has abruptly stopped publishing economic data — precisely the opposite approach to weakness as the American model.) Xi has crushed free speech in Hong Kong. His Belt and Road Initiative has lost its way. His workforce is aging.
As Putin’s fiasco teaches: An autocrat is his own worst enemy, choking off information and smothering creativity in the closed society he rules. Durable power, by contrast, springs not from projecting strength but from admitting and addressing flaws. Do that well, and the strength takes care of itself. | 2022-10-18T21:52:38Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Xi wants China to eclipse the U.S. He’s doing it wrong. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/18/xi-china-autocrat-strength-versus-weakness/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/18/xi-china-autocrat-strength-versus-weakness/ |
Now that 89-year-old Cormac McCarthy is widely hailed as one of our greatest living authors, it’s hard to remember that when he published “All the Pretty Horses” in 1992, few people were waiting for it. Although McCarthy had been writing for decades, his work — including the epic western “Blood Meridian” — was still largely the secret treasure of a small retinue of intense fans.
Inconspicuousness suited the author just fine, but like every fragile thing in the McCarthy universe, it would soon die.
“All the Pretty Horses,” the first volume of his Border trilogy, flirted with the bestseller list for months and then went on to win the National Book Award for fiction. McCarthy did not attend the New York ceremony to accept his prize, but the damage was done: He was becoming famous.
Nothing, though, could have prepared the author for the clamorous success of “The Road,” which extended his apocalyptic themes to the literal end of civilization. This lean story about a father and his little boy walking through a hellscape mesmerized — and terrified — readers. The novel won a Pulitzer Prize, which made perfect sense, but it also won a spot on Oprah’s Book Club, which felt like a rip in the space-time continuum because it meant that McCarthy would, for the first time, give an interview on TV. There, finally, we saw the shy, gentle writer, not so much disdainful of public adoration as inert to it.
For the last 16 years, McCarthy’s swelling fan base has been circling, picking at crumbs of information about his next project. This month, the moment of unveiling has arrived with a tempest of publicity that’s sure to draw in even more readers.
Prepare to be baffled.
“The Passenger” exhibits McCarthy’s signature markings, but it’s a different species than we’ve spotted before. In these pages, the author’s legendary violence has been infinitely reduced to the clash of subatomic particles.
Bobby Western, the novel’s contemplative, haunted hero, works as a salvage diver. We meet him at 3:17 a.m. off the Gulf Coast. He and a small crew are examining a private jet resting on the ocean floor. After his partner cuts open the door with an underwater torch, Western swims into this fresh tomb:
“He kicked his way slowly down the aisle above the seats, his tanks dragging overhead. The faces of the dead inches away,” McCarthy writes. “The people sitting in their seats, their hair floating. Their mouths open, their eyes devoid of speculation.”
A few minutes later, back in the inflatable boat, Western shakes his head. “There’s nothing about this that rattles right.” The bodies look unaffected by a crash. And the pilot’s flight bag and the data box are missing from the cockpit.
Western’s partner asks, “You think there’s already been somebody down there, don’t you?”
For several days, Western hears nothing in the news about a jet crashing into the Gulf. Then two men with badges appear at his apartment in New Orleans. They want to know how many bodies he saw in the plane because “there seems to be a passenger missing.”
McCarthy has assembled all the chilling ingredients of a locked-room mystery. But he leaps outside the boundaries of that antique form just as he reworked the apocalypse in “The Road.” Indeed, “The Passenger” sometimes feels more reminiscent of Franz Kafka’s “The Trial.” Western knows he’s suspected of something, but he’s not told what. The two men who repeatedly question him never drop their formal politeness — never flash a bolt gun like Anton Chigurh in “No Country for Old Men” — but Western knows his life is in danger and that he must run.
First, though, he ruminates, and that sustained rumination creates a very different novel than the heart-thumping thriller the opening suggests. Instead, we’re drawn deeper and deeper into the troubled soul of Bobby Western. His father worked with Robert Oppenheimer to create the first atomic bombs, and Western still labors under a kind of genetic guilt for unleashing such horror on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
In a futile attempt to come to terms with that legacy and other ghosts, Western chats with a collection of barflies who seem to have wandered in from other classics. There’s Debussy Fields, a trans woman doing an extravagant imitation of Brett Ashley from “The Sun Also Rises.” And there’s Sheddan, who sounds like he never recovered from playing Falstaff in a college production of “Henry IV.”
“A pox upon you,” he says. “You see in me an ego vast, unstructured, and baseless. But in all candor I’ve not even the remotest aspirations to the heights of self-regard which the Squire commands.”
The style — a mingling of profound contemplation and rapid-fire dialogue, always without quotation marks and often without attribution — is pure McCarthy. But so is the irritating tendency toward grandiosity. “Evil has no alternate plan. It is simply incapable of assuming failure,” he writes. “The last of all men who stands alone in the universe while it darkens about him. Who sorrows all things with a single sorrow. Out of the pitiable and exhausted remnants of what was once his soul he’ll find nothing from which to craft the least thing godlike to guide him in these last of days.”
The Book of Job might get away with language like that, and maybe Melville can pull it off on a particularly bleak day, but here it risks sounding comically overwrought.
Brooding and good-looking, Western “is sinking into a darkness he cannot even comprehend.” Women want to save him; men want to befriend him. And why not? Working as a salvage diver sounds exotic and cool. He earned a scholarship to study physics at Caltech. He used to be a racecar driver in Europe, and he still roars around in his Maserati. (He thinks of the trident symbol on the car’s grill as “Schrödinger’s wavefunction.” Sure.) And — yes, seriously — he lives off thousands of gold coins he found buried under his dead grandmother’s house.
But on the non-sexy side of the ledger, Western is still pining for his little sister, Alice, a mathematical prodigy who wanted to bear his baby. Apparently, during her brief tumultuous life, they shared more than a love of complex equations.
(That shuffling sound you hear is Hollywood directors tiptoeing away.)
One of Western’s friends tries to cast this incestuous relationship in terms of a Greek tragedy, but McCarthy suggests it’s a geek tragedy. Throughout the novel, we’re subjected to intercalary chapters about Alice and a menagerie of Vaudeville freaks who inhabit her psychotic hallucinations. Chief among these figures is the Thalidomide Kid, who torments her in a series of conversations so bizarre and relentless that I began to wish I were on that plane at the bottom of the Gulf.
Weirdly, in early December, McCarthy is releasing a related short novel called “Stella Maris” — the name of a psych hospital — which is composed entirely of dialogue between Alice and a doctor. I doubt there are more than a few hundred people in the country who can follow Alice’s freewheeling allusions to theoretical physics and advanced mathematics — certainly her doctor can’t. But the bigger mystery is why this material, which depends entirely on “The Passenger,” is being published separately.
On the other hand, maybe it’s a mercy. “The Passenger” is already burdened by a reference to space aliens, a conspiracy about the Kennedy assassination and enough scientific arcana to choke a Higgs boson. McCarthy can’t go long without referring to the work of Dirac, Pauli, Heisenberg, Einstein, Rotblat, Glashow, Teller, Bohm, Chew, Feynman and other scientists. Unless you majored in physics, your string theory is going to get badly tangled up with your Yang-Mills. This is the kind of novel in which people wonder, “What happened to Kaluza-Klein?”
Later, we’re told that a Swiss mathematician and physicist named Ernst Stueckelberg “worked out a good bit of the S-Matrix theory and the renormalization group.”
I’m happy to hear that worked out, but I still have no idea what the hell it means.
When McCarthy descends from Mount Olympus and writes in his close, precise voice about Western carving out the ordinary activities of his day, the novel suddenly hums with genuine profundity. But many pages strain self-consciously to explore Big Ideas about the Nature of Reality. The explanations are so cursory that we never get to see the light — just the shadows on the cave wall. Unlike the cerebral novels of Richard Powers, which create the illusion that you might actually understand neuropsychology, genetics or artificial intelligence, “The Passenger” casts readers into a black hole of ignorance.
Near the end, a friend tells Western, “We still dont know what this is about.”
Get used to it, man. | 2022-10-18T21:52:51Z | www.washingtonpost.com | 'The Passenger' is Cormac McCarthy's first novel in 16 years - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2022/10/18/cormac-mccarthy-novel-passenger/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2022/10/18/cormac-mccarthy-novel-passenger/ |
DETROIT — Eleven additional people were killed in crashes involving vehicles using automated driving systems during a four-month period earlier this year, according to newly released government data, part of an alarming pattern of incidents linked to the technology. Ten of the deaths involved vehicles made by Tesla, though it is unclear from the data whether the technology itself was at fault or whether driver error might have been responsible. The 11th death involved a Ford pickup truck. The deaths included four crashes involving motorcycles that occurred during the spring and summer: Two in Florida and one each in California and Utah.
BRUSSELS — European Union leaders enter a crucial stretch this week to make sure runaway energy prices and short supplies do not further weaken their struggling economies and foment unrest. At the same time, they need to keep all 27 members united in their opposition to Russian President Vladimir Putin. The EU’s executive Commission presents a blueprint on Tuesday that needs to reconcile the gap between those who want to impose a common gas price cap to keep prices down and those who think it will primarily keep out supplies and further starve industries and businesses. Then on Thursday, EU leaders will start two days of talks seeking a compromise , however hard that may be.
NEW YORK — Amazon workers in upstate New York overwhelmingly rejected a union bid on Tuesday, handing a second defeat to the labor group that’s been attempting to drag the company to the negotiating table since its historic win earlier this year. Warehouse workers near Albany cast 406 votes out of the 612 ballots counted — or about 66% — against the Amazon Labor Union, giving the company enough support to push back the fledgling group composed of former and current Amazon workers. According to the National Labor Relations Board, 206 workers — or 33.6% — voted in favor of the group. The 31 additional ballots that were challenged by either Amazon or the union were not enough to sway the outcome.
LONDON — Facebook parent Meta says it will sell off Giphy after running out of options to thwart a ruling by U.K. regulators, who again found that the deal to buy the GIF-sharing platform would limit competition and innovation. Britain’s competition watchdog had ordered Meta last year to reverse the deal. The company appealed to a tribunal, which rejected most of its arguments. Meta said it’s disappointed but accepted the ruling as the final word. Meta said it would wait for more details on the divestment order and wouldn’t file another appeal, bringing to an end the drawn-out battle over the acquisition reportedly worth $400 million. | 2022-10-18T21:53:03Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Business Highlights: Soaring US dollar, Netflix rebound - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/business-highlights-soaring-us-dollar-netflix-rebound/2022/10/18/5a14e2b4-4f2a-11ed-ada8-04e6e6bf8b19_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/business-highlights-soaring-us-dollar-netflix-rebound/2022/10/18/5a14e2b4-4f2a-11ed-ada8-04e6e6bf8b19_story.html |
Lee County has reported 26 of the state’s 27 cases since Ian barreled ashore
Sabrina Malhi
Water floods a damaged trailer park in Fort Myers, Fla., after Hurricane Ian passed through the area. (Steve Helber/AP)
The culprit’s name? Vibrio vulnificus a.k.a. the flesh-eating bacteria of the Gulf Coast.
Flesh-eating disease, or necrotizing fasciitis, is commonly caused by the streptococcus bacteria. But vibrio vulnificus — one of several species of vibrio that have different characteristics — can lead to similarly severe infections. The tissue around a wound rapidly dies, and the bacteria swoop into other parts of the body leading to sepsis, shock and organ failure. Treatment with antibiotics is complicated by the poor blood supply in dying tissue. Many people require disfiguring surgeries or even amputations to remove dead and infected tissue. About 1 in 5 dies, sometimes only a day or two after falling sick.
Lee County, where residents are still struggling to clear debris from the storm, offers the strongest evidence of Ian’s impact: 26 of the county’s 28 cases this year occurred in the weeks since the late September storm swept in. But vibrio is a constant low-level threat. Health officials farther north in Escambia County issued a warning in July about the risks of contracting vibrio.
“We do predict we will see increasing numbers in waterways,” said Anthony Ouellette, a professor of biology and chemistry at Jacksonville University. The bacteria thrive in water warmer than 68 degrees Fahrenheit, he said, and in the mix of salt and fresh water that is found in estuaries and salt marshes. They become concentrated in filter feeders like oysters and muscles, which pump large volumes of water through their bodies. | 2022-10-18T21:53:41Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Flesh-eating bacteria cases are rising in Florida after Hurricane Ian - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/10/18/flesh-eating-bacteria-florida/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/10/18/flesh-eating-bacteria-florida/ |
Settlement reached in suit over handling of assault case
The state Board of Public Works must still approve the state’s share of the settlement payment. According to an online agenda, the matter will be considered at the board’s Oct. 26 meeting.
The county is paying $50,000, said Erica Palmisano, spokeswoman for the county executive’s office.
If approved by the board later this month, the settlement would conclude the years-long legal battle over the handling of rape allegations by the county’s top prosecutor, Scott Shellenberger, and the county police department.
The case stems from an incident in 2017, when the woman was a college student.
The woman, then attending Towson University, has said an assault took place when she and another female student were in an apartment with three University of Maryland Baltimore County baseball players.
Both women told police they had blacked out or passed out, and were sexually assaulted by the men. The men have said the acts were consensual.
The Baltimore County State’s Attorney’s Office declined to bring charges against the men, so the woman opted to attempt to bring charges against them herself by filing a statement of charges with the court commissioner. Her first try failed, but after her second attempt a different commissioner charged the men with rape and sex offenses in 2018.
But before officials could deliver the criminal summonses, Shellenberger dispatched police officers to the woman’s home, according to her legal filing. Once there, they spoke with her grandmother and stated that she risked facing criminal charges of her own if she pursued the charges against the men. Ultimately, prosecutors dropped the charges against the men.
The woman’s account was included in a class-action lawsuit filed by several women against Baltimore County and UMBC. But in 2020 U.S. District Judge Deborah K. Chasanow threw out all of the claims — except hers.
Her case, focused on possible First Amendment violations, was allowed to go forward. In a rare move last year, Chasanow denied immunity for Shellenberger — opening the door for a trial or a settlement in the woman’s case.
The three baseball players received $150,000 each from the university in a defamation case after they were named in an article about the assault allegations by the campus newspaper, the Retriever. The university is under a U.S. Department of Justice investigation into its Title IX compliance and response to sexual harassment complaints. | 2022-10-18T21:53:47Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Settlement reached in suit over handling of assault case - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/settlement-reached-in-suit-over-handling-of-assault-case/2022/10/18/8899bf02-4e9d-11ed-a9c8-ab127a1ec70d_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/settlement-reached-in-suit-over-handling-of-assault-case/2022/10/18/8899bf02-4e9d-11ed-a9c8-ab127a1ec70d_story.html |
French company pleads guilty to U.S. charge of paying terror groups
U.S. Attorney Breon Peace said at a news conference Oct. 18, 2022, that Lafarge and its Syrian subsidiary were responsible for providing significant funds to ISIS. (Timothy A. Clary/AFP/Getty Images)
NEW YORK — Global cement company Lafarge will pay the U.S. government nearly $780 million for conspiring with Islamic State militants to run a production plant in war-ravaged Syria during its civil war — a move that helped bolster the terrorist group’s meager finances, officials said Tuesday.
A top executive of Lafarge, which was acquired by Swiss-based Holcim in 2015, pleaded guilty in the U.S. District Court in Brooklyn to a count of conspiring to provide material support to foreign terrorist organizations, admitting that Lafarge knowingly engaged in a deal with Islamic State, also known as ISIS, and the al-Nusrah Front (ANF), a Syrian Islamist militia, in 2013 and 2014.
The guilty plea marked the first time a corporation was prosecuted under a U.S. statute that prohibits a person or entity from assisting foreign terrorist groups, officials said. The Justice Department has a broad ability to bring such cases in U.S. courts even if the conduct generally occurred abroad but also involves at least one wire transaction locally.
With watchers on the ground and spy drones overhead, U.S. zeroed in on Islamic State leader’s hideout
Justice Department officials said Tuesday that the two groups obtained at least $6 million in payments from Lafarge. The payoffs allowed Lafarge to operate the plant in the Northern region of Syria, near the Turkish border, and bought them protection from the militias.
The Islamic State also made more than $3 million directly through the sale of cement it obtained at the end of Lafarge’s operation there starting in late 2014.
In total, Lafarge agreed to forfeit $687 million and pay $91 million in criminal fines to the United States.
U.S. District Judge William F. Kuntz, who accepted Lafarge’s guilty plea, said the case “impacts global communities [and] the national security of the United States,” as well as victims of the terrorists.
ISIS planned chemical attacks in Europe, new details on weapons program reveal
Lafarge, which is based in France, had dealings with ISIS at a time when the group was responsible for capturing and killing journalists and aid workers in the devastated region.
Justice Department officials said the company paid for access to the plant and for protection from ISIS at a time when other corporations were fleeing Syria.
The Islamic State even issued stamped driving permits for Lafarge workers to get access to the plant.
“To the brothers at the checkpoints of Qarah Qawzak Bridge, may Allah keep you safe," a translation of the permit read. “Kindly allow the employees of Lafarge Cement Company to pass through after completing the necessary work and after paying their dues to us.”
Trial to begin in ISIS killings of U.S. journalists, aid workers
U.S. Attorney Breon Peace said at a news conference Tuesday that Lafarge and its Syrian subsidiary were responsible for providing significant funds to ISIS, which “otherwise operated on a shoestring budget.”
“This conduct by a Western corporation was appalling and has no precedent or justification,” Peace said.
Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said greedy intentions by Lafarge fueled rampant violence.
“In its pursuit of profits, Lafarge and its top executives not only broke the law, they helped to finance a violent reign of terror that ISIS and [ANF] imposed on the people of Syria,” Monaco said.
In France, six former executives and Lafarge are facing pending criminal charges in connection with their relationships in Syria. Those six people were referred to in court papers in the New York case but were not named.
The conduct did not involve “Lafarge operations or employees in the United States and none of the executives who were involved in the conduct are with Lafarge or any affiliated entities today,” the statement also said. | 2022-10-18T21:53:54Z | www.washingtonpost.com | French company pleads guilty to U.S. charge of paying terror groups - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/10/18/france-lafarge-payments-terror/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/10/18/france-lafarge-payments-terror/ |
Igor Danchenko walks to the Albert V. Bryan U.S. Courthouse in Alexandria, Va., during a lunch break in his trial. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
A jury on Tuesday found Igor Danchenko — a private researcher who was a primary source for a 2016 dossier of allegations about former president Donald Trump’s ties to Russia — not guilty of lying to the FBI about where he got his information.
The verdict in federal court in Alexandria, Va., is another blow for special counsel John Durham, who has now lost both cases that have gone to trial as part of his nearly 3½-year investigation. Durham, who was asked by Attorney General William P. Barr in 2019 to review the FBI’s investigation of the Trump campaign in 2016, is sure to face renewed pressure to wrap up his work following the verdict.
Trump predicted Durham would uncover “the crime of the century” inside the U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies that investigated his campaign’s links to Russia. But so far, no one charged by the special counsel has gone to prison, and only one government employee has pleaded guilty to a criminal offense. In both trials this year, Durham argued that people deceived FBI agents, not that investigators corruptly targeted Trump.
The jury in Danchenko’s case deliberated for about nine hours over two days. Juror Joel Greene said in an interview that there were no holdouts in the deliberations and that the decision was “pretty unanimous.”
“We looked at everything really closely,” said Greene, who declined to comment on the politics of the case. “The conclusion we reached was the conclusion we all were able to reach.”
Durham, a longtime federal prosecutor who was U.S. attorney in Connecticut during the Trump administration, personally argued much of the government’s case against Danchenko. The special counsel alleged that Danchenko misled the FBI officials asking in 2017 about his sources, after the agency determined the researcher was the unnamed person behind some of the most explosive allegations about Trump in reports compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele.
The trial could be Durham’s last. A grand jury that the special counsel had been using in Alexandria is now inactive, people familiar with the matter have told The Washington Post, though the status of a similar panel in D.C. was not immediately clear. A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment when asked whether Durham would continue as special counsel in the wake of the Danchenko acquittal.
Barr, reached by phone Tuesday afternoon after the jury announced its verdict, declined to comment. In a statement released by the Justice Department after the verdict, Durham said, “While we are disappointed in the outcome, we respect the jury’s decision and thank them for their service. I also want to recognize and thank the investigators and the prosecution team for their dedicated efforts in seeking truth and justice in this case.”
A representative for Trump could not immediately be reached for comment.
After the verdict was announced, Danchenko choked up and embraced his defense attorneys, Stuart A. Sears and Danny C. Onorato. Danchenko declined to comment, but Sears said outside the courthouse that “we’ve known all along that Mr. Danchenko is innocent.”
“We’re happy now that the American public knows that as well,” he said.
To win a conviction, Durham had to convince jurors both that Danchenko lied and that his deception had a “material” impact on the FBI’s investigation of possible ties between the Trump campaign and Russia. Defense attorneys argued that Danchenko believed what he was telling agents was true and that it was not a crime to give unsure answers to imprecise questions.
After his investigation is complete, Durham will be required to write a report, but deciding how much of it, if any, to release to the public would be up to Attorney General Merrick Garland.
The indictment listed five charges against Danchenko for statements made to FBI investigators about whether his sources included a longtime Democratic public relations executive, Charles Dolan Jr., and Sergei Millian, a former president of the Russian American Chamber of Commerce. U.S. District Judge Anthony J. Trenga dismissed the charge related to Dolan before the case went to the jury.
For Durham, the FBI’s handling of the Steele reports has been a key area of investigative interest. Steele was hired to produce the reports by research firm Fusion GPS, which had been retained by a law firm that represented Trump’s opponent, Hillary Clinton, and the Democratic National Committee. A website funded by a deep-pocketed Republican donor initially hired Fusion GPS to dig into Trump’s background.
But the FBI began to look into possible coordination between Trump’s campaign and Russia before it used the Steele dossier to support the warrant applications covering Page. The Justice Department inspector general determined that the FBI was justified in starting the probe, which eventually would be taken over by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III.
Mueller did not find a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia, but a report from his office mapped out various links between Trump campaign officials and the Kremlin and characterized the campaign as eager to benefit from Russia’s help in 2016.
In his closing remarks, Durham defended his investigation as apolitical and a “logical” consequence, following Mueller’s failure to find that the Trump campaign illegally conspired with Russia.
FBI witnesses testified that some emails and information about Dolan and Millian that Danchenko kept to himself would have been valuable to investigators vetting the sources for the dossier’s claims in 2017. An FBI supervisor who led intelligence analysts in the 2016 Trump probe, Brian Auten, and a special agent working in Russian counterintelligence, Kevin Helson, both testified they might have taken different steps had they known as much as Danchenko.
But Auten and Helson also described Danchenko as a trusted source of information on Russian influence activities that U.S. investigators mined for years — testimony that seemed to frustrate Durham, whose questions for the FBI officials then turned more aggressive.
Devlin Barrett contributed to this report. | 2022-10-18T21:54:00Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Steele dossier source acquitted, in loss for special counsel Durham - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/10/18/igor-danchenko-john-durham-verdict/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/10/18/igor-danchenko-john-durham-verdict/ |
Colts owner Jim Irsay, shown here in 2017, says NFL owners should consider removing Daniel Snyder as owner of the Commanders. (AP Photo/Darron Cummings, File)
NEW YORK — Indianapolis Colts owner Jim Irsay said Tuesday he believes there are grounds for NFL team owners to consider voting to remove Daniel Snyder as owner of the Washington Commanders.
Irsay spoke on the issue for nearly 15 minutes before a large group of reporters at a New York hotel at which the owners were holding a one-day meeting. There is no vote on Snyder’s ownership status planned for Tuesday. Such a decision would require at least 24 of the 31 other owners voting to remove Snyder.
“I think, you know again, when we look at the evidence and go forward, we’ll have to determine what the situation is,” Irsay said. “But I just believe in the workplace today, the standard that the shield stands for in the NFL, that you have to stand for that and protect that. I just think that once owners talk amongst each other, they’ll arrive to the right decision.
“My belief is that — unfortunately I believe that that’s the road we probably need to go down. And we just need to finish the investigation. But it’s gravely concerning to me, the things that have occurred there over the last 20 years.”
The NFL and the owners are awaiting the findings of a league-commissioned investigation of Snyder and the Commanders being conducted by attorney Mary Jo White.
“It is highly inappropriate, but not surprising, that Mr. Irsay opted to make statements publicly based on falsehoods in the media," a Commanders spokesperson said Tuesday. “It is unfortunate that Mr. Irsay decided to go public with his statement today, while an investigation is in process, and the team has had no opportunity to formally respond to allegations. The Commanders have made remarkable progress over the past two years. We are confident that, when he has an opportunity to see the actual evidence in this case, Mr. Irsay will conclude that there is no reason for the Snyders to consider selling the franchise. And they won’t.”
The House Committee on Oversight and Reform also is investigating the team’s workplace and could issue a final report in the coming weeks.
The office of D.C. Attorney General Karl A. Racine (D), which has nearly completed its investigation of the Commanders and Snyder, is planning to take further actions in the case, according to a person familiar with that process.
Irsay becomes the first NFL owner to say publicly by name that the owners should consider removing Snyder. Multiple owners told The Washington Post last month that they believe serious consideration may be given to attempting to oust Snyder from the league’s ownership ranks, either by convincing him to sell his franchise or by voting to remove him.
“He needs to sell,” one of those owners said then. “Some of us need to go to him and tell him that he needs to sell.”
If Snyder could not be persuaded to do so willingly, NFL rules would require a vote of the owners to force him to sell. | 2022-10-18T21:55:08Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Colts’ Jim Irsay: Removing Daniel Snyder merits ‘serious consideration’ - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/18/jim-irsay-dan-snyder-nfl-owners/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/18/jim-irsay-dan-snyder-nfl-owners/ |
Newark Airport workers caught the garter snake from Florida and released it into the wild
Workers at Newark Liberty International Airport were called in to catch a garter snake on board a United Airlines flight that arrived from Tampa on Monday afternoon, according to airport officials.
The airport’s wildlife operations staff and Port Authority Police Department officers met United Flight 2038 at the gate and “removed the garter snake,” the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey said in a statement.
The snake was later released into the wild, the Port Authority said. No one was injured and operations were not affected, it added. The aircraft departed Newark on time a little over an hour later, according to tracking service Flightradar24.
In a statement, United said passengers alerted crew to the snake, and the airline “called the appropriate authorities to take care of the situation.”
An unnamed passenger told News 12 New Jersey that business-class passengers first spotted the reptile while the plane was taxiing after landing. Passengers started shrieking and pulling up their feet, according to the TV station.
Yes, a bald eagle went through a TSA checkpoint. It was on a business trip.
The common garter snake is found in every Florida county and is not venomous or aggressive toward humans, according to the Florida Museum of Natural History. The snakes, which are typically between 18 and 26 inches long, will tend to avoid direct contact with humans or pets and only bite if “intentionally molested.”
Garter snakes are also common in New Jersey, according to a “Snakes of New Jersey” pamphlet published by the state.
Unlike the 2006 action film “Snakes on a Plane” that saw Samuel L. Jackson fighting dozens of venomous snakes that take over a jetliner, most cases of snakes being discovered on planes have involved a single animal that managed to slither on board.
In February, an AirAsia flight in Malaysia had to be diverted after several passengers saw a snake while the plane was in the air, according to USA Today. A viral TikTok video from the flight appears to show the reptile inside a light fixture above passengers.
On a 2017 commuter flight in Alaska, a flight attendant jumped into action after a boy discovered a sleeping snake left behind by a passenger on an earlier flight, the Associated Press reported. Photos show the flight attendant grabbing the snake by the belly and dropping it into a bag, which she placed into an overhead bin for the rest of the flight.
And a year earlier, a large snake — believed to be a venomous green viper — emerged from an overhead compartment on an Aeromexico flight in Mexico, according to United Press International. A passenger’s video posted on Twitter shows the creature hanging from the ceiling of the plane, which received priority landing clearance when it reached Mexico City. | 2022-10-18T21:56:46Z | www.washingtonpost.com | A snake snuck onto a United flight from Tampa to Newark airport - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2022/10/18/newark-airport-snake-united-flight/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2022/10/18/newark-airport-snake-united-flight/ |
Blizzard Albany, formerly Vicarious Visions, gets union vote greenlight
In a Tuesday decision, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) ruled that a group of 21 quality assurance testers at Blizzard Albany, formerly Vicarious Visions, could vote in a union election.
Testers at Blizzard Albany argued in front of the board in August that they should be allowed to form a union on their own. Parent company Activision Blizzard countered that a broader number of workers — 88 employees at the Blizzard Albany studio working on Diablo games — should get to vote in the union.
Labor experts have told The Washington Post that companies often seek to increase the size of the bargaining unit so that chances of a union vote succeeding are lower.
“I’m very happy and excited that we can move forward with voting for our union,” said Amanda Laven, associate test analyst at Blizzard Albany and member of the new bargaining unit. “I hope that Activision Blizzard will set an example for companies everywhere by not engaging in further union busting and by working with us in good faith.”
Back in August, Activision Blizzard’s lawyers framed much of their argument in the Blizzard Albany hearing around the highly anticipated upcoming game “Diablo IV.” The upcoming dark fantasy action role-playing game, in which players battle various hellspawn, is slated for release sometime next year.
In the ruling, the NLRB dismissed Activision Blizzard’s lawyers’ argument that quality assurance testers working on different games don’t belong in the same bargaining unit.
“The difference between ‘Diablo II Resurrection’ and ‘Diablo IV’ is one of assignment that has minimal to no impact on the community of interest among associate test analysts,” the board wrote.
The NLRB notes that associate test analysts working on Diablo are paid $20.19 an hour, which adds up to a yearly salary of $41,995 if employees worked a full year with no weeks off. Meanwhile, employees in other departments earn $56,250 to $175,050, with designers earnings the most. The low pay of testers helped differentiate the group from the rest of employees at Blizzard Albany working on Diablo IV, according to the NLRB’s decision.
“While we respect the NLRB process, we strongly disagree that a decision that could significantly impact the future of the entire Albany-based Diablo team should be made by just a handful of employees,” said Activision Blizzard spokesman Rich George in a statement. “Given our tightly integrated operations in Albany, all of our eligible non-supervisory employees there should have a voice and be allowed to vote, not just the approximately 20 quality assurance testers picked by the union.”
The NLRB will mail out ballots to eligible employees Oct. 27. Voters in that group must return their ballots by close of business Nov. 17. The ballot count will take place via video conference Nov. 18.
“It’s about time,” said a current Blizzard Albany employee who is not a quality assurance tester. She spoke on the condition of anonymity as she wasn’t authorized to speak to media. “Our QA testers are some of the most talented and skilled people working in our company and they are critically undervalued by corporate. I think that all games workers need a union, but QA is in especially dire need.”
Microsoft is purchasing Activision Blizzard for nearly $69 billion in an all-cash deal, pending regulatory approval. The Xbox and Windows maker previously said in June it would respect the rights of Activision Blizzard workers to join a union.
Blizzard Albany is the second Activision Blizzard studio that has attempted to unionize at the company, which is facing multiple investigations over sexual harassment. Known for its work on franchises including Guitar Hero and Crash Bandicoot under its former name, Vicarious Visions, the studio officially merged with Activision Blizzard in April to become Blizzard Albany. The studio’s quality assurance department there took cues for its organizing campaign from Raven Software, another Activision-owned studio in Madison, Wis., where on May 28, a group of QA testers under the name Game Workers Alliance won their bid to unionize. They are currently undergoing bargaining efforts for a contract.
“I think that the people who said the [Game Workers Alliance] would serve as the spark for a new labor movement in games are being proven correct,” said a second current Blizzard Albany employee who is not a quality assurance tester. “I hope this win helps to spread that energy.” | 2022-10-18T22:31:12Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Blizzard Albany, formerly Vicarious Visions, gets union vote greenlight - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2022/10/18/blizzard-albany-nlrb-union-vote/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2022/10/18/blizzard-albany-nlrb-union-vote/ |
Woman dies in Prince George’s crash
The single-car crash occurred in the area of Indian Head Highway near Berry Road, police said.
A 33-year-old woman was killed in a crash in the Accokeek area early Saturday morning, Prince George’s County police said.
Officers responded at about 3 a.m. for a single-vehicle crash in the area of Indian Head Highway near Berry Road, police said.
Police identified the driver as Tiffanie Bunch of Waldorf. Police said an initial investigation indicates that Bunch struck a median and then a light pole, “for reasons under investigation,” when she was approaching Berry Road.
Bunch was taken to a hospital where she died shortly after, police said. | 2022-10-18T22:44:15Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Woman dies in Prince George's crash - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/18/woman-killed-crash-prince-georges/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/18/woman-killed-crash-prince-georges/ |
Mike Bloomberg takes different approach in funding Democrats this year
The billionaire former candidate for president plans to spend more than $60 million on this year’s elections.
Former New York mayor Mike Bloomberg speaks during a news conference on March 3, 2020, in Little Havana, a neighborhood in Miami. (Brynn Anderson/AP)
Top Democratic donor Mike Bloomberg, a billionaire former candidate for president, plans to spend more than $60 million on this year’s elections, according to his advisers, opting for a lower public profile than he has taken in recent years.
Much of his spending, including about $11 million in donations to House Majority PAC, the primary outside group supporting Democrats in the battle for control of the House, has not yet been publicly disclosed, while more than $15 million more has been pushed through Democratic-aligned groups such as Emily’s List, Planned Parenthood and the League of Conservation Voters, the advisers said.
“I expect that once again Mike Bloomberg will the be largest Democratic donor,” Bloomberg political strategist Howard Wolfson said. “We are facing as a country multiple threats, in multiple areas, federal, state and local, and we are attempting to be helpful in as many places as possible.”
Wolfson said that Bloomberg, 80, who served as mayor of New York after becoming a billionaire through his eponymous financial information and media company, has also made donations of more than $1 million to Democratic gubernatorial candidates in Michigan, Pennsylvania, New Mexico and Colorado. He further invested in the effort to defeat an amendment to the Kansas state Constitution that would have banned abortion in the state this summer.
Everytown for Gun Safety, a group largely funded by Bloomberg with the aim of increasing firearm regulation, has spent an additional $5 million so far this cycle, including more than $1 million in advertising against each of the Republican Senate candidates in the Georgia, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin elections, according to Federal Election Commission.
“House Majority PAC is thankful for Mike Bloomberg’s continued support to our organization this cycle, in addition to his previous contributions, as we work to achieve our shared goal of securing a Democratic House Majority and protecting American democracy,” House Majority PAC Executive Director Abby Curran Horrell said in a statement.
Democratic groups have struggled this cycle to keep pace with Republican peers, as GOP billionaires have opened their wallets with historic outlays. Contributions of $1 million or more, from groups or major individual donors, account for $48.2 million, or about 49 percent of the fundraising for House Majority PAC through the end of August.
By contrast, contributions of $1 million or more account for $152 million, or about 80 percent, of revenue for the Republican counterpart, the Congressional Leadership Fund, through Sept. 12, according to Federal Election Commission records.
The approach Bloomberg has taken this year contrasts with the high-profile splash he made in both the 2020 and 2018 cycles, when his presidential ambitions played a role in his approach. A group he funded, Independence USA, spent nearly $57 million on ads in 2018, mostly for targeted House races, according to federal records.
In the final days of that campaign, Bloomberg dropped an additional $5 million on last-minute ads, including an extraordinary 2-minute spot with him directly addressing the camera that ran nationally the Sunday before the election alongside CBS’s “60 Minutes.”
Bloomberg returned to center stage during the 2020 Democratic primaries when he launched a presidential campaign, which spent $1.1 billion in a matter of months. After a poor debate performance in Nevada, and the late surge of support for fellow Democratic contender Joe Biden, Bloomberg ended his campaign and endorsed Biden.
Bloomberg subsequently transferred $18 million to the Democratic National Committee to help Biden in the general election. He later spent about $100 million in Florida in an effort partially designed to draw Republican resources from other states. Republican Donald Trump won the state by more than 3 percentage points.
Bloomberg is worth nearly $77 billion, making him the 12th richest person in the world, according to Forbes magazine’s ranking of wealthy individuals. The magazine reported his net worth at about $56 billion in 2019, before his presidential campaign. | 2022-10-18T22:52:57Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Mike Bloomberg takes different approach in funding Democrats this year - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/18/bloomberg-spending-democrats-midterms/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/18/bloomberg-spending-democrats-midterms/ |
The D.C. Council in March. (Craig Hudson for The Washington Post)
The D.C. Council voted Tuesday to spend more than $8 billion over a five-year span for health-care coverage for more than one-third of all D.C. residents, bringing to a contentious end a years-long fight over which insurers should hold D.C.’s highest-value contracts, covering health care for Medicaid recipients.
The council also voted to impose new requirements on the D.C. Housing Authority after a scathing report from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development found D.C.’s public housing to be among the worst in the nation on some measures.
While the council members were unanimous in their desire for change at the Housing Authority, the Medicaid contracts provoked hours of debate as lobbyists and residents supporting the insurer CareFirst — which ultimately lost in its attempt to win the lucrative Medicaid job — sat in matching T-shirts watching the council’s debate.
D.C. leaders clash over best insurance plans to care for low-income patients
CareFirst had argued, in paid advertisements on social media and in lobbyists’ pleas to council members, that its competitor Amerigroup was not fit to hold one of the city’s three contracts for covering Medicaid patients, a view some council members found persuasive.
“It’s not enough to say that the [procurement process] complied with the law,” said council member Brianne K. Nadeau (D-Ward 1), who urged fellow members to vote against the contracts. “Crossing every t and dotting every i sometimes leads to bad results, and that’s why final accountability rests with us. … I say let’s send this back and get better outcomes for our patients.”
But members ultimately decided to adhere to the outcome of the city’s competitive procurement process, which awarded the contracts to Amerigroup, MedStar and AmeriHealth. Judges on the city’s Contract Appeals Board repeatedly upheld the procurement process as fairly conducted this time — unlike the city’s attempts to award Medicaid contracts in 2017 and 2020, which were ruled improper by judges. (Mayor Muriel E. Bowser’s lengthy resistance to the judge’s 2020 ruling led to an impasse with the council and eventually to her decision to rebid the Medicaid contracts altogether.)
From last year: D.C. plans to rebid its troubled Medicaid contracts
Robert C. White Jr. (D-At Large), who chairs the committee that oversees government procurement, said the council could set a bad precedent by rejecting D.C.’s highest-dollar contracts. “That will set the tone that the council will intervene if people spent enough money,” he said. “If they lose an appeal, if they lose multiple appeals, they can still spend money and get the outcome that they prefer.”
“I very much encourage us to pass the contracts that were sent to us and not get in the business of picking winners and losers,” White said.
The council eventually agreed, voting 10-2 in favor of the contracts, which required nine votes to pass. Nadeau and Brooke Pinto (D-Ward 2) voted against the contracts. Vincent C. Gray, who missed the meeting because of health problems, also urged members in a letter to vote no, because of his concerns about Amerigroup’s fitness to insure low-income residents.
The unanimously backed legislation dealing with the D.C. Housing Authority imposes stricter training requirements for DCHA’s 13-member board and executive director and requires the agency to report certain data to the council, including the number and status of vacant units as well as a “detailed accounting of expenses paid for with District funds.”
Elissa Silverman (I-At Large) introduced the bill after The Washington Post published the findings of a HUD report that detailed — among dozens of problems — that DCHA’s occupancy rate for public housing is among the worst in the nation.
Silverman said D.C. Attorney General Karl A. Racine (D) helped write the measure; Racine’s office has sued DCHA twice in recent years over the conditions at its properties and for allegedly discriminating against tenants with disabilities. The emergency bill codifies that the city’s consumer protection laws apply to DCHA. Silverman has said she plans to introduce a permanent bill that goes even further to make changes at the agency.
“The federal audit is clear: The Housing Authority is failing its residents and failing this city, at a time when we desperately need safe, affordable housing for our low-income working families,” said Silverman, who is up for reelection this year in a competitive contest for one of two at-large seats. “The problems go beyond basic maintenance. The authority is out of compliance with federal and local law. It is putting residents and health and safety risk.”
Council member Anita Bonds (D-At Large), who chairs the council’s housing committee, said in a statement Monday said that she had gone through the report and planned to introduce “substantive legislative proposals” of her own in response.
The statement did not offer specifics about the forthcoming legislation from Bonds, who is also up for reelection this year and has taken some heat related to her oversight of the agency. Bonds said she also requested a meeting with Bowser (D) about the report and promised to hold council hearings on the matter.
“Moving forward, the D.C. Housing Authority will require sweeping change,” Bonds said. “Every aspect of the agency’s governance, operations and procurement functions must be examined.”
Lawmakers also approved a bill that extends a property tax exemption for dozens of Southeast Washington homeowners who were told to evacuate from their Anacostia condominiums last year after an engineering firm found potentially dangerous structural issues in their condo complex.
They found dream homes through D.C.'s first-time homebuyer program. Now they have to evacuate.
Earlier this month, The Post reported that the homeowners, who are mostly Black women and first-time home buyers, would receive another year of financial support from the city to rent short-term housing, though it remains unclear when or if they will be able to return to the homes they own. D.C. Council Chairman Phil Mendelson (D) said research is underway to find out whether the sinking building can be shored up or will have to be demolished.
The council also approved its preliminary decision earlier this month to allow noncitizens to vote in local elections. The bill now heads to Bowser’s desk. | 2022-10-18T23:23:25Z | www.washingtonpost.com | D.C. Council votes for $8 billion Medicaid contracts, housing overhaul - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/18/dc-council-medicaid-contracts-dcha/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/18/dc-council-medicaid-contracts-dcha/ |
Montgomery teachers union to file unfair labor practice charge
The union and the county school system have been in a dispute while setting ground rules for contract negotiations
Teachers and senior students return in-person at Sherwood High School in Montgomery County on April 8, 2021, in Sandy Spring, Md. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
Leaders of Montgomery County’s teachers union said they planned to file an unfair labor practice charge against the county’s public school system Tuesday in an ongoing disagreement over ground rules that have stalled contract negotiations.
The dispute has blocked discussions over an upcoming three-year contract that would start in July 2023 and help determine teacher salaries and benefits. The Montgomery County Education Association — which represents more than 14,000 teachers — and Montgomery County Public Schools clashed this month over how many of those contract talks should be open. The union wanted all the negotiations to be open for all of its members; the school system has offered five virtual open sessions and two virtual town halls. Negotiations were scheduled to start Tuesday at the latest.
Jennifer Martin, the teachers union president, said in an interview Tuesday that the union tried to move forward by proposing its own set of negotiation dates, but the school system’s negotiators didn’t respond.
“Because we’ve been arguing over ground rules since June, at this point, their refusal to establish dates for us to meet we believe constitutes an unfair labor practice and is contrary to the law,” Martin said. The union is bringing some of its proposals over teacher retention and recruitment to an annual, routine meeting it has with the county’s board of education Tuesday instead.
Before that meeting, several members of the union protested outside the school system headquarters.
Montgomery County Public Schools questioned whether the union’s decision to file an unfair labor practice charge could delay contract discussions for months. “MCPS continues to request that MCEA help all of us to move forward, establish ground rules today, and allow us to demonstrate the leadership that is required now,” a statement from the school system said Tuesday.
The charge is being filed with Maryland’s Public School Labor Relations Board. The school system can offer a written response. After the union’s complaint and school district’s answer are filed, the labor relations board can make a decision or refer the matter for a fact-finding hearing before the Office of Administrative Hearings, according to Kristy Anderson, an attorney from the Maryland State Education Association. | 2022-10-18T23:23:36Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Montgomery teachers union to file unfair labor practice charge - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/10/18/montgomery-teachers-union-contract-negotiations/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/10/18/montgomery-teachers-union-contract-negotiations/ |
U.S. to give $2 million in hurricane aid to Cuba
The Cuban government made an appeal in the wake of devastation caused by Hurricane Ian
A woman walks down a street full of garbage in La Coloma, Pinar del Rio province, Cuba, on Oct. 13. Hurricane Ian battered western Cuba late last month, causing widespread damage. (Yamil Lage/AFP/Getty Images)
The United States will provide $2 million in funding for emergency relief in Cuba, the State Department announced Tuesday, following Cuba’s appeal for aid in the wake of devastation on the island caused by Hurricane Ian.
Both the appeal, made directly to the United States, and the U.S. response marked a rare moment of agreement between the two governments — although the Biden administration made clear that its assistance would not go to the Cuban government, but would be funneled through nongovernmental international organizations.
“We stand with the Cuban people as they work to recover from this disaster,” spokesperson Ned Price said in a statement. “The United States will continue to monitor and assess humanitarian needs in coordination with our trusted partners and the international community, and we will continue to seek ways to provide meaningful support to the Cuban people, consistent with U.S. laws and regulations.”
The assistance, Price said, would be provided indirectly, through the U.S. Agency for International Development, to international relief organizations such as the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies “who have a long presence in hurricane-affected communities.”
Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez quickly expressed appreciation on Twitter, saying that the U.S. aid would “contribute to our recovery efforts and support by those affected by the ravages” of the storm.
Although President Biden pledged during his campaign to roll back the Trump reversals, he has only gingerly approached normalization with Havana, in part because of political pressure from the Florida-based Cuban American community and its backers in Congress, and partially because of the Cuban government’s repression of political protests during the summer of 2021. | 2022-10-18T23:23:48Z | www.washingtonpost.com | U.S. to give $2 million in hurricane aid to Cuba - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/10/18/biden-cuba-hurricane-ian/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/10/18/biden-cuba-hurricane-ian/ |
FLORISSANT, Mo. — Radioactive waste in a creek that meanders through part of suburban St. Louis has long been suspected of causing rare cancers and other health problems for residents who live nearby. Now, a new study funded by law firms suing on behalf of residents of the area has created worry that contamination is inside a grade school. | 2022-10-18T23:24:25Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Radioactive waste finding raises worries at Missouri school - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/radioactive-waste-finding-raises-worries-at-missouri-school/2022/10/18/174eb14c-4f13-11ed-ada8-04e6e6bf8b19_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/radioactive-waste-finding-raises-worries-at-missouri-school/2022/10/18/174eb14c-4f13-11ed-ada8-04e6e6bf8b19_story.html |
The Post found more than 500 retired members of the military – from helicopter mechanics to high-ranking generals – have cashed in on work with foreign governments since 2015, sharing military expertise and political clout.
Many worked for countries with known human rights abuses and political repression, but the U.S. military approved these contracts anyway. The activity lacks transparency or congressional oversight, and largely remains out of public view.
Those seeking foreign work must first obtain approval from their branch of the armed forces and the State Department. The Post found these requests are largely rubber-stamped: Of more than 500 submitted since 2015, about 95 percent were granted. For military retirees who do this work without seeking approval, few penalties exist. | 2022-10-18T23:24:45Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The retired military cashing in with repressive governments - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/podcasts/post-reports/the-retired-military-cashing-in-with-repressive-governments/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/podcasts/post-reports/the-retired-military-cashing-in-with-repressive-governments/ |
Automatic annual adjustments mean higher thresholds for income tax brackets and a heftier standard deduction
Internal Revenue Service headquarters in Washington. (Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg News)
The standard deduction — the baseline amount of income that filers can collect tax free — will increase to $13,850 for individuals and $27,700 for married couples. It is the largest adjustment to deductions since 1985, when the IRS began annual automatic inflationary adjustments.
Social Security benefits will jump next year. Here’s why.
Several other elements of the tax code also are indexed to inflation. The maximum 2023 Earned Income Tax Credit, one of the federal government’s main anti-poverty measures, will be $7,430, up from $6,935 in 2022. | 2022-10-18T23:26:06Z | www.washingtonpost.com | You can keep more money from the IRS next year, thanks to inflation - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2022/10/18/irs-deductions-brackets-inflation/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2022/10/18/irs-deductions-brackets-inflation/ |
Key Oath Keepers witness testifies Jan. 6 plans potentially ‘treasonous’
Jason Dolan testifies in Stewart Rhodes’s seditious conspiracy trial that members were prepared to stop Congress from confirming 2020 election ‘by any means necessary’ and brought firearms for that reason.
This image from court filings shows Jason Dolan marked with the red arrow. Dolan began testifying in the Oath Keepers seditious conspiracy trial. (USAO/U.S. Attorney's Office for D.C.)
The testimony Tuesday by Jason Dolan was the first in the trial from several cooperating Oath Keepers witnesses who have pleaded guilty in the Capitol attack investigation. The Florida man and others are expected to be critical to the prosecution because they have admitted under oath to what Rhodes and co-defendants are charged with: plotting to obstruct and disrupt Congress by, as Dolan put it in plea papers, “intimidating and coercing governmental personnel.”
Prosecutors must show that even though Rhodes did not enter the building that day, he and co-defendants conspired to oppose by force the lawful transition of presidential power, culminating in the Capitol attack, making Dolan a direct witness.
Dolan, a 19-year former Marine and infantry unit leader, recalled to jurors how he sent an encrypted message to other Oath Keepers members in Florida on Dec. 6, 2020, agonizing over whether after serving five overseas deployments he should ask his family to let him go into combat again. But this time it would be against fellow Americans, “with no pay, no coming back, no awards, no homecoming and if I’m lucky I get a prison sentence, tagged with treason, or a bullet from the very people I would protect.”
On the stand, Dolan said he understood it “would be treasonous fighting against what I saw as an illegitimate form of government,” but that Oath Keepers had discussed and Rhodes had declared that even if Trump took no action, they would. That meant, Dolan said, “We will act to stop the certification of the election … by any means necessary. That’s why we brought our firearms.”
Dolan said his understanding was that if Trump called on a private militia to keep him in office, “We would be fighting with pro-Trump forces basically against pro-Biden forces.”
“Within the United States government?” U.S. prosecutor Jeffrey S. Nestler asked.
“Yes,” Dolan answered, saying the pro-Trump side would have battled forces loyal to Congress and Democrats on the other.
Dolan, 46, pleaded guilty in September 2021 to conspiracy and aiding and abetting the obstruction of Congress’s confirmation of the 2020 election results.
A former security guard and head of shipping and receiving for a Four Seasons resort in Palm Beach, Fla., Dolan admitted being among a group that forced entry through the Capitol’s East Rotunda doors after marching single file up the steps, wearing camouflage vests, helmets, goggles and Oath Keepers insignia.
Cooperating in hopes of trimming a likely five- to seven-year prison term, Dolan said he brought a rifle, pistol and ammunition to the Washington area with others in the group who were stashing weapons at a Ballston hotel in case a “Quick Reaction Force” (QRF) was needed. Dolan said he communicated, met with and identified at the defense table Rhodes and Florida co-defendants Kelly Meggs and Kenneth Harrelson.
Audio excerpts from a conference call with Stewart Rhodes and other Oath Keepers on Nov. 9, 2020, detail plans for a "guerrilla fight" on Jan. 6, 2021. (Video: U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia)
Inside the Capitol, Dolan testified, he repeatedly chanted “Treason!” He also believed lawmakers could be “scared into doing the right thing,” and later obstructed the investigation by resetting his cellphone, deleting photographs from inside the Capitol and encrypting communications, he said.
Dolan’s appearance at Rhodes’s trial, now in its third week, and testimony by any of three others who have admitted to seditious conspiracy, could be central to whether prosecutors can distinguish Rhodes’s and his co-defendants’ actions from those of nearly 300 who are accused of trying or conspiring to obstruct Congress, but not using force to oppose the government. .
Only 19 people — all affiliated with the extremist right-wing groups Oath Keepers and Proud Boys — have been charged with seditious conspiracy, accused of playing an outsize role in mobilizing and planning for violence that day. Both conspiracy and seditious conspiracy charges are punishable by the same 20-year maximum prison sentence.
Rhodes and four co-defendants have pleaded not guilty. Their attorneys have said the QRF was for defensive purposes only if Trump invoked the Insurrection Act to mobilize the military and militia to stay in power. Their attorneys have also said that they complied with all firearms laws and that they came to Washington as a peacekeeping force and security guards for Republican VIPs.
Through more than a dozen witnesses so far, prosecutors have shown jurors many of the military-style rifles Oath Keepers members brought to the area, including Dolan’s, which he said he recognized because he built it himself.
On Monday, FBI Special Agent Sylvia Hilgeman testified that Rhodes himself spent as much $20,000 on his way to Washington to purchase a small arsenal of at least three rifles and a semiautomatic shotgun, part of $150,000 he withdrew from an Oath Keepers bank account for January 2021.
“The point of the QRF was to prevent Biden from taking power in whatever form that took,” Hilgeman testified. “I think the QRF was meant to occupy D.C.”
Dolan testified that he was prepared to take up arms with divided federal forces. But he said his path to that point was “pretty naive and downright stupid” in hindsight. He said he was thankful Trump did not unleash further violence.
Oath Keepers attorney Kellye SoRelle arrested on Jan. 6 charges
Dolan was not charged with seditious conspiracy, an offense that, if he had been convicted, would have ended his military benefits, which help support his wife and daughter. He said he left his hotel job just before undergoing hip-replacement surgery in 2018 or 2019 — the culmination of five or six procedures for “long-term issues, gut issues and really bad hip and feet injuries” from military service.
In 2020, he said he spent “a lot of time in the garage in the evenings drinking and trying to kill the pain” with anything from a six-pack of beer to a half-bottle of vodka by himself before discovering the Oath Keepers.
“It felt good to know there were other people out there who felt the same way I did,” Dolan said. He viewed the group as “patriotic for our country” and believed “The same idea of the election having been stolen, or at least thinking that it had been stolen.”
Dolan said if a handful of people fight against what they see as “an illegitimate form of government, “You would be tossed in prison.”
By contrast, the Oath Keepers said on Signal, “10,000 people” would get you a war. As he headed to the Capitol on the afternoon of Jan. 6, Dolan told jurors, “Here you had 100,000 people who looked like they were pissed that day. For me at least, it seemed if anything was going to happen to stop the certification of the election, that was going to be it.” | 2022-10-18T23:45:10Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Key Oath Keepers witness Jason Dolan testifies plans were 'treasonous' - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/18/oath-keepers-jan6-trial-jan6-treason/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/18/oath-keepers-jan6-trial-jan6-treason/ |
Dangerous beauty
The culture’s stubborn beauty standards may be its most dangerous enemy. (Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post)
In recent years, we’ve also been told of the terrible toll that fumes from lacquers and acetones in nail salons have on the human body and how damaging they can be to the men and women who steadily breathe in those toxins while working there. Exposure to those chemicals have been linked to asthma, skin disorders, miscarriages and cancer. Other beauty treatments — skin lighteners, skin tighteners, wrinkle reducers — have known side effects and complications, too.
And yet, people just can’t stop trying to look younger, thinner … better.
But this much is certain: The greater the distance between one’s natural attributes and the beauty ideal, the greater the risk in reshaping, retraining and redesigning oneself into a more valued asset. The more marginalized you are; the more difficult it is to seen as relevant. No one has felt this more than Black women. They’re always struggling to claim their full worth.
For some, sassiness becomes their armor, weapon and self-care. They use it fend off insults from folks who have no business commenting on their body, but do so anyway as if it’s a whiteboard for laying out an argument about health, fitness and a lack of discipline.
What kind of message is fashion trying to send plus-size women?
In March, the House of Representatives passed the Crown Act which bans discrimination based on certain hairstyles including braids, cornrows and dreadlocks. The act, which is an acronym for Creating a Respectful and Open World for Natural Hair, reads in part: “Throughout United States history, society has used (in conjunction with skin color) hair texture and hairstyle to classify individuals on the basis of race. Like one’s skin color, one’s hair has served as a basis of race and national origin discrimination. Racial and national origin discrimination can and do occur because of long-standing racial and national origin biases and stereotypes associated with hair texture and style.”
It took multiple tries to get this bill passed in the House and that didn’t happen before Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), voting in opposition to it, derisively referred to it as the “bad hair” bill. While President Biden has indicated that he will sign it, the bill has yet to be passed by the Senate.
It’s no surprise that the things people do to themselves in the name of beauty are questionable. The cultural pressure to look a certain way is extreme but so are the rewards. It’s a pressure that Black women know well. They have borne the brunt of that stress, but no one is exempt. Yet if society opened itself wide to fully welcome the natural beauty of Black women, it would also mean that so many others — in large bodies, with an abundance of crow’s feet and perhaps no hair at all — could stop contorting themselves to squeeze through what is now the narrowest opening. | 2022-10-19T00:02:34Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Dangerous beauty - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/10/18/dangerous-beauty/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/10/18/dangerous-beauty/ |
Showing some swagger, the Yankees deny the Guardians and power into the ALCS
Giancarlo Stanton's first-inning home run helped the Yankees take control. (Frank Franklin II/AP)
NEW YORK — At times late in the season, the New York Yankees looked like a poor imitation of the juggernaut they’re supposed to be. Injuries meant stars shuffled in and out of the lineup, never quite aligning. They looked like a marathon runner who broke out to an early lead, then got passed by other, more confident contenders and limped toward a finish line that had never felt so far away.
But Tuesday, as they rolled past the Cleveland Guardians, 5-1, in Game 5 of the American League Division Series, the Yankees looked almost whole. They hit for the kind of power they were built to win with. Nestor Cortes gave them five painless innings on short rest. They seemed energized for October.
This Yankees core has not had as much October success as others have. Most Yankees generations pale to the past in comparison, of course. But by the end of Tuesday night, Aaron Judge was fifth all-time in Yankees postseason homers with 13, just behind Babe Ruth and just ahead of Reggie Jackson and Yogi Berra. Giancarlo Stanton moved into a tie for eighth with Jorge Posada. These Yankees seem to play every October. They will have more chances.
But what this Yankees team also has, for the first time since 2019, is a legitimate chance at the AL pennant — as they were supposed to have all along.
Someday — maybe as soon as Game 1 of the AL Championship Series against the Astros on Wednesday night in Houston — the Yankees’ bullpen will not be strong enough to keep them alive against elite competition. While the lineup has healed and the rotation has steadied, that group remains far from what the Yankees intended it to be.
But that day of reckoning was not Tuesday. On this day, the Yankees looked like the Yankees are supposed to look at this time of year — even though they weren’t supposed to be playing Tuesday at all.
This ALDS was defined by its schedule. It began Tuesday, Oct. 11, ahead of an unusual scheduled day off Wednesday. It rained Thursday, postponing Game 2. The teams went two days without playing, played three straight games between New York and Cleveland, then waited hours Monday night only to have Game 5 pushed to Tuesday — a change that came so late the Guardians had to split up the traveling party in hotels across the city because theirs was booked. For the first time in MLB history, a division series game and a championship series game — in the National League, where the Phillies and Padres were set for their opener — were scheduled for the same day.
The delay also meant both teams’ bullpens were rested. If they got an early lead, the Guardians could shorten the game to three or four innings before turning it over to a bullpen that had the fourth-lowest ERA and the sixth-best strikeout rate in the majors. They never got that lead.
Cleveland could have given the start to ace Shane Bieber on short rest, as the Yankees decided to do with Cortes after Monday’s rainout. Instead, the Guardians opted to start Aaron Civale, as they had planned to Monday.
To start the bottom of the first, Civale walked Gleyber Torres, struck out Judge, hit Anthony Rizzo and surrendered a low line drive to the opposite field to Stanton.
Stanton held his bat and hopped toward first base as he watched that ball hurtle over the fence in right-center, facing the dugout until he flung the bat away with something that has been noticeably absent from these Yankees lately: swagger. Four batters into the game, the Yankees had a 3-0 lead.
An inning later, after lefty Sam Hentges had taken over, Judge saw a hanging curveball. He didn’t miss it. He hit the kind of high-arcing shot to the opposite field — 113 mph off the bat with a 41-degree launch angle — that only he can. By the time it landed, Judge had his fourth home run in a winner-take-all game — the most in major league history — and the Yankees had a 4-0 lead.
The biggest swings in Yankees history came across the street at old Yankee Stadium: the House that Ruth Built, the place where Roger Maris pummeled his way into history, where Jackson became Mr. October, where Derek Jeter became Mr. November. But since they won the World Series in their first season here, the Yankees haven’t imprinted the unforgettable on this side of the street.
But Tuesday, with a familiar Bronx chill in the air, had the aura of more formidable Octobers past. The crowd even resurrected its old “Who’s your daddy?” chant, previously reserved for Pedro Martinez and those early 2000s October showdowns with the Boston Red Sox, for Guardians designated hitter Josh Naylor. Naylor, they recalled, had rocked a baby in Gerrit Cole’s direction after homering against him during the Yankees’ Game 4 win Sunday in Cleveland.
That absurdity aside, the Yankees seemed in their best October form until the third, when shortstop Oswaldo Cabrera collided with left fielder Aaron Hicks in pursuit of one of those bloop hits that so vexed the Yankees in this series. Hicks left with a knee injury, and the play left runners on first and second with one out. A walk loaded them for José Ramírez, who hit a sacrifice fly to center to give Cleveland its first run — the kind of play that can breathe life into a team like the Guardians, who are used to fighting back from the brink. But that was all Cleveland could muster.
When the afternoon began, Yankees Manager Aaron Boone was clear that he didn’t plan to use Cortes for long. He was on short rest, and winner-take-all games normally land in the hands of relievers sooner than later anyway. Five innings in, Cortes had thrown 61 pitches and worked twice through the order without much incident.
The Yankees do not have the kind of bullpen weaponry available that, say, the Guardians do. They do not even have the kind of firepower they did in the last week of the regular season, before an elbow injury to Scott Effross knocked him out of action. So the decision to turn the game over to the bullpen meant replacing what had looked like a sure thing with the unknown. Boone had to decide when to push the button.
He waited until the top of the sixth inning, after Rizzo’s RBI single had given his team a 5-1 edge. He turned the game over to Jonathan Loáisiga, who recently has been his most trustworthy reliever. For a moment, it appeared he might have pushed the button too soon.
The Guardians’ Amed Rosario hit a bouncing ball up the middle that Cabrera couldn’t corral. Ramírez followed with a single through the right side, the makings of the kind of rally that Cleveland used to get to this point. But Loáisiga got a groundball, a line drive and a strikeout to end an inning he finished with a fist pump and a leg kick. The bullpen never tempted fate again.
After all the waiting and all the injuries, all the first-half hope and all the second-half decline, the Yankees advanced to the ALCS for the first time since 2019. They didn’t have much time to celebrate. They were set to fly to Houston on Tuesday night in preparation for Wednesday’s Game 1, which was set to begin just over 24 hours after they determined they would be there in the first place. | 2022-10-19T00:07:02Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Yankees power past Guardians to win ALDS Game 5 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/18/yankees-alds-game-5-guardians/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/18/yankees-alds-game-5-guardians/ |
Rail car factory is hailed as a boon for Metro, Maryland
Local officials visit the site where the transit agency’s eighth generation of cars will be built
Justin George
Construction has begun on a $70 million Hitachi Rail factory in Washington County, Md. Supports lean against some of the 35,000-pound concrete panels being put in place. (Doug Kapustin for The Washington Post)
HAGERSTOWN, Md. — As wind swept over 35,000-pound concrete panels propped up around Hitachi Rail’s future assembly line in Western Maryland on Tuesday, gusts nearly toppled a large red Japanese daruma doll meant to signify good luck.
Metro General Manager Randy Clarke leaped from the crowd of dignitaries seated at the construction site outside Hagerstown to stop the doll’s runaway cart from tipping, saving the fierce-faced symbol of perseverance from a fall.
“We need good luck,” Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) said later, after helping to fill in the doll’s left eye with a black pen.
“Yes, we do,” Clarke said. When the factory opens in the first quarter of 2024, the other eye will be filled in, completing the symbolic tradition, company officials said.
Hogan joined state and local leaders, Metro officials, and Hitachi executives to mark the company’s $70 million investment in a rail-car assembly line that, at full capacity, will be able to build 20 cars each month. As Metro reels from a pandemic-era ridership drop and wheel problems that pulled its newest trains from service, the transit agency is looking to its eighth generation of rail car as its oldest models near the end of their life span.
Metro’s next rail cars to be built at new $70 million Maryland plant
Metro has ordered 256 of the 8000-series rail cars at an average of $2.15 million apiece, with an option to purchase up to 800. The first cars are expected to come off the assembly line and be handed to Metro in 2025.
Metro’s contract with Hitachi, which could total $2.2 billion if all 800 cars are purchased, includes a clause requiring cars to be assembled in the Mid-Atlantic region. Hitachi officials have said they plan to continue making rail cars at the Maryland site after Metro’s contract ends.
Hitachi officials said the 300,000-square-foot facility about 70 miles northwest of Washington will be its main rail-car factory in North America. The site will have up to 460 employees working directly for Hitachi as part of a broader economic lift to the area.
“The job-creation potential and associated economic benefits are an absolute game changer for this region and for the entire state,” Hogan said. “Hitachi’s success truly is Maryland’s success.”
The 41-acre site near cornfields and a FedEx distribution center has enough open space for an 800-yard test track. The insulated concrete walls stand halfway around what will be a cavernous workspace that will have raised rails, allowing workers to easily reach beneath the cars.
Tuesday’s event came at a low point for a transit agency struggling through safety and financial challenges amid a pandemic that has slashed ridership numbers in half. Clarke said the new cars will be an integral part of the rail system’s future, one that will see a rebound in passengers as the region and the nation continue to build a reliance on transit.
“I’m convinced the future’s bright,” he said. “We’re becoming more transit-oriented. We’re building closer to rail stations and bus stations. We’re reducing parking.”
While the future of Washington commuting may no longer involve trekking five days a week to a downtown federal office building, Clarke said that Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays are becoming increasingly crowded in the system, while demand for weekend service is recovering quickly.
The crowded trains have been a source of tension in recent days with the Washington Metrorail Safety Commission, the rail system’s regulatory agency, which has limited the number of 7000-series trains it can operate. Metro board members expressed frustration over a year-long rail-car shortage that transit officials say has exacerbated budget shortfalls.
Clarke said Tuesday that Metro is working to restore riders’ confidence in the system amid long waits for trains.
“I ask people to have a little patience with us,” he said.
As Metro slowly returns 7000-series trains to the system, it’s also preparing for their successor.
The aluminum shells for the 8000-series cars will be shipped from Italy to the Maryland factory, then outfitted with components sourced from across the country and around the world, company officials said.
The new cars will have heated floors, WiFi service, phone-charging ports, additional straps to grab for passengers standing near doors, easily changeable digital maps that can alert passengers to system issues, and more cameras inside and out to improve security and help train operators. The rail cars will also be more able to withstand crashes than the 1980s-era models they will replace, transit officials said.
The cars in Metro’s first order are slated to replace its 2000- and 3000-series cars, the system’s oldest models. Rail cars have a life span of about 40 years. The cars will be Metro’s eighth generation of rail car since the transit system opened 46 years ago.
Designed to match the all-silver 7000 series, the 8000-series cars will have similar bench seating and wide aisles, as well as upgrades including improved braking and increased ventilation and filtration systems to combat future pandemics, in addition to ordinary colds and the flu, Metro officials said.
Each car will be able to seat about 68 passengers. Hitachi Rail said the cars will be quieter and more energy efficient than Metro’s previous models.
Metro’s next generation of rail cars has been overshadowed by the plight of its 7000-series cars, which account for 60 percent of its fleet. That series, built by Kawasaki Rail between 2014 and 2020, was suspended more than a year ago by the safety commission.
Metro selects Hitachi Rail to build its next-generation rail car
While investigating a Blue Line derailment that occurred in October 2021, the National Transportation Safety Board discovered a defect in some cars that pushes wheels apart on their axle, creating instability. The cause of the slow-progressing defect hasn’t been determined, although investigators say several factors are probably involved. The safety commission has allowed Metro to operate up to 160 cars daily from the series under conditions that include regular wheel screenings.
Metro is planning for wheels on the series to be screened indefinitely. The transit agency is testing automated wayside inspection systems that officials hope can screen wheels instantly and on a regular basis, and eventually allow all 748 cars to be reinstated.
The year-long suspension continues to hobble the transit system as Metro scrambles to find enough trains. The agency this month said it wouldn’t be able to simultaneously reopen six stations next week that were temporarily closed for a construction project and also open the 11.5-mile Silver Line extension this year without more trains.
Metro’s long search for a manufacturer of the 8000 series began in late 2018 and was marked by protests from lobbyist groups, overtures from a Chinese rail manufacturer and the passage of a federal law that limited whom the transit agency could partner with.
In selecting Hitachi, Metro is also turning to a former partner: Three of its first four models were built by Breda, a company later sold to Hitachi Rail, a division of Tokyo-based Hitachi Ltd. Hitachi Rail has a U.S. headquarters in Pittsburgh and holds contracts to build a new rail system in Honolulu and rail cars for transit systems in Miami and Baltimore.
Strolling not far from an orange Hitachi earthmover and towering crane, Joe Pozza, president of Hitachi Rail North America, said he hopes the nation’s surge of transit funding under last year’s federal infrastructure bill will help to keep the Washington County site busy far into the future.
“We’re looking to get ingrained here pretty quickly and be successful together,” Pozza said. | 2022-10-19T00:24:20Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Metro's 8000-series rail cars a boon for Maryland, transit agency - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2022/10/18/metro-hitachi-hagerstown-8000-series/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2022/10/18/metro-hitachi-hagerstown-8000-series/ |
James McDivitt, commander of pivotal NASA missions, dies at 93
The astronaut’s missions, including the flight featuring the first spacewalk by an American, helped the space agency eventually get to the moon
James McDivitt during the Apollo 9 mission in 1969. (NASA/Reuters)
James A. McDivitt, who served as commander in two pivotal NASA missions in the early, awe-inspiring days of spaceflight — including the Gemini launch that featured the first American spacewalk — died Oct. 14 at a hospital in Tucson. He was 93.
NASA announced the death but did not cite a specific cause.
In 1962, shortly after President John F. Kennedy delivered his “We choose to go to the moon” speech declaring that space “deserves the best of all mankind,” Mr. McDivitt was plucked from an Air Force test-flight team to become an astronaut in NASA’s Gemini program.
Three years later, Mr. McDivitt and his best friend, former test-flight pilot Edward H. White II, launched in what NASA called “the program’s most ambitious flight to date,” flying for a record four days, during which White became the first American to walk in space. (A Soviet astronaut walked in space earlier that year.)
The Gemini 4 mission captivated America, with families gathering around their televisions for updates and to eavesdrop as the astronauts checked on their worried but thrilled families on Earth.
“You being good?” Mr. McDivitt asked his then-wife, Patricia, in one exchange.
“I’m always good,” she said. “Are you being good?”
Mr. McDivitt replied: “I haven’t much choice. All I can do is sleep and look out the window.”
But Mr. McDivitt, in getting a few laughs from viewers back home, was underselling just how important — and dangerous — his work was for the space program. The Gemini 4 flight gathered crucial engineering and medical data that NASA scientists used in preparation for the Apollo moon program.
In 1969, Mr. McDivitt was the commander of the Apollo 9 mission, a 10-day flight during which the crew tested a prototype of the lunar module that Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong used to land on the moon — a historic event that overshadowed Mr. McDivitt’s mission.
“I could see why,” Mr. McDivitt said in an oral history of his career that NASA conducted in 1999. “You know, it didn’t land on the moon.”
James Alton McDivitt was born in Chicago on June 10, 1929, and grew up in Kalamazoo, Mich. He enrolled in junior college and then joined the Air Force in 1951 despite never having been on a plane.
“I’d already joined the Air Force, was in the Air Force, was accepted for pilot training before I had my first ride,” Mr. McDivitt said in the oral history. “So, fortunately, I liked it!”
Mr. McDivitt flew 145 combat missions in the Korean War, after which he went to the University of Michigan, where he studied aeronautical engineering and graduated at the top of his class in 1959. There, he met White, who was also an Air Force pilot.
They became test pilots, then astronauts, and then were paired together on the Gemini 4 mission in part because of their tight relationship.
On the morning of June 3, 1965, they arrived at the No. 19 launchpad on Florida’s Cape Canaveral and were strapped into the tiny cockpit.
“The Gemini was very, very tight,” Mr. McDivitt said in a 2019 interview with Astronomy magazine. “It was extremely tight — you couldn’t stretch all the way out. You were in the seat, and that’s where you stayed.”
At 10:16 a.m., Gemini 4 shot into the sky as millions of people watched on television. “Looks like this baby is going,” a CBS television reporter said.
When it was time for White’s spacewalk, the astronauts encountered a hitch — the door was stuck. “Oh my God,” Mr. McDivitt said out loud “It’s not opening!”
He began to wonder what would happen if they got the door open but then couldn’t get it closed to land. (“You’re dead,” Mr. McDivitt predicted in the oral history. “… You’ll burn up on the way down for sure.”)
The door finally opened, and out White went. The astronauts were in awe.
“You look beautiful, Ed,” Mr. McDivitt said on his radio.
“I feel like a million dollars,” White replied.
Gemini 4 splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Florida on June 7. The astronauts were taken aboard an aircraft carrier and congratulated over the phone by President Lyndon B. Johnson. Ticker-tape parades followed.
After flying the Apollo 9 mission, Mr. McDivitt remained with NASA as manager of the Apollo program. He retired from the Air Force and NASA in 1972 as a brigadier general, then entered the private sector.
White was killed in a 1967 fire at Cape Canaveral during preflight tests for the Apollo 1 mission. “My father was absolutely devastated by it,” said Mr. McDivitt’s son Patrick.
Mr. McDivitt’s Gemini 4 flight was notable not just for the data it produced that helped NASA eventually get to the moon. While on board, Mr. McDivitt took photographs of what he initially believed was a UFO.
“I looked outside, just glanced up, and there was something out there,” he said in the oral history. “It had a geometrical shape similar to a beer can or a pop can, and with a little thing like maybe like a pencil or something sticking out of it. That relative size, dimensionally. It was all white.”
The film was examined by NASA, which determined that whatever Mr. McDivitt had seen wasn’t a spacecraft. He later concluded he had probably just seen strange reflections of bolts in the windows.
Still, the UFO world and pop culture could never quite let go of what Mr. McDivitt thought he saw. The astronaut was constantly asked about it.
“I became a world-renowned expert in UFOs,” he joked in the oral history. “Unfortunately.”
The astronaut even appeared as himself on an episode of “The Brady Bunch” in which Peter and Bobby Brady are tricked into thinking they saw a UFO.
Mr. McDivitt’s first marriage, to Patricia Haas, ended in divorce. Survivors include his wife of 37 years, the former Judith Odell; four children from his first marriage, Michael McDivitt, Ann Walz, Patrick McDivitt and Katie Pierce; two stepsons, Joe Bagby and Jeff Bagby; 12 grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren.
In histories of Mr. McDivitt’s triumphs in space, the astronaut often speaks of how difficult it was to get his best friend back in the cockpit after the spacewalk — not because of the hard-to-open door but because the moment was magical for both of them.
“Come on,” Mr. McDivitt said over his radio. “Let’s get back in here before it gets dark.”
His best friend, still bouncing around in space, replied, “It’s the saddest moment of my life.” | 2022-10-19T00:55:19Z | www.washingtonpost.com | James McDivitt, commander of pivotal NASA missions, dies at 93 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/10/18/james-mcdivitt-dies-key-astronaut-in-early-nasa-missions/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/10/18/james-mcdivitt-dies-key-astronaut-in-early-nasa-missions/ |
A back-and-forth over guns was one of many fiery exchanges in the debate
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Rep. Val Demings (D-Fla.) conclude their televised debate with a handshake at Duncan Theater on the campus of Palm Beach State College in Palm Beach County, Fla., on Tuesday, Oct. 18, 2022. (Thomas Cordy/The Palm Beach Post via AP, Pool)
Sen. Marco Rubio and Rep. Val Demings of Florida clashed heatedly over gun restrictions and abortion at a debate Tuesday where Rubio disavowed one measure he embraced four years ago after a deadly school shooting in Florida — a law banning 18-year-olds from buying assault-style rifles.
Rubio, the two-term Republican incumbent, said days after the mass shooting in Parkland, Fla. — at an event with student survivors — that he would support such age restrictions as well as expanded background checks on gun purchases. But at his first and only debate with Democratic challenger Demings, the senator said the law “doesn’t work” and also claimed background checks would not have stopped the litany of shootings the candidates argued over.
Demings said the Republican has done “nothing to help address gun violence” and accused him of making “promises that you had no intentions to keep” to the parents of the Parkland massacre, when a 19-year-old killed 17 people. A jury last week sentenced the shooter to life in prison, opting against the death penalty in a case that spurred bipartisan calls for actions to prevent more killings.
“How long will you watch people being gunned down in first grade, fourth grade, high school, college, church, synagogue, a grocery store, a movie theater, a mall and a night club — and do nothing?” Demings said, pointing her finger as her voice rose.
The back-and-forth was one of many fiery exchanges in the debate, where Demings said Rubio “has never run anything but his mouth” and Rubio accused the Democrat of getting little done as a legislator. Rubio is favored to win, but polling has shown Demings, a former Orlando police chief, within striking distance as she vastly outspends her opponent, pouring more than $35 million into ads this year.
Defending his stance on gun regulations, Rubio pointed to recent shootings in which he said the assailants had shown signs that they would take up arms. He blamed Democrats for not supporting his proposed version of a red-flag law that would take away firearms from people deemed dangerous. And he criticized the gun-control legislation that Congress passed this year with some Republican support, calling it “crazy” and suggesting it would allow guns to be seized in too many situations.
Disputing that he had failed to address the issue, Rubio pointed to a Department of Homeland Security website with school safety resources. Demings ridiculed that as insufficient.
“He thought he would get a pass!” she said.
The candidates also tangled over abortion. Asked whether he would vote for a federal abortion ban without exceptions, Rubio repeatedly declined to answer directly and said no such legislation was politically feasible. He has previously said that he does “not believe that the dignity and the worth of human life is tied to the circumstances of their conception” — seemingly ruling out exceptions in cases of rape and incest — while also acknowledging that most Americans do not share his view.
On Tuesday he reiterated that he is “a hundred percent pro-life” but said every bill he has ever backed included exceptions because “that’s what can pass.” He recently backed a proposed federal ban on abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy and defended that measure as reasonable and in line with many other countries.
Demings said, “As a police detective who investigated cases of rape and incest, no senator, I don’t think it’s okay for a 10 -year-old girl to be raped and to carry the seed of her rapist.”
Rubio then pressed the moderator to ask Demings what limits on abortion she would support. She responded that she supported abortion access “up to the time of [fetal] viability,” about 24 weeks into pregnancy.
Throughout the debate, Rubio struck some contrasts with fellow Republicans. He argued he “took on” his party to expand child tax credits. And he said he wouldn’t support his colleague Sen. Rick Scott’s (R-Fla.) proposal to have Congress review Social Security and Medicare every five years.
As part of a 12-point plan, Scott has proposed to “sunset” all federal programs after five years, meaning they would expire unless renewed. “If a law is worth keeping, Congress can pass it again,” Scott says in his proposal. This would include Social Security and Medicare programs.
Multiple Republican leaders have dismissed Scott’s proposal, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). Democrats this campaign season have used the proposal as an attack against their Republican opponents, warning voters that if the GOP takes control of the House and the Senate, they will put Medicare and Social Security “on the chopping block.”
Rubio was asked whether he supports putting these federal entitlements on the “chopping block every five years.”
“No, that’s not my plan,” he said. “That is Senator Scott; he’s doing a great job.”
Asked whether he would accept this year’s election results, Rubio said that “Florida has good election laws” and defended GOP-led voting restrictions passed in other states. Pressed to answer directly, he reiterated: “We have great laws in Florida, absolutely,” then — with more prodding — said “sure” before criticizing election laws in other states such as Pennsylvania.
Rubio has not embraced former president Donald Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen. But his campaign did not respond earlier when The Washington Post asked candidates in this year’s most closely watched races whether they would accept their election’s outcome.
Rubio criticized Demings’ support for a national voting rights law that he and other Republicans have assailed as a “federal takeover” of elections. He defended voter ID requirements, saying “I’m a minority, I never felt like producing an ID disadvantages my ability to vote." Demings suggested the idea of making sure that every person can vote “scares the senator to death.” | 2022-10-19T03:48:52Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Marco Rubio backs off age limit for rifles at Florida Senate debate with Val Demings - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/18/florida-senate-debate-rubio-demings/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/18/florida-senate-debate-rubio-demings/ |
Ask Amy: My ex-husband’s niece refuses to invite me to her wedding
During our 30-year marriage we lived three to four hours from his family and visited at major holidays. I was present in Clare’s life from the time of her birth and during all the years of our marriage. I have seen her at my daughter’s wedding, graduations, funerals and on Facebook over these years.
Her mother, my former sister-in-law, wanted me included, but the bride refused. My adult children will be traveling a long distance to attend this wedding, just as Clare attended my daughter’s wedding five years ago — along with many members of my ex-husband’s family.
Although my feelings are very hurt by this slight, I’ve made peace with the fact that a bride can invite whomever she wants. Now I am unsure how to navigate this going forward.
Should I send a card? Act like it never happened? Or do I tell this niece that I am sorry she has held onto this resentment that I was never aware of, and wish her well?
This niece and her parents will be invited to my son’s out-of-town wedding next year, and she attended an engagement party this spring. I saw the parents of the bride at a family funeral just last week and didn’t bring it up.
Aunt: I assume that you’ve arrived at one important destination, in that you no longer would even consider attending a wedding where the bride so steadfastly does not want you there.
Dear Amy: These days, it seems as if Americans can’t agree on anything. I have a bunch of close family members who have extreme political views. I’m more moderate.
I’m looking for a good one-liner to help stop disagreements politely. The cliche line is “Let’s agree to disagree.”
Stumped: I like “We agree that we have different beliefs.” I suggest that you add a line to that: “ … but can we all also agree to change the subject to a more neutral topic?”
Harmonious: You’re dodging a major trigger for breaking up. Good for you.
I’m working on a project to follow up on previously published advice. If you’d like to participate, please contact me at askamy@amydickinson.com with “Update” in the subject line. | 2022-10-19T04:28:03Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Ask Amy: My ex-husband's niece refuses to invite me to her wedding - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/10/19/ask-amy-niece-wedding-invite/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/10/19/ask-amy-niece-wedding-invite/ |
Carolyn Hax: To expectant mom, a husband giving labor support ‘makes no sense’
Dear Carolyn: My husband and I are expecting our first child. My husband is an American. I immigrated to the United States as a college student.
We are at a stalemate about my birthing plan. In my country, the father is not usually present for the birth. Normally, the father waits outside while a female relative or friend provides the mother with support. Our hospital allows only one support person.
I want to have either my mom or my sister as my support person and have my husband come in right after the baby is born. I’m not comfortable having someone who has absolutely no experience giving birth whatsoever as my support person. That just makes no sense to me.
The birthing classes cemented my opinion. My mom and my sister are both willing to do it, but neither one feels strongly about being there. My husband is appalled that he will “miss the birth” in favor of someone who doesn’t care about witnessing it. I’ve tried to explain that it’s not a spectator sport, but he says he’s being unfairly excluded. I don’t know what to do.
Expecting: As the one birthing the child, you are the decision-maker. You run your own body and care (no matter what your state government tells you). If I must choose from: (a) You decide; (b) He decides; and (c) Anyone else decides, then it’s (a). Slam dunk. You get to be “unfair,” and we all, your husband included, need to hear and respect that.
But I can’t support your making this decision without even trying to understand a husband and father’s emotional ache for inclusion.
Declaring it’s “not a spectator sport” is shockingly dismissive of your husband’s feelings and his investment in the family you two have created.
As you say yourself in arguing for a female attendant, the person at your side is a participant, not a spectator. A good support person holds your hand, keeps your spirits up, plays your music, reads your mood, advocates for you with the medical staff, keeps you company for hourrrrrs in most cases — and, yes, shares with you the unforgettable moment of the birth of your — that’s the plural “your,” not singular — child.
Someone who has never been in labor is capable not only of doing this, but also of being better at it than someone who has given birth. It’s the meaning as much as the mileage. The medical staff has the labor and birth experience covered.
Being together through this is often profound for a couple. Stories to retell decades later. That’s not a trifle.
Furthermore: You want him to be an involved, invested parent and spouse. He can still be that, certainly, after missing the birth — even if he’s smarting from his exclusion, his showing up fully for his family is a moral imperative — but his living this transcendent moment on the wrong side of a door you shut on him is not the most fortuitous start.
If you’re going to deny him one of his life’s singular moments, then make sure your reason is, “I foresee it adding unhealthy stress to my labor,” and not, “My country doesn’t do this.”
But, again — not until you’ve really heard him. Feel his need. Respect it. If you can’t, then ask him to talk you through it — if nothing else, so you get why “spectator” is such a face-slap and you don’t use it again.
Better, though, that you lower your defenses enough to sympathize.
At least then, no matter what you decide, he won’t start parenthood with the chill of not being heard. | 2022-10-19T04:28:09Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Carolyn Hax: Husband's support during labor doesn't work for expectant mom - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/10/19/carolyn-hax-labor-husband-room/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/10/19/carolyn-hax-labor-husband-room/ |
This undated photo released by the FBI shows Kristin Smart, the California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo student who disappeared in 1996. Paul Flores, the last man seen with Smart, was convicted on Tuesday of killing the college freshman. (AP)
Flores’s father, Ruben Flores who had been accused of helping his son conceal Smart’s remains, was found not guilty of being an accessory to the murder. Smart’s body has not been found.
“Without Kristin, there’s no joy or happiness,” Stan Smart, her father, told reporters after the verdict. “This has been an agonizingly long journey, with more downs than ups,” he said, before thanking prosecutors for securing the guilty verdict for the younger Flores. But he said that with the senior Flores acquitted, the Smarts’ “quest for justice would continue.”
Paul Flores, 45, faces 25 years to life in prison, prosecutors said. He is scheduled to be sentenced on Dec. 9 at the Monterey County Superior Court in California. His attorney, Robert Sanger, declined to comment, saying “the matter is still pending.”
Ruben Flores, 81, told reporters Tuesday after the verdict that the evidence against him and his son had “too much made-up stuff,” and that the ruling was based on “feelings instead of facts.” He expressed sorrow to the Smarts, saying he believed they didn’t get answers about what had happened to her. His attorney did not immediately reply to a request for comment Tuesday night.
20 years after Kristin Smart vanished, authorities unearth ‘items of interest’ in campus dig
After Smart’s disappearance, Paul Flores was initially designated a person of interest by authorities. He had a black eye at the time that he told investigators that he had got during a basketball game with friends, who later contradicted his statement, the Associated Press reported. He then changed his story, saying he had bumped his head while working on his car.
Then last year, after searching his father’s home, the San Luis Obispo County Sheriff’s Office instead described Paul Flores as “the prime suspect” in the disappearance.
After the verdict Tuesday, Sheriff Ian Parkison in a statement thanked Smart’s family for their “patience and support” during the long investigation and case. “I made a vow to them many years ago, that we would not let Kristin’s memory be forgotten. Nor would we let her killer go unpunished. … But there is no true justice until Kristin is reunited with her family. This investigation will not be closed until we find Kristin.” | 2022-10-19T05:11:34Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Kristin Smart verdict: Paul Flores convicted of 1996 murder - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/10/18/kristin-smart-murder-trial-paul-flores/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/10/18/kristin-smart-murder-trial-paul-flores/ |
Investors in the French retail group Casino Guichard-Perrachon SA, and parent Rallye SA, may be forgiven for thinking they’ve been here before.
Over the past five years, Casino has embarked on a €4.5 billion ($4.4 billion) disposal program and completed several refinancings. Meanwhile, Rallye — the investment vehicle of Casino chairman Jean-Charles Naouri and controlling shareholder in Casino — agreed to a restructuring plan with the French courts in early 2020. This gave it 10 years to pay back its then €2.9 billion of borrowings.
Yet shares in Casino fell to a fresh low last week after Standard & Poor’s cut its credit rating.
The difference this time around is that there are few easy options left for the company to pay off the about €5 billion of net debt in its French business. It’s already engaged in an extensive disposal program, agreed to sale and leaseback deals for French supermarket properties and refinanced its debt several times.
To ensure it can meet about €3 billion of bonds maturing over the next three years, it must consider selling more assets — with its holdings in Latin America the most likely candidate. Alternatively, it could seek an investor for its French supermarkets, its famous Parisienne chain Monoprix and its convenience store Franprix, or it could strike a deal with rival Carrefour SA.
While Casino’s financing structure is convoluted, it owns quality assets that are in tune with how consumers want to shop, which is in smaller stores and online. Although its retail businesses were hit hard by the pandemic and Paris remained sluggish long after economies reopened, the city is buzzing again and third-quarter results next week should reflect an influx of tourist spending.
But the intervening period took its toll on free cash flow. That’s problematic because Casino had net debt in its French retail business of about €5.1 billion at June 30, and just under €7.5 billion across all of its operations. This dwarfs the company’s market value, which is now less than €900 million. Debt remains stubbornly high despite €4 billion of disposals over the past five years.
There is also an impact on Rallye: It relies on dividend income from Casino to service its own debt, and Casino cannot pay a dividend until it has effectively halved the total debt in its French business.
Casino should be able to repay the about €200 million of bonds falling due in January. It recently raised €600 million from the sale of its GreenYellow renewable energy business, and it hopes to bring in another €500 million from disposals by the end of 2023. These proceeds should help meet the about €1.2 billion of bonds maturing in 2024. (It has also been buying back the debt.)
But it has about €1.8 billion more maturing in 2025. Unless cash flow improves drastically, that likely means more disposals. Casino is rejigging its holdings in Latin America so that it will have stakes in three listed entities, estimated to be worth over €2 billion.
A more controversial choice would be to sell a stake in Monoprix and Franprix. The French food retail assets are now held in a single holding company, owned 100% by Casino, which could facilitate outside investment in the unit. But this may not be straightforward. Some of the chains’ real estate has been sold off, while some of Casino’s loans are secured against its French assets.
That leaves room for a deal — if Casino can find a partner.
Czech billionaire Daniel Kretinsky’s Vesa Equity Investment Sarl still has a 10% stake in the company. Then there is Carrefour. The two retailers flirted with a merger in 2018, and again a year later.
Since then, Carrefour has explored other potential tie-ups — a sale to Canada’s Alimentation Couche-Tard Inc. and a potential takeover by domestic rival Auchan last year. Neither came to fruition. But Carrefour has a duty to its shareholders to explore any deal that may be beneficial, and Auchan is still keen to consolidate. So perhaps it’s time to reconsider Casino. For all of its financial complexity and mountain of debt, it owns two desirable French retailers.
If Naouri had followed contemporaries Bernard Arnault and Francois Pinault into luxury, he would likely be enjoying the resilience of top-end spenders, exemplified by LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton SE’s better-than-expected results last week. Instead, Naouri is selling groceries in what may become a more difficult environment.
He got out of a tight spot three years ago when Rallye agreed to the debt restructuring. Casino also started to make a dent in its borrowings before the pandemic, so there is hope that it can find a way forward this time around. Yet even if that happens, one thing is certain: It won’t be as straightforward as selling Louis Vuitton handbags to the rich. | 2022-10-19T05:29:07Z | www.washingtonpost.com | France’s Casino Must Spin the Wheel of Debt Again - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/frances-casino-must-spin-the-wheel-of-debt-again/2022/10/19/b59888d4-4f6b-11ed-ada8-04e6e6bf8b19_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/frances-casino-must-spin-the-wheel-of-debt-again/2022/10/19/b59888d4-4f6b-11ed-ada8-04e6e6bf8b19_story.html |
Throughout the eight months of the Ukraine invasion, Vladimir Putin has stressed that his war is an existential struggle for Russia, a fight for a new world order. Now, important Western policy thinkers appear to be coming to the same conclusion: The narrative is shifting from helping Ukraine win to shaping a postwar global order that would sideline Russia, rendering it unable to cause further trouble.
This shift challenges the conventional wisdom that the war will end with some kind of negotiated compromise — before or after the Putin regime falls. Many in the West — and not just in Central Europe, where the belief that Russia never changes has always been widespread — will argue that Russia needs to be stripped of its oversized international role. And some will say, increasingly openly, that it must be brought to its knees, like Nazi Germany or its ally Japan, before it can be rebuilt and reintegrated into the world.
French political scientist and civil servant Nicolas Tenzer eloquently laid out this argument on Substack. It was a mistake, he wrote, to try to re-engage with a post-Communist Russia based on an “illusion born of the hopes of 1991” — a mistake made by stupid and corrupt politicians. The West, Tenzer argued, should not be shy about setting its own war goals, even if it’s not officially part of the Ukraine war — and those maximalist goals should include a Russian pullback from every country and region where the Putin regime currently has a presence, including not just Ukraine and Georgia, but also Syria, Belarus, Armenia, the Central Asian states and the African and Latin American nations where the Wagner Group — a private military company linked to Moscow — operates. According to the argument, Russia should also lose its veto in the UN Security Council, all access to the Western financial system and its influence networks in the West. A “semi-defeat,” Tanzer wrote, would still be a victory for Russia because it would retain its global ambitions; Russia needs to be turned into a “normal country” — “the opposite of an empire.” It cannot be transformed from the inside alone.
Fiona Hill, one of the most respected Russia experts in the US and a former Russia guru in the Trump administration, offered a less radical version of the same argument in a recent interview with Politico. She also called for Russia to lose its Security Council veto. The war, she said, isn’t really about Ukraine. “This is a great power conflict, the third great power conflict in the European space in a little over a century,” Hill was quoted as saying. “It’s the end of the existing world order. Our world is not going to be the same as it was before.”
In this paradigm — as in Putin’s — Western interests go well beyond the fall of the his regime. The strategic goal is a Russia permanently diminished. However, even as his troops suffer one battlefield setback after another, Putin is still shaping the discourse simply because Western advocates of his “strategic defeat” can’t articulate how it can actually happen.
What exactly would stripping Russia of its UN veto achieve except a Security Council majority that could authorize the direct involvement of a Western force in the Ukraine war? Putin is not to be stopped by mere condemnation, as numerous General Assembly votes that went overwhelmingly against him have shown. And how does Russia relinquish its military presence throughout the former Soviet Union and in parts of the developing world if it is not decisively defeated in a broader conflict than the Ukraine war? If it is merely forced to retreat from some, or even all, Ukrainian territories, it would still have the size and the resources to maintain influence elsewhere and prepare for another go at Ukraine, too.
Literally no one, even the most radical proponents of stripping Russia of the remnants of its prominent post-World War II role, is suggesting a full-scale war with Russia. Even Tenzer admits as much. “By saying that we are not at war — we are certainly not suggesting that Western leaders declare loudly that we are — we put ourselves in a kind of frame of mind that prevents us from formulating war aims,” he writes. The disclaimer is important: He’s not actually calling on Western governments to declare war on Russia — but he advocates going for results that can only be achieved in a full-scale war.
That taboo against direct military confrontation is a cold-war remnant: It rests on the idea that Russia would respond by nuking the world. Whether or not it actually could, the fear is powerful enough that no responsible political expert wants to cross that line — for now.
What this means is that any prospect for a new world order in which Russia becomes a meek, contrite, post-imperial state now rests on the shoulders of Ukrainians. The hope and expectation is that they will be able to defeat the Russian military without getting nuked in response — or, what goes unsaid is that if they get nuked, their martyrdom will serve the greater goal of turning Russia into a complete pariah and thus permanently weakening it.
For all the Western support that comes in the form of ammunition, training and equipment, Ukrainians are still fighting alone: It’s their soldiers who die, and it’s their country that is being methodically destroyed by Russian strikes on cities and infrastructure. And for all their success on the battlefield, the outcome of the war is far from decided. As Russia goes for the “Syrian option” of trying to bomb Ukraine into the Middle Ages, Ukraine’s advantages in motivation and tactical creativity may not be as effective as they were during the recent counteroffensive. Cynical, poorly armed and trained, Russia’s mobilized soldiers are nevertheless going to make it harder for Kyiv to break through the invaders’ defenses, especially during the winter. And if Ukrainians do win, they have no interest in conquering and “denazifying” Russia: They just want their own country back, and they have a lot of rebuilding to do.
The flaw in the “strategic defeat” logic is that, while Russia’s nuclear capability is seen as the joker in Putin’s hand, there are no practical means for the West to render Russia small and pliant. To achieve the maximum goals, the West would need to ignore Putin’s nuclear leverage and put boots on the ground. Because, again in this perspective, unless Russia is similarly subjugated, it cannot be “denazified” the way Germany and Japan shed their imperialism thanks to decades of occupation, forced demilitarization and externally imposed political structures.
The recourse is to accept that Russia is not out of second chances yet and that it can still change from the inside. It’s naive to expect a liberal democracy to emerge immediately from the ruins of Putin’s regime — a far-right government acting out of an even deeper resentiment is a more realistic scenario. It’s equally naive, however, to expect that a country of Russia’s size and stamina will somehow slink away if the West applies tougher diplomacy or hardens the already unprecedented economic sanctions.
What Russians must be offered is a vision of inclusion, not hopeless, eternal defeat; we need the kind of optimistic prospect Germany and Japan faced as they reformed. Uncompromising toughness that draws the line at direct military interference is as hypocritical a stance as that taken by Putin’s open appeasers in the last two decades. The only future that could unite and motivate the ragtag Russian resistance to Putin, the war, Russian imperialism and totalitarianism — both inside and, increasingly, outside the country — is one in which Russia is part of the West, with all the constraints and benefits that involves.
• Putin’s War Has Come Home to Russia: Leonid Bershidsky
• We Can’t Give Putin His Off-Ramp: Andreas Kluth | 2022-10-19T05:29:38Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The Wishful Theory of ‘Strategic Russian Defeat’ - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/the-wishful-theory-of-strategic-russian-defeat/2022/10/19/fe3dacd2-4f6a-11ed-ada8-04e6e6bf8b19_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/the-wishful-theory-of-strategic-russian-defeat/2022/10/19/fe3dacd2-4f6a-11ed-ada8-04e6e6bf8b19_story.html |
People peek inside one of the gates at Kanjuruhan Stadium in East Java, Indonesia, where a stampede killed more than 100 people on Oct. 1. (Dicky Bisinglasi/AP)
Indonesia said it will demolish a stadium where more than 130 soccer fans, including many children, were killed in a deadly stampede earlier this month, as it seeks to rebuild its reputation as a safe host nation ahead of the under-20 men’s World Cup in 2023.
The country’s president, Joko Widodo, made the announcement following a meeting with the leader of soccer’s global governing body, FIFA, in the Indonesian capital, Jakarta, on Tuesday. The incident at Kanjuruhan stadium in East Java was one of the world’s deadliest stadium disasters, and trained a spotlight on crowd control and safety standards in the Southeast Asian country ahead of the global competition.
“This is a football country, a country where football is a passion for over 150 million people,” said FIFA President Gianni Infantino after the meeting. “We owe it to them that when they see a match they are safe and secure.”
FIFA bars “crowd control gas” from being used inside stadiums and mandates that exit gates and emergency exits remain unobstructed at all times. It also requires event organizers to have an emergency plan in the event of a major incident, and to cap the number of spectators at a level at which they can be safely accommodated.
Officials found a number of issues with the stadium, which was reportedly completed in 2004, including that there was no emergency exit that could be accessed by spectators. Some 42,000 tickets to the deadly Oct. 1 soccer match between Arema FC and Persebaya Surabaya had been sold even though officials had wanted to cap the attendance at 38,000 people, according to an Indonesian minister, Mohammad Mahfud Mahmodin.
The Kanjuruhan stadium wasn’t on the proposed youth World Cup lineup, but FIFA has committed to supporting Indonesia in a nationwide overhaul of stadium safety measures, Infantino said. The stadium will be rebuilt to FIFA standards, according to Widodo.
Six people, including several police officers and soccer officials, are facing criminal charges after police fired a barrage of tear gas munitions following this month’s match, prompting a fatal crush as fans made a panicked run for the exits.
Several hundred fans came onto the field after Arema FC, the home team, lost 3-2 to their local rivals — and were beaten back by uniformed officers carrying batons and riot shields. At least 132 people died and nearly 600 were injured, 96 of them seriously, according to a government report into the incident.
A Washington Post investigation showed police fired at least 40 rounds of munitions at the crowd within a 10-minute span, in violation of national protocols and international security guidelines for soccer matches.
Hundreds were killed or injured in a violent clash at a soccer stadium in Indonesia on Oct. 1 after security personnel beat back fans charging onto the field. (Video: Reuters)
Many fans were either trampled to death or fatally crushed against walls and metal gates because some of the exits were closed, The Post reported. The Indonesian National Police did not respond to repeated requests for comment on the investigation.
The police officers and Indonesian soccer officials could face prison terms of up to five years if found guilty of negligence for ordering or allowing the tear gas to be fired, the Associated Press reported. Human rights organizations have condemned the use of tear gas.
Infantino’s visit was scheduled after the deadly incident to discuss ways to improve safety and security measures ahead of the World Cup, FIFA said.
In the stampede’s aftermath, Infantino described it as a “dark day for all involved in football.” | 2022-10-19T06:29:55Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Indonesia to raze Kanjuruhan stadium, site of fatal soccer stampede - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/19/indonesia-soccer-stampede-stadium-demolish-kanjuruhan/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/19/indonesia-soccer-stampede-stadium-demolish-kanjuruhan/ |
Dispatch from Italy
Italy has 334 ‘most beautiful’ villages. Can their beauty survive?
The village of Abbateggio is nestled in the hills of Abruzzo, east of Rome. (Chico Harlan/The Washington Post)
ABBATEGGIO, Italy — Which village is the most beautiful in Italy?
At this point I’ve been to dozens of hill towns across Italy, including 20 on the Most Beautiful List, and often I get the impression that their residents are the last courageous holdouts, fighting for something that is already half gone.
Romans mastered aqueducts. Now Italy is just trying to fix its leaky pipes.
Even as I got out of the car, the town felt fully alive. Music and laughter echoed off the stone houses. Front doors were swung open, revealing shops selling locally made digestivi, olive oil and local grains; there was even an art gallery. Mayors and visitors from other Most Beautiful villages made the rounds, and an 86-year-old local man sat on a bench playing the accordion, right next to a bottle of chianti, with pours being offered to anybody who stopped by.
With excitement, another Abbateggio man, Giacinto De Thomasis, took me on a tour through the oldest part of the village, cutting this way and that, through little passageways he said he knew from playing hide-and-seek as a child. We came to a narrow stairwell that sliced between two homes, and at the end of the stairs there was nothing but a drop-off and a green panorama — the end of town. De Thomasis pointed out the fortified exterior of the village.
“This area,” he said, “used to be a castle.”
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But whatever it used to be, the houses on either side of the stairwell were now in disrepair. Same with a home across the street, its old wooden door swung half-open, decades of rubble inside. Up and down the street hung For Sale signs, and even the properties that looked tidy from the outside, De Thomasis said, were nothing more than “shells.”
“No water. No electricity. Unlivable,” he said.
He knew because he’d been looking to buy. And he’d been looking to buy because he hadn’t lived in Abbateggio for decades — having been effectively forced out, at age 19, by a dearth of available jobs. He instead moved to Montreal, where he spent his adulthood and raised his family, all while longing so much for Abbateggio that he’d come back to visit 43 times. His home village, he said, had become quieter over the years. The butcher was gone. Same with the supermarket. Even the art gallery and olive oil stores were just temporary.
They’d been set up solely for the festival in otherwise empty buildings.
As sundown neared, much of the town — plus the visitors — gathered in a central square, where lights were strung up near a red-carpeted stage. The mayors wore their red, white and green sashes. The local archbishop stood among the VIPs. And then the Borghi Più Belli president, Fiorello Primi, took the podium.
What he wanted most of all in these villages, he said, was to create a future “where people have a chance.”
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Primi said the efforts are working — to an extent. In an interview over lamb skewers, he said the 334 towns were in a population stall, not a decline. In other words, they were doing better than the average Italian village. But even some of the Most Beautiful towns — particularly in the poorer south — were having trouble. And there were countless other towns that didn’t meet the standards to get recognized and would never get the boost. When towns are designated Most Beautiful, Primi said, property values tend to go up.
On anniversary of Italy’s first covid lockdown, bikers trace a 45-mile route through the red zone
So what does it mean to be Most Beautiful? The Borghi Piu Belli association has a technical answer. A town is eligible only if at least 70 percent of the buildings in its historic center predate 1939. There must be a “harmony” of roof materials and decorative elements. There are 72 parameters in total, dealing with aspects of community and history, and a scientific technical committee that assesses bids.
In some instances, towns may gain Most Beautiful status provisionally, with the requirement that they make certain changes — such as making their historic centers off-limits to cars, for instance. They’re booted if they don’t follow through. As part of the final assessment of a town’s application, an expert from the association makes a site visit.
The acceptance rate is about 40 percent.
There are plenty of towns applying to become No. 335.
But there are other ways to understand beauty, too, and later that night, when the association held a panel talk on bellezza, I snuck away down the streets of Abbateggio and ducked into the olive oil store. A small crowd there was sampling wine and oil drizzled on bread. The man offering the samples caught my attention, because he buzzed with energy, and after I introduced myself as a reporter, his ideas started cascading out — fast enough that I had to pause.
The night, he said, was just a “sneak preview” of what Abbateggio could become.
The following morning, the crowds were gone. It was as if the stores had never existed. Besides two cyclists passing through, the only activity was at the highest point of the village, the cafe, where I met back up with Bernardo Lecci, 51, as well as Donato Parete, 53.
They were a curious duo — Parete, a wealthy Milanese investor in cuff links; Lecci, a marketer with a rich bob of curly hair, whose main occupation at the moment was advising Parete on how to put his money to use. Lecci had spent much of his career in the elegant northern town of Treviso, working for the fashion brand Benetton. Now he was spending some of his nights on a foldable bed in Abbateggio, and he no longer considered himself a visitor.
They had big plans for the town, they said.
Parete’s father, Ermando, was born in the village. After Ermando died in 2016, and after Parete became a father himself, he started feeling an urgency to connect with his familial past. So, he arrived in Abbateggio and started buying homes — one, two, three … 12 in all. He also helped rescue the town cafe, which had closed last year with no plans to reopen.
With Lecci, he started dreaming up other ways to revive the village — ideas that were still mostly conceptual. Maybe, he said, they could recruit university researchers interested in the mountainous environment. Maybe they could attract digital nomads. Maybe they could use some of their properties for a hotel — rooms scattered throughout different buildings in town.
Parete said it would be a “lifetime” project.
Lecci took me on a tour of the 12 properties, and to my eyes, many would require major reclamation work. One was nothing more than a living room, frozen in time from an earlier decade, with a dusty TV console, green bottles, and a little picture of Jesus. Still another — which Lecci said they had their eyes on for purchasing — looked as if it had been abandoned in haste: A suitcase on the floor lay half-open, stuffed with clothing. One side of the home was nothing but a pile of furniture, broken apart like matchsticks.
But I’m the kind of person who would be dissuaded by the work of such projects; Lecci is not. He has already spent months trying to find the best parts of Abbateggio and its surroundings. He enthuses about the local olives and the nearby women who sell him cheese. He says the macellaria 15 miles away is the “Tiffany’s of butchers.” He so enjoyed a regional microbrew that he stocked it at the local cafe.
“With a bit of imagination …,” he kept saying, opening one door after the next.
“I know it’s ugly right now, but ….”
We wound through a few more narrow streets and came to one final spot on the tour, a courtyard hidden away from the rest of the village. Some of the surrounding windows gave glimpses into the cobwebbed husks of empty homes, their exteriors chipping away, revealing yet older stone — layer upon layer of history. But Lecci wasn’t thinking about the past. He was thinking of the future, and a courtyard one day full of tables.
“For people,” he said. | 2022-10-19T06:42:59Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Italy has 334 'most beautiful' villages. How many can survive? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/19/italy-most-beautiful-villages/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/19/italy-most-beautiful-villages/ |
Hunter Biden. (Tom Brenner for The Washington Post)
“Hunter Biden’s committed serious crimes, as you mentioned, 150 suspicious activity reports. Those are the most severe bank violations. This is when the bank notifies the federal government that we’re pretty confident our client has committed a crime. He’s had multiple banks file 150 suspicious activity reports, saying that we believe each instance was another act of a crime. But yet the FBI did nothing about it.”
— Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), in an interview with Maria Bartiromo of Fox News, Oct. 16
If the Republicans win the House in the November elections, Comer is on track to be chair of the House Oversight Committee. In his Fox News interview, Comer signaled that the business dealings of President Biden’s son Hunter and brother James with such countries as China, Russia and Ukraine will be the subject of intense scrutiny in a GOP-led Congress.
“It’s clear the FBI needs to be held accountable. Congress must begin considering meaningful reforms,” Comer tweeted over his interview. “For too long, the Biden family has peddled access to the highest levels of government and the FBI has been slow to act.”
For the purposes of this fact check, we will examine his claim that suspicious activity reports (SARs) means a bank is “pretty confident” that a crime has been committed. Comer, in fact, said each filing of a SAR meant “another act of a crime.” Is that really the case?
As part of the government’s effort to combat money laundering and terrorist activity, financial institutions are required to file SARs to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), an arm of the Treasury Department. A SAR is supposed to be triggered by a minimum amount of a transfer (generally at least $5,000, or $2,000 for money services businesses) and a suspicion the transfer involved funds derived from an illegal activity.
After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, banks significantly stepped up SARs reporting after it was learned that the terrorists had funded their attacks using the U.S. financial system but that no SARs were filed on their transactions. The Patriot Act passed after the attacks had added new reporting requirements.
Under Comer’s logic, that would suggest banks will report 3.7 million crimes. But that’s not correct.
“A financial institution only had to say ‘something doesn’t look right about this’ using the FinCEN guidance,” said James E. Johnson, Treasury undersecretary for enforcement in the late 1990s who oversaw FinCEN. “That is well short of, ‘I think a crime has been committed.’ ”
Another former Treasury official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the political nature of Comer’s comments, described SARs reports as merely “a tip.” He noted that the threshold for filing a SAR is not especially high and that many banks file the reports just to be on the safe side. “There is an incentive that, when in doubt, to file a report,” he said.
The Bank Policy Institute (BPI), an advocacy group for large banks, says banks receive computer-generated alerts about possibly suspicious transactions and then a compliance officer decides whether to file a SAR. “Since banks are subject to enforcement action if they fail to file a SAR when they should have, but suffer no sanction if they file a useless SAR, the general presumption is to file the SAR,” the group says.
A filing of a SAR by itself does not necessarily trigger an investigation. Each SAR is deposited in a massive database that law enforcement agents later may access when investigating a person or an entity, providing further leads for inquiry.
For instance, a New York bank had filed a SAR after New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer (D) in 2007 allegedly wired more than $10,000 from a Manhattan bank account but sought to break up the payment in an apparent effort to avoid triggering a currency transaction report. But that report was unnoticed until another bank later filed a report about two shell companies that had collected hundreds of thousands of dollars without an apparent source of revenue. That investigation eventually led Internal Revenue Service agents to discover the SAR previously filed on Spitzer, according the New York Times. Spitzer resigned after investigators linked his wire transfers to a company that supplied high-end sex workers to wealthy clients.
In a 2018 report, BPI said a survey found that only about 4 percent of SARs that were filed in 2017 led to a law enforcement inquiry — an estimate that the former Treasury official said sounded accurate. “A tiny subset of these results in an arrest and ultimately a conviction,” the group says. If a bank concludes a SAR reflects actual criminal behavior, as opposed to suspicion, “someone at the bank will call law enforcement directly to flag the SAR.”
In other words, we have established that a filing of a SAR does not mean a bank believes a client has committed a crime, as Comer claimed. In fact, Comer should well know this. He has posted on the committee’s minority website a Sept. 2 letter from a Treasury official that plainly states that SARs are “preliminary and unverified tip-and-lead information on possible violations of law.”
When we outlined our findings to Jessica Collins, communicator director for the minority staff of the House Oversight Committee, she responded with a statement that sidestepped Comer’s error.
“Hunter and James Biden have racked up at least 150 suspicious activity reports for their business transactions,” she said. “SARs are used to identify possible illegal activity like money laundering or tax evasion. The sheer number of flagged transactions in this case is highly unusual and may be indicative of serious criminal activity or a national security threat.”
While Comer often speaks of 150 SARs filings as an established fact, his source is a vague media report. Collins said the source of the figure was a CBS report in April that said: “150 financial transactions involving either Hunter or James Biden’s global business affairs were flagged as concerning by U.S. banks for further review.” But, unlike Comer, that same report correctly noted that “such banking reviews could point to deeper problems — or they could prove innocuous.”
In a July letter to a financial adviser to Hunter Biden, Comer suggested a text exchange found on a hard drive copy of the laptop Hunter Biden supposedly left behind for repair in a Delaware shop in April 2019 indicated that the president’s son “was aware of these SARs and took steps to avoid detection in his financial dealings.” Experts working with The Washington Post have verified thousands of emails contained on the hard drive but not text messages.
A lawyer for Hunter Biden declined to comment. A representative for James Biden said: “We have no information regarding SARs allegedly filed about James Biden.”
“Under the Biden administration, the Treasury Department has changed long-standing policy to restrict Congress’s access to these reports,” she said. “We need access to these reports to determine whether the Biden family’s business schemes threaten national security or have compromised President Biden. Instead of defending Hunter Biden’s SARs, it would be better to investigate why Biden’s Treasury Department is trying to hide them.”
Her complaint has bipartisan support. In July, by a vote of 349-70, the House passed a bill sponsored by Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) that would require Treasury to provide SAR reports to a congressional committee or subcommittee within 30 days. Waters said in a report that the action was needed because Treasury had imposed requirements that hampered congressional investigations, such as “requiring congressional staff to review all material in a reading room at Treasury, prohibiting the copying of materials for purposes of highlighting, ongoing reference, or margin notation, and restricting information collection to note taking.” Action is still pending in the Senate.
Whether Treasury’s new rules are related to Hunter Biden is unclear. The Trump administration also was accused of slow-rolling congressional requests for information on SARs and argued, in a legal opinion, for limiting congressional access. The Trump Treasury Department, however, provided SARs related to Hunter Biden to Republican Senate probers, who relied on the raw data to make questionable allegations about his business practices.
Treasury spokesman Mike Gwin rejected Collins’s statement. “Treasury provides SARs to Congress in a manner that enables robust oversight and that is consistent with how other sensitive law enforcement information is often produced,” he said. “It is not a political process. Since the beginning of this administration, Treasury has made SARs available in response to authorized committee requests and continues to engage on the process with any individual members seeking information.”
Comer may soon be in a significant position of power. But he needs to get his facts straight. Even if as many as 150 SARs reports were filed concerning Hunter Biden’s business dealings — a number that remains unconfirmed — that does not mean that he committed “serious crimes” or that banks were “pretty confident” that a serious crime was committed. Instead, these reports are merely tips that something may be suspicious — raw intelligence that still needs to be vetted, confirmed and possibly investigated.
Three Pinocchios | 2022-10-19T07:13:27Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The misleading claim that bank reports show Hunter Biden ‘committed serious crimes’ - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/19/misleading-claim-that-bank-reports-show-hunter-biden-committed-serious-crimes/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/19/misleading-claim-that-bank-reports-show-hunter-biden-committed-serious-crimes/ |
A quarter featuring actress Anna May Wong, part of the U.S. Mint's American Women Quarters Program. (Burwell and Burwell Photography; U.S. Mint; Treasury Department)
Wong is regarded as Hollywood’s first Asian American movie star. A third-generation American, her career took off at a time of widespread anti-Asian xenophobia, and with the Chinese Exclusion Act still in effect. She gained fame for her roles in films like “The Toll of the Sea” (1922) — one of the first Technicolor films — and “The Thief of Bagdad” (1924).
Maya Angelou to become the first Black woman to appear on U.S. quarter as Treasury rollout begins
She tried to break out from playing the antagonist, but was met with resistance, in part due to restrictions on interracial displays of affection. Wong vied for the starring role of O-Lan in the 1937 film “The Good Earth,” but was instead offered the role of Lotus, a sex worker who becomes the concubine of O-Lan’s husband.
“As the first Chinese American film star in Hollywood, she faced constant discrimination, frequently being typecast and passed over for lead roles in favor of non-Asian actresses,” said Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) in a statement Tuesday. “She is remembered not only as a great actress, but also as an advocate for increased representation of Asian Americans in film and media.”
Though Wong, born in Los Angeles in 1905 as Wong Liu Tsong, disliked the roles she was cast in, they also caused problems for her with the Chinese American community, as well as in China. They criticized her for perpetuating stale and demeaning stereotypes, and in China, where she toured after “The Good Earth” debacle, she was seen as too American.
Asian women say Hollywood has failed them for decades. They’re ready for meaningful change.
The new quarter-dollar coin is not the first major recognition of Wong’s legacy. She was the first Asian American actress to get a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, in 1960. Nearly six decades later, Lucy Liu became the second. Liu cited the contributions of Wong — whom she called “a pioneer while enduring racism, marginalization, and exclusion” — as a factor behind her success.
Wong died in 1961 at the age of 56. Though a century has passed since she appeared in “The Toll ,” Asian Americans are still underrepresented in American films. According to a 2021 survey by the University of Southern California of 1,300 popular films from 2007 to 2019, only 29 featured an Asian lead or co-lead, and 21 had a Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander lead or co-lead, totaling more than 3 percent of the films examined. Asians and Pacific Islanders make up more than 6 percent of the U.S. population, according to 2020 census figures. | 2022-10-19T07:56:58Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Who is Anna May Wong, the first Asian American on U.S. currency? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/10/19/anna-may-wong-us-currency-quarter/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/10/19/anna-may-wong-us-currency-quarter/ |
A podcast spotlighting climate innovators who are helping to solve some of the most challenging environmental issues we face today.
The small town taking on climate change
High in the Himalaya, a tiny community is testing a new conservation model that could have far-reaching effects.
What are ‘deep' reefs’?
The ocean’s murky and difficult-to-reach “middle light” zone is teeming with undiscovered species. Meet the man on a mission to find them. | 2022-10-19T08:31:47Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The small town taking on climate change - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/podcasts/planet-visionaries/the-small-town-taking-on-climate-change-/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/podcasts/planet-visionaries/the-small-town-taking-on-climate-change-/ |
The aftermath of an explosion at a celebratory bonfire near Pulaski, Wis., on Friday. (WBAY)
Just before it happened, dozens of teenagers were reveling around a bonfire on Friday night near Pulaski, Wis., celebrating the start of homecoming weekend and their high school football team’s dominant win just hours earlier.
“It was at that second that everything happened,” his mother, Tammy Brzeczkowski, told The Washington Post, “and it was very fast.”
The drum, filled with diesel fuel, exploded during the party attended by about 30 to 40 Pulaski High students and recent graduates, according to the Shawano County Sheriff’s Office. At least 17 people were taken to multiple hospitals in the Green Bay area. Medical staff sent some of the patients with more serious injuries, including Brandon, to a Milwaukee hospital with a burn unit.
The explosion has rocked the town of nearly 3,900 residents that sits 15 miles northwest of Green Bay. People have rallied, donating tens of thousands of dollars to more than a half-dozen fundraisers to cover victims’ medical bills. Many residents have changed their Facebook profile photos to an image imploring people to “Pray for Pulaski.”
Shawano County Sheriff’s Lt. Chris Madle told WBAY that investigators don’t believe whoever put the drum of diesel fuel on the fire wanted to hurt anyone, though they could still be charged with reckless endangerment or mishandling of burning materials. Investigators are still trying to figure out what happened.
“This is an unprecedented situation, but it is in times of crisis that the Pulaski community has shown time and again that we will pull together to overcome,” Pulaski Community School District Superintendent Allison Space said in a statement.
Before the bonfire, around 6 p.m. on Friday, Brandon Brzeczkowski ate dinner with his mom and, since she’d recently broken her leg in two places, made sure she was okay before he went out.
He checked in on her after he got to the party, where people were celebrating the Red Raiders’ 62-14 win over the Green Bay Preble Hornets at that night’s homecoming game. He texted her several times: Was she doing well? Did she need help? Had she made it to bed?
Then, for the next hour and a half, Tammy Brzeczkowski, 52, didn’t hear from her son, who graduated from Pulaski High in May.
Instead, she got a call at 11:08 p.m. from Sam, who told her about the explosion. Tammy, who’s since seen video of the aftermath, compared the ensuing chaos to a war zone. Afire, teenagers stripped off their burning clothes. Some tried to pat down the flames engulfing their friends. Others ran. Everyone screamed.
“It just looked like balls of fire all over,” she said.
Brandon suffered second- and third-degree burns on 38 percent of his body, Tammy said. He remains on a feeding tube. Doctors, concerned his throat would swell shut, also put him on a breathing tube. Even though it remains in place, he’s now breathing on his own. Despite being heavily sedated, he’s able to occasionally communicate with family. On Monday, he used a whiteboard marker to write his first words since being burned.
“I want to go home.”
That won’t happen for at least four to six weeks, his mother said. Brandon’s scheduled to undergo his first surgery on Wednesday to get skin grafts on his face and hands. Once he’s released from the hospital, he’ll have to return repeatedly for outpatient treatment as he recovers. Getting back to anything approximating normal will require extensive physical therapy.
But, if he can avoid infection, his doctors think he’ll bounce back to something that’s “pretty close” to his pre-explosion life, Tammy said.
That will take work and time — maybe one or two years until he’s completely healed, she said.
In the days since the explosion, Tammy and her husband, Bruce, have cycled between forgiveness and anger. They understand that those who put the drum on the fire didn’t do so maliciously and were, in all likelihood, only trying to scare people.
“But at the same time … these kids are going to be suffering for, you know, for years. And they probably all won’t … be the same.”
The Brzeczkowskis try to focus on how the Pulaski community has rallied around them and the other burn victims’ families. They have been floored by the people who’ve offered help. Tammy said she’s been flooded with calls and texts. People have dropped by their house, their marketing business and the hospital bearing food, food and more food.
“I think I need another refrigerator,” she said.
“We’re overwhelmed with what everybody is doing,” she added. “And that’s, I think, how we’re going to get through this.” | 2022-10-19T08:53:33Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Bonfire explodes at teens' homecoming party, leaving 17 injured - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/10/19/homecoming-bonfire-explosion-burn/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/10/19/homecoming-bonfire-explosion-burn/ |
Democratic fundraisers provide rare unscripted moments when the president seems to muse aloud
President Biden boards Air Force One at JFK International Airport in New York on Oct. 6, following a political fundraiser. (Tom Brenner/Reuters)
There are few venues in which he says all that he means more than at Democratic Party fundraisers, when the audience is friendly and his guard is down.
While Trump’s Twitter feed provided near-hourly windows into the presidential id, Biden’s comments are projected to the public less often, but just as revealingly, through the donor gatherings, among the few events where he does not use a teleprompter.
At a fundraiser Thursday in Brentwood, Calif., with more than 100 guests under a large white tent and small vases of zinnias sitting on cocktail tables, Biden veered into an unprompted discussion of technological changes that have fractured society and made discerning the truth all the more difficult.
Turning to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, he revealed that his staff calculated he had spent more than 225 hours in direct contact with allied leaders trying to hold the coalition together. He asked the crowd whether anyone would have thought, after the Cuban missile crisis, that a Russian leader would threaten to use nuclear weapons.
His musings then took him to Pakistan, which he called one of the most dangerous nations in the world because it has “nuclear weapons without any cohesion.”
The nuclear threat, in fact, is increasingly on Biden’s mind, and is therefore cropping up regularly at his fundraisers.
It was in the art-filled home of James Murdoch, son of Fox News mogul Rupert Murdoch, that Biden painted a picture of a world-ending battle of nuclear annihilation. (Despite his father’s political leanings, James and his wife, Kathryn, a climate activist, have supported Biden.)
“We have not faced the prospect of Armageddon since Kennedy and the Cuban missile crisis,” Biden said, adding, “I don’t think there’s any such thing as the ability to easily [use] a tactical nuclear weapon and not end up with Armageddon.”
Some U.S. allies, including French President Emmanuel Macron, immediately suggested the comments were needlessly provocative, and the White House spent much of the next day trying to tamp down on the presidential warning.
Biden similarly caught his staff by surprise during a fundraiser in August when he launched into the anti-democratic forces he said Trump had unleashed. “It’s not just Trump, it’s the entire philosophy,” Biden elaborated before pausing, perhaps considering whether he wanted to say what he wanted to say.
“I’m going to say something,” he said. “It’s like semi-fascism.”
White House aides said later they were taken aback less by the sentiment — they knew it was how Biden felt — as by his decision to voice it in a quasi-public setting.
And a few weeks ago, speaking at a Democratic Governors Association fundraiser, Biden pointed to Italy as one example of global democracy under threat after voters there elected a far-right governing coalition.
“You just saw what’s happened in Italy in that election. You’re seeing what’s happening around the world,” he said, providing an assessment far blunter than his administration’s official position. “And the reason I bother to say that is we can’t be sanguine about what’s happening here either.”
Other politicians have also created trouble for themselves during fundraisers, lulled by a roomful of allies into speaking without their usual restraint.
During the 2008 campaign, Barack Obama was at a San Francisco fundraiser when he talked about how rural Americans have struggled, adding, “It’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them.” The backlash was swift and severe.
Mitt Romney in 2012 seemed to dismiss nearly half the country, saying that 47 percent of voters would never pick him because they are too dependent on government assistance. “My job is not to worry about those people,” he added curtly. The comments were seized upon by the Obama campaign to depict Romney as contemptuous of ordinary Americans.
Hillary Clinton in 2016 told the audience at a New York fundraiser that half of Trump’s supporters fit into a “basket of deplorables.” “The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic — you name it,” she said to laughter in the crowd. The next day, she clarified that she was “grossly generalistic” and regretted putting the proportion at “half.”
While Obama’s and Romney’s comments were recorded secretly, Biden knows his comments are being transcribed. But that rarely seems to prompt any notable caution.
Biden certainly is also capable of off-script comments outside of fundraisers. He commented that Putin “cannot remain in power” as an ad-libbed line at the end of a speech in Poland. He remarked that “the pandemic is over” during an interview with CBS’s “60 Minutes.” Both deviated clearly from the official line of his own White House.
And it was while addressing reporters outside Air Force One that Biden revealed that U.S. military leaders opposed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s plans to visit Taiwan — a trip that had not even been confirmed yet, either by Pelosi’s office or by the State Department.
But fundraisers are most often the venues where Biden reveals what’s on the top of his mind.
In the opening months of his candidacy, he bragged at a New York fundraiser about working with segregationist senators. It was the same event where he assured donors that “rich people are just as patriotic as poor people” and “nothing would fundamentally change” for them if he was elected.
Both comments became headaches for his campaign, but arguably allowed him to showcase his identity as a moderate striving for bipartisanship.
When his campaign was trying to withhold the bad news of a paltry fundraising quarter, he blurted it out — at yet another fundraiser. At another donor event, he reveled that Cindy McCain was going to endorse him, and he provided regular updates on his vice-presidential selection process, including setting an Aug. 1 deadline (he announced Kamala D. Harris as his pick on Aug. 11).
In recent weeks, Biden’s gatherings with Democratic donors have yielded real-time political prognostications, regardless of what others in the party are saying.
“I feel pretty good where we are as it relates to the Senate,” he said last week. “But it’s premature.”
And on Thursday night, Biden concluded with an appeal that was uncharacteristically on message.
“Please, please, please,” he said, “keep a Democratic House of Representatives.” | 2022-10-19T09:15:19Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Party gatherings give a window into Biden’s mind, from nukes to Pelosi - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/19/party-gatherings-window-biden-mind/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/19/party-gatherings-window-biden-mind/ |
Notes from NFL owners meeting
Browns quarterback Deshaun Watson is serving an 11-game suspension for violating the NFL's personal conduct policy. (Kirk Irwin/AP)
NEW YORK — Cleveland Browns quarterback Deshaun Watson has complied with the terms of the settlement that resulted in his 11-game suspension under the NFL’s personal conduct policy, Commissioner Roger Goodell said Tuesday. That suggests Watson remains on course to be reinstated to play for the Browns in a Dec. 4 game at Houston against his former team, the Texans.
“He’s followed all of the terms of the agreement,” Goodell said at the conclusion of a meeting of the NFL’s team owners.
Watson also was fined $5 million and was required to undergo a professional evaluation and treatment plan under the terms of the settlement.
Last week, another woman accused Watson of sexual misconduct in a lawsuit filed in Texas. The woman alleged in the lawsuit that Watson “attempted to solicit sexually related acts with [the] Plaintiff including intercourse” during a December 2020 massage therapy session in Houston.
It was the 26th lawsuit filed against Watson by women accusing him of sexual misconduct during massage sessions, and it became the second active lawsuit. One suit was withdrawn, and Watson reached settlements with 23 of his accusers.
Watson has not been charged with a crime and previously denied the allegations made against him by the other women.
“We obviously will follow all of those,” Goodell said Tuesday of the new lawsuit. “If there’s new information, we will take that into consideration. But we’ll see as time goes on.”
Owners resolve dispute over St. Louis settlement
The team owners voted unanimously to ratify a proposal for how to divide the payment of the NFL’s $790 million settlement last year with St. Louis to resolve the city’s lawsuit over the Rams’ relocation to Los Angeles in 2016.
Under the resolution, Rams owner Stan Kroenke apparently agreed to pay for the settlement and legal fees, minus the approximately $7.5 million per team that the league previously withheld from the other 31 franchises to contribute toward the total.
Goodell confirmed the agreement but did not divulge details. He also disputed a characterization that the process was contentious among the owners.
“I wouldn’t describe it that way,” he said. “And, no, I won’t comment further on it. That’s a matter for the ownership. It was resolved. It was resolved as partners, and that’s what the league does. I think it was incredibly positive. It was unanimous.”
Owners plan to complete extension with Goodell
The owners emerged from Tuesday’s meeting planning to proceed with negotiations toward completing a contract extension with Goodell, according to a person familiar with the league’s inner workings.
“That’s going to get done,” said that person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because negotiations are ongoing.
Goodell’s contract runs through the 2023 season. | 2022-10-19T09:15:25Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Deshaun Watson has complied with terms of suspension, Roger Goodell says - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/19/nfl-deshaun-watson-roger-goodell/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/19/nfl-deshaun-watson-roger-goodell/ |
Wes Unseld Jr. and the Washington Wizards open the season Wednesday at Indiana. (Issei Kato/Reuters)
This month at a basketball arena 20 minutes off the Las Vegas Strip, Washington Wizards President and General Manager Tommy Sheppard settled in with his cohorts from across the league to watch the future of the NBA.
French sensation Victor Wembanyama, projected to be the top pick in next year’s draft, dazzled.
The only other event Sheppard can remember that sent the league’s imagination whirring was when more than 11,000 people attended a 2002 matchup in Trenton, N.J., between a couple of high-schoolers named LeBron James and Carmelo Anthony.
“You looked around the room, and you could see people thinking like — woooo,” Sheppard said, whistling to mimic the sound of falling artillery as his hand traced a downward slope to illustrate the obvious: For teams with meager expectations this season, the bottom suddenly didn’t look so bad.
The Wizards are one of those teams with outside expectations that are dispiritingly low.
In the two seasons since the organization traded John Wall and reset with Bradley Beal as its franchise leader, the team has made clear efforts to lift its fortunes. It has cycled through supporting cast members, changed head coaches and locked in the person the front office and team ownership determined was crucial to success, signing Beal to a five-year, $251 million maximum contract this summer.
Yet by any measure, the Wizards remain stuck in a cycle of mediocrity. It has been five years since Washington made it out of the first round of the playoffs. It has been 43 years since it claimed a conference title.
What’s worse, it has been mired in NBA draft no man’s land since 2018, winning just enough during the regular season to land between ninth and 15th in the order each June, turning over the roster in July and August and landing back where it started in October.
With Wembanyama as the top prize, it would seem there is no better year to embrace the ugly.
But eschewing effort has never been Washington’s MO — not since owner Ted Leonsis declared in 2019 “we will never, ever tank” and not now, after the organization gave Beal the combination to the bank vault.
“If it happens, it happens organically,” Sheppard said when asked whether the team’s philosophy toward tanking remains the same. “But I don’t think that’s anything that’s in our wheelhouse.”
The question for the Wizards now: How can they break the cycle? It’s a query for the organization’s three cornerstones, finally in place with Beal committed, Wes Unseld Jr. entering his second year as coach and Sheppard beginning his fourth season as the top basketball executive.
‘One got to crack’
Unseld arrived as an assistant in Denver the same year as Nikola Jokic, the draft’s 41st pick in 2014. The coach is acutely aware of how a prospect who outperforms his draft position can alter an organization’s path.
Washington isn’t expecting Rui Hachimura (picked ninth in 2019), Deni Avdija (ninth in 2020), Corey Kispert (15th in 2021) or Johnny Davis (10th in June) to develop into Jokic or Giannis Antetokounmpo, who also was drafted with minimal fanfare at No. 15 in 2013.
Yet when a team goes about building the Wizards’ way — without tanking or adding top-tier free agents over the summer — the draft takes on outsize significance. For Washington to get off its Ferris wheel of mundanity, one of Sheppard’s first-round picks has to hit.
“I’m excited for them,” Beal said. “They’re going to have a lot of opportunities this year, and it’s going to be a big year for them. But one — one got to crack. For sure.”
Beal singled out 24-year-old Hachimura as the player closest to breaking through. The 6-foot-8 forward was the standout of the Wizards’ preseason and arrived this year looking relaxed and refreshed after taking the first half of the 2021-22 campaign off for mental health purposes.
He grew more confident when the Wizards played a pair of games in Saitama, Japan, in front of a supportive home crowd. Hachimura is playing with some of the sure-footedness and aggression Washington feels will take his game to the next level — yet he and the team did not agree on a rookie extension at Monday’s deadline, putting him on track to become a restricted free agent next summer.
There are other ways for the Wizards’ young players on attractive contracts to help the team this year. Playing well enough to be of value in a trade down the line is one.
Washington’s roster is far from settled for the long term. In addition to Hachimura becoming a free agent, Kristaps Porzingis will be able to opt out of his deal at the end of this season, as will Kyle Kuzma. If they aren’t part of the Wizards’ future, the veterans could be moved before the trade deadline instead of being allowed to walk away for nothing next summer.
“The way I distill it in my mind is [the roster] is still cooking, you know what I mean?” Sheppard said. “We’re still cooking it, going to see what the final dish is going to look like.”
When speculation about Beal leaving the Wizards was at its peak, one common refrain among pundits was that the guard could go anywhere because his game and personality would mesh so easily as a secondary star with different franchise players throughout the league.
Yet another factor that has kept Washington from sustained success is the organization’s inability to find him a stable partner as a leading man. Porzingis and Kuzma follow Russell Westbrook in 2020-21 and a calamitous stint from Spencer Dinwiddie last season as the team’s answers for running mates.
That no one has been able to stick begets a wider issue — the Wizards haven’t had continuity in years. Sheppard likes to remind that Hachimura was the only player on the roster who was with Washington in the NBA bubble in August 2020.
“That is a tough thing to juggle, being able to find that consistent balance and that guy who you know night in and night out is right there with you,” Beal said. “Hopefully I can get that out of KP. Kuz is developing into that, but KP has shown that he can do that. That’s kind of where our chips have fallen.
“But for me personally, this is probably the most confident I’ve felt going into a year with a team with what we have. I like our team. We don’t have the, I guess, ego problems necessarily. We all kind of come in, get our work done, listen to Coach, buy into his system. Last year wasn’t like that at all. So it’s good to have that.”
There is on-court work to be done to break the cycle, most of it on the defensive end. To get to good defense, Unseld said, the team first must establish better habits and — to echo an issue that has dampened the Wizards for years — care more.
“In a nutshell, I want us to be more competitive,” Unseld said, adding that offseason acquisitions such as point guard Monte Morris and wing Will Barton will help with that.
Unseld had a front-row seat for much of Morris’s ascension in Denver from being a G League player to cracking the roster as a backup to filling in at starting point guard during Jamal Murray’s absence last season. He and Sheppard welcome anyone with that kind of drive.
“Because until we change it,” Sheppard said, “the scouting reports are still going to say: ‘Don’t give up. The Wizards are still going to let you back in the game.’ The only way you change that is with defense. You’ve got to step on the neck. … It’s the mentality. You can’t have that. You can’t.”
Unseld feels those cultural elements must be in place to find success anywhere else. He isn’t building a new foundation for the Wizards, but in his second year, he is still working on the organization’s base layer. To snap the cycle, Unseld wants to address the root of Washington’s long-term problems that fall under his purview, not the symptoms.
“I can’t speak for the 11 years I wasn’t here, but it’s our willingness to buy in and have consistency on our roster. It’s also a willingness to look from the outside and see where we can make moves to better capitalize on our position. Not be afraid to spend money or to sign free agents,” Unseld said. “I think with all of those things, it’s in my opinion turning in the right direction. Time will tell.
“There’s no real way to say we’re out of the cycle, but I think there’s a different feel. And I couldn’t tell you how long that’s going to take, honestly. We have to have a breakthrough year, and we have to stay healthy, have to win some games, and that can shift — just like that.” | 2022-10-19T09:15:31Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Can the Wizards break the cycle of mediocrity? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/19/wizards-season-nba-mediocrity/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/19/wizards-season-nba-mediocrity/ |
His van broke down in Venezuela. It saved him from a deadly landslide.
The aftermath in Maracay, Venezuela, on Tuesday. (Leonardo Fernandez Viloria/Reuters)
Arturo Betancourt always takes the same route home from work. But a mechanic recently fumbled the installation on his new GPS system, and on Monday afternoon, his van wouldn’t start.
The inconvenience ended up saving his life, he said. After hitching a ride partway home from a co-worker at lunchtime, Betancourt made the rest of the trek by foot to his home in Maracay, the capital of Venezuela’s northern state of Aragua.
It was raining — hard. A creek that flows down a nearby mountain swelled, spilling over into the larger river it feeds below. A fast-moving landslide formed, sweeping away car-sized boulders and swallowing up houses in northern Maracay.
“I was drenched in water and getting stuck in the mud,” Betancourt said. “But, meanwhile, the landslide was gushing down the street I would’ve normally taken home. My car would’ve definitely been swept.”
It was Venezuela’s second catastrophic landslide in a little over a week. Another devastated the nearby town of Las Tejerías on Oct. 8, killing 54. Monday’s landslide killed at least three people after hitting the Palmarito, El Castaño and Corozal areas — a sector of the city along the slope of a mountain in the Henri Pittier National Park.
Rain isn’t unusual in Maracay — especially during Venezuela’s wettest season, from May to November. But the loud thunder, bright flashes of lightning and monstrous roaring hinted at the deadly turn the torrential downpour would bring on Monday afternoon.
Betancourt’s wife, Francia, was inside the couple’s home when it rattled for about three minutes around 1:30 p.m. At first, she thought it could be an earthquake. Then she saw trees falling like dominoes and brown water gushing down the neighborhood’s slope. There was a clamor that sounded as if “a giant monster was crawling underneath the earth,” she said.
Looking at that muddy mass approaching her home, Francia worried about Arturo. The two were supposed to meet for lunch in a few minutes. She wondered whether he would be swept away. Fortunately, she said, “it just wasn’t his time to leave us.”
After dragging himself through knee-deep sludge, Arturo made it back some three hours later, on a walk that would’ve normally taken about 30 minutes.
The Betancourts’ street was one of about two that hadn’t been washed away in their upper-middle-class neighborhood of about 250 families. Yet the signs of destruction were everywhere, they said: One young neighbor died after the river carried her away, while another was stuck in her home. Entire houses had disappeared, and the aqueduct servicing the area was gone.
That night, families reeled from the “unimaginable loss,” Francia said. Their power, cellphone and water services are also down and could take months to fix — all while the country is already facing an energy crisis.
“That scare from seeing the landslide move in is terrible. The loss of life is terrible,” Francia said. “But the aftermath is just as terrifying. I mean, this is a place where we have brief power outages at least three times each week, and we have to come together as neighbors to fix any problems. I’m trying to be an optimist, but I don’t see this getting better any time soon.”
The aftermaths of other natural disasters in Venezuela don’t inspire much hope either, the couple added. Communities in the nearby coastal state of Vargas are still rebuilding 23 years after mudslides killed at least 10,000 people in 1999 — a moment in history dubbed the “Vargas tragedy.” Arturo said he fears crumbling infrastructure and the government’s history of refusing humanitarian aid could also prolong the crisis.
The office of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from The Washington Post. On Monday night, Maduro, along with Vice President Delcy Rodríguez and other officials, surveyed the area amid “the most difficult year in terms of rain for the whole country,” the president told reporters, blaming climate change for the torrential rainfall in Venezuela this year.
Maduro said 1,000 members of the armed forces would be mobilized to the area to assist with rescue operations and clearing debris. “We have to go in with everything and support [the city] because there are zones that are buried [in mud and debris], and we have to go in early,” he said.
🚨 #URGENT The "El Castaño" River overflowed in #Maracay causing flooding in the streets.
There are cars, trees and large rocks dragged by the water.
Neighbors of the sector worry about the growing situation at the moment🇻🇪#elcastaño #news pic.twitter.com/F3KHFUzkY8
Juan Guaidó, who is recognized as Venezuela’s president by the United States and a slew of other nations, said on Twitter that “rain shouldn’t mean anguish for our people, as it is in Maracay and in tragedies like Las Tejerías. Natural disasters are inevitable, but we can prepare and learn from them.”
In Maracay, the Betancourts decided to leave their home and drive east to Caracas, where Francia’s mother lives. On Tuesday morning, each of them carried a small backpack with two changes of clothes and important documents as they walked down a street pancaked in mud, trees, boulders and pieces of concrete.
The elderly man who lives in front of them was being rescued by civil defense workers, who carried him atop a dining room chair. One of them handed Francia a steel tube as makeshift tool to measure the mud’s depth.
“The scene was surreal, like something out of an apocalyptic movie or Indiana Jones,” she said, sitting beside Arturo inside a home in Venezuela’s capital, where they’re hoping to stay for at least a month.
Still, Arturo said, “we’re some of the lucky ones.”
“We’re safe, and our house was spared. But some people lost everything. I fear for the many, many others who are going through a tremendously difficult situation that’s only just beginning.”
“They have to pick up the pieces of their lives that were swept away by water and mud,” he added. | 2022-10-19T09:32:44Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Landslide in Maracay kills at least three people in Venezuela - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/10/19/landslide-venezuela-maracay-el-castano/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/10/19/landslide-venezuela-maracay-el-castano/ |
For Bad Bunny’s fans, he’s more than a global superstar. He’s a political icon.
Bad Bunny performs at Eagle Bank Arena in Fairfax, Va., on Aug. 16, 2018. (Kyle Gustafson for The Washington Post)
For a night each month at the Basement Nightspot — a party bar and nightclub popular with Pennsylvania State University students — the airwaves shift from U.S. chart-toppers to Latin dance music stretching from salsa to reggaeton.
“Yes, this includes Bad Bunny,” a promotional flier notes.
“When I play Bad Bunny in these club settings, it can relate to each and every single person that’s in there,” said Adam Romero Jr., a 21-year-old student of Puerto Rican descent known as DJ AD1 who hosts the 100% Latin Night. “Even though they don’t know the words, they’re enjoying the vibes.”
Since the Puerto Rican artist began sharing music on SoundCloud in 2016, Bad Bunny (Benito Martínez Ocasio) has seen a seismic rise. He’s a global superstar — the most streamed artist on Spotify globally for the past two years — and his latest album, “Un Verano Sin Ti” (“A Summer Without You”), has tied for the most weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart of any album in the past 10 years.
Bad Bunny isn’t the next big thing. He’s a very big thing at this very moment.
But the moment Bad Bunny is experiencing is of particular resonance to young Puerto Ricans on and off the island — and Latinos across America, who see him as more than just a Latin trap-reggaeton phenom. For his fans, his unabashed pride for Latino communities and the Spanish language, defiance of traditional gender norms and push for justice on a range of social issues, also makes him a de facto political icon.
In Puerto Rico, Bad Bunny’s appeal has long been musical and political. When islanders took to the streets in 2019 to demand Gov. Ricardo Rosselló’s ouster, Bad Bunny joined protests and released the song “Afilando los Cuchillos” (“Sharpening the Knives”), with Puerto Rican artists Residente and iLe. His new music video for his hit “El Apagón” (“The Blackout”) documents the island’s ongoing housing, electricity and corruption crises five years after Hurricane Maria.
Boricuas have taken note — as have members of Congress, including Rep. Nydia M. Velázquez (D-N.Y.), who called herself a proud tití — referring to both the Puerto Rican Spanish colloquialism for “auntie” and Bad Bunny’s song, “Tití Me Preguntó” (“Auntie Asked Me”).
“He is part of that generation that doesn’t have a memory of prosperity,” said Mayra Vélez Serrano, an associate professor at the University of Puerto Rico at Río Piedras.
Bad Bunny wants you to stop ignoring Puerto Rico
His political advocacy increasingly transcends Puerto Rico. Earlier this month, he hosted a survivor of the Uvalde, Tex., school shooting at his Dallas concert and made large donations to help her family buy a new home through his Good Bunny Foundation.
Unlike many Latino musicians who aspire to become crossover artists, Bad Bunny is sticking to creating music for global audiences in his native tongue. What makes Bad Bunny distinct is how he mostly speaks in Spanish, said Yarimar Bonilla, a political anthropologist and the director of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College. “He’s so proud and doesn’t feel any kind of embarrassment, or like he has to accommodate an English-speaking audience. I think it’s something that Latinos admire, and speaks to them.”
To fans across the spectrum of latinidad, Bad Bunny has inspired pride in what it means to be Latino. During his Made in America festival performance over Labor Day weekend, Bad Bunny told fans, “Made in America, Latinos make America,” and encouraged fans to display flags representing a range of Latin American countries.
Victor Rangel, a 21-year-old Mexican American college student from Brownsville, Tex., attended the festival and said he found Bad Bunny’s words “really, really motivating.”
“A lot of times people think America is the United States,” he said. “But the Americas are South, North and Central America. And [Bad Bunny] really pointed out that Latinos are the majority when you consider the Americas as a whole and … that Latinos have had a huge role in the culture here.”
Paula Jiménez Nieva, a law student who moved from Puerto Rico to Florida after Hurricane Maria, said she believes Bad Bunny is promoting the inclusion of Puerto Ricans in the American narrative. Despite being U.S. citizens, those living on the island cannot vote in the U.S. presidential general election and do not have voting representation in Congress.
“I feel like sometimes Puerto Ricans are forgotten,” she said. “And there is still a lot of ignorance in the world in regards to Puerto Rican individuals and the Puerto Rico status as a whole. So he really is spreading his awareness on how we are Americans.”
His influence stretches beyond politics, though. Fans also hold Bad Bunny up as challenging the traditional machismo that often characterizes reggaeton, such as when he dressed in drag in his “Yo Perreo Sola” (“I Twerk Alone”) music video, wore a skirt and a T-shirt that called attention to the murder of a transgender woman in Puerto Rico on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon,” and kissed a male backup dancer during his MTV Video Music Award performance in August.
“He’s really combating the stereotypical norms that Latino men usually have in our community,” said Juan Diego Mazuera Arias, a 24-year-old Colombian American graduate student. “And I think for Latino men, it just, in a way, opened the doors to being more comfortable with your sexuality, whether you are straight, or gay or bi or pan.”
(To be sure, there are still examples of traditional machismo in his videos, fans say, including hypersexualized women twerking and lyrics that some listeners find misogynistic.)
While fans have praised him for speaking out in support of disenfranchised Puerto Ricans, some have also pointed to Bad Bunny’s initial silence when Black Lives Matter protests erupted early in the summer of 2020. Weeks later, he released a statement in Time magazine titled “Perdonen” (“Forgive”), in which he mentions how he was teased for having “bad hair” growing up as a White child in Puerto Rico, just as his Black neighbors were. Others contend he has not sufficiently acknowledged the Black history behind reggaeton, which originated in Afro Latino communities.
Sujeylee Solá, a publicist for Bad Bunny, told The Washington Post that Bad Bunny “has grown as a person and artist, and his music reflects this evolution.” She also said “the comments regarding ‘bad hair’ are out of context, as he was not trying to claim to be a victim of racism but pointed out a societal problem.”
Jorell Meléndez-Badillo, an assistant professor of Latin American and Caribbean history at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, said she is glad Bad Bunny has taken a stand on a range of social issues. “But I think that we cannot expect him to lead any sort of movement. He is, like us, a person that learns new things every day.”
Reggaeton needed a racial reckoning. Afro-Latinos are leading it.
While some fans believe his being a cisgender White Latino may have contributed to his success compared to other reggaeton artists who are Afro Latino or women, they also praise Bad Bunny for helping lift less-privileged communities up, including transgender people and women through his activism.
“Unlike other artists with the same privilege, that have had the same opportunities like he has, at least I feel like he’s turned around and … tried to uplift those communities as well,” said Rangel, the college student from South Texas. Rangel added that he is impressed by Bad Bunny’s range of backup dancers who are women, Afro Latino and “of all body types.”
Rangel, Mazuera Arias and other non-Puerto Rican Latinos have felt Bad Bunny’s impact reverberate in their own communities, from western Arizona to Texas to Pennsylvania.
For Nallely Guadalupe Gonzalez, a 21-year-old Mexican American college student from Parker, Ariz., Bad Bunny inspires her to be proud of her Latina identity in the face of racism.
“I definitely do think that he has helped me be more in tune within my Latino side,” Gonzalez said, adding that her non-Latino friends often send her Bad Bunny songs playing on the radio or in restaurants. “And it just makes me feel seen, it just makes me feel so good on the inside when they do that.”
At Penn State, Romero is on the executive board of the Latino Caucus, an organization encompassing various Latino student groups on campus. This year, the university honored Hispanic Heritage Month from Sept. 15 to Oct. 15, with the theme “Nuestra Música.” The month featured a series of events focused on Latin music and culture — including Bad Bunny’s contributions to it.
“Bad Bunny is really a pivotal icon for Hispanic Heritage Month this year, because not only is he an inspiration to many young Latino music listeners, but he’s a political icon as well,” said Latino Caucus President Michael Garza, a 19-year-old Mexican American student originally from Houston.
What’s refreshing about Bad Bunny, said Meléndez-Badillo, is that he does not claim to represent everyone. “When you have an artist, talking about joy, talking about how ... awesome Puerto Rico is, I think that it’s highly political as well,” he said. “It’s so interesting for me … that he got so far talking about things that were so colloquially Puerto Rican.”
Perhaps there’s universality in specificity — and in highly specific acronyms. For Meléndez-Badillo, the title of Bad Bunny’s second solo album, “YHLQMDLG” (“Yo Hago Lo Que Me Da La Gana”), encapsulates the superstar’s approach to life and music — a mind-set that is resonating with fans across the Americas.
“He is not necessarily leading the conversation or speaking on behalf of anyone. He is doing lo que le da la gana — whatever he wants.” | 2022-10-19T10:11:55Z | www.washingtonpost.com | For Bad Bunny’s fans, he’s more than a global superstar. He’s a political icon. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/10/19/bad-bunny-political-activism/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/10/19/bad-bunny-political-activism/ |
As Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. John Fetterman recovers from a stroke while running for senator, his wife has emerged as a passionate voice — not only for him but for others
Gisele Barreto Fetterman listens to her husband, Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, speak during a rally in Philadelphia in September as he runs for U.S. Senate. (Hannah Beier/Reuters)
PITTSBURGH — So many words have been written about Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. and Senate hopeful John Fetterman’s tattoos. The imposingly statured, baldheaded 53-year-old former mayor of Braddock, Pa., has ink of the Pittsburgh borough’s Zip code and the dates of every violent death that took place there while he served in office, as well as a Nine Inch Nails lyric: “I will make you hurt.”
But what about his wife’s tattoos?
“This is the most recent one,” says Gisele Barreto Fetterman, 40, pulling her sleeve up past her wrist in an East Liberty coffee shop to reveal a tiny outline of a bird.
“This is from a very famous Brazilian poem,” she says of the bird’s significance. The poem is “I Fly,” by Mário Quintana. Translated from the Brazilian American second lady of Pennsylvania’s native Portuguese, it reads: “Those who would / My path deny / Are bound to falter / And I to fly.” Elsewhere, she has some hearts, an equality sign and on her arm, a word: “Soft.”
A thick skin isn’t soft. Gisele could use a thicker skin these days, as she helps John fight one of the toughest midterm races of the cycle. It all gets to her: the attacks from her husband’s opponent, former TV doctor Mehmet Oz; the disdainful comments she hears from people who fixate on her past as an undocumented immigrant. Piled onto that are all the injustices of life in America in 2022. Oh, and also the puppies.
The day before, Jezebel published a report that Oz’s medical experiments caused the deaths of more than 300 dogs, including puppies, and “inflicted significant suffering on them and the other animals used in experiments.” The Fettermans are dog lovers, so in a twisted sort of way this report was a gift to their campaign: an opportunity to call their opponent a puppy killer.
“It’s a profile of a really dangerous person, you know?” she says. “They said that the screams of the puppies were heard through the closed door.” (While Oz oversaw the experiments in these allegations, which took place between 2002 and 2004, there is no evidence that he personally abused the animals.)
Politics is mean and hard, and Gisele — soft Gisele, who cries three times over the course of this interview — had no choice but to get good at it: After her husband suffered a stroke four days before the Pennsylvania primary election last spring, she stepped up and become his surrogate, delivering his acceptance speech and campaigning across the state.
“It’s easy because I know his message, and I love him, and I know how good he is, and I get to tell that to people,” she says.
Later on this day, after a visit to an abortion clinic and a shift at the Free Store 15104, her mutual aid project, she will do an interview with KDKA, a local TV station, about the puppy allegations. Reached for comment by KDKA political editor Jon Delano, the Oz campaign’s senior spokesman Barney Keller responded: “Who is Gisele? Is she running for something?”
No. But, kind of.
She almost didn’t see it happen. But the morning of May 13, the couple were getting into the car to head to a campaign event.
“I was paying attention, and the corner of his mouth just dropped for one second,” she says. “His speech didn’t change. His energy didn’t change. Nothing else, other than a drop for a second. And I just knew that wasn’t a natural movement of the mouth.” She insisted that he go to the nearest hospital in Lancaster, Pa. He resisted. But once they arrived, doctors removed a clot from his brain and installed a pacemaker in his heart, which had been beating in atrial fibrillation, when the heart’s top chambers are out of sync with the bottom chambers.
Four days later, it was Gisele, not John, giving a victory speech.
“I now have one more thing I get to hold over him. I mean, I saved his life, right?” she said in the speech, making light of what was later revealed to be a near-deadly stroke. “I will never let him live that down.” Her sunny demeanor papered over the worry that had consumed her for days — and there was some anger, too. Fetterman had been diagnosed with cardiomyopathy in 2017 but had neglected his health and not returned for follow-up appointments.
“We have to be okay with accepting that we can feel all the different things at the same time,” she says. “So it’s okay to be mad at him, and to really love him, and to be proud of him. It’s okay that they all live together.”
The next few weeks were a whirlwind. Gisele had to tend to John’s recovery, while taking care of their three children, (Karl, 13, Grace, 11 and August, 8), and also acting as John’s voice — quite literally, as his speech was affected by the stroke. (John stumbles on his words occasionally and uses closed captioning for interviews. His campaign did not make him available to be interviewed for this story.) She campaigned for him and kept news outlets updated on his condition. “Just keeping the seat warm for him,” she told NBC.
“Had he been married to anybody else, I think his recovery and ability to stay in this race would have been drastically diminished,” says Brit Crampsie, a Pennsylvania political consultant who is not working with the Fetterman campaign. “Not many people have a surrogate like Gisele in their pocket, should they fall ill.”
Nevertheless, the couple was criticized: John for being absent, and Gisele for — according to detractors — not being more forthcoming about his condition.
Over in Ohio, one of the few women who could relate to Gisele’s situation was paying close attention.
“I was watching what she was doing and thinking, this takes a lot of guts because on Day 1, she knew she was going to get a lot of criticism for it,” says Connie Schultz, a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and the wife of Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio). Schultz is also the author of “ … And His Lovely Wife,” a memoir of her time supporting her husband on the trail, during which she had to take a leave of absence from her job at the Cleveland Plain Dealer to avoid a conflict of interest.
A Democrat in gym shorts tries to rally blue votes in Trump country
“This idea that somehow she should not be speaking in his stead — I don’t know who would have been more qualified to do so,” says Schultz. “It’s more than just a commitment to the personal success and the ambitions of her husband, right? If she shares his values, and we have every reason to think she does, she also shares his concern about who should be in the Senate.”
Schultz knows how this goes. Political wives are caricatures in the media: Either they’re the meek stand-by-your-man types who appear onstage when a mistress has surfaced, or they’re power-hungry lightning rods for criticism.
“In some ways, we really are still considered either props or problems,” says Schultz.
But the things that previously could make a candidate’s wife a “problem” have mostly been assets for Gisele. Her previous immigration status gives her a national platform to advocate for “dreamers” and asylum seekers. She’s a medical-marijuana patient (thanks to lingering pain from a childhood injury) who can speak personally about cannabis legalization, a popular part of her husband’s platform. She eschewed the lieutenant governor’s mansion, opting to remain in the converted auto garage they have renovated into their Braddock home, but opened up the mansion’s backyard pool to children from underprivileged backgrounds. She charmingly referred to herself by her title’s acronym — Second Lady of Pennsylvania, or SLOP.
Aside from being the target of anti-immigrant rhetoric, the thing Gisele is criticized for the most, she says, is her eyebrows — thick and dark, like Frida Kahlo’s but separated in the middle. Many women would pay good money to have them.
“I don’t think that Gisele would ever think about what a politician’s wife is supposed to be,” says Kristen Michaels, her close friend and partner in For Good PGH, their nonprofit. (According to tax filings, Gisele does not draw a salary from the endeavor.) “She is so her own person.”
Among Democrats, these characteristics have made her popular enough for some to openly wonder if she should be the candidate instead. That sentiment turned somewhat more fraught as it entwined with worries about her husband’s health.
“I like your hubby, but I wish I could vote for you,” wrote one Twitter follower.
“Gisele vs Oz is the debate I want to see,” wrote another.
Some even think of the Fettermans as a Bill-and-Hillary-style “two for the price of one.” The Fetterman campaign has capitalized on her popularity, selling “I’m With Gisele’s Husband” T-shirts with the couple’s silhouettes — and John’s head cropped out, a running joke on Gisele’s social media (she’s petite and likes to show off her shoes). An article on the site Latino Rebels bore the headline “Gisele Fetterman’s Husband Campaigns for Senate in Pennsylvania.”
“If she wanted to run for office, she would have a strong following and a decent fundraising first quarter,” says Crampsie.
“It’s very kind, but it’s not for me,” says Gisele. “It’s an awful, mean and cruel world, and my heart cannot take it.”
It was her father, actually, who was “always running for something,” says Gisele, scrolling through her phone to produce an old photo of herself as a baby in Brazil, being held by people wearing campaign shirts that bore her father’s name. In that photo, “He was running for deputado estadual, which would be state deputy” — equivalent to a state representative in the United States. Delfim Aguiar Almeida ran for that office multiple times, most recently in 2010, but did not win any of his elections. He has affiliated with both left- and right-wing parties during his career, which also included journalism and unelected community leadership in Rio de Janeiro’s West Zone.
“We never really talked about it because I’ve always hated politics,” says Gisele. “I think he thinks, like, ‘Oh, she followed in my footsteps.’ I absolutely did not.”
Her parents divorced when she was young; her mother brought her and her brother to the United States when Gisele was 7. It had been summer when they left Brazil, and she arrived wearing canvas sneakers and a light jacket, surprised by the chill of New York winters. It was a few years before another reveal — that her family was undocumented.
Her mother taught her she “can’t really draw any attention to yourself, right? Like, you can’t get in trouble. You can’t do these things because, you know, we are undocumented. And what this means is that we can be deported at any time,” Gisele says. Her mother cleaned houses. They furnished their Queens apartment with things found on the curb. She got her green card in 2004.
In 2007, while working as a nutritionist, Gisele was on a yoga retreat in Costa Rica when a magazine story about newly elected mayor John Fetterman trying to revive a neglected steel town caught her eye. She wrote him a handwritten letter with her business card enclosed to ask if she could come visit and maybe help.
“When I read about the city that had been abandoned, to me, I wanted to see what that looked like,” she says. “In Brazil, cities don’t get abandoned.”
What followed was a bit like a rom-com plot. The mayor gave her a tour of the city. A year later, he proposed.
Later, it was the memory of seeing all the perfectly good, discarded things on the streets of New York that gave her the idea to open the Free Store, a place for Braddock residents to come for anything from food to toys. Other free stores have opened across the state with her help.
When Breanna Adams, 32, of Erie, Pa., reached out to Gisele for advice on starting one in her own community in 2015, she personally coached her through the process, Adams says. After the store opened, the couple brought donations of brand-new children’s clothing the next time they were in Erie.
“She literally came in carrying boxes,” says Adams. She “was just like: ‘Hey, I’m in town. Can we stop by?’ And kicked off her shoes and got right to work folding things and putting things away.” The store wasn’t even open at the time of her visit, says Adams, so she wasn’t doing it for an audience.
In Gisele’s Braddock store hangs a sign that reads, “Wherever you came from, however you got here, we’re SO glad to see you.” But the store has also been the location for some tense exchanges.
“I had a gentleman who came to the Free Store for food, and I gave him like, a couple of meals from Costco,” she says, “And then my mom called, and I answered in Portuguese, and then he made a really disparaging comment.” He was a veteran and told her that “your people” had taken all the jobs. It wasn’t as frightening as the time she was followed out of a Pittsburgh Aldi by a woman calling her the n-word — an incident that made headlines in the United States and Brazil — but she’s tearing up at the memory.
“I don’t want to ever get to a place where it doesn’t affect me because then I feel like I’ve lost a part of who I am,” she says. “I’m okay crying at least once a day. Sometimes more.”
In a way, the walk to a Pittsburgh abortion clinic is familiar. Teenage Gisele once accompanied a friend who needed an abortion. On their way to the appointment, the pair encountered antiabortion protesters. The friend’s pregnancy ended in miscarriage, Gisele says, but the memory of making their way inside with the protesters yelling at them stuck with her, and inspired her to volunteer as a clinic escort while earning a degree at the Institute for Integrative Nutrition, protectively shuffling women through the shouting gantlets.
There are only three protesters in front of the Allegheny Reproductive Health Center today, but a staff member tells her that on the weekends, there are often about 40. The protesters sit in foldable chairs across the street and eye Gisele up as she walks toward the door. One holds up a sign with a picture of a baby that reads “I love you mommy don’t leave without ME!”
“It’s so hard to understand where inside of [them] that cruelty comes from,” she says.
The Fetterman campaign has repeatedly pressed Oz on his stance on abortion, holding “Women for Fetterman” (or, “Fetterwomen”) rallies and emphasizing abortion access in campaign advertising. Oz has said he is antiabortion, with exceptions for rape, incest and if the mother’s life is at risk.
Gisele’s three children were born via water birth, at her home. She wanted to feel all the feelings. But she doesn’t want other women to have to. “Forcing a child to have to give birth,” she says, referring to a recent, nationally debated example. “I can’t wrap my mind around that mentality.”
Inside the clinic, after opening her purse for security (“There’s lots of snacks in there,” she says), she makes her way through waiting rooms and exam rooms, guided by Nikkole Terney, the center’s abortion care director.
“Since the Dobbs decision, a lot of people got their abortions canceled in Ohio,” says Terney, referring to the recent Supreme Court ruling. “We’ve seen almost double our monthly numbers.”
“What’s the farthest you’ve had someone come?” asks Gisele.
“Tennessee, one from Mississippi recently,” says Terney.
“Literally anywhere west of us and south of us,” says Rogelio Garcia II, the center’s director of security and safety. Downstairs, where volunteers counsel patients, the phones constantly ring.
Soft is what Gisele brings to a campaign that is only getting harder. In the weeks since her visit to the abortion clinic, Fetterman’s lead has narrowed. The candidate was criticized for using closed captions and fumbling some words in an interview with NBC News; disability advocates condemned coverage of the candidate as ableist. On Twitter, Gisele said that she, too, uses closed captioning to help with her ADHD, and pivoted to the impact the coverage would have on others: “Close to 15% of the US population identify as hard of hearing and may need accommodations.”
“I see her as outward-focused. The candidate has to talk about himself,” says Schultz. “And she turns to shine the light on people they’re meeting, people who are gathering around them.”
John is an introvert — “awkwardly shy,” says Gisele. So she compensates for that with gregariousness and hugs. Three times in the conversation, she refers to herself as a Pisces — “Pisces are sensitive and emotional.” Later, she would try to encourage this reporter to write a story about a child she met who needs a bone-marrow transplant.
If her husband wins, Gisele will find herself with a much larger platform for the causes that she holds dear, which center on meeting people’s basic needs and rechanneling food and goods that would otherwise be wasted. She says someone has already approached her about opening a free store in D.C.
“A lot of things that she cares about are more appropriate for a federal stage,” says Crampsie. “I know immigration is a big one for her, and as lieutenant governor John didn’t really have a big say in that, so maybe we’ll see more from her.”
“I know that she will be thoughtful about where and how she spends her time and energy, and she will support John, as she always has,” says Michaels, her friend. “She’ll make her own path.”
On her way out of the abortion clinic, Gisele meets with two volunteers to thank them for their work. “I escorted a long time ago, and I’m ready to get back into it,” she says, quietly adding her number to the clinic’s volunteer database. “Phones, whatever you need me to do.”
Beatriz Miranda in Rio de Janeiro contributed to this report. | 2022-10-19T10:12:01Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Gisele Fetterman, forging on through her husband’s heated Senate race - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/10/19/gisele-fetterman-profile/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/10/19/gisele-fetterman-profile/ |
Kate del Castillo, TV’s antiheroine queen, talks ‘La Reina del Sur’
Kate del Castillo and Pêpê Rapazote in “La Reina del Sur.” (Telemundo)
The third season of Telemundo’s hit series “La Reina del Sur” premiered Tuesday, reuniting the world with Teresa Mendoza (Kate del Castillo), the antiheroine at the center of a drug-trafficking empire she inherited amid tragedy in the show’s first episode. “La Reina” broke records for Telemundo when it premiered in 2011 (and led to an English-language adaptation that ended its five-season run last year). It also marked an international breakout for del Castillo, a veteran Mexican American actress.
Teresa, who went to prison in the United States at the end of last season, travels across Latin America in the latest installment, finding herself at Peru’s Machu Picchu; Bolivia’s sprawling salt flat, Salar de Uyuni; and Santa Marta in Colombia.
Del Castillo talked to The Washington Post about what to expect from the country-hopping new season, feeling protective over Teresa and how “La Reina” influenced the increasingly international TV landscape.
(This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.)
Q: Where does the new season find Teresa, and what has her evolution been like since the first two seasons?
A: She’s stronger than ever physically, but also mentally, because she spent four years in confinement in this jail in the United States. A woman like Teresa Mendoza, being isolated for so long, it just increases her thirst for revenge, for justice. It’s still the same “Queen of the South” — “La Reina del Sur”— but now we have different writers; we’re going to different places in Latin America. Latin America is going to be shown like you’ve never seen it before.
Q: The third season takes viewers to several different countries and into various Indigenous communities that were involved in the production. Was there a place that you liked the most? And was there anything that you learned interacting with all those different people?
A: That’s why I love what I do. My career has given me so much and has taken me to places that I might have never gone by myself. The second season, we went to Russia, Romania, Italy, but now, for me, it was even better because now it was time to have “La Reina del Sur” in Suramérica [South America]. We hired actors from every single one of those places. So, the Mexicans are real Mexicans, the Argentinians are real Argentinians and so on.
Q: Throughout the pandemic, Netflix generated a lot of buzz around non-English titles. Do you see “La Reina” as a precursor to that given how popular it has been worldwide?
A: Personally, I like to keep it real. So I don’t like listening [to a show] in another language — I’d rather read subtitles. And the good thing about [“La Reina”] is that you can listen to it now however you want. For me, it’s very important because now Americans, they are getting used to reading subtitles. It’s great because now they are much more open to watching shows — from Latin America, from Europe, from Asia — and I think that’s awesome. Everything is changing and everything is getting much better for all of us, I think.
International streaming hits are proof that good TV translates, no matter the language
Q: Do you think that has led to more opportunities for Latino actors in general?
A: Absolutely. I mean, there’s so much work right now. When I first got to the United States, Americans they didn’t hire me because they wouldn’t like to hear my accent. So I spent a lot of money, you know, on accent coaches and this and that. And now everything has changed. And I’m very happy because now I can work much more with my own accent.
Q: You’ve also talked about the expectation, especially in Hollywood, that Latinos look a certain way on-screen when in fact they are all races, hair colors, eye colors. Is that changing as well?
A: Not as fast as I would like. Yes, they all talk about inclusion. But still, I receive scripts all the time with so many stereotypes and I’m getting tired of it. I actually am very tired of it. And that’s why I created my own production company, so I can just do whatever I want instead of having to teach the industry about who we are. You know, it’s about time. … It’s just ignorance, pure ignorance. And I think it needs to change. But it’s not. So we have to bear with that. And we have, as Latinos, to let the people who are doing these narratives learn a little bit more about who we are.
Q: “La Reina” is so popular and important to so any people. Has anyone approached you and said something about the show that has stuck with you?
A: Oh, my God. So many people, they say beautiful things — especially about the character, about Teresa Mendoza being this woman that has to go through so much. And she’s a survivor and she was a victim, but she doesn’t victimize herself. All these things make this character unique and approachable, and that’s why people relate so much with her, because she’s real. She’s an antiheroine, full of defects; she’s flawed in so many ways. That’s what I like about her. And I wish we could see more characters like her in American television, in [the] mainstream. For us Latinas it’s great because she’s not sexualized in any way — she’s just smart because she’s smart.
Q: How collaborative is the show? Are there opportunities to ask for things in terms of character development or even music? How much input do you have?
A: Yes, and I’m very grateful because Telemundo and Marcos Santana, who is the showrunner, they listen to me. And I love it because they know that I know the character inside out. So I give them tips. I read every single episode before they are approved and they listen to my notes. I really defend [Teresa] in so many ways because this is such a unique character that I don’t want her to do things that she wouldn’t do. Sometimes the writers want her to do things just to add something cool. And I say “yes, but not that” or “yes, that.” So it’s a fine line also, for me to talk to them and that they listen to me, but also not finding myself too protective of her. But I just can’t help it.
Q: Not to put you on the spot, but do you have any examples?
A: At the end of the second season, they wanted me to [end up] with this guy, like a beautiful family. No, that’s not Teresa. All the men in her life die. So, sorry, that cannot be the ending. Because she does not need a man to be happy. She has her daughter and that’s it. That’s one of the things, as a woman, that I would defend, especially a character like Teresa. Those little things, they listen to me, thank God. | 2022-10-19T10:16:17Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Actress Kate del Castillo discusses Telemundo’s ‘La Reina del Sur’ - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/10/19/kate-del-castillo-la-reina-del-sur/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/10/19/kate-del-castillo-la-reina-del-sur/ |
Dak Prescott tests his surgically repaired right thumb by throwing before the Cowboys’ loss Sunday night in Philadelphia. (Matt Slocum/AP)
Dak Prescott is set to play Sunday for the Dallas Cowboys at home against the Detroit Lions after missing five games because of a fractured right thumb. The Miami Dolphins are making plans for Tua Tagovailoa to play Sunday night at home against the Pittsburgh Steelers after he missed two games while in the NFL’s concussion protocols.
Prescott returned to the practice field last week but was on the inactive list for the Cowboys’ 26-17 loss Sunday night in Philadelphia. That ended a four-game winning streak with Cooper Rush as the fill-in starter and dropped the Cowboys to 4-2. Prescott said as the Cowboys were leaving Lincoln Financial Field that he plans to play this weekend against the Lions.
The Dolphins lost the past two games they played without Tagovailoa and are on a three-game skid since their 3-0 start. Doctors cleared Tagovailoa on Saturday, but the Dolphins already had ruled him out of Sunday’s game at home against the Minnesota Vikings, a 24-16 defeat in which rookie Skylar Thompson started at quarterback but suffered a thumb injury. Teddy Bridgewater replaced him.
They showed they can win in Kansas City. Now the main task is to make certain they don’t have to return to Arrowhead Stadium during the playoffs.
This time, Patrick Mahomes didn’t get it done in crunchtime against the Bills. He should get another opportunity in January.
Few quarterback-wideout combinations ever have been as in sync as Aaron Rodgers and Adams were during their time together with the Packers. But the trade enabled Green Bay to receive a handsome package of draft picks for a receiver who turns 30 in December, perhaps with the thought that Rodgers’s excellence would make a revamped group of wideouts look better than it actually is.
Russell Wilson was more productive for a stretch of Monday night’s OT loss to the Chargers. But it didn’t last. This simply isn’t working thus far.
“The reality is that’s not good enough,” Wilson said after the game. “We’ve got to be better. … We’ve got to play sharper. We’ve got to find ways to make plays. We’ve got to find ways to continue to get first downs, touchdowns. It’s a good football team out there. But we’re just as good, if not better, we feel like. We’ve got to answer the call, you know? Adversity is definitely challenging us right now. The only way I know through it all is just continue to work hard and continue to believe. I felt like we should have won that game tonight.” | 2022-10-19T10:20:43Z | www.washingtonpost.com | NFL rankings, Dak and Tua returning, Packers’ and Broncos’ woes - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/19/nfl-rankings-dak-tua-broncos/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/19/nfl-rankings-dak-tua-broncos/ |
Republican congressional candidate Yesli Vega greets supporters at an Oct. 14 rally in Lake Ridge, Va. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
She started her story like she always did: beginning with her parents in El Salvador, fleeing civil war in the 1980s to come to the United States and rebuild their lives.
The story is familiar to anyone who has heard Yesli Vega, the Republican challenging Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-Va.), rock a room full of enthusiastic supporters, and that night she told it to dozens of Latinos who had come out for a Hispanic get-out-the-vote rally.
“Mi familia es mi inspiración, mi familia es mi motivación,” she said, alternating between English and Spanish as margaritas and applause flowed at Hector’s Mexican Restaurant in Lake Ridge on Friday night. “We’re going to seize this moment y vamos a hacer historia” — and we’re going to make history.
Here in Northern Virginia, the GOP’s overtures to Hispanic voters could not be more evident as Vega, the first Latina elected to the Prince William Board of County Supervisors, seeks to become Virginia’s first Hispanic congresswoman as well.
Locked in a highly competitive race with Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-Va.), Vega is one of a record 31 GOP Hispanic nominees — including 11 incumbents — on the ballot across the country this year, according to the National Republican Congressional Committee. In Virginia, her candidacy also follows a broader trend of the GOP running with more diverse candidates, coming on the heels of last year’s victories of Attorney General Jason S. Miyares, the first Latino elected statewide, and Winsome Earle-Sears, the state’s first Black female lieutenant governor and a Jamaican immigrant.
But Vega, a former police officer who’s now a Prince William County auxiliary deputy, is not without controversy among Hispanics in the county, having previously sparred with immigrant rights activists over her vocal support for a federal immigration enforcement program in the local jail. In a blue-leaning region like eastern Prince William, Vega’s political appeal could face challenges, said Mark Rozell, the dean of George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government.
A Washington Post-Ipsos poll found that the GOP has made gains with Hispanic voters since 2018, but Democrats have a 27-point advantage. Still, Rozell said, “the Latino vote is not a lock Democratic vote,” noting Latino voters are far from monolithic on the issues driving this year’s election, such as high prices and abortion — which according to the poll are two top issues for Hispanic voters this year. In Virginia’s 7th District, Hispanics make up 15 percent of the voting-age population, and even considering not all of those voters may be registered or eligible, Rozell said they could “certainly be decisive to the outcome — especially in a closely contested election.”
“The Hispanic vote is key, there’s no doubt about that, and it’s much more swingable than many observers suggest,” Rozell said. “Although the Hispanic vote in that district traditionally has leaned strongly Democratic, the Republican Party has made some important inroads with Hispanic voters,” he said, noting that Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) eschewed “anti-immigrant” rhetoric compared with previous statewide Republican candidates.
Vega, in fact, co-led his Hispanic outreach efforts, and Youngkin has been returning the favor, stumping for her this year.
The importance of Hispanic voters in the district has had both candidates, their supporters and Hispanic advocates seeking to maximize their outreach.
While Vega has drawn on her experience leading Hispanic get-out-the-vote efforts for Youngkin with events such as Friday’s rally, Spanberger pointed in a statement to several bilingual events that she’s done across the district, plus ads she has taken out in Spanish-speaking newspapers or radio stations.
“You have my word that I will continue fighting for you as I’ve always done,” Spanberger says in Spanish in one recent radio ad with Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), who also speaks the language. “I am going to continue working to improve the economy, reduce prices in the supermarket and at the gas station, and bring more jobs to our community.”
CASA in Action — the immigrant rights organization that has clashed with Vega and endorsed Spanberger — has spent roughly $78,000 in its canvassing efforts supporting Spanberger. Del. Elizabeth R. Guzman (D-Prince William) had also been leading some Hispanic outreach canvassing for Spanberger, though recently incurred Republican ire after WJLA reported that she planned to introduce a bill that could allow child abuse investigations into parents who did not “affirm” their children’s LGBTQ identities, which Spanberger said she did not support, and which Guzman said had been mischaracterized. The campaign said Tuesday that Guzman is no longer doing Hispanic outreach “at this time.”
Libre Action — a Koch-backed organization advocating Hispanic prosperity and a conservative policy approach — endorsed Vega and through its parent organization, Americans for Prosperity, has spent nearly half a million dollars on independent expenditures for her.
“This is another example of the Hispanic community flexing its muscle in elections,” said Michael Monrroy, the Virginia director of the Libre Initiative, over empanadas at Arepas Capitol in Dale City before a day of door-knocking. “It’s great to see more diversity, but is that the only goal? Absolutely not. Anyone who advances some of our policy ideals, they don’t have to be Hispanic — but she is, and a personal story is very powerful with a voter when they can relate.”
One was Edith Romero, a 41-year-old Salvadoran immigrant who lives in Woodbridge. “She’s from the same country as me, so I feel so excited,” she said of Vega, who was born in Texas, speaking in an interview on a recent Saturday at a Latin music concert put on by the Libre Initiative in its nonpolitical capacity.
Romero said she was initially drawn to the Republican Party because she is religious and opposes abortion — and because her sister was deported under President Barack Obama’s administration, leading her to lose trust in Democrats on immigration. So when she met Vega at a church meet-and-greet, she said, she became a fast supporter, even agreeing to appear in the background of a recent Vega ad about education.
Romero said she backed Vega not only for her antiabortion views and her focus on crime and parent empowerment in education, but also because she saw herself reflected in Vega’s parents, who came to the United States buscando una vida mejor, Romero said — seeking a better life, like her.
Romero said she crossed the border illegally in 2001, got lost in the desert and was misled by coyotes, or people who smuggle or lead migrants into the United States for profit. Because of her mistreatment, she said, she is a strong supporter of more border security and a crackdown on ill-intentioned smugglers who exploit immigrants, another reason she said she supports Vega.
“I am not against people coming to work. It’s not like that,” said Romero, who said she became a citizen after her 2015 marriage. “Some people, they misunderstand that.”
Vega has made border security a main tenet of her campaign, discussing the topic frequently on Fox News, though she has not said much about other ideas for immigration reform. She said in a brief interview that she would not make promises she couldn’t keep on the campaign trail and that she was “open to having conversations” about a path to citizenship for “dreamers,” or people brought to the United States as children of undocumented immigrants.
“They understand we have a lot of work to do when it comes to the immigration system,” she said of Hispanic voters. “This is an opportunity for somebody like me, with my story, to have a seat at the table to have those conversations with people that perhaps don’t understand the why, and we can put common-sense solutions to make sure we can secure the border and that we figure out what we’re going to do moving forward with dreamers.”
While many of Vega’s conservative Hispanic supporters said they backed her focus on border security, Vega’s clashes with immigration rights organizers early in her tenure has them galvanized against her.
CASA split with Vega early on after she pushed for keeping a federal immigration enforcement program known as 287(g), which allowed the local jail to flag and transfer suspected undocumented immigrants to federal immigration custody. Vega drew on her experience in law enforcement and her family’s brush with violent crime when she was a teenager — her brother was shot by the gang MS-13 — in pushing for the program, which Prince William County ultimately eliminated.
First Latina to be elected in her blue-leaning county. But she’s a Republican and an object of hate.
To its opponents, 287(g) created fear among Latinos about interacting with police even if they needed help or wished to report a crime, and contributed to fears of profiling of Latinos or deportation, advocates said.
“She doesn’t represent us,” Marvin Hernandez, a Salvadoran immigrant and the Virginia elections manager of CASA in Action, said in a recent interview. “We feel that she’s doing the opposite of what we want, what the immigrant or Latino community needs in the state of Virginia,” he said, noting that he has not seen Vega being a vocal advocate for more affordable health-care access for the Hispanic and especially undocumented community, or putting forth any detailed platform about creating paths to citizenship or helping immigrant workers.
It wasn’t only liberal Hispanics who broke with Vega after her public fights with the activists. Carlos Castro, a prominent Latino business owner who aligns with Republican principles but identifies as an independent, said he was excited for Vega during her first run for office and endorsed her that year. “My hope was, as I told her, that she would be a bridge builder,” said Castro, the owner of Todos Supermarket in Woodbridge. And Vega had advocated for the Latino community on certain issues, such as opposing a transportation project that affected a primarily Latino mobile home park.
But Castro found himself feeling turned off by Vega’s public fights over 287(g) and noted that “I don’t see that she has a lot of experience for the job that she’s aspiring to,” and so he decided not to endorse her run for Congress. The decision tore at him, he said, because a part of him still wanted to root for a fellow Salvadoran American. “That’s the difficult part,” he said.
On a recent Saturday, both Libre in Action and CASA in Action were out in force advocating for their candidates. Canvassers from both groups didn’t have the best luck finding many voters interested in talking at length.
But Danny Martinez, an 18-year-old canvasser with CASA, found at least one who had a lot to say, as he carried Spanberger literature from door to door. Martinez said in an interview that he decided to knock doors for Spanberger after learning of her support for raising the minimum wage, advocacy for making college more affordable and her vote for the American Dream and Promise Act to create paths to legal residency for dreamers and people with temporary protected status, like many of his relatives. But when speaking to voters, Martinez did a lot of listening; one of his first questions: What were the issues most important to them?
The Salvadoran American voter who wanted to talk at length told Martinez about his concerns: the high cost of food, high taxes, a tight family budget at home, and was anyone in Washington paying attention to the treatment of immigrant workers? It didn’t feel like it to the voter, who said he had voted Democrat in the past but now sounded noncommittal. “Sooner or later, I could vote Democrat or vote Republican,” he said.
“Of the politicians, we have to see who is the most focused on our community,” the voter told Martinez in Spanish.
He was exactly the kind of voter Democrats were trying to keep — and the GOP was trying to convert, capitalizing on voters’ widespread discontent with the economy. Martinez marked him “lean Democrat” as he left the home, given the man’s past support for Democrats.
But just six days later, as Salvadoran and American flags rippled in the crowd at Vega’s rally at Hector’s, a familiar face appeared. It was the same voter Martinez had met — now wearing a “Vega for Congress” sticker on his shirt.
He stood in a line to take a picture with Vega, smiling proudly, and as he sat back down, recognizing the reporter he had met in his driveway a week earlier, he explained he liked Vega’s calls for change. “I’m so happy that she’s from my country,” he said.
Teo Armus contributed to this report. | 2022-10-19T11:04:15Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Hispanic voters could be ‘key’ in competitive Vega-Spanberger race - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/19/hispanic-voters-virginia-vega-spanberger/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/19/hispanic-voters-virginia-vega-spanberger/ |
Wes Moore, the Democratic nominee, suggested the increasingly popular ‘baby bonds’ program to target the racial wealth gap. The price tag is more than $92 million per year.
Wes Moore, the Democratic nominee for Maryland governor, stands at his campaign office in Baltimore on Oct. 11. (Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post)
If Democrat Wes Moore is elected Maryland’s governor, tackling childhood poverty is a “day one” priority for which he’s pitched an arsenal of expensive policy tools, including what could be the country’s largest “baby bonds” program to date.
Moore’s trust fund program would cost roughly $100 million per year and be seeded with $3,200 for every child born on Medicaid, which amounts to nearly 40 percent of Maryland’s infants, disproportionately those from Black and Latino families.
The proposal is among the most expansive interventions Moore has pitched to build a more equitable society in his “leave no one behind” campaign that, so far, has resonated in deeply blue Maryland. He holds a 32-percentage point lead in a recent poll over his Trump-backed opponent, Del. Dan Cox (R-Frederick).
But like many of his proposals, Moore has not identified a specific way to pay for baby bonds and broadly said he would work it out with the legislature. Instead of specifics, he points to a historic infusion of federal aid and a $2 billion surplus generated in large part by Maryland’s richest residents growing richer.
There’s a serious proposal to give babies born in the United States $20,000 (or more)
It’s not clear if the money will be there in the future to pay for it, and the scope of the pitch is far bigger than other programs quickly undertaken in Maryland, which just last year accomplished a long-sought goal to provide dental coverage to all adults on Medicaid.
Moore, former CEO of the poverty-fighting nonprofit Robin Hood Foundation, is undeterred, saying: “I believe deeply in making sure that we are being aggressive in terms of … making our state more competitive while also making it more equitable.”
While about 12 percent of Maryland’s children live below the poverty line, according to 2020 data from the Annie E. Casey Foundation, many more qualify for Medicaid — 28 percent come from homes living at or below 200 percent of poverty. And aside from income disparities, minorities broadly hold less wealth: Nationwide, the typical White family holds eight times the wealth of a Black one and five times the wealth of Hispanic family, according to the Federal Reserve.
Developed by economists studying inequality a dozen years ago, the baby bonds concept has gained awareness since the 2020 racial justice protests. It infuses capital into the lives of young people encountering pivotal life choices about college or work, starting a business, saving for retirement or buying a home — times when wealthier counterparts may be able to count on a boost from parents.
Booker wants a ‘baby bond’ for every U.S. child. Would it work?
The scope of endowments varies widely across proposed plans, with economists Darrick Hamilton and William Darity Jr., who developed the idea, suggesting that up to $60,000 in federal-government backed trusts and more-modest state proposals offer a maximum benefit closer to $11,000. An analysis by Morningstar found Booker’s proposal, which would yield up to $50,000 when recipients turn 18, could cut the racial wealth gap in half.
A handful of states of have debated or passed smaller versions, and the idea has gained enough attention that the Federal Reserve of New York last month convened an event called “Exploring Baby Bonds as a Tool to Improve Economic Security.”
“This is a unique opportunity, and a data-driven opportunity, to show how exactly we can both address the issue of child poverty and also address the issue of the racial wealth gap in one fell swoop,” Moore said.
Nationwide, the median Black family has about 12 cents of wealth for every dollar a median White family does, according the most recent estimate by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, which calculates the disparity using the Fed’s triannual Survey of Consumer Finances. That disparity has changed little since 1989.
Not only were Black people shut out of many lucrative professions and educational opportunities for about a century by Jim Crow laws, but bias government policies regarding land acquisition, asset ownership and home lending — among many other forces — systemically hampered the ability of Black families to build wealth to pass on to their children, Hamilton and Darity wrote.
The economists also noted separate academic studies that showed family wealth was the greatest indicator of child’s future wealth, and Black families have higher savings rates.
Rodney Brooks, author of “Fixing the Racial Wealth Gap,” wrote in a recent Washington Post article that “the history of racism, discrimination and violence runs deep. Every time Black Americans made progress, it was taken away either legally … or violently.”
“The result is that Black Americans are far behind White Americans in every economic statistic,” Brooks wrote.
A Black Family Won Back Its Beach. The Law Remains Broken.
The goal of the program is to create a taxpayer-funded trust that gains value over time and gives a child born in poverty a lump sum of cash upon adulthood, money that would be substantial enough to change a young adult’s choices yet restricted to a handful of uses, perhaps to pay for college, buy a home or start a business. Moore suggested recipients would need to complete a financial literacy course before receiving the money.
“We need to have the courage to do things that we know are going to be important long-term investments to be able to address a lot of challenges,” Moore said.
Moore said that the $3,200 investment would be a starting point for discussion and that he’d leave it up to negotiations with the Maryland General Assembly — which is dominated by Democrats and led by lawmakers who wholeheartedly endorse him — to determine the scope and sweep of the proposal, as well as who would qualify. Some state senators have started working on similar ideas, and a spokesman for Senate President Bill Ferguson (D-Baltimore City) said Ferguson “is in favor anything that helps reduce child poverty in Maryland.” A spokesman for House Speaker Adrienne A. Jones (D-Baltimore County) did not respond to a request for comment.
Two other jurisdictions — Connecticut and D.C. — have enacted similar baby bonds initiatives, though on a smaller scale. D.C.'s plan for $500 accounts is estimated to cost $32 million over the first four years. Connecticut, meanwhile, pushed off the start date for its $3,200 accounts for two years. California launched one to help children who lost a parent to the coronavirus. Massachusetts’s treasurer set up a task force to develop a program. In Washington state, the treasurer is touring rural counties selling his baby bonds idea as a way to eradicate rural poverty.
“The difference between haves and have-nots is capital. The difference between a renter and homeowner is a down payment,” Zewde said.
Had children born into poverty in the early ’90s received trust funds at birth, Zewde estimated in a 2019 analysis, the wealth disparity between young White and Black people would have been reduced enormously: A young White person would hold 1.4 times the wealth of a young Black person, rather than 16 times the wealth, as they do in real life. | 2022-10-19T11:04:21Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Wes Moore wants a Maryland 'baby bonds' program if elected governor - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/19/wes-moore-maryland-baby-bonds/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/19/wes-moore-maryland-baby-bonds/ |
In supporting a bill that critics called ‘don’t say gay,’ Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis compares his attack on ‘big corporations’ to Reagan’s assault on ‘big government’
By Michael Kranish
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis leaves after holding a news conference at Anna Maria Oyster Bar Landside in Bradenton, Fla., on Sept. 20. (Thomas Simonetti for The Washington Post)
Early on March 9, Robert Chapek, the Walt Disney Company’s CEO, got on the phone with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to discuss the Parental Rights in Education bill, which restricts what teachers can say about gender and sexual orientation.
On the surface, the pair shared a classic partnership between corporate leader and Republican governor. Disney was a DeSantis donor and one of the state’s biggest employers. Thanks to a $578 million tax break approved during his administration, Disney planned to move 2,000 high-paid creative jobs from California to the Sunshine State.
But DeSantis was bristling about similar plans, as he soon made clear in public and private. Californians moving to Texas will “vote the exact same way they voted that turned San Francisco into the dumpster fire that it is,” he warned at a forum in April, adding that he also didn’t want “leftists” infiltrating Florida. He echoed such concerns to Disney executives, according to a person familiar with the discussions who spoke on the condition of anonymity to disclose private conversations.
Now, as they spoke about the Parental Rights bill, the divide between the two men was widening. Facing growing fury from Disney’s LGBTQ employees, Chapek expressed his “disappointment” and asked DeSantis for a meeting to address the company’s concerns, he told shareholders.
Instead, DeSantis used Disney’s turmoil as a launchpad for his boldest confrontation yet with corporate America, spearheading a successful push to strip Disney of a decades-old tax district, slamming the company on Fox News and fundraising off the clash. “You have companies, like a Disney, that are going to say, and criticize, parents’ rights,” DeSantis said. “They’re going to criticize the fact that we don’t want transgenderism in kindergarten and first-grade classrooms.”
In Florida, DeSantis has infuriated cruise lines by signing a law banning businesses from verifying vaccination status. He blocked state funding for a Tampa Bay Rays baseball facility after the team donated to a gun violence prevention program after the Uvalde, Tex., mass shooting. And he signed what became known as the Stop Woke Act, which bans businesses from requiring that employees receive certain types of training about racial diversity. Signing the law in April, DeSantis said, “We will not let the far-left woke agenda take over our schools and workplaces.”
The approach has helped elevate DeSantis into a leading threat to former president Donald Trump’s dominance of the Republican Party, putting him in a strong position to win his reelection campaign as governor this fall and potentially to challenge Trump in 2024 for the White House.
It’s also coincided with a surge in fundraising that has enabled DeSantis to raise more for a gubernatorial bid than anyone in Florida history. His campaign and political committees have collected a combined $180 million, according to state records, including millions from big businesses and billionaire tycoons. The message to Florida companies has been to stay out of the culture wars or pay the price — and many have continued opening their pocketbooks for him.
Al Cárdenas, a former chairman of the Florida Republican Party, said that many businesses believe DeSantis is “someone they will have to work with for the next four years, so donations are not drying up. I believe they are now more pragmatic.”
DeSantis has increasingly articulated his attacks on corporate America to audiences, including in a Sept. 11 speech to the National Conservatism Conference where he noted that when President Ronald Reagan was elected in 1988, “it was really big government that was to blame” for the nation’s problems.
Today, DeSantis said, the villain is “big corporations” — a line closer to traditional Democratic attacks. That followed a speech earlier this year in which DeSantis said: “What I tell conservatives is you can’t just say private companies can do whatever the hell they want to. They are not the friend of conservatives right now. They are not the friend of the foundations of this country. And so they’re using their economic power to advance harmful ideologies.”
No single fight with corporations in his tenure has been as consequential or surprising as DeSantis’s war with Disney. A reconstruction of the events by The Washington Post through interviews with key players, documents and other sources reveals how Disney’s missteps set the stage for the conflict, as its army of 38 lobbyists in Tallahassee failed to change or halt the bill, and Chapek declined for weeks to speak publicly about it. Chapek later apologized for his actions, which led to internal protests and a public backlash, saying employees had helped him understand “how painful our silence was.” The conflict also highlights the careful political calculus of DeSantis, who had previously said little publicly about gay rights issues.
“When Disney stumbled, DeSantis pounced,” said a person familiar with the episode who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private discussions. “They served it up to him on a silver platter.”
Disney declined to comment. A DeSantis spokesperson did not respond to a list of questions submitted by The Post.
Even some of DeSantis’s staunchest allies in the business world have watched uneasily as his clash with Disney escalated. Citadel hedge fund CEO Ken Griffin, who has given DeSantis’s political committee $11 million in the last two cycles and who is moving his own business to Miami, said earlier this year that “I don’t appreciate Governor DeSantis going after Disney’s tax status. It can be portrayed, or feel, or look like retaliation.”
He added, “It’s important that the leaders in both parties stay above the fray when it comes to retaliation against corporate America.”
‘Amazon will kneecap you’
DeSantis’s own relationship with the business world began before he entered politics. And it provided a lesson about the power of major corporations.
After serving as a Navy JAG lawyer, and as he began work on a book that bashed President Barack Obama, DeSantis joined two classmates to co-found a company in 2009 called LSAT Freedom, an online course for law school applicants. DeSantis took a leading role their ads, pledging in one YouTube clip that recently had just 400 views that “you’ll be able to almost know that they’re going to ask a certain question as you’re going through.”
But the firm soon faced pressure from major corporate competition. “Initially, we did very well,” said Robert Fojo, one of the company’s co-founders. “And then many of the big-box companies jumped in and starting launching their own version. And so we didn’t have the marketing recourse to compete with them.”
DeSantis, who noted his stake in LSAT Freedom in 2012 and 2013 campaign disclosures but reported no income from it, has not spoken in detail about the company’s finances but has talked about small firms in a similar position.
“What happens when you try to start your own thing? Amazon will kneecap you. They will all come and kneecap you.” (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Post.) He said the “big monopolies … have more power over our society than the monopolies of the 20th century ever did.”
From the beginning of his political career, DeSantis has showed a willingness to take aim at industries that wield power in his state.
In the House, he opposed the sugar subsidies that have propped up one of his state’s key industries for decades. And when he ran for governor in 2018, he blamed the industry for water pollution. Big Sugar stopped sending him campaign contributions and poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into a committee supporting DeSantis’s primary opponent, Agriculture Commissioner Adam Putnam.
As Trump and other Republicans took populist aim at what they called the “woke” agenda of some companies, DeSantis gained notice by opposing vaccine and mask requirements — and making it clear that there would be consequences for Florida companies that speak out on social issues.
After the Tampa Bay Rays tweeted that mass shootings such as the one that left 21 dead in Uvalde “have shaken us to the core” and made $50,000 donation to gun violence prevention, DeSantis blocked $35 million in state funding for the team’s spring training facility, saying it would be “inappropriate to subsidize political activism of a private corporation.”
DeSantis has faced some backlash from businesses and courts, such as a ruling from U.S. District Judge Mark Walker in August that the Stop Woke Act is “impermissibly vague,” violates the First Amendment and has a provision “bordering on unintelligible.”
His fundraising prowess hasn’t suffered. His record haul includes $146 million to a political committee that — unlike a campaign committee limited to $3,000 per individuals in a cycle — can take unlimited donations. In all, 94 percent came from donors who gave more than $200, according to an analysis by Bloomberg. That includes millions from major Florida industries including the lodging and tourism business; finance, security and real estate companies; and lawyers and lobbyists, according to campaign finance reports.
Some of the largest sums come from a handful of individuals. Griffin, the Citadel CEO who is moving his company from Illinois to Florida, gave DeSantis’s political committee $5 million in this cycle, in addition to about $6 million in the prior cycle. A Nevada hotel and aerospace executive, Robert T. Bigelow, gave $10 million in July. Griffin and Bigelow declined to comment.
Companies may be apprehensive about how DeSantis has gone after some of them but most have concluded that conduct is balanced by the state’s corporate-friendly tax and regulatory policies, said Cárdenas, noting his own opposition to the governor’s “provocative statements about immigration or Disney.”
“What the governor says, I don’t really see translating to policies that hurt the corporations in this state,” Cárdenas said.
At first, DeSantis had little involvement with the bill that would lead him into open conflict with Disney and the LGBTQ rights community.
The bill was introduced in the House by Rep. Joe Harding and signed onto by state Sen. Dennis Baxley, a Republican with a history of controversial comments on gay rights. It bans teaching on “sexual orientation or gender identity” through third grade or if it’s not “age appropriate or developmentally appropriate.” As it neared a Senate vote in March, DeSantis stressed it wasn’t his idea.
“This wasn’t, like, my legislation, like, I have certain big priorities that we did, this is something the legislature felt strongly about,” DeSantis said, while pushing back on the “don’t say gay” name bestowed by critics by noting the phrase doesn’t appear in the legislation. “So I start getting asked about this by the media and … I didn’t even look at the bill yet. I just knew it wasn’t true.”
Disney made a strategic decision to work behind the scenes to reshape the legislation, while declining to make its position public. Despite its army of lobbyists in Tallahassee, the company made no headway. Baxley said Disney never contacted him.
“I never heard from any Disney lobbyist,” Baxley said, calling it “a strategic error that they didn’t get involved until after it was on the governor’s desk.”
State Sen. Shevrin Jones, a Democrat and the only openly gay Florida state senator, said in an interview that he pleaded at the time with Disney officials to publicly oppose the bill, but they refused. Jones, who taught biology and chemistry at a Florida high school, also said he wrote to DeSantis requesting a one-on-one meeting, but he said he got no response.
“The Disney CEO, he didn’t want to get political,” Jones said in an interview. “But when you’re playing with people’s lives and people’s safety … that’s dangerous.”
By March, though, amid rising public protests and internal pressure from employees, Disney’s executives met in their Burbank, Calif., headquarters to discuss whether to take a public stand against the measure.
Front and center was Chapek, the top executive since 2020. Chapek had spent three decades at Disney but lacked the strong bond with the company’s creative side enjoyed by his predecessor, Robert Iger, who only two months earlier had stepped down as board chairman. Now, Iger had turned up the heat on Chapek by taking sides on the Florida legislation. Quoting President Biden’s assessment that it was “hateful bill,” Iger tweeted that “if passed, this bill will put vulnerable, young LGBTQ people in jeopardy.”
Chapek turned to Geoff Morrell, whom he’d had recently brought into the company as the chief corporate affairs officer. The former ABC News White House correspondent and Pentagon press secretary advised Chapek not to take a position on such divisive legislation, suggesting that Disney should maintain its status as an outlet for unifying people. (Morrell left the company after three months, saying it wasn’t the right fit. He declined to comment.)
Chapek took the advice to heart. Although he met on March 4 with a group of employees representing the LGBTQ+ community, he then sent a mass email saying that Disney had no intention of making a public statement because it could “divide and inflame” the situation. Chapek declined an interview request.
His message backfired. LGBTQ workers at Disney’s Pixar Studios sent a mass letter alleging that they had frequently been censored. “Nearly every moment of overtly gay affection is cut at Disney’s behest,” the Pixar employees wrote. And as the bill passed the state Senate on March 8, Disney employees staged walkouts and created a website aimed at their boss called whereischapek.com.
That’s when Chapek called DeSantis to plead his case for a meeting and a pause on the legislation. Chapek told shareholders Disney was concerned the law could “unfairly target gay, lesbian, nonbinary and transgender kids and families.” By the call’s end, he thought DeSantis had agreed to sit down with him and Disney officials representing the LGBTQ community, as he later told investors.
But that meeting never happened, according to Disney.
The next day, March 10, Fox News published a video of DeSantis striking back at Disney for having “made a fortune off being family-friendly” while opposing the bill. Then DeSantis’s reelection committee sent out a fundraising email titled “Woke Disney Falls to the Media Pressure,” accusing the company of repeating “phony hysteria over a Florida bill that sensibly prohibits K-3rd graders from being indoctrinated with transgenderism and R-rated lessons about sexuality.”
Chapek, meanwhile, issued a statement to Disney employees acknowledging his missteps, saying: “It is clear that this is not just an issue about a bill in Florida, but instead yet another challenge to basic human rights. You needed me to be a stronger ally in the fight for equal rights and I let you down. I am sorry.”
When DeSantis rebuffed Chapek and signed the legislation on March 28, Disney responded with its most searing statement yet, saying the bill “should never have been signed into law,” and that the company’s goal now was “for this law to be repealed by the legislature or struck down in the courts.”
Pushing the battle
DeSantis joined the show as Carlson played a clip of a Disney executive explaining that she has “two queer children, actually, one transgender child and one pansexual child,” and arguing that Disney didn’t “have enough leads and narratives in which gay characters just get to be characters and not have to be about gay stories.”
An opportunity arose when DeSantis called a special session, which met in April to redraw congressional district maps. With legislators streaming back to Tallahassee, DeSantis asked them to approve an unrelated proposal: take away Disney’s special taxing authority.
It was a bombshell for which Democrat lawmakers said they had no preparation. Through what is known as the Reedy Creek Improvement District, Disney has since 1967 in effect been allowed to levy a separate taxation system on a 25,000-acre area in Orange and Osceola counties that includes four theme parks and hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of infrastructure.
DeSantis’s critics noted one particularly crucial development in the vote. The measure would need support from Senate President Wilton Simpson, who was running in a primary for agriculture commissioner against Chuck Nadd, an Army veteran who called himself a “DeSantis Republican.” DeSantis withheld his endorsement in the race — until the bill passed, when he endorsed Simpson and Nadd dropped out. Neither DeSantis nor Simpson responded to questions about the timing of his endorsement.
DeSantis declared he took action because Disney had “gotten massive tax breaks” and “more subsidies from the state of Florida than any company in our state’s history.”
But State Rep. Anna Eskamani, an Orlando Democrat whose district is near Disney World, said she has never gotten support from DeSantis in her efforts to close corporate tax loopholes as the ranking Democrat on the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee. She cited a report in the Orlando Sentinel that 99 percent of Florida companies didn’t pay corporate income tax, which has a 5.5 percent rate, due in large part to loopholes and deductions.
“The majority of DeSantis’s money comes from corporate megadonors, and despite his rhetoric, he has done nothing to address corporate tax loopholes,” Eskamani said in an interview.
Indeed, before DeSantis complained about Disney’s tax breaks, his administration in 2020 approved the company’s application for what would be one of the largest tax gifts in state history to a single corporation: a $578 million tax break for the 2,000 high-paying jobs, called Imagineers, to Orlando.
Everything seemed on track for the move to be complete by 2023. Disney announced it was spending $864 million to buy property to move a sizable portion of its California-based Imagineers, widely seen as the creative lifeblood of the company, to an Orlando area called Lake Nona.
But after the passage of the Parental Rights bill, the already troubled project was thrown into chaos. Some Imagineers had already resisted the move. A group of Disney employees, including a number of those who would be required to move to Florida, called on the company to guarantee that no one would lose their job if they refused relocation, citing the “hateful legislation.” And DeSantis, in his speeches and talks with Disney, suggested his unease with the jobs coming from a blue state.
After the legislative fights were over, Disney announced in June it was suspending the relocation plan until 2026, citing construction delays and a desire to provide “flexibility to those relocating.” The company made no reference in the announcement to the Parental Rights in Education Act, its feud with DeSantis or the governor’s concern about transferred workers who might vote for Democrats.
‘Not backing down’
DeSantis outmaneuvered Disney in the legislature, but it remains unclear how — or even whether — Disney will feel the effects of the governor’s moves to target the company after the bill passed.
Democrats have said the pending elimination of the taxing district measure was a political stunt that could result in $1 billion in debt being transferred to local taxpayers. Orange County’s tax collector, Scott Randolph, has estimated Reedy Creek collects $105 million for services that would have to be replaced.
Local officials have said they are concerned residents could see their taxes go up to pay for services previously performed by the Reedy Creek district. DeSantis has said he would come up with a proposal to ensure there is no increased tax burden on local communities.
The result, according to North Carolina State University accounting professor Christina Lewellen, who has studied the matter, is the opposite of how some have portrayed it. Far from losing tax breaks, Disney stands to save hundreds of millions of dollars, while local citizens potentially pay more taxes and promised new jobs are delayed or do not arrive.
“They were trying to hurt Disney potentially and make their life more difficult, but yet in the end, from a monetary standpoint, they might end up better off,” Lewellen said in an interview.
There appears no chance that Disney can or will pack up its theme parks and move elsewhere, given the depth of its investment in the state. But the long-term plan for Disney to move many of its highest-paying jobs to the state has at least stalled, and may flame out, prompting other governors to court the company.
LGBTQ students and their supporters, meanwhile, say the power struggle between DeSantis and Disney shouldn’t obscure the real impact of the bill on their lives. Last month, the Miami-Dade School board voted 8-1 against holding an LGBTQ History Month — a measure that had easily passed the year before.
“This is children you’re targeting that are already confused and scared about themselves,” Link Ardavin, a 17-year-old Miami high school student and transgender mane, said he would like to tell DeSantis about the impact of the legislation. “You’re trying to turn human rights and a child’s mental health into something that was purely political.”
Four days after the school board vote, DeSantis delivered his Miami speech to the National Conservatism Conference in which he said the root of many of the nation’s problems are “big corporations.”
Such companies, DeSantis said, said “are now exercising quasi-public power in terms of using their economic power to change policy in this country.” DeSantis said his actions against Disney demonstrated how he would be a counterweight to such efforts.
In using his power to take on Disney and corporate America, DeSantis said: “I’m not going anywhere. I’m not backing down.” | 2022-10-19T11:08:30Z | www.washingtonpost.com | How Ron DesSantis used Disney's missteps to wage war on corporate America - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/19/desantis-disney-corporate-america-war/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/19/desantis-disney-corporate-america-war/ |
A custom pegboard made with maple plywood creates a landing zone to hold mail, bags, jackets and more. (Adam Albright/Better Homes & Gardens)
“I would use it 100 percent for toy storage,” says Shaver, who recommends installing the material on a wall in a playroom and using it to hang costumes, bins of Legos and more.
Pegboard had a starring role in Julia Child’s Cambridge, Mass., kitchen, now enshrined at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in D.C. She hung her cooking utensils and more from a board painted in a soft shade of blue, with outlines to show where each item went. “She was the OG of using pegboard in a way that is both functional and drop-dead cool,” Panos says.
Marissa Hermanson is a freelance writer in Richmond. | 2022-10-19T11:26:01Z | www.washingtonpost.com | How to turn utilitarian pegboard into a stylish home accent - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/home/2022/10/19/utilitarian-pegboard-stylish-design/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/home/2022/10/19/utilitarian-pegboard-stylish-design/ |
Q: I’m sure you’ve gotten this question 100 times over, so apologies in advance. We’re trying to figure out the best way to handle major personality differences between our daughter and both of us parents. To wit, our daughter is a huge extrovert; we’re introverts. Over the past seven years, I’ve pretty much concluded that there’s no happy medium here. Someone is usually going to be miserable with this type of difference, and it’s usually me.
She’s now at the age where she’s playing regularly with some of the neighborhood kids, which does help, but supervision of said activities still requires frequent interpersonal interaction (which, as an introvert, I’d love to avoid).
Don’t get me wrong: We love our daughter, and we spend whatever quality time we can with her. But we still need our privacy to recharge, and, frankly, it’s something we rarely get with an extroverted child. At the end of every day, we feel bled dry by our daughter’s need for near-constant interaction. Any tips you can give would be a great help. Thanks!
A: I haven’t gotten this question 100 times over, but I have received many questions about temperament issues over the years. In fact, it’s so common for people’s temperaments to differ from their children’s that I would find it a bit weird if everyone did match perfectly! And, yes, I won’t deny that it is especially hard when there is a chasm between the one child and two parents, but we need to take a different perspective regarding your relationship with your daughter.
The first bit we need to grapple with is “no happy medium” when it comes to expectations with your daughter. If we are looking at the middle ground as being “all parties being completely content and getting everything they want,” then there will be only misery. But, as with everything in life, we aren’t going for perfection (or the middle); we’re going for the best we can.
First, if she’s 7 years old and everything is on track developmentally, then she’s old enough to have discussions about people’s differences and how others gain and use their energy. You aren’t doing her (or yourself) any favors by kowtowing to her every extroverted need; that’s not how people live. Trust me: She already knows that she’s not like her parents, so just put it out there. Say: “Whitney, some people love to be with lots of other people. It leaves them feeling energized and full. Some people love people. They just may need to be with fewer of them or be around them for less time. They like to be alone. Every human is a little different, and one of our family values is that everyone gets to be fully themselves.” You really want to drive home the point that you love your daughter’s temperament and that, although you’re different, it’s all okay.
Second, planning how she can get her energy out in ways that suit you all is important. Can she join clubs or teams where you are not expected to interact (much)? Can she participate in after-school programs or activities that burn up her energy and desire to be with others? Can you find a way to have her friends over where they are in the house, but you don’t have to be “babysitting” them too much? Can you have a mother’s helper or young teen come by to play games, walk around the neighborhood or hang out with your daughter? Is there family nearby? There’s no shame in hiring help or relying on family.
At the end of day, your daughter isn’t responsible for pleasing you or taking care of your mental health, so talk to your partner, and plan how to divide and conquer. Take turns going away for weekends or bringing your daughter to see family while the other stays home to recharge.
There are numerous ways to come at this, so try to abandon the more negative approach and instead find a slightly more balanced, nuanced and compassionate perspective (for everyone in the family).
I would also check with a good friend or a therapist to be sure that the stories you’re telling yourself are true. How much supervision is needed? How much do you have to talk to parents? Either way, your family can grow in appreciation and ease; you just need to do it in a way that works for you. Good luck. | 2022-10-19T11:26:07Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Our daughter is an extrovert, and we’re introverts. Help. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/parenting/2022/10/19/extrovert-introvert-parents-child-advice/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/parenting/2022/10/19/extrovert-introvert-parents-child-advice/ |
‘Ejaculate Responsibly’ boldly reframes the abortion debate
In a new book, Gabrielle Blair, a mother of six, explains how to prevent unwanted pregnancies with a few very simple precautions — for men
Review by Kimberly Harrington
Sure, sex is great, but have you seen the title of Gabrielle Blair’s new book, “Ejaculate Responsibly?” As I found out firsthand when I left my copy out on a coffee shop table, some people find the title intriguing — others are, no word play intended, turned off.
It certainly must feel offensive to that second group that anyone would dare tell them what to do with their bodies. I can’t imagine! That’s only because I don’t have to. As everyone knows, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade this spring. Blair’s book proposes a (theoretically) duh-simple solution to the thorny issue of abortion: If men took responsibility for how and where they ejaculate, it would eliminate most unwanted pregnancies and, therefore, the need for most abortions.
“My key claim is that 99 percent of abortions are the result of unwanted pregnancies, and men cause all unwanted pregnancies,” Blair writes. “An unwanted pregnancy doesn’t happen because people have sex. An unwanted pregnancy only happens if a man ejaculates irresponsibly — if he deposits his sperm in a vagina when he and his partner are not trying to conceive.”
After decades of political and legal maneuvering, cultural warfare, movements and manifestos, and real life-or-death consequences for providers and patients alike, could the answer really be this obvious? This simple? Blair seems completely confident it is. And if you allow yourself to step back and not jump to the usual “but, but, but” responses that you’ve learned over time, you might find yourself agreeing with her. I know I did.
“Ejaculate Responsibly” began as a 63-tweet-long thread in 2018. “I was totally afraid no one would respond,” Blair said in a recent interview. “I was thinking, ‘How fast can I delete?’ ” Instead, the tweets went viral. Blair, a mother of six and member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, says the first person who called her after seeing her tweets was her bishop, who told her she could build a legal career on it. Instead, she wrote this book. On the podcast “Mormon Land,” Blair said her treatise emerged from conversations with the many women she’s met over the years, particularly through her lifestyle blog, Design Mom. Now she is asking her followers there to send “Ejaculate Responsibly” to specific members of the Supreme Court. (So far, Justice Amy Coney-Barrett has the most copies in her box.)
The long fight for reproductive rights is only getting harder
Blair’s argument is plain-spoken and direct. Smartly, she doesn’t engage in a debate over whether abortion is right or wrong. In stark language and (mostly) straightforward examples, she underscores how unacceptable we find it to merely suggest that men take responsibility for their actions (and sperm). Or how it’s unthinkable that men would compromise their pleasure in any way, for example, by using a condom (although she does have a lot to say about the myth of condoms impacting pleasure nearly as much as we’ve all been led to believe). Or to expect men to tolerate even mild side effects for the greater reproductive good, as happened when an otherwise successful 2006 trial for male birth control was shut down because some participants experienced acne and weight gain. Or as women like to refer to these side effects: being alive.
But, as Blair makes clear, the problem with who takes responsibility for birth control isn’t just a men-believe-this situation. It’s a a-whole-lot-of- us believe this situation: “We, men and women, have a huge blind spot when it comes to men and birth control. Men assume women will do all the work of pregnancy prevention, that a woman will take responsibility for her own body and for the man’s body, and women assume women will do it, too.”
Instead of telling women to keep their legs shut, Blair wonders why men can’t keep it in their pants (or in a condom or get a vasectomy — methods that are easier, safer and more effective than birth control options for women.) As she notes, when condoms are used correctly, they’re 98% effective at preventing pregnancy. They’re also the only form of birth control that prevents transmission of sexually transmitted infections. Vasectomies are 99.9% effective at preventing pregnancy. Although the pill is 99% effective, it’s also a hormonal form of birth control that must be taken daily, requires a prescription, isn’t instantly effective, has cost implications for the user as well as a long list of potential side effects — and is also susceptible to restrictions from employer health insurance plans and, well, in June “following the overturning of Roe v. Wade,” Blair points out, “Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas signaled that Griswold v. Connecticut, the case legalizing the use of contraception by married couples, could be up for reversal as well.”
After Roe, what we can learn from the female lawyers who took on Trump
She also argues against those who respond, “All women need to do is ask men to wear a condom, and then refuse to have sex with him if he doesn’t.” As if it’s ever that simple or that we live in a world where there aren’t real power dynamics and the potential for domestic violence. “Don’t ask: Why don’t women pick better men? Instead, ask: Why are there so many abusive men? And: Why don’t we teach men not to abuse?” This reminded me of my local police department offering a self-defense class for women, suggesting it was the perfect mother-daughter activity for girls 14 and up, but didn’t offer an equivalent class for fathers and sons teaching them how to not assault or rape girls and women.
Blair’s book is incisive, but there are some stumbles. As a lengthy Twitter thread, her arguments packed a real punch. It was simple and bold, cutting off avenues to counterargument left and right. The expanded book version can sometimes lose its way and its momentum. The points Blair makes can get repetitive, so much so that at one point I thought I had lost my place and was rereading a couple chapters by mistake. The analogies can sometimes be a little silly, losing their power to illustrate a valid point. And a few chapter headings (like “Sperm are dangerous”) feel designed to shock at the risk of losing the reader who might otherwise be open to her argument.
Also, since this book is, in effect, a rebranding of the abortion issue — by the creator of “Design Mom” no less — it’s odd that the book itself isn’t a more satisfying design exercise. Blair’s powerful core proposal and the information that’s jam-packed into it are perfectly suited for a tighter, more compelling approach. For every credible stat, there’s a Wikipedia reference or a mushy phrase like “the vast majority.” There are caveats and notes galore that can make the reading experience sometimes feel disjointed. A more infographic-like style could have helped weed out some of these weaknesses and punch up her most potent points.
Still, Blair’s fresh reframe should be required reading for any person who has sex, wants to have sex or is raising someone who might have sex in the future. This slender book has what it takes to be the foundation for a movement. At the minimum, the point Blair makes in her introduction should get everyone examining their expectations, biases and judgments more closely: “We’ve put the burden of pregnancy prevention on the person who is fertile for 24 hours a month, instead of the person who is fertile 24 hours a day, every day of their life.” It feels impossible to argue with this point in theory. But the thing about ejaculating responsibly is we now need to see it in practice. So to speak.
Kimberly Harrington is the author of “But You Seemed So Happy.” Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Cut, and McSweeney’s. She’s also a creative director who has worked with Apple and Nike.
Ejaculate Responsibly
A Whole New Way to Think About Abortion
By Gabrielle Blair
Workman. 144 pp. Paperback, $14.99 | 2022-10-19T11:34:37Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Ejaculate Responsibly by Gabrielle Blair book review - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2022/10/19/ejaculate-responsibly-book/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2022/10/19/ejaculate-responsibly-book/ |
Nine million households could still be due significant stimulus money and for expanded child tax credit and earned-income tax credit payments
President Biden, joined by Vice President Harris, after signing the American Rescue Plan, a coronavirus relief package, in March 2021. (Andrew Harnik/AP)
With rent, food prices and utility bills up, many families could use some extra cash. Inflation is stressing people’s budgets big time.
If you’re struggling and didn’t file a tax return this year, check your mail.
Last week, the IRS started sending letters to the 9 million households who may still be eligible for several lucrative tax benefits, including the third round of stimulus payments, worth as much as $1,400 for an individual and $2,800 for couples.
If you didn’t get the full amount of the pandemic-related Economic Impact Payment under the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, you may be able to claim the 2021 credit. But you must submit a 2021 tax return — even if you don’t usually file taxes.
You don’t have to have income for 2021 to qualify for the stimulus money. But there are income caps.
The IRS faced a daunting task amid the pandemic to reach millions of people who don’t typically file tax returns. Technically, the stimulus payments were an advance of a credit referred to on Forms 1040 and 1040-SR as the Recovery Rebate Credit.
For those without children, the American Rescue Plan nearly tripled the earned-income tax credit from $543 to $1,502. The credit can be as much as $3,618 for those with one child, $5,980 for those with two children and $6,728 for those with at least three children.
The child tax credit was increased to $3,600 for children 5 and younger and $3,000 for those 6 through 17. The credit wasn’t new; it was created in 1997 and has always been meant to help struggling families. What was different for the 2021 tax year was the boost from the pre-pandemic maximum of $2,000 per child younger than 17.
The IRS letters will be arriving in mailboxes this month to people who appear to qualify for the credits but haven’t yet filed a 2021 return. The Treasury Department’s Office of Tax Analysis identified individuals who typically are not required to file a tax return because they appear to have very low incomes, based on W-2s, 1099s and other third-party statements, according to the IRS.
To help people file their returns to claim the credit, the IRS said, the agency’s Free File program at irs.gov will remain open for an extra month, until Nov. 17 at midnight, Eastern time. The fastest way to file a return and claim these credits is to file electronically. People whose incomes are $73,000 or less can use Free File using brand-name software.
The IRS said people who aren’t required to file a 2021 tax return — usually individuals earning less than $12,500 or $25,000 for married couples — can also visit childtaxcredit.gov/file to submit a simple 2021 income tax return.
If you miss the electronic filing period, you can still claim the credits by filing a paper return, though it may take some time for the IRS to get to it. There’s still a significant backlog of paper returns. You can find tax forms by going to irs.gov/forms or calling 800-TAX-FORM (800-829-3676). | 2022-10-19T11:34:50Z | www.washingtonpost.com | 9 million U.S. households could still be due stimulus money - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/10/19/irs-stimulus-payment-letters/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/10/19/irs-stimulus-payment-letters/ |
LOS ANGELES, CA - SEPTEMBER 22: An ‘open house’ flag is displayed outside a single family home on September 22, 2022 in Los Angeles, California. The U.S. housing market is seeing a slow down in home sales due to the Federal Reserve raising mortgage interest rates to help fight inflation. (Photo by Allison Dinner/Getty Images) (Photographer: Allison Dinner/Getty Images North America)
Mortgage rates above 7% have put the housing market on ice as affordability challenges put off a lot of buyers. Newer, younger homeowners who locked in their mortgage at a low interest rate — and whose next move probably would be trading up — are content to stay where they are until mortgage rates fall.
But there’s one group of homeowners for whom high interest rates are arguably good news as they contemplate their next housing market transaction: downsizing members of the baby boom generation. For them, housing and financial market conditions are more attractive than a year ago.
Consider a homeowner in their 60s who has recently retired or is planning to retire soon, and who is contemplating a move. That housing-market transaction might be selling a four- to five-bedroom house for something smaller and more manageable, or moving from a high-cost state like New York or California to a lower-cost state like Florida or Arizona (or both). Their new house will be cheaper than their current house, meaning they’ll get cash out of this transaction — potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars.
That’s in part because of how older homeowners differ from younger homeowners. While the average home price in the US is around $400,000, it stands to reason that older homeowners have on average more valuable homes than younger homeowners who only recently bought into the market. And older homeowners in many cases benefit from decades of home-price appreciation. They’re also more likely to have paid off their home in full, or have mortgages that are relatively small compared with the level of equity in their homes.
If someone sells a fully paid-off home for $800,000 and buys a cheaper retirement home for $500,000, they’re not giving up a low mortgage rate because they don’t even have a mortgage, and since they’re paying all cash they don’t care about whether mortgage rates are 7% or more. With the surge in interest rates this year there’s actually a decent yield they can earn on the extra home equity garnered from the transaction, which wasn’t the case through most of the prior decade. With 10-year Treasury yields around 4%, it’s possible to buy relatively low-risk investment-grade corporate bonds yielding 5%-6%. If more income is needed in retirement, it wouldn’t matter that much if interest rates continue to rise — they can rely on that interest income regardless of where bond prices go from here.
It’s true that home prices are now falling in most of the country, but outside of a few markets that boomed the most during the pandemic, prices are still up on a year-over-year basis. The S&P/Case-Shiller US National Home Price Index was up 9% year-to-date through July, and more real-time data from Redfin suggests that asking prices and sales prices are still close to that on a year-over-year basis. Meanwhile, the Vanguard Intermediate-Term Corporate Bond ETF is down 20% over the past year, with longer-term bonds and stocks down more than that. In a way, choosing to downsize now and invest the proceeds into financial assets is playing a sort of arbitrage that’s occurred between the housing market and financial markets over the past year.
The situation we find ourselves in right now — with home prices still up meaningfully over the past few years while bond prices are down substantially given the rise in interest rates — is decidedly not what happened in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. Then, home prices plunged, crushing the equity balances of older homeowners, and interest rates plunged as well in response to the Federal Reserve’s rate cuts. The economics of downsizing are far more attractive in late 2022 than they were between the late 2000s and early 2010s.
I’m skeptical that changes in the prices of houses and interest rates will lead to a surge in opportunistic downsizing over the next year because homes are emotional assets as much as financial ones for many homeowners. If I’m wrong and there’s suddenly a glut of larger, expensive homes hitting the market with few younger buyers interested, prices may fall significantly from where they are currently, reducing the attractiveness of the downsizing decision.
But if you’re already considering downsizing, or you have parents who find themselves in this situation, you should be encouraged — higher interest rates might be causing a lot of pain for some, but for someone thinking about trading down, current conditions help more than they hurt.
Sticker-Shocked Consumers Near Breaking Point: Jonathan Levin
Buying a House Now Wouldn’t Be a Bad Idea: Teresa Ghilarducci
Variable Mortgages May Never Make a Comeback: Stephen Mihm | 2022-10-19T11:34:56Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Downsizing? Why Rising Interest Rates Are Your Friend - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/downsizing-why-rising-interest-rates-are-your-friend/2022/10/19/fdddcb86-4f9d-11ed-ada8-04e6e6bf8b19_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/downsizing-why-rising-interest-rates-are-your-friend/2022/10/19/fdddcb86-4f9d-11ed-ada8-04e6e6bf8b19_story.html |
California’s Solar Problem Could Be Solved by Floating Wind Farms
In its quest to decarbonize its energy, California is heading offshore. Besides being green, tapping the winds over the Pacific Ocean offers an additional benefit: Good timing.
Amanda Lefton, who runs the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, announced the first offshore wind auctions for California from the stage of the American Clean Power Association’s WindPower conference on Tuesday morning. Even if many Californians were still asleep, the crowd gathered in Providence, Rhode Island — home to the only operating offshore wind project in the US — clapped and hollered. California’s leases, targeting 4.5 gigawatts of capacity, represent almost a third of the Biden administration’s offshore wind objective for 2035.
For California, offshore wind could help address an unwelcome side-effect of the state’s efforts to date in greening its grid. The boom in solar capacity has resulted in a deluge of power supply in the middle of the day. When that drops off in the evening, however, demand for electricity from other sources surges. Peak demand for grid power — known as the “ net peak” — has, therefore, shifted a couple of hours back to around 7.30 p.m.
Meeting this net peak, especially during heatwaves and droughts, has become a nerve-wracking experience for California’s grid, its governor and, of course, its residents. It is also painful for environmentalists, since the go-to generation source for those evening hours is natural gas-fired plants. One obvious, but expensive, zero-emissions technology for displacing gas peaker-plants is battery storage that draws excess solar power during the day and dispenses it quickly in the evening.
Offshore wind could also play a vital part. Turbines off the coast capture steadier ocean winds than those on land. Capacity factors for offshore wind power — meaning the power that actually gets produced relative to the nameplate capacity — are thought to be above 50%, compared with typical onshore performance of 20-40%. That means more zero-emissions energy available for more hours.
The more intriguing aspect is when that capacity comes online. In general, wind-power tends to peak at night, making it a useful complement to solar power during the day. In California’s case, there may be an added bonus.
Average offshore wind speeds in the Morro Bay wind energy area — which sits in between Monterey and Santa Barbara and is home to three of the five leases being offered — tend to peak in the early evening, based on an analysis of historical averages published in a study by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. The ramp-up is particularly steep in spring, summer and fall, with average peak wind speeds 25-30% higher than the lunchtime lull. This fits better with the shape of California’s power demand. Offshore turbines could step in when the sun sets over the Pacific, reducing the need to turn to gas-fired plants and, ultimately, the amount of battery capacity to be installed.
Matching supply more precisely with demand is an essential, but often overlooked, element of the energy transition. Traditional power supply relies on having dispatchable generators, usually burning fossil fuels, on call to match fluctuating demand. Getting higher penetration of renewables, at a reasonable cost, means meeting as many hours of demand each day with solar and wind power as possible, since those are essentially free to operate once built.
Now all that remains is getting projects fully permitted, financed and built. The last part will require floating turbines — a technology still in its infancy — since the seabed drops away so quickly on the West Coast. Lefton noted after her announcement that “the United States is literally building this industry from the ground floor.” California’s sunsets offer one tangible spur to that.
• Driving a Tesla in California Is Really Expensive: Liam Denning
• We Need a War Effort on Wind Turbines: Chris Bryant | 2022-10-19T11:35:08Z | www.washingtonpost.com | California’s Solar Problem Could Be Solved by Floating Wind Farms - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/californias-solar-problem-could-be-solved-by-floating-wind-farms/2022/10/19/cafb5796-4f99-11ed-ada8-04e6e6bf8b19_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/californias-solar-problem-could-be-solved-by-floating-wind-farms/2022/10/19/cafb5796-4f99-11ed-ada8-04e6e6bf8b19_story.html |
It’s not all scary. (Photographer: Bloomberg/Bloomberg)
The world’s largest food maker Nestle SA has become the latest company to join the “whisper it, inflation isn’t all bad” club.
While that’s not quite as impressive as PepsiCo Inc., which last week upgraded both its forecast of full-year sales and profit growth, Nestle has avoided the problem that hit consumer goods earlier in the year, when companies were able to upgrade their sales forecasts, but little fell through to the bottom line. Nestle even trimmed its margin forecast in July.
Nestle’s more recent performance underlines the power that companies with strong brands have when it comes to persuading consumers to pay more. But as I said about PepsiCo last week, as price hikes continue, there is a question over how long this can last.
Prices are set to increase further as there has been no improvement in commodity costs; in fact, with energy becoming more expensive, the situation has deteriorated. The escalation won’t be as much as the hikes already passed through — Nestle has effectively gone from zero to 10% price increases in two years — but any further uptick comes as the consumer outlook grows darker, particularly in Europe.
UK inflation rose by 10.1% in September, with food a big driver of the increase, although the country is a relatively small part of Nestle’s business, accounting for 3.9% of sales in 2021.
Sales also decelerated at Nestle’s Nespresso unit. Although prices rose 4.9% in the first nine months, volumes fell 1.9%. This could reflect a slowdown from the pandemic boom, which drove growth rates of 11%-12% — more than twice the level of expansion prior to the outbreak. Stuck at home, people became their own baristas. Now that many are back in the office, they are purchasing their caffeine hit at a coffee shop.
Nestle shares were little changed on Wednesday. But on a forward price to earnings ratio, they trade at a premium to Unilever Plc and Danone SA, and are on a par with one of the world’s most powerful consumer goods groups, Procter & Gamble Co. | 2022-10-19T11:35:17Z | www.washingtonpost.com | How Much Inflation Can Consumers Take? Ask Nestle - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/how-much-inflation-can-consumers-take-ask-nestle/2022/10/19/80d93c04-4f9a-11ed-ada8-04e6e6bf8b19_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/how-much-inflation-can-consumers-take-ask-nestle/2022/10/19/80d93c04-4f9a-11ed-ada8-04e6e6bf8b19_story.html |
Rely on tested methods from experts — not a farmer’s almanac or caterpillar
By Barb Mayes Boustead
People walk through Lincoln Park during a snowstorm in Washington, D.C. (Craig Hudson/for The Washington Post)
Throughout history, people have sought signs of the winter to come, turning to the skies, the land and the water. Will it be mild or cold? Snowy, rainy or dry? People watch the behaviors of animals and plants, clouds, oceans, and in recent decades, computer models to drop hints about the winter to come. After all, knowledge is power, and any advance warning of severe winter conditions or mild ones can let people prepare in advance.
But who can you trust when it comes to winter look-aheads, and which ones are best left to the entertainment department? If you are making decisions based on winter outlook information, you might want to consider relying on tested methods from experts — not a farmer’s almanac or caterpillar.
The National Weather Service’s Climate Prediction Center
Every month, the National Weather Service Climate Prediction Center sends an outlook for the 12 upcoming three-month “seasons,” with maps that paint areas favored for temperatures to be unusually warm or cold, and precipitation to be unusually wet or dry.
The outlooks are given as odds, tilting those odds toward a favored category the same way that weighted dice can favor one roll over another. CPC never forecasts a guarantee or predicts specific temperatures or precipitation amounts. The inputs to CPC outlooks are known and based on published methods. The verification, where they compare forecasts to outcomes, is public and adds credibility to their methods and results.
The outlooks lean heavily on climate change trends, the influence of El Niño or La Niña, and some longer-range computer models, but very few global patterns have been confidently connected to the winter ahead when looking more than a month in advance.
Interpreting the outlook maps can be challenging. If you want to dig deeper, the National Weather Service has training to help.
Research groups
A handful of other research-based entities produce seasonal or sub-seasonal winter outlooks. One of these, the International Research Institute for Climate and Society at Columbia University, partners with the CPC to extend seasonal outlooks, including winter outlooks, to a global perspective. The experts in both groups collaborate to make the forecasts, sharing their collective expertise in a decades-long partnership.
Another entity providing winter look-ahead information is Verisk Analytics, a private company, largely through the work of one scientist: Judah Cohen. While Cohen’s work is done for a private company, he does publish his methodology. Many of his methods are still being tested and debated by climatologist peers — something he invites with weekly discussions.
Traditional Indigenous knowledge
Indigenous peoples around the globe have been tracking winter weather patterns for generations, passing on their knowledge in writing and pictures, or orally through their own traditions. Until recent years, the methods of Western scientists have remained independent from traditional Indigenous knowledge. As these scientists connect with Indigenous knowledge of the environment and ecology, they incorporate viewpoints not considered in the past.
The connections with traditional Indigenous knowledge are new and, in some cases, delicate, as Western scientists learn to navigate relationships with and become trusted by Indigenous peoples.
Least reliable sources
What does it mean to say a winter will be “cold, snowy” for a three-week period in February, especially in snowy climates? Is one snowstorm enough? How cold does it have to be to qualify as “cold” in the almanac? These questions are among the many reasons that validating the farmer’s almanacs is next to impossible. The language is too vague, applies to too large of an area and too long of a time, to assign a “hit” or “miss” to the outlook.
According to the Farmers’ Almanac, the outlooks rely on a formula that considers sunspot activity, the moon’s tides and positions of the planets, but the authors do not publish or publicly discuss their methodology, leaving the scientific community in the dark about their validity. Although the Farmers’ Almanac states forecasts are 80 to 85 percent accurate, closer, independent looks at the outcomes demonstrate that the almanacs are, at best, the same as flipping a coin.
Groundhogs
Punxsutawney Phil and his prognostications are the subject of an unofficial holiday, a movie and a large gathering of suited men proclaiming whether winter’s end is close. By legend, the groundhog who sees its shadow gets scared back into its hidy-hole for six more weeks of winter, while the one who does not see its shadow emerges and winter’s end is nigh. Unfortunately for Phil’s fans, he’s worse than a dart board at predicting the end of winter. Take the National Centers for Environmental Information’s word for it — the groundhog is not a forecaster.
Woolly bear caterpillars
Woolly bear caterpillars are often credited with the ability to forecast winter seasons by the thickness of their brown and black stripes, with thicker black stripes foretelling a longer, harder winter. But their stripes have nothing to do with the weather — their width stems from how long the caterpillar has been feeding, its age and its species. Woolly caterpillars that crawl south don’t predict a hard winter, nor does northward movement indicate a mild winter — their movement is directed by finding shelter under a rock or some bark, or perhaps a tasty treat.
Legend holds that years with lots of acorns falling from the oak trees (“mast years”) are those that bring hard winters, providing extra food for the squirrels, chipmunks and other gatherers. Instead, it turns out that mast years are more tied to the weather of the past season than the future one. Oak tree flowering in the spring depends on the temperatures in the winter and early spring leading into flowering season. Mild winters without a deep spring freeze are more favorable for flowering, which translates to more acorns developing.
While geese migration patterns can foreshadow shorter term weather, they are not a sign of the winter to come. Geese can fly high in high-pressure weather, when the denser air allows them to loft more easily. On the flip side, they tend to fly low in low-pressure weather, which typically brings more unsettled conditions. Geese may migrate just ahead of a cold front, foreshadowing the arrival of a cold-weather spell. But cold weather in fall does not foretell the entire winter to come.
Possibly reliable sources
Local television meteorologists and private companies
Some local meteorologists and private weather companies release winter outlooks, often without fully explaining their methods. If the methodology isn’t known, then it can’t be tested by other scientists to check its accuracy. If the outlook details are described using words rather than degrees and inches, then their accuracy is difficult to evaluate. Some local meteorologists and private weather companies employ a sound and transparent methodology for their outlooks, but others do not. Use with caution.
Other animal behaviors
Not every relationship between animal behaviors and the winter ahead has been tested, so it would be irresponsible to say that they all are mythology. It is unlikely that any one animal or plant holds the key to the winter ahead.
Researchers need to conduct more research to fully understand the relationship between some animals’ behavior and the environment. Such animal behavior will be better understood as Western science better connects with traditional Indigenous knowledge to tune into the long history of observations and understanding held by Indigenous peoples.
Barb Mayes Boustead is a meteorologist and climatologist living in the heart of the Great Plains. Her interests include the overlap between weather and climate, especially in weather extremes, as well as historical weather events like the one at the heart of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “The Long Winter.” She is a Dissertation Award winner from the American Association of State Climatologists and past president of the Laura Ingalls Wilder Legacy and Research Association. | 2022-10-19T11:35:35Z | www.washingtonpost.com | How to assess which long-term winter weather predictions are reliable - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/10/19/winter-outlook-sources-trust-meteorologists/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/10/19/winter-outlook-sources-trust-meteorologists/ |
The storm’s toll could last a lifetime for youngsters
Sisters Eden Rogers, 5, left, and Avery Rogers, 9, play on a downed palm tree in front of their home in Fort Myers, Fla., on Oct. 8. (Thomas Simonetti for The Washington Post)
Here are some of the things kids lost when Hurricane Ian came ashore:
A Mickey Mouse plush toy that had been named “Baby.” Miniature hangers that once hung doll clothes. Three pairs of Converse sneakers — one blue, one black and one white. Polaroids of friends making funny faces. Three “All About Me” books, which siblings had filled in to mark their fifth birthdays. A mango tree. A pet chameleon named Rex.
School days.
Karate lessons.
The magnitude of this storm has been measured in many ways — the dollar amount of the damage it wrought, the height of the storm surge, the death toll, the number of households that lost power. None of those numbers really capture what this storm has meant for young people, who are often afterthoughts in storm response.
Lee County’s 94 schools and programs, which educate more the 90,000 students, shuttered the day before the storm, hallways emptying of students and, in some places, filling with evacuees who slept on the tile floors to wait out the hurricane. Out of the classroom, young people were severed from cafeterias — where every child in the district eats breakfast and lunch free — and classrooms and counselors.
Students started to trickle back in to classrooms on Monday, and by the end of the week at least 60 schools will be set to be open — even as repairs continue to fix ceilings and floors and clear debris. Others will take time to rebuild, and in the interim, students will log on for virtual classes. Three elementary schools were so badly damaged that they are closed indefinitely. Their students will reassemble at schools with spare classrooms while their home campuses are being reconstructed.
“We can minimize the impact in terms of the amount of time out of school,” Lee County Superintendent Christopher Bernier said in early October, as he helped volunteers at district headquarters assemble packages of food and bottled water for an unending line of cars waiting outside. He seeks to open the buildings as soon as possible. But, he added, “we cannot minimize the impact of what Ian did to us. We have to be prepared on a deeper level to deal with trauma and the mental health piece.”
Natural disasters have been shown to have deleterious impacts on children and adolescents: Young children may regress in their development, older ones can develop symptoms of anxiety and depression and those who narrowly escaped floodwaters can develop post-traumatic stress disorder.
Katie A. McLaughlin, a Harvard psychology professor who has studied how natural disasters and the pandemic affect children’s mental health, said that certain groups of young people are particularly vulnerable, including children who were proximate to the disaster — who lost loved ones, or their homes, who had to linger in shelters, who missed a lot of school — and kids who were already grappling with trauma linked to poverty or community violence. They are, she said, more likely to develop mental health problems that persist for months or even years.
Eden Rogers, 5, lost a school of tadpoles. The creatures had taken up residence in a pool of water in a kayak in the backyard. Eden refused to let her parents dump them out, so they instead transferred them to a plastic bin. Eden, apropos of her name, loves animals and was excited to see them grow into frogs. Now the tadpoles were gone, and the backyard was littered with all kinds of stuff that didn’t even belong to her, or anyone else in her family: seashells, a cage of propane tanks, a dead fish, a drowned duck.
When her parents evacuated to a house in Tallahassee two weeks ago, Eden begged her mother, Meghan, to take the tadpoles with them. But there was no room in the car, which was already carrying two of Eden’s siblings, two cats and a dog.
So Eden worried about what happened when the sea washed over her home, rising to nearly five feet inside, soaking nearly all of the family’s belongings. The surge had also taken her school on Sanibel Island, where she and two older siblings attended classes. To make matters worse, in the midst of all the uncertainty, Eden had been separated from her parents, who sent the kids to stay with their grandmother in suburban Tampa as they dealt with their ruined home.
Now life for her family is filled with change. The three youngest siblings would start classes next week, but not in the school building on the decimated island, which will need to be rebuilt. Instead, they will head to nearby San Carlos Park Elementary, where teachers were setting up in vacant classrooms.
When Eden reunited with her parents days later, she buried her face into Meghan’s stomach and wrapped her tiny arms around her, staying there for several seconds until Meghan picked her up and cradled her.
The material stuff is replaceable, said Meghan, a social worker who chose Sanibel School thanks in part to its focus on outdoor learning and ecological justice. But some things, such as routines, are harder to reconstitute: the sunrise commute to Sanibel Island to drop her kids off at school, the swim lessons, the stability. The family just settled in to the home in March, after moving from Buffalo, and spending months in a three-bedroom apartment while they searched for housing.
“The loss of stuff — that’s not what we’re really worried about,” Meghan said.
Fairy Olivo, an 11-year-old aspiring astronaut, lost three pairs of Converse sneakers and a solar system diorama she built in the fifth grade. She was lounging on the bed of her mother, Elizabeth, when the water started seeping in through the door of their trailer in Naples. She panicked as it kept rising.
“We’re going to die!” she yelled to her mother.
As they escaped, her mother yelled at her to grab some clothes. But it was too late. The waist-deep water made it impossible for her to get to her bedroom, and even if she had, her bureau — stuffed full of her favorite jeans, her favorite T-shirts — was already submerged.
The rest of the household — her 5-year-old sister Imi McBride, her grandmother and her mother’s husband, Allen Jamal McBride — had already gone, trudging the murky water to a gas station that a neighbor had said was on dry ground. Now it was her turn. Standing barefoot at the threshold, she was scared. She could swim, but her mother couldn’t. And what if there were crocodiles in the water? Her mother Elizabeth yelled to her: “C’mon! You can do it!”
Finally, Fairy stepped into the water, carrying a lavender backpack and one of her mother’s purses. She followed her mother — who had fiery pink hair — across the street. They waited out the storm beneath the canopy of the gas station — where other neighbors had gathered — as the wind whipped debris around them. Imi put on her mother’s jacket, spread her arms wide, let its oversize sleeves fill with wind and yelled “I’m flying!”
Later, the family returned to the flooded home, where the floors and the walls were still soaked. Her mother’s mattress had mostly been spared, so the entire family — Elizabeth, Imi, Fairy and Allen — curled up there and went to sleep. They slept that way for several nights until the family purchased a futon for Fairy.
“I was scared to be here,” Fairy said. “The room was dirty, and it smelled bad because of the hurricane.”
Nearly a week later, the smell of mildew was still thick in the air. Fairy returned to school a week and a day after her home was flooded. She had lost every pair of shoes she owned, save for a pair of black and red Nike Dunks that they had salvaged. On the first day back, the stylish sixth-grader slipped them on even though they didn’t match her outfit.
Fairy had never liked living in this place, where her room was dark and cramped. Her family had moved in to this trailer with Elizabeth’s mother when their rent went up, forcing them from their apartment. And now it had been stripped bare of all her possessions. Not just the clothes, but also the small library of books she had amassed. She was fond of the “Jacky Ha-Ha” book series, about a middle school prankster. And the solar system diorama, which she treasured because she dreamed of someday going to space.
Standing out in the streets — now lined with the ruined contents of flooded homes — Elizabeth said she knew how much Fairy disliked their home. A bartender, she was working hard to make enough money for the family to get their own place. The flood was a setback.
“She just has to be patient,” Elizabeth said. She turned to her daughter: “We’re gonna make it.”
Jaikobie Garcia, 4, lost a small Mickey Mouse plush toy that he had named “Baby” and his collection of stuffed-animal sharks. He and his family — his mother Ana, father Jose and four older siblings — left their home the night before the storm arrived. Most of them thought they would stay the night, so they traveled with not much beyond the clothes on their backs and the shoes on their feet. Jaikobie was at least wearing his favorite pair: yellow Croc sandals with charms in the shapes of cars.
Now they were stuck at Hertz Arena,in normal times the home of the region’s minor league hockey team, the Everblades. Since the storm, though, it had housed hundreds of people desperate to escape the storm. Those who remained did so because the storm had wiped out their home. The Garcias, who had lived in the converted car port of a trailer owned by Jose’s parents, were among them. The water swept in with such force that it soaked and tossed their possessions everywhere. Their section of the trailer — where five kids and two adults slept — had been deemed uninhabitable.
Out of the entire family, no one had taken the displacement as hard as Jaikobie. He kept begging to return home.
“It’s been really stressful,” said Jalizza, at 17 the eldest sibling. One of the hardest things, she said, was having to watch Jaikobie try to make sense of what had happened. “My brother wants to be going home, but we don’t really have a house no more.”
It tortured Ana: “As a 4-year-old, how do you explain to them that there’s nowhere to go any more?”
The day after the storm, hoping it would help him understand, his parents took him back to the trailer so he could see why they couldn’t live there. Water had flooded their room and violently tossed around their possessions. A tree had fallen nearby. Many of their neighbors endured the same — or worse.
“It’s okay, I can clean it up and rebuild,” he told Ana, she recalled.
A week later, Jaikobie sat on the curb outside the arena despondent. He and Ana had passed a donation pile with a toy power drill that he wanted. Ana said they had to get lunch first, but by the time they got back, another child had taken it. He had already lost so much, and now, how was he going to rebuild the house without the power drill?
Here are some of the things salvaged from the wreckage of Hurricane Ian: an Xbox that miraculously survived in a plastic box, a pair of dance shoes right before classes restarted, a 3D sonogram photo.
Even though children are considered the most vulnerable storm victims, McLaughlin emphasized that many come out unscathed. About a quarter of kids have symptoms of anxiety or depression that resolve on their own. Another quarter have “clinically significant” symptoms that require the help of a professional. About half “are resilient, even in the face of these major stressors.”
Barbara Ammirati of Save the Children, an organization that aids children in humanitarian crises, said there are many factors that can mitigate the impact of natural disaster, including ensuring access to counselors and therapists and giving children a place that feels safe and familiar. It’s why her group has advocated to reopen schools and day-care centers as soon as possible.
“You have all the protective factors on one side and then you have all of these risks and that the negative impacts on the other end,” Ammirati said. “And the more you can build up those protective factors on that side of the seesaw, the child really has the ability to cope and come back very strong.”
Still, the effects can last, and they are not always visible. Children who have already weathered traumatic situations — like poverty, community violence or the pandemic — are particularly vulnerable.
Standing outside the stadium with tears in her eyes, Jaikobie’s mom, Ana, described how loss from hurricanes in her family had become generational. As a teenager living in the same area, her parents’ home had flooded, destroying all her possessions. Her family came to the arena then, too. She’d lost everything to floods twice more when she was in her 20s, including once when Jalizza was 4. The possibility that her whole world could suddenly vanish always lingered in the back of her head. It made it hard for her to ever truly feel at home.
Now she was watching the same thing unfold for her youngest child. | 2022-10-19T11:35:48Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Hurricane Ian's toll on children and schools - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/10/19/things-they-lost-storm/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/10/19/things-they-lost-storm/ |
An ominous sign hangs near Washington Square Park in New York on March 24, 2020, at the beginning of pandemic lockdowns seeking to stop the spread of the coronavirus. The virus spread anyway. (Jeenah Moon/For The Washington Post)
SOMERVILLE, Tenn. — Skill Wilson had amassed more than three decades of knowledge as a paramedic, first in Memphis and then in Fayette County. Two places that felt like night and day.
With only five ambulances in the county and the nearest hospital as much as 45 minutes away, Skill relished the clinical know-how necessary to work in a rural setting. Doing things like sedating patients to insert tubes into their airways.
But when it came to covid-19, despite more than 1 million deaths nationwide, Skill and his family felt their small town on the central-eastern side of Fayette County, with its fields of grazing cattle and rows of cotton and fewer than 200 covid deaths since the start of the pandemic, was a cocoon against the raging health emergency.
Covid seemed like other people’s problems — until it wasn’t.
The imbalance in death rates among the nation’s racial and ethnic groups has been a defining part of the pandemic since the start. To see the pattern, The Washington Post analyzed every death during more than two years of the pandemic. Early in the crisis, the differing covid threat was evident in places such as Memphis and Fayette County. Deaths were concentrated in dense urban areas, where Black people died at several times the rate of White people.
“I don’t want to say that we weren’t worried about it, but we weren’t,” said Hollie, who described her 59-year-old husband as someone who “never took a pill.” After a while, “you kind of slack off on some things,” she said.
Over time, the gap in deaths widened and narrowed but never disappeared — until mid-October 2021, when the nation’s pattern of covid mortality changed, with the rate of death among White Americans sometimes eclipsing other groups.
The nature of the virus makes the elderly and people with underlying health conditions — including hypertension, diabetes and obesity, all of which beset Black people at higher rates and earlier in life than White people — particularly vulnerable to severe illness and death.
That wasn’t Skill.
The virus also attacks unvaccinated adults — who polls show are more likely to be Republicans — with a ferocity that puts them at a much higher risk of infection and death.
That was Skill.
He joined the choir of critics opposing vaccination requirements, his rants in front of the television eventually wearing on Hollie, who, even if she agreed, grew tired of listening and declared their home “covid-talk free.”
So, she said, Skill commiserated with like-minded people in Facebook groups and on Parler and Rumble, the largely unmoderated social networking platforms popular with conservatives.
New immune-evading covid variants could fuel a winter surge
Capt. Julian Greaves Wilson Jr., known to everybody as Skill, died of covid Jan. 23, a month after becoming infected with the coronavirus. He fell ill not long after transporting a covid patient to the hospital. At the time he died, infection rates in Fayette County had soared to 40.5 percent among people taking coronavirus tests.
‘A different calculus’
When the coronavirus appeared in the United States, it did what airborne viruses do — latched onto cells in people’s respiratory tract, evaded innate immune responses and multiplied. The pathogen, free of politics or ideology, had a diverse reservoir of hosts and found fertile pathways for growth in the inequalities born from centuries of racial animus and class resentments.
Unequal exposure, unequal spread, unequal vulnerability and unequal treatment concentrated harm in communities that needed protection the most yet had the least. Cumulatively, Black, Latino and Native American people are 60 percent more likely to die of covid.
The Post analysis revealed the changing pattern in covid deaths. At the start of the pandemic, Black people were more than three times as likely to die of covid as their White peers. But as 2020 progressed, the death rates narrowed — but not because fewer Black people were dying. White people began dying at increasingly unimaginable numbers, too, the Post analysis found.
Then came the delta variant. The virus mutated, able to spread among the vaccinated. As it did, an erosion of trust in government and in medicine — in any institution, really — slowed vaccination rates, stymieing the protection afforded by vaccines against severe illness and death.
After delta’s peak in September 2021, the racial differences in covid deaths started eroding. The Post analysis found that Black deaths declined, while White deaths never eased, increasing slowly but steadily, until the mortality gap flipped. From the end of October through the end of December, White people died at a higher rate than Black people did, The Post found.
That remained true except for a stretch in winter 2021-2022, when the omicron variant rampaged. The Black death rate jumped above White people’s when the spike in cases and deaths overwhelmed providers in the Northeast, resulting in a bottleneck of testing and treatment.
When the surge subsided, the Black death rate once again dropped below the White rate.
The shift in covid death rates “has vastly different implications for public health interventions,” said Nancy Krieger, professor of social epidemiology at Harvard University’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Officials must figure out how to connect with “communities who are ideologically opposed to the vaccine” while contending with “the cumulative impact of injustice” on communities of color.
“Think about the fact that everyone who is age 57 and older in this country was born when Jim Crow was legal,” she said. “What that did was intersect with covid-19, meaning that embodied history is part of this pandemic, too.”
What emerged is a story about how long-standing issues of race and class interacted with the physical and psychological toll of mass illness and death, unprecedented social upheaval, public policies — and public opinion.
Many Republicans decided they would rather roll the dice with their health than follow public health guidance — even when provided by President Donald Trump, who was booed after saying he had been vaccinated and boosted.
Researchers at Ohio State found Black and White people were about equally reluctant to get the coronavirus vaccine when it first became available, but Black people overcame that hesitancy faster. They came to the realization sooner that vaccines were necessary to protect themselves and their communities, Padamsee said.
As public health efforts to contain the virus were curtailed, the pool of those most at risk of becoming casualties widened. The No. 1 cause of death for 45-to-54-year-olds in 2021 was covid, according to federal researchers.
“I still remember when I was doing the mayor’s press conferences a few months into this, and I made note of the fact that most of those people who had died look like me,” said James E.K. Hildreth, president and CEO of Meharry Medical College, one of the nation’s oldest and largest private, historically Black academic health sciences center, in Nashville. Hildreth played a central role in the city’s pandemic response.
“I wondered aloud if it were reversed, would the whole nation not be more galvanized to fight this thing?” recalled Hildreth, an immunologist and member of an expert panel that advises the Food and Drug Administration on vaccines, including coronavirus shots.
“Getting to make this decision for themselves has primacy over what the vaccine could do for them,” said Lisa R. Pruitt, a law professor at the University of California at Davis who is an expert in social inequality and the urban-rural divide. “They’re making a different calculus.”
It’s a calculation informed by the lore around self-sufficiency, she said, a fatalistic acceptance that hardships happen in life and a sense of defiance that has come to define the modern conservative movement’s antipathy toward bureaucrats and technocrats.
“I didn’t think that that polarization would transfer over to a pandemic,” Pruitt said.
A lifesaving vaccine and droplet-blocking masks became ideological Rorschach tests.
The impulse to frame the eradication of an infectious disease as a matter of personal choice cost the lives of some who, despite taking the coronavirus seriously, were surrounded by enough people that the virus found fertile terrain to sow misery. That’s what happened in northern Illinois, where a father watched his 40-year-old son succumb to covid-19.
For Robert Boam, the increase in White deaths is politics brought to bear on the body of his son, though he’s reluctant “to get into the politics of it all, but it all goes back to that.”
Brian Boam was a PE teacher at an elementary school in suburban Chicago. On Christmas Eve, the entire family gathered at the elder Boam’s home in an Illinois town where the first Lincoln-Douglas debate was held. Brian Boam was there with his 10-year-old daughter and 6-year-old son.
Robert Boam said his son had survived covid the year before, so “we got on his butt to get that booster shot when he was here for Christmas.” And he did — but got sick again, the 73-year-old said. “Being vaccinated, and all that, and getting covid again kind of bummed him out.”
Just after the new year, Brian Boam, who was hypertensive, went to a hospital feverish and vomiting. It took 10 hours to be seen and even longer for a bed to become available. As he waited, he sent what would be his last text message to his parents. Thanks for all you do. I love you.
He went into cardiac arrest in the emergency room and was transferred to Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, one of the nation’s top academic hospitals. There, his family hoped he would be healed, but his organs began to fail. He died Jan. 8.
“The thing that gets me is the people who still don’t believe it’s serious or even real, but when they get sick, they run to the hospital,” Robert Boam said. “You’re taking away from heart attack patients and stroke patients.”
The pandemic, he said, “should’ve been taken seriously from the very beginning, and it wasn’t. It was denied. It was downplayed. And it all goes back to one person, as far as I’m concerned.”
Asked who that was, Boam would say only: “I’ll give you three guesses. The first two don’t count.”
Stress, and its burden
While almost three years of chaotic public health crises have left Americans of all races uncertain about the future, they have also revealed the enduring nature of racial and class politics — and the cost they exact, including for White Americans.
Those triggers are layered upon each other, stoking stress, said Derek M. Griffith, who co-leads the Racial Justice Institute and directs the Center for Men’s Health Equity at Georgetown University
“Whether it’s ‘I can’t pay my rent and mortgage as easily as I used to,’ or ‘I want to show I’m not worried about covid,’ your body doesn’t care where the stress is coming from. It’s just experiencing stress,” he said. “Then add to that how people are coping with the stress.”
When it comes to racism, most people think of something that occurs between individuals. But it’s as much about who has access to power, wealth and rights as it is about insults, suspicion and disrespect. Prejudice and discrimination, even if unconscious, can be deadly — and not just for the intended targets.
A growing body of research, outlined in the book “Caste,” by Isabel Wilkerson, shows that even the most anodyne of social exchanges with people of different races, such as glancing at faded yearbook photos, can raise White people’s blood pressure and cortisol levels.
Stress is a hard-wired physiological response, triggered at the first sign of danger. The brain sounds an alarm, setting off a torrent of neurological and hormonal signals. Persistent surges of cortisol and other stress hormones can wear down the body, increasing the risk of stroke, diabetes, heart attack or premature death by damaging blood vessels and arteries. Overexposure to stress can weaken the immune response and can make it harder to develop antibodies after being vaccinated against infectious diseases.
Sometimes, the harm is not just biological but also behavioral.
Perhaps, the report concludes, explaining covid’s unequal burden as part of an enduring legacy of inequality “signaled these disparities were not just transitory epidemiological trends, which could potentially shift and disproportionately impact White people in the future.”
Translation: Racial health disparities are part of the status quo.
And because of that, government efforts to bring a public health threat to heel are seen by some White Americans as infringing on their rights, researchers said.
“This is reflective of politics that go back to the 19th-century anxieties about federal overreach,” said Ayah Nuriddin, a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University who studies the history of medicine.
Us vs. them
Questions about the government’s role in ensuring the public’s health and well-being hang heavy with historical inflections in states such as Tennessee, once home to the president who argued that Reconstruction-era legislation to help and protect newly freed enslaved people violated states’ rights.
And so in many ways, the roots of the consternation over recent pandemic-control measures began sprouting a century and a half earlier.
But that hasn’t stopped people such as Civil Miller-Watkins from wondering why those roots are choking so many now.
The former Fayette County school board member, who possesses an abiding belief in the power of the common good, said she finds the mind-set “I know what’s good for me, and if it’s harmful for you, you’re going to have to deal with it” worrisome amid a pandemic.
“Living in a rural county is not for the faint of heart, especially as a Black person,” the 56-year-old said. Still, she can’t help but wonder, “if I’m the same neighbor you give sugar to, and you know I have an 84-year-old in my house and a little-bitty baby at home, why wouldn’t you wear a mask around me?”
It’s a question that dogged her over Christmas when two of her grandchildren were infected with the coronavirus days before they were scheduled to be vaccinated.
“We put it on Republicans and politics,” she said, “but I think we should dig deeper.”
That’s what Jonathan M. Metzl, director of Vanderbilt University’s Department of Medicine, Health, and Society, did for six years while researching his book “Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment is Killing America’s Heartland.”
Published in 2019, it is a book about the politicization of public health and mistrust of medical institutions. It is a story about how communal values take a back seat to individuality. It’s an exploration of disinformation and how the fear of improving the lives of some means worsening the lives of others.
“I didn’t know it at the time, but I was writing a prehistory of the pandemic,” Metzl said in an interview. “You’re seeing a kind of dying-of-Whiteness phenomenon in the covid data that’s very similar to what I saw in my data.”
Metzl and Griffith, a Vanderbilt professor at the time, conducted focus groups on the Affordable Care Act throughout middle Tennessee including White and Black men who were 20 to 60 years old. Some were small-business owners and security guards. Others were factory workers and retirees.
The divergent medical experiences of Black and White patients permeated Metzl’s focus groups, particularly when the conversation veered toward the politics of health and government’s role in promoting well-being.
Tennessee has yet to expand Medicaid under the ACA, a decision fueling rural hospital closures at a rate that eclipses nearly every other state because there isn’t enough money to keep the doors open. Not only would expanding Medicaid have saved hospitals, Metzl wrote, it would have saved thousands of lives — White and Black.
Metzl said watching the pandemic unfold felt like a flashback to past battles over federal health-care reform. Messaging that leaned into quantitative data about masks and vaccines sounded eerily similar to the mistakes made, “at least for this part of the country,” with the ACA, he said.
“The minute public health infrastructure started to talk about the statistical public health benefits of the mask” and not how everyone needed to be on the same page to stay safe, Metzl said, “I just knew that it was going to open a door for the same kind of anti-ACA stuff, which is ‘the government’s telling you what to do.’ ”
Much like protests to “repeal and replace” the ACA, Metzl said rejecting public health measures is about dogma more so than a mistrust of the science of vaccines or masks.
“We’ve oversimplified this with morality tales about the vaccine is good, and anti-vaxxers are bad, and they’re automatically racist,” Metzl said. “Being anti-vaccine or anti-mask is part of an ideology. When people get more desperate, they get more ideological.”
A funeral, a cause
Skill Wilson’s funeral in January was a public testimony to the complexity of people. The room was draped in the unmistakable symbols of patriotism, a steely declaration that this was someone who believed in service and sacrifice for country and community. Firefighters sat in row upon row, their dress uniforms — crisp white shirts and formal blue blazers — marking the solemn occasion. Maskless faces abounded.
His urn, embossed with the firefighters’ “thin red line” flag — a black-and-white U.S. flag with a single red stripe across it — sat between two firemen’s helmets. It is a flag that some have come to see as a political statement, while others view it as a way to honor fallen firefighters. Behind them, a burial flag folded into a crisp triangle.
A succession of eulogies told the story of a man who could make you drive past your highway exit in a fit of rage, who harassed the fire chief until every station in the county had a flagpole that displayed the Stars and Stripes, who loved sneaking up behind his children and yelling, “Boo!”
Husband. Father. Friend.
Sarcastic. Goofy. Joker.
“Skill was one of the constants in my life. For people who didn’t really know our friendship, they’d think we hated each other,” said Debbie Patterson, a division chief with Emergency Medical Services at the Memphis Fire Department. “We were constantly going to battle and name-calling. Some of them are dork, idiot, slacker. But our true term of endearment for each other, for years, has been ‘b----es.’ ”
He would call at 6 a.m., even when she wasn’t on shift, to “wake me up and tell me I was a slacker for being on vacation,” she said, laughing.
During those phone calls, they figured out the day’s menu for lunch, bragged about their children and personal lives, and solved the fire department’s problems “as firefighters do.”
“Of course, we rarely saw eye to eye on anything,” she said. “The best part about Skill was he could laugh at himself for being a dumb ass, too.”
It was a scene of mourning and hope, of bravado and brokenness. There was as much laughter as sorrow, wounds healed by scripture and classic ’70s rock. It was a paragon of Southern, White masculinity.
Last to the lectern was Hollie’s uncle, who looked out at the sea of uniforms, at the men and women in government service, and assured them that the uncomfortable truths he said he was about to share were not directed at anybody in the room.
Skill, he said, was a warrior who put his faith in the system that “betrayed him and left him laying on this battlefield” during a “war he was willing to fight.”
“How many more good men and women — fathers, brothers, mothers and sisters — will be sacrificed on the altar of money before we all stand up and say this is enough?” he continued, adding that “Skill and I were on the same page. We had the same worldview.”
He never specified the war, though he said it was one we’re all fighting “no matter what lines they try to draw between us.” Faith, he said, lies with God and each other, “not in those who are solely motivated by profit.”
But it wasn’t about what he said. It was about what he left unsaid: the far-right extremist views that go beyond the bounds of traditional conservative politics and ideals of patriotism.
Online, he and the family have shared social media posts and, until recently, sold customized insulated plastic cups bearing the insignia of Three Percenters, a decentralized militant movement named after the myth that just 3 percent of the population fought the British in the American Revolution. It’s founded on the idea that armed “patriots” should protect Americans from the tyranny of big government, including gun laws, pandemic shutdowns and racial justice protests.
Later, outside in the parking lot while smoking a cigarette, Hollie’s uncle clarified that the battle is against covid and shared the popular — yet false — conspiracy that potentially lifesaving covid medications are being withheld by the health-care system. What he wouldn’t do was provide his name, saying he didn’t want “little black SUVs showing up at my house.”
The Post applied the standard technique used by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to calculate age-adjusted covid death rates by race using the CDC’s provisional covid death data that includes race, ethnicity, age and date of death. Under that procedure, The Post calculated death rates for age groups by dividing the number of deaths by the population in that age group. The Post then used a standardized age distribution to create an overall rate for each race-ethnicity group.
Age-adjusted rates are especially necessary for understanding covid deaths because the majority of people killed by covid are age 75 or older, even though that group represents less than 9 percent of the U.S. population. Additionally, more than 90 percent of covid deaths are in people age 50 and older.
The covid death age pattern is important in reviewing deaths by race because White people are disproportionately older. More than 40 percent of White people are age 50 or older, but less than 30 percent of Black people are in those older age groups. Hispanics are even younger, with less than 25 percent age 50 or older.
The age-adjusted rates offset that difference in age distribution to compare deaths as if the races or ethnic groups had the same age distribution.
Whites, Blacks, Asians, American Indians and Alaskan Natives are non-Hispanic. Hispanics are of any race, so the racial groups and the Hispanic groups do not overlap.
For maps, The Post calculated age-adjusted covid death rates for each race in each state over the course of the pandemic using provisional covid death data by state. | 2022-10-19T11:35:54Z | www.washingtonpost.com | White covid deaths increasing in U.S., surpassing death rate of Blacks - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/10/19/covid-deaths-us-race/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/10/19/covid-deaths-us-race/ |
Hurricanes have hampered racial justice activism in the past
How recovery from Hurricane Ian can hamper social justice
Perspective by Brandon T. Jett
Brandon T. Jett is a professor of history at Florida SouthWestern State College and the author of “Race, Crime, and Policing in the Jim Crow South” (out from LSU Press July 7, 2021).
Remains of destroyed restaurants, shops and other businesses are seen after Hurricane Ian caused widespread destruction in Fort Myers Beach, Fla. (Marco Bello/Reuters)
On Sept. 28, Hurricane Ian barreled into the southwest Florida coast as the fifth-most powerful hurricane to ever strike the United States. Storm surge reached upward of 12 feet, and the storm dropped nearly 20 inches of rain on the region. As of Oct. 12, officials have recorded 127 deaths. That number is expected to increase over the next few weeks.
Hurricanes and other natural disasters have a history of causing devastation in ways well beyond the structural, physical and emotional destruction that typically comes to mind and that we are seeing in Florida. While the full scope of Hurricane Ian’s ultimate impact is unclear, Florida hurricanes have a history of reinforcing existing inequality and have hurt efforts aimed at racial and social justice.
A lynching in LaBelle, Fla., in 1926, provides just one example. LaBelle sits roughly 30 miles east of Fort Myers and 30 miles west of Lake Okeechobee. In 1926, the town found itself in the throes of a land boom. Property values increased as speculation about new businesses coming to the region spread. It is within this context that the town decided to invest heavily in a highway that would connect the town to both of Florida’s coasts.
To help build the road, an out-of-state contractor hired hundreds of African American workers and brought them to the town of roughly 1,000 White and only a few dozen Black residents. The Black workers were met with frustration and resentment among White locals who were firmly ensconced in the ideology of the Jim Crow South that justified the legal segregation and disenfranchisement of African Americans because of their supposed inferiority and threat to White communities.
Soon a Black construction worker named Henry Patterson was accused of trying to assault a White woman named Hattie Crawford. Crawford later admitted the accusation was baseless. Nonetheless, as in many of the 319 lynchings known to have occurred in Florida, a mob formed and brutally lynched Patterson, claiming to protect the community, and White women specifically, from the threat of dangerous Black men.
What stood out in Patterson’s case was the response. Local county prosecutor Herbert Rider, Judge Wesley Richards and other locals decried the lynching and quickly convened a coroner’s inquest to investigate. They subpoenaed more than 100 witnesses and, after a week of interviews, issued arrest warrants for over a dozen White locals who participated in the lynching.
The effort to prosecute members of the lynch mob attracted support from across the state and country. News of the lynching spread, as reports appeared in newspapers as far away as New York City and Los Angeles. In response, the governor of Florida sent in the National Guard to assist in the investigation into the lynching, and civil rights activist Mary McLeod Bethune facilitated communications between Rider and the national NAACP office, which sent $300 to help in the prosecution. James Weldon Johnson, the executive secretary of the NAACP, saw this as a real opportunity to bring members of a lynch mob to justice, writing that this seemed to be “one of the few cases in which there seems to be any reaction on the part of the local whites for justice.” Soon Rider and others formed a fundraising committee that attracted wide support from a range of state and national organizations, including the Commission on Interracial Cooperation and the Florida Chamber of Commerce.
But then things began to unravel. After a change of venue hearing in late June 1926, the grand jury trial was set to occur in late November in Lee County (Fort Myers). And then, on Sept. 18, 1926, a massive category four hurricane hit Miami. The Great Miami Hurricane was described by the Miami Weather Bureau Office’s Official in Charge Richard Gray as “the most destructive storm in the history of the United States” at the time. According to the Red Cross, at least 372 people died in the storm and more than 6,000 people were injured. The damage in South Florida was estimated at $105 million in 1926 ($164 billion in today’s dollars).
The storm sapped attention from the prosecution of the lynchers of Patterson. The momentum and attention garnered by the initial investigation and arrests in May and June had dissipated.
As the state focused on recovery efforts, the importance of a lynching case in a small town dwindled. The lack of public attention meant there was less external pressure to secure a conviction, and by November, it appeared that many locals just wanted the case to go away.
Furthermore, the local land boom came to a crashing halt, hurting the state and local economy, which meant that many of those who had been willing to put resources behind the drive for justice were no longer in a position to do so. According to historian Jerrell H. Shofner, “people who had pledged aid to the LaBelle committee were either economically ruined by the floods or they concentrated their efforts on aiding the homeless hurricane victims.” Plus, as the town of LaBelle suffered nearly $300,000 in damages, many of the region’s residents — including some of the prosecution’s witnesses — were forced to move out of town or even out of state.
Rider lamented: “Unless some strong force or pressure is brought to bear … I am apprehensive that there is going to be a gross miscarriage of justice.” In December, the grand jury found no justification for continuing the prosecution of the arrested mob members and all were released from custody, facing no legal repercussions for killing Patterson. The prosecution that attracted so much state and national attention just a few months earlier disappeared from the mainstream press.
Although it had been difficult and rare for courts of law to secure convictions against lynch mob participants throughout the early 20th century, the effects of the 1926 Great Miami Hurricane completely derailed what looked like unprecedented momentum, attention and effort to bring members of the lynch mob to justice.
There may be parallels today. When destruction is wrought on this scale, there is an often-unrecognized effect on activism. There are dozens of local nonprofits in Lee County and the surrounding area working on projects like affordable housing, environmental protection, racial justice and more. But in the wake of Hurricane Ian, it is unclear if those smaller organizations will survive. Recovery itself can reinforce inequality. Will most of the aid money go to rebuilding places like Sanibel Island, which is 98 percent White and has a median income of $93,000? Or will aid money be equitably distributed to places like Dunbar — the historically-Black community where the median income is $38,000 and many residents are uninsured — that also suffered damage from flooding and hurricane-force winds?
Above and beyond local issues, will national organizations that are challenging recent state laws, like the Parental Rights in Education and Stop Woke Act, continue to attract financial support for their lawsuits — when the governor and president stress that political issues should not interfere with the larger recovery effort? As money flows into immediate relief and recovery organizations, will longer-term efforts take a back seat? Is it possible that criticism of the DeSantis administration will be blunted as Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) attempts to be the face of recovery efforts in the state?
As the nation comes to the aid of the southwest Florida community and the long process of rebuilding unfolds, there is an opportunity to remake the region in a way that is more environmentally conscious, racially just and socially equitable. But doing so requires sustained attention and care not to repeat the mistakes of the past, where major hurricanes have stymied activist efforts and reinforced inequities. | 2022-10-19T11:36:00Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Hurricanes have hampered racial justice activism in the past - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/made-by-history/2022/10/19/hurricane-ian-social-justice/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/made-by-history/2022/10/19/hurricane-ian-social-justice/ |
Pitting Rosa Parks against Claudette Colvin distorts history
A new documentary explores the origins of the Montgomery Bus Boycott — with lessons on how we see movements.
Perspective by Jeanne Theoharis
Say Burgin
Rosa Parks is fingerprinted by police Lt. D.H. Lackey in Montgomery, Ala., on Feb. 22, 1956, two months after refusing to give up her seat in a bus for a White passenger. (Gene Herrick/AP)
On Wednesday, NBC-Peacock will premiere “The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks,” a documentary based on Jeanne Theoharis’s book of the same title, directed by Yoruba Richen and Johanna Hamilton and executive-produced by Soledad O’Brien. The film disrupts the fable of Parks as a tired, accidental heroine and instead displays her lifetime of fighting for freedom. It will be paired with a curriculum we helped create to aid teachers in sharing Parks’s “life history of being rebellious” and encouraging critical thinking toward a more accurate history of race and struggle across the 20th century.
Parks had been an activist for more than two decades before her December 1955 bus stand. Joining Montgomery’s NAACP in 1943, she spent the next dozen years pushing the chapter toward activism, mounting protests against wrongful convictions, unpunished rapists and school and bus segregation. “It was hard to keep going when all our efforts seemed in vain,” Parks observed, noting the pressures put on “troublemakers” like herself.
Beginning to despair of the complacency of adults, Parks placed her hopes in young people, re-founding the NAACP youth branch in 1954. It was through this work that Parks met and mentored Claudette Colvin, a 15-year-old girl who refused to give up her seat in a bus eight months before Parks took her stand.
It was March 2, 1955, when Colvin took the bus home from school and was arrested on three charges for refusing to give up her seat on the bus for a White woman.
One of the newer myths about Parks pits her against Colvin — holding that Colvin was the first and real resistor but was overlooked because respectability politics favored a middle class Parks and not a dark-skinned, pregnant Colvin. Distorting the contributions and personhood of both activists, the myth insinuates that Parks put herself over Colvin. But that simply wasn’t true.
Colvin and Parks were part of a long line of Black Montgomery residents who defied segregation orders on public transportation.
In 1944, Viola White refused to give up her bus seat and was arrested. When she decided to press her case, police raped her daughter. Then the state tied up her appeal and never let it come to court.
Hilliard Brooks, a veteran, rebuffed a bus driver’s orders in 1950 only to be shot and killed by the driver (who faced no charges).
Colvin herself also wasn’t some accidental resistor — she had been politicized by the wrongful rape conviction of a young man at her school, Jeremiah Reeves, who was set to be executed. To see Colvin — or Parks — as significant because they were the “first” also misses the point that no single act of resistance could have changed segregation in the buses. It took an accumulation of outrage, a collective breaking point, an organized movement.
After Colvin’s arrest, Black Montgomery residents began to mobilize. Some petitioned the city for better treatment in the bus, but Parks refused to go “paper in hand asking White folks for any favors.” She fundraised for Colvin’s case and got her involved in the NAACP Youth Council. The city, meanwhile, made promises it did not keep about improved bus treatment.
In May, a judge convicted Colvin only for an assault charge, strategically throwing out the other two charges (including a segregation charge), thereby making it harder to use her case to challenge segregation law. Colvin continued to show a rebellious spirit and stopped straightening her hair, which she said she’d do until the courts “straighten out this mess.” Between that, colorism and the assaulting-an-officer charge, the NAACP got scared off the case.
Part of the bias against Colvin was that she was young and “feisty.” Many adults didn’t trust young people to be the face of the case. Parks thought otherwise. As others backed away from Colvin, Parks encouraged her leadership in the NAACP Youth Council. Colvin recalled Parks asking her over and over to share her story of bus resistance with her peers to inspire them to also resist segregation — so much so that it began to embarrass Colvin. Periodically, Colvin stayed the night at Parks’s apartment.
She later said that Parks was the only adult who kept up with her that summer of 1955. Feeling isolated and vulnerable, Colvin met an older man, and shortly afterward became pregnant. In other words, she became pregnant after the community dropped her case.
In addition to the fallacy that Colvin was pregnant, the idea that Parks was chosen as a test case because she was middle class and pleasing to White people is also inaccurate. Parks wasn’t middle class. She had lived in the Cleveland Courts housing complex with her husband and mother since 1943. She and her husband Raymond never owned a home. Indeed, both Parks and Colvin had been overlooked by Black middle class people in Montgomery. The middle class Women’s Political Council (WPC) didn’t even tell Parks about announcing the boycott after her arrest; its leader said she didn’t feel like she needed to let Parks know.
Moreover, some White Montgomery residents scorned Parks. She constantly received death threats and hate calls — not just during the year-long boycott but afterward. Rumors raged that Parks was a Communist plant, that she was Mexican, that she owned a car, that she wasn’t even from Montgomery — all to discredit her as an outsider agitator. Five weeks into the boycott, she was fired from her job and never again found steady work in Montgomery. The Parks family left Montgomery for Detroit eight months after the boycott’s successful end because they still couldn’t find work and still received death threats.
Beyond artificially pitting Colvin and Parks against each other in sexist fashion, these myths downplay both the Black community’s will and both women’s courage. They miss the point that movements often don’t happen with the first injustice but, rather, after an accumulation.
If Colvin hadn’t done what she did in March, if 18-year-old Mary Louise Smith hadn’t done what she did in October by refusing to give up her seat, if the WPC hadn’t agitated for years around bus segregation, then Black Montgomery residents might not have been at the breaking point when Rosa Parks was arrested Dec. 1. The leaflet the WPC printed that night to announce the boycott read, “Another woman has been arrested on the bus.” It did not say Rosa Parks’s name. To sustain a year-long boycott, they organized 40 pickup stations across town; at its height, the movement was giving 10,000 to 15,000 rides a day.
What’s more, Colvin didn’t perform just one act of bravery but many. Two months into the boycott, lawyer Fred Gray decided to file a proactive case in federal court (known as Browder v. Gayle. It went to the Supreme Court and succeeded in overturning bus segregation).
Even as a pregnant young woman, Colvin agreed to be on the case with three other women, and Gray wanted her on it. Gray also wanted a minister but none were willing. (Parks was not on the federal case in part for procedural reasons and in part because her long political history could be a liability in Cold War Alabama.) When questioned on the witness stand about who put her up to this, Colvin testified, “Our leaders are just we ourselves.” Within the new Parks-versus-Colvin mythology, there is no room for Colvin’s second major act of bravery — joining the Browder suit — because the new myth begins and ends with respectability politics (and the community casting Colvin out).
Finally, while the myth that Colvin was the real hero seems to center on the bravery of young people, it actually foregrounds the decisions of those adults who didn’t think she was the right test case, and it misses Colvin’s continuing courage. It also misses the actions of adults like Rosa Parks and Fred Gray who supported rather than feared young people’s leadership.
Parks’s trust and support of young people continued throughout her life. In Detroit, she was buoyed by the spirit and militancy of young Black Power activists. She participated in the 1967 People’s Tribunal, which exposed the police killing of three Black teenagers at the Algiers Motel, served on the advisory board for groups such as the Northern Student Movement, and visited the Black Panther school in Oakland. “If I can be useful, I will come,” she told the young radicals who invited her to join these and many other mobilizations in the 1960s, 1970s and beyond.
We would all do well to take a page from her and support young people’s activism today. | 2022-10-19T11:36:06Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Pitting Rosa Parks against Claudette Colvin distorts history - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/made-by-history/2022/10/19/rosa-parks-documentary/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/made-by-history/2022/10/19/rosa-parks-documentary/ |
Dehd. (Alexa Viscius)
One of the leading exponents of lilting “tropical house” hails from a place well north of the equator. Electronic composer, producer and DJ Lost Frequencies (a.k.a. Felix De Laet) is Belgian, but his music often has a laid-back Latin or Caribbean vibe. And while his beats and riffs derive from electronic dance music, De Laet is best known for enlisting guest vocalists to collaborate on mainstream synth-pop hits such as “Where Are You Now” (sung by Calum Scott) and the recent “Questions” (sung by James Arthur). Lost Frequencies albums include such purely instrumental tracks as the funk-meets-jazz-meets-flamenco “Funky’n Brussels,” which may get extended workouts at Echostage, but the crowd-pleasers are such compact love songs as Lost Frequencies’ country-tinged debut single, “Are You With Me.” Oct. 21 at 9 p.m. at Echostage, 2135 Queens Chapel Rd. NE. echostage.com. $33.
With only three members, Dehd can’t produce a Phil Spector-style wall of sound. Yet there’s a hint of Spectorian grandeur to the Chicago-based group’s brand of alt-rock. Partly it’s Eric McGrady’s drums, which often thump a stately processional rhythm that recalls 1960s girl-group hits. Another factor is the way the vocals of bassist Emily Kempf and guitarist-producer Jason Balla merge and diverge; they’re not exactly the Ronettes, but their singing does pack significant drama into the short, mostly midtempo tunes. The lyrics to songs such as “Window” — whose refrain is the title of the trio’s recent fourth album, “Blue Skies” — chatter in dynamic conversation. The vocal synergy may reflect the fact that Kempf and Balla remain in a band that outlived their romance, but it’s also a tribute to Dehd’s musical savvy. It takes skill to make music this spare sound this big. Oct. 23 at 7:30 p.m. (doors open) at the Black Cat, 1811 14th St. NW. blackcatdc.com. $20.
The London-based Afro-techno octet Ibibio Sound Machine was originally conceived by three electronic music producers with a shared taste for 1970s West African funk and disco. Then the group found its voice in Nigerian-British singer Eno Williams, whose mother’s native tongue is Ibibio. The band’s fourth and latest album, “Electricity,” has all the high-tech effects you’d expect from music produced by British synth-pop outfit Hot Chip. But its heart is Williams’s powerful singing and impassioned bilingual lyrics, some of them derived from Nigerian folk tales. Reflecting what the singer has called “an edgier world,” the new album is darker and sharper than the Machine’s earlier work. The new attitude doesn’t preclude, however, dance-floor stompers like “All That You Want” or the techno-rap title song’s upbeat refrain: “Without love there’s no, no, no electricity.” Oct. 24 at 7:30 p.m. (doors open) at the Black Cat, 1811 14th St. NW. blackcatdc.com. $22-$25.
Hip-hop may be the entry point for Jean Dawson’s music, but his songs are just as likely to be built on guitar riffs as breakbeats. The son of a Mexican mother and African American father, Dawson grew up on both sides of the border, a childhood reflected in his cross-cultural style and occasional Spanish lyrics. His second full-length release, the brand new “Chaos Now,” emphasizes heavy guitar more than its predecessor, “Pixel Bath,” but such songs as the gentle “Pirate Radio” ride on rippling acoustic fretwork, supplemented by an unexpectedly pretty orchestral counterpoint. In theory, Dawson’s music might seem complex for complexity’s sake. In practice, it sounds entirely natural — and dazzlingly original. Oct. 27 at 8 p.m. at Union Stage, 740 Water St. SW. unionstage.com. $20-40. | 2022-10-19T11:36:12Z | www.washingtonpost.com | 4 concerts to catch in D.C.: Oct. 21-27 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/music/2022/10/19/concerts-dc/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/music/2022/10/19/concerts-dc/ |
Kemp’s placidity conceals an urgency about defeating Abrams in Georgia
Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R), at left, and Democratic challenger Stacey Abrams. (John Bazemore/AP)
In 2018, Abrams, who is Black and was the first female minority leader in the state House of Representatives, ran for governor and lost to Kemp by about 55,000 votes out of 3.9 million cast. Claiming voter suppression, Abrams has never conceded defeat, so she has been an “election denier” twice as long as Donald Trump. But denying a winner’s legitimacy has become a Democratic tradition. Hillary Clinton said there were “many legitimate questions” about election “integrity” in 2005, when 31 House Democrats voted to make John F. Kerry president by denying President George W. Bush the 20 electoral votes of Ohio, which Bush carried by more than 118,000 votes. Clinton called the 2016 election “stolen,” and then-Sen. Kamala D. Harris, when an interviewer said Trump “didn’t really win” in 2016, responded “you are absolutely right.”
After 2018, Abrams considered running for the Senate and hoped to be Joe Biden’s running mate, but decided on a rematch in this formerly red, increasingly purple state. Georgia — closely divided, increasingly urban, a smorgasbord of ethnicities — mirrors the nation. If Florida becomes as red as Ohio has, Georgia will be the second-largest swing state, after Pennsylvania. It is 32 percent Black (the third-highest percentage of any state) and has the second-lowest percentage of Whites (after Maryland) among states east of the Mississippi. | 2022-10-19T11:36:24Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | In Georgia, Brian Kemp is feeling the pressure to defeat Stacey Abrams - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/19/brian-kemp-stacey-abrams-georgia-vital-election/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/19/brian-kemp-stacey-abrams-georgia-vital-election/ |
Perspective by Troy Witcher
Bart and Rob with Ethan and Noah. (© Bart Heynen from 'Dads' published by powerHouse Books)
There is no denying the impact fathers have on sons and daughters. Many grow up hoping to either be like their dad or seek a companion like him.
Like many boys, my father was a huge influence on my growth into adulthood. He was the man I aspired to be like one day, the hero whose subtle George Jefferson-like swagger I imitated as a kid and whose physique I hoped to eventually develop. Words can’t describe the immense pride I feel when a family member tells me I look like my dad. Or I inherited his strong handshake.
It’s been 35 years since my father’s passing, and there isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t miss him. Childhood memories vividly recount days of him returning home from the office and my brother and I anxiously racing to the door to clinch his legs like panda cubs to tree branches as my mom greeted him with a kiss.
I have flashbacks of straddling his back as he did push-ups, thinking he was the strongest man alive because he’d once fought a grizzly while growing up in the wilderness of Pittsville, Va. (a tall tale he loved to indulge us with from time to time).
I can still remember fun-filled Saturdays watching cartoons and martial arts flicks together and assisting him in the kitchen as he’d cook up some monstrosity after watching an episode of “Louisiana Cookin,’ ” while imitating Chef Justin Wilson’s Southern drawl (whenever he’d say, “I guarantee” and “cayenne pepper” we’d laugh uncontrollably).
For every good memory I have of my father, I am also tormented with regrets of not spending more time with him when I reached high school and girls really started to pique my interest. Hanging out with friends took precedence over catching a movie or going fishing with him whenever he’d ask. “There’s more than enough time to do all that stuff,” is what I naively thought at 16. But 16 years was all the time I was allotted a father before his unexpected death.
This is why photographer Bart Heynen’s “Dads” reminded me of my own relationship with my father when I stumbled on this touching project. I instantly knew I wanted to share his collection of endearing familial interactions. “Dads” is an affectionate and candid visual guide of the bond between fathers and their children. Heynen’s photos show patriarchs varying in race, age and backgrounds but they also share one thing in common: They are all gay.
When asked about the inspiration behind shooting this moving series, the Belgian portrait photographer said:
“Almost 20 years ago, November 3, 2003, to be exact, New York Magazine published an article called ‘Gay Baby Boom.’ On the cover it featured two attractive fathers with their children. This cover blew my mind. I was 32 years old, gay and in a relationship with another man. Same-sex marriage had become legal earlier that year in Belgium where I still lived at that time. But seeing two men with their children took it one step further. Until that day I had only seen family portraits of mothers and fathers with their children. Flash forward 15 years. I was a gay father with two 6-year-old boys living in New York City with my husband. As a gay father I realized I wanted to meet more gay men who were also parents and at the same time as a photographer I found out there was no photography book about gay dads. Soon afterward I decided to portray families across the United States.”
As to why focus on families here in the United States, Heynen pointed out:
“I have been in love with film and photography from a very young age. As a little kid, I spent hours in our sofa with my mother watching Hollywood classics from the 50s and 60s. When I was 12, I started to collect movie star portraits of Marilyn Monroe, James Dean but also younger stars like Dianne Wiest and Mia Farrow. At the same time there was a huge attraction to everything American. I grew up in Belgium where everything seemed so much more depressing and less glamorous.”
With more than 40 families portrayed in “Dads,” Heynen’s portraits take us on an expedition into the nontraditional nuclear family in America rarely seen or discussed. The love emanating from the moments captured in “Dads” is undeniable. “For ‘Dads’ I chose not to work with any assistants nor extra lights. I did not want any technical restrictions and wanted to focus all my time with the subjects. I shot on film with available light and went for photographs that were closer to a ‘documentary’ style where I tried to highlight the small moments while taking care of children,” he said.
When asked what he hopes people will gain from “Dads,” Heynen replied: “Let’s say it with the words of Harvey Fierstein: “Love, commitment, and family are not heterosexual experiences, not heterosexual words, they are human words, and they belong to all people.” | 2022-10-19T11:36:37Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Photos of gay dads - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/photography/2022/10/19/photos-of-gay-dads/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/photography/2022/10/19/photos-of-gay-dads/ |
Voters cast ballots June 21 at Malibu Elementary School in Virginia Beach. (Kristen Zeis for The Washington Post)
Jason Miyares, a Republican, is the Virginia attorney general.
As a first-generation American and child of a parent who escaped an oppressive regime, I have a deep appreciation for our innate rights and liberties. That appreciation might not be understood by individuals whose families have never experienced anything other than the liberties America offers.
When I was growing up, my mother told me stories about her childhood and early life in communist Cuba. She told me the horror of the secret police coming to their house and kidnapping my uncle in the middle of the night. She told me the pain of seeing Havana’s thriving metropolis before Fidel Castro and communism turned her world upside down. She shared how painful it was to live in a country where the vulnerable have no voice, where there was no consent of the governed — the opposite of the American republic we all call home.
Gratitude is one of life’s most underrated of human traits. I’m so grateful for the life, freedom and opportunities we have here as compared with so many areas of the world where people don’t have a voice.
The most sacred of these freedoms is the right to vote. The ability to participate in a democracy through choosing our elected officials is an incredible right that is a cornerstone of our American miracle. One of my strongest beliefs is the simple concept that it should be easy to vote but hard to cheat.
Every Virginian, regardless of political affiliation, should have full faith and confidence in our election system. There is no reason any Virginian should have any doubt walking into a voting booth or mailing in a ballot. Wanting every Virginian to freely vote and to have absolute confidence in our democracy should not be controversial.
That’s why I created an Election Integrity Unit within the Virginia Office of the Attorney General. As the son of an immigrant who fled an oppressive country, I want every Virginian to be confident in our American experiment.
The media has enjoyed making a panic over the unit’s existence, claiming that I’m somehow aiming to discourage voting or spreading disinformation about our elections.
Let’s be clear: Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election, and there was no widespread voter fraud in Virginia or elsewhere in the country.
But that has nothing to do with my Election Integrity Unit.
For decades, the Office of the Attorney General has had broad and original jurisdiction over election law. The power of my office to prosecute any violation of Virginia election law, bring and defend civil actions involving elections and give legal advice to the Department of Elections well pre-dates my time as attorney general. For years, the Office of the Attorney General has had a dedicated group of election law lawyers who work every day to protect the sanctity of our election system.
The Election Integrity Unit is simply a restructuring of lawyers, paralegals and investigators already employed by my office and working on election matters. The goal is to more efficiently work with the election community by creating a more cooperative and collaborative approach from our office. This unit will also work to protect voting rights and crack down on voter intimidation.
No new tax dollars are used, and no individual is taken away from other responsibilities.
My Election Integrity Unit is designed to make my office work better for Virginians. That shouldn’t be controversial. It should be expected. Government should work for its people.
It’s a shame others doubt and villainize my intentions because of our party affiliations. I pray our country and our commonwealth outgrow this season of hyper-partisanship that makes even common-sense policies somehow controversial. | 2022-10-19T12:13:55Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Jason Miyares: Why I created an Election Integrity Unit in Virgina - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/19/jason-miyares-election-integrity-unit-virginia-fair-elections/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/19/jason-miyares-election-integrity-unit-virginia-fair-elections/ |
Los Angeles Lakers star LeBron James and Golden State Warriors guard Stephen Curry each have four NBA championships, but only Curry has a realistic shot at chasing the 2023 title. (Ezra Shaw/Getty Images)
SAN FRANCISCO — Stephen Curry barely had a chance to slide on his fourth championship ring before the Golden State Warriors made it clear that they’re serious about chasing their fifth title since the 2014-15 season.
The defending champions welcomed LeBron James and the Los Angeles Lakers to Chase Center for opening night on Tuesday, shaking off some early nerves to build a 27-point second-half lead and cruising to a 123-109 victory. This wasn’t a fair fight: Golden State was working through its first-world problems, while Los Angeles was already coming to grips with its fatal flaws.
Indeed, the gap in playable talent between the Pacific Division rivals was so vast that Warriors Coach Steve Kerr paced his stars by utilizing an 11-man rotation, while his Lakers counterpart Darvin Ham wasn’t even willing to reveal his starting lineup before the game. Kerr had his hands full finding time for everyone who deserved it; Ham simply had too many holes to fill.
For James, who boasts four rings like Curry, it must have been a frustrating reality check. The Warriors began their title defense without skipping a beat, while his new-look Lakers bore many of the same old problems — poor outside shooting, shaky chemistry and inconsistent defensive effort — that haunted them last season. While Curry should have a credible shot to join Magic Johnson, Kobe Bryant and Tim Duncan as a single-team, five-ring superstar, James’s own drive for five has stalled with the Lakers treading water well below the contender class.
The 37-year-old James and 34-year-old Curry go way back. They were famously born in the same Akron hospital and faced off in four straight Finals from 2015 to 2018. They endorse rival sneaker brands and have been engaged in a decade-long battle for all-star votes, jersey sales and television ratings.
James welcomed Curry to the NBA by beating him in their first three meetings, and he delivered the most painful defeat of Curry’s career in the 2016 Finals. More recently, the Lakers managed to beat the Warriors in the 2021 play-in tournament. James has more career points, rebounds, assists, steals and blocks than the Warriors guard, and he will soon pass Kareem Abdul-Jabbar as the NBA’s all-time leading scorer. In historical conversations, James is far more likely to be compared to Michael Jordan than to Curry.
But history will be of little help to James as he embarks on his 20th season, which opened on an ominous note. History won’t help him suddenly find a way to make it work with Russell Westbrook. History won’t keep Anthony Davis healthy and engaged. And history won’t convert James’s kick-out passes into three-pointers.
“To be completely honest, we’re not a team that’s constructed of great shooting,” a candid James said, after the Lakers missed 18 of their first 20 three-point attempts and finished 10-for-40 from deep against the Warriors. “That’s just the truth of the matter. It’s not like we’re sitting there with a lot of lasers on our team.”
The Warriors, by contrast, have lasers galore, thanks to Curry, Klay Thompson and reserve guard Jordan Poole, who led a team that made the third-most three-pointers in the NBA last season. The splashy trio wasn’t hitting on all cylinders against the Lakers, but they put on a good show nonetheless. Curry led all scorers with 33 points, and he iced the game by scoring nine points in 46 seconds during a rally-squelching burst.
That fourth-quarter kick, which included a corner three-pointer, a pretty finger roll past Davis and a four-point play from the top of the key, capped a jubilant evening.
“I’ve never had a bad ring night,” quipped Kerr, who won five titles as a player and has added four more as a coach. “They’re all awesome.”
Before the game, the Warriors lined up their championship trophies in an imposing row, with the 2022 edition placed on a white table near center court. After each player received his gaudy, 16-carat diamond ring, designed by celebrity jeweler Jason of Beverly Hills, the Warriors unveiled their latest championship banner and snapped a group photograph.
Curry, Thompson and Draymond Green all donned gold-accented sneakers for the celebration as NBA Commissioner Adam Silver saluted their staying power.
“It takes more than skilled players to win championships,” Silver said. “It takes resiliency. Resiliency is what defines these Golden State Warriors.”
The Warriors didn’t splinter after injury-plagued seasons ended with lottery trips in 2020 and 2021, and they showed no obvious fissures Tuesday following Green’s practice punch of Poole during the preseason. Those down years helped Golden State reload with young talent, as recent draft picks Poole, James Wiseman, Jonathan Kuminga and Moses Moody should all see major playing time this season. Kerr likened his team’s depth to the 2014-15 Warriors, who adopted the “Strength in Numbers” motto en route to Curry’s first title.
In desperate need of a similar infusion, the Lakers have been stuck in gridlock since betting the house on their 2021 trade for Westbrook. There have been some modest wins on the edges over the past two offseasons — Malik Monk, Austin Reaves and, possibly, Matt Ryan — but no game-changers. The cast around James and Davis has cycled at an alarming and self-defeating rate, with newcomers Lonnie Walker IV and Patrick Beverley thrust into starting roles on opening night.
“It’s a team that’s coming together for the first time,” James said. “A lot of new pieces. A whole new system and coaching staff.”
The popular, and overdue, solution is to trade Westbrook, but there isn’t a silver-bullet deal capable of boosting these Lakers back into the Western Conference’s top tier. James surely understood this predicament when he inked a two-year contract extension in August, though it’s always more difficult to cope with losing once the day-to-day reality of an 82-game season kicks in.
James has been a master of reinvention throughout his career, bouncing from Cleveland to Miami and back before leading the Lakers to the 2020 title. The cruel truth: James needs a new story, but he can’t easily write his way out of this one. Meanwhile, Curry glides along in the only NBA home he’s ever known, looking as balanced and determined as ever. | 2022-10-19T12:18:10Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Stephen Curry, LeBron James headed in different directions - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/19/lebron-james-steph-curry/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/19/lebron-james-steph-curry/ |
Montrell Washington's muffed punt contributed to Denver's 19-16 loss to the Chargers on Monday night. (Washington Post illustration//Sean M. Haffey/Getty Images)
Here’s our Week 6 summary: Whew. The Cincinnati Bengals ended up with a four-point win over the New Orleans Saints thanks to a two-minute drill that resulted in a 60-yard touchdown pass from Joe Burrow to Ja’Marr Chase. (We only needed them to cover a one-point spread for our best bets, but the line closed at Bengals -3.) I will admit: That pick didn’t look pretty, or promising, early on. In fact, the Bengals never had a lead until that decisive drive. They, were, however, the better team. Burrow and the rest of the offense managed 6.4 yards per play compared to 5.6 for New Orleans, and Cincinnati had a success rate of 59 percent on first or second down. (Those are plays that earned a first down or touchdown.) The Saints earned a new set of downs or scored a touchdown on just 38 percent of early downs.
The total scored by the New York Jets and Green Bay Packers, unfortunately, fell short of 46½ points, thanks in large part to those teams going a combined 0 for 3 in the red zone. The Packers averaged just 4.0 yards per play, and quarterback Aaron Rodgers appeared to be more bothered by his thumb injury than expected, completing 26 of 41 passes for 246 yards and a touchdown. The poor passing performance led to a commanding 27-10 upset by the Jets in which the over wasn’t seriously threatened.
Speaking of passing performances, Tampa Bay’s Tom Brady, despite surprisingly playing from behind the entire game, was held to 243 passing yards by the Pittsburgh Steelers defense, cashing the under 277½ passing yards proposition we advocated late last week.
1. New York Jets at Denver Broncos (-1½)
Pick: New York Jets +1½, although the spread was +3 or even an expensive +3½ at the time of this writing
The Jets are on the upswing. Since quarterback Zach Wilson got healthy, Gang Green is scoring 12 more points per game than expected after accounting for the down, distance and field position of each play, per data from TruMedia. Wilson, of course, relieved Joe Flacco under center, and Flacco’s offense was scoring 13 points fewer than expected. The Jets have covered the spread by an average of 19.2 points over the three-game stretch with Wilson, including the upset over the Packers on Sunday.
New York’s offense can’t take all the credit for this hot stretch. Its defense has been the seventh best in the league, per Pro Football Focus, while Football Outsiders ranks it 11th. Over the past three weeks, the Jets’ opponents are scoring 13 fewer points per game than expected, the best mark in the NFL over that span.
Denver is trending in the other direction, having covered the spread just twice, with an anemic offense averaging 12 fewer points than expected over the past three weeks. This pick was made before reports emerged that quarterback Russell Wilson’s hamstring injury could be serious, news that moved the point spread from +3 (or even an expensive +3½) to a less desirable +1½, but the Jets are still the pick, up to -2½ if Wilson is out and up to a pick’em if Wilson plays.
2. Green Bay Packers (-5½) at Washington Commanders
Pick: Under 41½ points, playable to under 40. The game pick is Commanders +5½, but it isn’t a best bet.
There are quarterbacking concerns for both teams in this matchup between disappointing NFC clubs. Packers Coach Matt LaFleur told reporters that Rodgers’s thumb, injured while being sacked on the final play in a Week 5 loss to the New York Giants, was “hurting” during the loss to the Jets on Sunday. Commanders quarterback Carson Wentz has a fractured finger on his throwing hand and will be sidelined, opening the door for former starter Taylor Heinicke.
Uncertainty rarely makes anything better, and these two offenses combined to score 24 fewer points than expected last weekend. In fact, after adjusting each team’s scoring rate for the defenses they’ve faced and giving each squad an expected 11 drives to work with, I project 34 points Sunday, prompting me to seek some alternative (lower) totals at plus money.
3. New Orleans Saints at Arizona Cardinals (-1½)
Pick: New Orleans Saints +1½ or +115 or better on the money line
4. Atlanta Falcons at Cincinnati Bengals (-6)
5. Cleveland Browns at Baltimore Ravens (-6½)
Pick: Baltimore Ravens -6½
6. Indianapolis Colts at Tennessee Titans (-3)
Pick: Indianapolis Colts +3 or +125 or better on the money line
7. Detroit Lions at Dallas Cowboys (-7)
Pick: Detroit Lions +7
8. New York Giants at Jacksonville Jaguars (-3)
9. Tampa Bay Buccaneers (-11) at Carolina Panthers
Pick: Tampa Bay Buccaneers -11
10. Houston Texans at Las Vegas Raiders (-7)
11. Kansas City Chiefs (-3) at San Francisco 49ers
12. Seattle Seahawks at Los Angeles Chargers (-6½)
Pick: Los Angeles Chargers -6½
13. Pittsburgh Steelers at Miami Dolphins (-7)
Pick: Pittsburgh Steelers +7
14. Chicago Bears at New England Patriots (-8)
Pick: New England Patriots -8 | 2022-10-19T12:18:16Z | www.washingtonpost.com | NFL Week 7 odds, picks and best bets - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/19/nfl-picks-odds-best-bets-week-7/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/19/nfl-picks-odds-best-bets-week-7/ |
Iranian climber who competed without hijab welcomed by crowds in Tehran
Iranian competitive climber Elnaz Rekabi speaks to journalists at Imam Khomeini International Airport in Tehran on Oct. 19. A statement on her Instagram account explained that she had appeared without a headscarf at the competition in South Korea by mistake. (Irna/AP)
Elnaz Rekabi, an Iranian climber who made global headlines for competing without the state-mandated hijab in South Korea, was welcomed by jubilant crowds in Tehran on Wednesday, following days of concern over her welfare.
Rekabi’s return to Iran comes as mass protests across the country continue into their fifth week following the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, who died in custody after the country’s morality police detained her on accusations she wasn’t wearing the right headscarf correctly. Many interpreted Rekabi’s not wearing a headscarf as a symbol of solidarity with women in Iran, many of whom have removed or burned their hijab during recent demonstrations.
A statement had appeared on the 33-year-old athlete’s Instagram account Tuesday, explaining that she had appeared without a headscarf at the competition by mistake.
The stilted message raised further fears for her safety among Iranian rights groups based abroad, who say that Iran routinely extracts false confessions from activists, protesters and detainees.
Some of that concern turned to joy as Rekabi returned to Iran in the early hours of Wednesday, with videos shared on social media showing cheering crowds waiting outside the capital’s Imam Khomeini International Airport, chanting the athlete’s name and hailing her as a “hero.”
Video shared online shows a large crowd at Tehran's Imam Khomeini International Airport on Oct. 19, chanting Iranian competitive climber Elnaz Rekabi's name. (Video: Spectee via AP)
In an interview with Iranian state news agency IRNA from inside the terminal, Rekabi appeared nervous. With her head covered with a baseball cap and a hood, she echoed the explanation given in her Instagram story that a last-minute call to compete had caused her to forget to put on her headscarf.
“I have returned to Iran in complete health,” she said, and offered an apology “to the people of Iran” over the incident.
She also stated that she had traveled back to Iran as planned — in an apparent response to reports that she had left South Korea a day earlier than scheduled, with activists fearing for her safety as BBC Persian reported that her friends had been unable to contact her. Rekabi added that said she intended to continue competing for Iran.
The Iranian Embassy in Seoul previously responded to the international attention on Rekabi by expressing its opposition to “all the fake, false news and disinformation” surrounding the athlete’s fate.
Elnaz Rekabi violated Iran's ultraconservative dress code by competing without wearing a headscarf in Seoul on Oct. 16. (Video: International Federation of Sport Climbing (IFSC), Photo: International Federation of Sport Climbing/International Federation of Sport Climbing (IFSC))
Rekabi had finished in fourth place in the Combined Boulder and Lead final of the recent International Federation of Sport Climbing (IFSC) Asian Championships.
In previous competitions, Rekabi has always appeared with the headscarf, which is mandatory for both women inside Iran and female athletes representing the country internationally.
Competitors who did not comply with the mandatory hijab in the past have issued apologies or remained abroad.
The unrest over the issue of mandatory veiling for women has come to symbolize wider anger against the Iranian government and has been met with a violent crackdown by authorities.
Many of those demonstrations have turned violent, with some 240 people, including 32 children, killed since the unrest began in September, according to U.S.-based Iranian rights groups HRANA. | 2022-10-19T12:26:52Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Climber Elnaz Rekabi met by crowds in Iran after competing without a hijab - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/19/iranian-climber-elnaz-rekabi-crowds-iran/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/19/iranian-climber-elnaz-rekabi-crowds-iran/ |
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