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PARIS — French prosecutors say Credit Suisse has agreed to pay 238 million euros to settle tax fraud allegations. Prosecutors said Monday that the Swiss bank will pay $234 million in fines, damages and interest to France, whose investigators will close an inquiry launched in 2016 on possible charges of aggravated tax fraud laundering and illegal soliciting. French media have reported that Credit Suisse representatives courted wealthy French customers to persuade them to open accounts with the bank that weren’t declared to French tax authorities. Credit Suisse says it doesn’t acknowledge criminal liability. It’s the latest blow for the bank, which agreed a week ago to pay $495 million in a U.S. settlement over a yearslong dispute tied to mortgage-backed securities.
LONDON — Coca-Cola’s sponsorship of the flagship U.N. climate conference, known as COP27, sparked an online backlash and highlighted broader concerns about corporate lobbying and influence. Environmental activists slammed the company for its outsized role contributing to plastic pollution and pointed to the deal as an example of corporate “greenwash.” Coca-Cola said its participation underscores its ambitious plans to cut its emissions and clean up plastic ocean trash. The COP27 talks aimed at limiting global temperature increases are set to kick off next month in the Egyptian Red Sea resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh.
BANGKOK — Myanmar’s central bank has promised improvements and warned against currency manipulation after an international watchdog put the military-controlled country on a terrorism and financial crimes blacklist. The Financial Action Task Force recommended that Myanmar be put on the list of countries requiring stronger due diligence. It cites deficiencies in Myanmar’s enforcement of precautions against money laundering and other financial crimes. The country had been removed from the blacklist in 2016 during a time of transition toward a civilian, democratic government. But army leaders took control in February 2021. In a statement, the central bank said Myanmar has an “action plan” for addressing the the task force’s review.
WASHINGTON — Two suspected Chinese intelligence officers have been charged with attempting to obstruct a criminal investigation and prosecution into Chinese tech giant Huawei. That’s according to court documents unsealed Monday. The two men, Guochun He and Zheng Wang, are accused of trying to direct a person they believed was a cooperator with the U.S. government to provide inside information about the Justice Department’s investigation, including about witnesses, trial evidence and potential new charges. Eleven other Chinese have been charged with various additional offenses in cases, including harassment of individuals in the U.S., that FBI Director Christopher Wray said show that China’s “economic assaults and their rights violations are part of the same problem.”
BEIJING — China’s export growth weakened in September while imports rebounded from a contraction as economic growth improved. Official data showed exports rose 5.7% over a year earlier to $322.8 billion, down from August’s 7% growth. Imports gained 0.3% to $238 billion, recovering from the previous month’s 0.2% contraction. The figures were in line with expectations that Chinese exports were likely to weaken as global consumer demand cools at a time when the Federal Reserve and central banks in Europe and Asia are raising interest rates to rein in surging inflation. Imports from Russia, mostly oil and gas, rose 55% over a year earlier but were off slightly from August levels.
PARIS — French President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist government has survived two no-confidence votes prompted by opposition lawmakers to protest the use of a special constitutional power to force the budget bill through the National Assembly without a vote. The members of the leftist Nupes coalition and the far-right National Rally party had filed two separate no-confidence motions. Only a minority of legislators approved both motions, far short of the 289 votes needed. The right-wing opposition party, The Republicans, did not support the move. Next year’s budget is therefore adopted without a vote and will now be debated at the Senate. Far-right lawmakers denounced the French government’s unwillingness to debate, while left-wing lawmakers wanted faster action against climate change.
SAN FRANCISCO — The Republican National Committee has filed a lawsuit against tech giant Google, alleging the company has been suppressing its email solicitations ahead of November’s midterm elections. The lawsuit filed in California Friday evening accuses Gmail of “discriminating” against the RNC by unfairly sending the group’s emails to users’ spam folders. They complain that’s impacting both their fundraising and get-out-the-vote efforts in pivotal swing states. Google denies the allegation and says the company doesn’t filter emails based on political affiliation. A spokesperson says Gmail’s spam filters “reflect users’ actions.” | 2022-10-24T21:04:57Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Business Highlights: China's growth, Credit Suisse fined - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/business-highlights-chinas-growth-credit-suisse-fined/2022/10/24/de712524-53dd-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/business-highlights-chinas-growth-credit-suisse-fined/2022/10/24/de712524-53dd-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html |
This 1981 photo provided by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) shows an electron micrograph of Respiratory Syncytial Virus, also known as RSV. Children’s hospitals in parts of the country are seeing a distressing surge in RSV, a common respiratory illness that can cause severe breathing problems for babies. Cases fell dramatically two years ago as the pandemic shut down schools, day cares and businesses. Then, with restrictions easing, the summer of 2021 brought an alarming increase in what is normally a fall and winter virus. (CDC via AP) (Uncredited/Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) | 2022-10-24T21:05:15Z | www.washingtonpost.com | What’s behind worrying RSV surge in US children's hospitals? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/whats-behind-worrying-rsv-surge-in-us-childrens-hospitals/2022/10/24/dc49f3f0-53d5-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/whats-behind-worrying-rsv-surge-in-us-childrens-hospitals/2022/10/24/dc49f3f0-53d5-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html |
Criminal trial against Trump Organization begins as jurors are screened
Defense attorney Michael van der Veen, left, arrives for the beginning of the Trump organization trial Oct. 24. (Eduardo Munoz Alvarez/AP)
NEW YORK — Jury selection in the Trump Organization’s criminal tax fraud trial began Monday morning with the screening of about 130 juror prospects, some of whom could serve on the panel that will decide whether the former president’s namesake company committed crimes.
New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan told the potential jurors that the case would last as long as six weeks. He gave them an overview of the charges and began speaking to dozens of people individually in a back room, where those would-be panelists who alerted him to potential issues offered reasons why they might not be able to serve.
Merchan refused to allow members of the press to be present for the screening portion of the proceeding, a decision several news organizations were challenging.
Prior to the solo sessions, Merchan read aloud the names of possible witnesses and people whose may be mentioned during testimony — a list that included former president Donald Trump and other executives at the company. Ivanka Trump, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, three of his adult children, were also on the list, along with longtime chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg and members of his family. His family is said to have benefitted from some of the perks he got from the Trump Organization, including cars and apartments, but none of the relatives were charged.
Weisselberg, who pleaded guilty in August to 15 counts tied to an alleged longtime fraud scheme within the organization, is expected to be a main witness against the company and has promised to discuss his role as the orchestrator of an operation involving untaxed compensation for Trump Organization executives. He avoided paying nearly $1 million in taxes by omitting benefits he received from the company as unreported compensation.
His testimony is supposed to be limited to his direct involvement, and prosecutors hope to be able to prove the company absorbs liability through his conduct. In the past, he has refused to cooperate against Trump about other matters the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office is still investigating.
In exchange for his testimony, Weisselberg is expected to get a five month jail sentence. He was previously facing up to 15 years.
Prospective jurors Monday were expected to notify the judge if they had any personal conflicts based on the list of names or if they had “a legitimate good faith reason based solely on what you’ve heard up until this point about the case” for being unable to serve.
About 60 people survived the screening process and from that pool, 18 were put into the jury box for open court voir dire.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has said he is still evaluating whether Trump committed crimes when allegedly manipulating the value of his assets to get favorable loan and interest rates, or devaluing his assets to reduce his tax liability. New York Attorney General Letitia James has sued Trump, his children and Weisselberg for fraud in connection to that alleged business practice.
Some jurors who were dismissed on Monday expressed strong views about Trump. One woman was released after disclosing her connection to the Weisselberg family through the Columbia Grammar & Prepatory School, where Weisselberg’s grandchildren attended. Their tuition there for a certain time period is considered one of his untaxed benefits.
The woman who knows the family, an attorney from the Upper West Side, said she always questioned how Weisselberg’s son and former daughter-in-law appeared to live above their means. His son, Barry Weisselberg, was a manager at the Central Park ice skating rink that the Trump Organization previously operated. | 2022-10-24T21:05:21Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Criminal trial against Trump Organization begins as jurors are screened - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/10/24/trump-organization-criminal-trial-begins/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/10/24/trump-organization-criminal-trial-begins/ |
The skyrocketing support for legal marijuana
Employees harvest cannabis by clipping the plants' top flowers at Maryland's first legal outdoor marijuana grow in 2019, in Cambridge, Md. (Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post)
When same-sex marriage was legalized nationwide, political and social scientists noted the societal shift on the issue had been remarkable — even unparalleled. Before the Supreme Court enshrined the right into law in 2015, Americans had moved sharply in favor of it, and they have continued to do so since then.
“You can’t find another issue where attitudes have shifted so rapidly,” a political scientist told The Washington Post.
It turns out you kind of can — because marijuana is on virtually the same trajectory.
Monmouth University released a new poll Monday finding that nearly 7 in 10 Americans — 68 percent — support legalizing small amounts for personal use, compared with just 26 percent who oppose it.
The poll comes as President Biden in recent weeks moved to pardon anyone convicted of a federal crime for simply possessing the drug, and urged governors to do the same at the state level. (The poll shows 69 percent support those pardons.) He also said his administration would review marijuana’s classification as a Schedule I drug, a category that includes heroin.
Compared with 25 years ago, the poll numbers regarding marijuana legalization have flipped. In 1997, an ABC News poll showed just 22 percent supported legalizing possession of small amounts for personal use, and three-quarters opposed it.
That position had held since the 1980s. But since then, the trajectory has been steadily and rather sharply tilting toward legalization, according to a review of polling from Monmouth, ABC, CBS News and The Washington Post.
And if you overlay support for same-sex marriage on top of legalizing small amounts of marijuana, you’ll see they are on very similar tracks. Only about one-quarter supported these policies in the late 1990s; now about 7 in 10 support them.
(The below chart uses Gallup data for same-sex marriage.)
Thus far, the sharp shift in favor of legalizing marijuana hasn’t occasioned a blanket national policy. But many states have moved to legalize medical marijuana, and a smaller but growing number have legalized possession for personal and recreational use.
Measures to legalize recreational marijuana are on the ballot in five states in next month’s election, including four red ones. If they pass, it will mean nearly half of all states will have legalized it.
Most of those states have legalized it via ballot initiative rather than through their legislators — a reflection of how touchy this issue remains for elected officials. At the same time, the response on the right to Biden’s move has been muted — even as Republicans pursue a tough-on-crime message in the 2022 elections. It mirrors same-sex marriage in that way: Conservatives perhaps recognize their side is increasingly on the losing side of an issue and decide to stop talking about it.
(Democrats have recently pushed for Congress to codify same-sex marriage, citing the Supreme Court’s overturning the right to an abortion and warning same-sex marriage could be next. While we don’t know whether Republicans will provide enough votes in the Senate, 47 House Republicans did vote for it, and the ones who oppose it have emphasized that they feel the bill is unnecessary — that the Supreme Court won’t actually overturn Obergefell — rather than that they oppose same-sex marriage.)
The Monmouth poll suggests the march toward legalized marijuana is likely to continue. For instance, far fewer people said marijuana was more dangerous than alcohol (7 percent to 54 percent) and tobacco (13 percent to 45 percent). It shows just 3 in 10 view marijuana as at least a “moderately serious” problem — down from half in a 2014 CNN poll. And support for legalization is nearly at consensus levels among younger people, with 87 percent of those under 35 years old supporting it.
It might take some time before everyone is truly on board, given that Republicans and senior citizens are split about evenly on the issue. But right now — barring some new revelation showing negative effects from the legalization we’ve seen thus far — it seems to be only a matter of time. | 2022-10-24T21:05:40Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The skyrocketing support for legal marijuana - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/24/marijuana-same-sex-marriage-legalization/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/24/marijuana-same-sex-marriage-legalization/ |
Flags are flown in support of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) and former president Donald Trump ahead of a Senate candidates' debate in Lake Worth, Fla., on Oct. 18. (Eva Marie Uzcategui/Bloomberg News)
Former president Donald Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis cannot both be the Republican Party’s nominee for the 2024 presidential election. That’s not how it works. Should both of them seek that role — as seems likely — they will necessarily at some point have to abandon the two-guys-who-don’t-particularly-like-each-other-being-forced-to-intermingle-at-an-office-party vibe that they’ve adopted since Trump left office.
This is particularly true of DeSantis. He continues to trail Trump in a hypothetical presidential matchup; in recent New York Times-Siena College polling, DeSantis was down by a nearly 2 to 1 margin among potential Republican primary voters. DeSantis could wait for Trump’s support to collapse, the strategy that proved so effective for Jeb Bush, Rand Paul, Ben Carson, Chris Christie, John Kasich, Marco Rubio, Carly Fiorina, Lindsey O. Graham and Ted Cruz in 2016. Otherwise he’ll need to try to eat into Trump’s advantage. In other words, he’ll need to make a case to Republican voters not only for himself but against Trump.
So far, DeSantis hasn’t been eager to do so. When the federal government searched Trump’s Mar-a-Lago event space for presidential records and classified documents in August, DeSantis’s response was similar to most other Republicans: The feds were demonstrating bias against the former president. It was a moment to raise an eyebrow, as Christie (a former U.S. attorney and potential 2024 candidate) did. But DeSantis continued down the path he’s been walking since he first sought the nomination in 2018: planting each shoe carefully into a footprint Trump had already left.
Earlier this month, Joe O’Dea, the Republican challenger to Sen. Michael F. Bennet (D-Colo.), appeared on CNN’s “State of the Union.” He was asked whether he thought the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, should disqualify Trump from again serving as president.
“I don’t think Donald Trump should run again,” O’Dea responded. “I’m going to actively campaign against Donald Trump and make sure that we have got four or five really great Republicans right now.” He mentioned some alternative candidates, the first of whom was DeSantis. “I’m going to do my job as a U.S. senator to make sure that they have good campaigns in the primary here, so we have a good selection of candidates for 2024.”
There’s an obvious reason O’Dea made this point: He’s running for the Senate from a state that backed Joe Biden in 2020 by nearly 14 percentage points. Distancing himself from Trump means being able to run against both Trump and Biden, which Bennet can’t do. Basic politics.
But something you may have noticed about Trump is that he does not like people to offer criticism. So, in short order, he posted a statement bashing O’Dea on his social-media network. O’Dea was a Republican-in-name-only; he said nasty things. You’ve seen it before.
Then the threat: “MAGA” — meaning Trump’s supporters — “doesn’t Vote for stupid people with big mouths.”
This is a flag-planting, obviously. O’Dea is on the Outside and should not be supported by Trump-loyal Republicans.
Enter DeSantis, who recorded an automated voice message on O’Dea’s behalf.
“This is Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis,” it said. “America needs strong leadership and desperately. That’s why I’m endorsing Joe O’Dea for U.S. Senate. Colorado, please vote for Joe O’Dea.”
Trump’s response was terse: “A BIG MISTAKE!”
It may, in fact, prove to be a mistake by the standard Trump applies to endorsements: O’Dea has only a modest shot at winning. Should Bennet prevail, it will take Trump no more than, say, two hours to trumpet how he was right and DeSantis wrong. How he holds the electorate in his hand and DeSantis doesn’t.
Of course, that will very likely come as DeSantis is enjoying a robust reelection victory as Florida governor. This is part of why DeSantis doesn’t necessarily want to go to war with Trump yet: no reason at this point to alienate Trump’s most energetic supporters.
By endorsing O’Dea, though, DeSantis is planting his own flag. How often do Senate candidates in the Mountain West seek the endorsement of a Florida governor anyway? That DeSantis’s endorsement is seen as valuable at all is a measure of his own hold on the Republican electorate. It’s also important to recognize that part of what O’Dea wants to do is reinforce his bona fides to Trump-supporting Coloradans, a group that overlaps with DeSantis-supporting ones. There’s an advantage in serving as someone’s shadow: You can be mistaken for the real thing.
It will be hard to measure whose pull on Colorado Republican voters is stronger, DeSantis’s or Trump’s. But that they’re pulling in different directions is a new development in their beneath-the-surface jockeying for 2024.
I mean, it’s not like there’s been no contentiousness, of course. Trump has been bad-mouthing the Florida governor for months. Trump takes credit (with some justification) for DeSantis’s 2018 election as governor and therefore no doubt sees a DeSantis run as disloyal, just as Trump said was the case with potential bids from former vice president Mike Pence or people who served in Trump’s Cabinet.
Nor is there no reason for Trump to be worried. A recent ABC News-Ipsos poll found that 47 percent of registered Republican voters thought DeSantis should have a “great deal” of influence on the future of the party, the highest percentage of any of those included in the polling. Only 35 percent said the same of Trump.
Look, no one is technically running for the 2024 Republican nomination yet. There’s time for DeSantis and Trump to bring their feud fully into the light, particularly once the midterms are out of the way. This lining up on opposite sides of O’Dea, though? It’s a sign that the fight is getting underway. | 2022-10-24T21:05:46Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Has the Trump-DeSantis feud finally broken the surface? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/24/trump-desantis-2024-election-colorado/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/24/trump-desantis-2024-election-colorado/ |
Audrey Yim, left, and her Langley teammates pose at Twin Lakes during the Virginia girls' state tournament. (Hayley Salvatore)
On Monday morning, Audrey Yim arrived at Twin Lakes Golf Course in Clifton for the Virginia girls’ state tournament hoping to play better than she did last year. But despite putting up solid scores at the district qualifier, the Langley senior couldn’t disrupt a certain pattern.
“I played bad at states all four years,” she said. “States brings out the not-so-good golf.”
On Monday, Yim finished tied for 25th out of 43 golfers with a score of 10-over-par 82. Teammate Alina Ho followed up a big performance at this month’s co-ed championship with a third-place finish.
Despite Yim’s middle-of-the-pack finish, she had an impressive high school career. For the past four years, she has played on both the Class 6 championship-winning co-ed team and the undefeated girls’ team. This year, she was a co-captain — along with senior Cami Hiek — not necessarily for her scores but for her humility and energy.
“The two co-captains went out of their way to talk to the freshmen before their first match, making sure they were feeling good,” Coach Duane Bean said. “That’s not something you can coach; it’s something you just have.”
At the qualifier last week, Yim shot a 3-over 75 that gave her confidence going into Monday’s round. Yim did reach her goal of beating last year’s score — by a stroke.
Yim was introduced to golf at age 5 when she took a trip to South Florida to visit her grandparents. Yim’s grandmother enrolled her in golf camp for fun, and she fell in love with the game. She hopes to continue to play at the collegiate level, but she has not decided what school she will attend.
Western Albemarle’s Elsie MacCleery won the tournament for the second year in a row by shooting a 2-under 70. She was followed by Colonial Forge’s Makayla Grubb (71).
Ho finished tied for third with Floyd County’s McKenzie Weddle. Ho said she had trouble putting, which caused her to bogey two holes.
Lightridge’s Riley Kim also earned a medal with a fifth-place finish at 1 over. Robinson’s Katie Vu, Salem’s Macy Johnson and Langley’s Emily Wang tied for sixth after shooting 74s.
The golfers competing in the tournament qualified by shooting in the top 15 percent of each of nine zone qualifiers held across the state. | 2022-10-24T21:06:10Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Results are mixed for Northern Virginia golfers at girls’ state championship - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/24/results-mixed-northern-virginia-golfers-girls-state-championship/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/24/results-mixed-northern-virginia-golfers-girls-state-championship/ |
Cemeteries are more than final destinations for the dead. Just ask the tombstone tourists who love them.
Congressional Cemetery as the sun goes down in Washington, D.C., on Oct. 18. (Michael S. Williamson/The Washington Post)
Most travelers are accidental taphophiles. If you’ve ever visited Père-Lachaise in Paris, Bonaventure in Savannah, Ga., or St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 in New Orleans, you qualify. To advance to the next level, you just need to visit more cemeteries and graveyards, which is easy to do considering they’re everywhere. In 2018, Joshua Stevens, a cartography and data visualization expert at NASA’s Earth Observatory, mapped out nearly 145,000 burial grounds in the contiguous United States.
Are the ‘Blair Witch’ woods actually haunted? A reporter went camping to find out.
Around Halloween, a number of cemeteries will raise a few hairs with events that illuminate the sometimes dark and tortured backstories of the buried. D.C.’s Congressional Cemetery, for one, organizes “Murder and Mayhem: Tragic Deaths at Congressional Cemetery” walking tours. Volunteers in period dress channel the personalities residing in the 19th-century Cedar Rest Cemetery in Bay Saint Louis, Miss. Docents also don costumes on the Capturing the Spirit of Oakland tour in Atlanta. However, the Georgia cemetery reassures the easily spooked that the tour is “designed to enlighten rather than frighten.”
Père-Lachaise, which opened in 1804 and attracts more than 3.5 million visitors a year, according to the Paris Convention and Visitors Bureau, sparked the movement. The garden-style design soon spread across the English Channel and the Atlantic. In the United States, Mount Auburn in Cambridge, Mass., is the earliest example. It opened in 1831 under the creative direction of Jacob Bigelow, a Boston physician and botanist who calls the cemetery his forever home.
Dog walkers helped revive the historic cemetery after it fell into disrepair. (Video: Taylor Turner, Jayne Orenstein/The Washington Post, Photo: Melina Mara/The Washington Post)
A local's guide to Washington, D.C.
Your guide to fall travel | 2022-10-24T21:06:56Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Why we love visiting cemeteries - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2022/10/24/cemetery-congressional-woodlawn-green-wood/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2022/10/24/cemetery-congressional-woodlawn-green-wood/ |
Rishi Sunak to become U.K. prime minister Tuesday, first person of color in the role
Conservative Party leader Rishi Sunak arrives at his party's headquarters in London on Monday. (Dan Kitwood/Getty Images)
LONDON — After months of political fever, Britain on Tuesday will get a new prime minister, the third in two months, with the country now looking to Rishi Sunak — a former finance minister and hedge-fund manager, a 42-year-old whiz kid, richer than the royals — to beat back the harshest economic head winds here in a generation, including some of his own creation.
Sunak, a practicing Hindu of Indian descent, will be the first person of color to serve in Britain’s highest office, and his Conservative Party leadership win on Monday, coinciding with the festival of Diwali, marked a moment of jubilation among many in Britain with South Asian heritage.
Sunak’s rise to top office is especially significant in a country that has sometimes struggled to grapple with the legacy of its colonialist past. Britain ruled India for almost a century from 1858 to 1947, and the modern-day United Kingdom is filled with the children and grandchildren of immigrants from the former realm.
Live updates: How the contest to be the new leader of Britain unfolded
In Southall, an area of west London sometimes called “Little India” for its large diaspora, people in the streets celebrated Sunak — even though many residents support the opposition Labour Party.
“If Rishi Sunak ever dreamed he would be prime minister on Diwali day, well, you couldn’t take bets on this. What a wonderful thing,” said Davinderpal Singh Kooner, 67, a dental surgeon, who was speaking outside a temple, as young children lit candles behind him.
“It’s a unique moment to have an Asian PM,” he said — pausing for the fireworks that burst in a bright display of red above his head — “it’s a pivotal moment in the politics of this country.”
Hardeep Marwa, 45, a tech worker with the National Health Service said his friends were talking about Sunak’s win as “an Obama moment.”
“It’s opening the door for South Asians to go into politics,” Marwa said.
Others in Britain were not so celebratory — for the fact that British public in this race were mere spectators, with no role to play, as Conservative Party lawmakers in the House of Common concluded, based on votes by 357 members, that Sunak was their savior.
In a two-minute televised address, his first as Tory leader, Sunak paid tribute to “dignity and grace” of outgoing prime minister Liz Truss, whose six week tenure was an unprecedented disaster. Sunak warned that Britain faced a “profound economic challenge.” In those few words, the sunny forecasts of a post-Brexit “Global Britain,” previously sold by Sunak and his predecessors, began to be grounded in new realities.
Sunak vowed to serve with “integrity and humility” — qualities he suggested were lacking when he resigned from Boris Johnson’s government and led a revolt against his former boss. He called for “stability and unity,” in other words the opposite of the tumult and divisions that characterized Truss’s tenure.
Rishi Sunak, the U.K.'s newest prime minister said on Oct. 24 that Britain faces serious economic challenges and needs stability and unity. (Video: Reuters)
Opposition politicians don’t appear to be leaving much leeway for a honeymoon period. On Monday, they continued their calls for a general election. Labour lawmaker Angela Rayner complained the Sunak’s accession was a coronation and that the Tories could not “keep doling out prime ministers every month.” Labour leader Keir Starmer charged that Sunak was “covered in the mess” that 12 years of Conservative rule had created.
Sunak is a center-right moderate who promises to craft a prudent path to balance Britain’s books, to address its sky-high debt, which is partly the result of his own borrowing. Sunak wrote big checks as chancellor under Johnson during the pandemic. He had the government cover up to 80 percent of wages for millions of furloughed British workers — one of the most generous pandemic subsidies in the world. He also promoted a month of subsidized meals in August 2020, dubbed “Eat Out to Help Out “or “Rishi’s dishes,” designed to get Britons back into eateries.
The pandemic bills around the world are now coming due. And Britain’s predicament was made worse by Truss’s plan to slash taxes for the wealthy and corporations and double-down on borrowing, hoping for a surge in supply-side growth.
Even after Truss gutted her plan and announced her resignation, the country’s top stock index, the FTSE 100, is struggling. The pound has been pounded, and is trading with the dollar at $1.13. The Bank of England is predicting a recession for Britain in the coming months. Inflation has crested 10.1 percent, a 40-year high, with cost of living soaring because of higher energy and food costs, driven in part by Russia’s war in Ukraine.
The Moody’s ratings agency lowered Britain’s economic outlook from “stable” to “negative” on Friday, citing “the heightened unpredictability in policymaking amid a volatile domestic political landscape” and “the risk of more persistent inflation.”
Once stolid Britain has become something of a global laughingstock, a northern European version of Italy, with its constant churn of direction and leaders, as allies asked: Who has the keys to this car?
Johnson entertained a return to the driver’s seat, mounting a bid that fizzled on Sunday. Johnson said he had enough support to proceed to a vote among Conservative Party lawmakers on Monday — a claim that was not reflected in tallies of declared lawmakers by the BBC and the Guardian. Johnson said, “I believe I have much to offer but I am afraid that this is simply not the right time.”
Dark-horse challenger Penny Mordaunt, the Conservative leader in the House of Commons, withdrew Monday just ahead of a deadline to secure endorsements. “It is clear that colleagues feel we needed certainty today,” Mordaunt said in a message posted to Twitter. “This decision is a historic one and shows, once again, the diversity and talent of our party. Rishi has my full support.”
There’s never been a prime minister quite like Sunak. Many in India and its diaspora hailed the milestone in British politics as a testament to the country’s multiculturalism — contrasting with a history of colonialism and racism.
In India, the development took on additional meaning, particularly among nationalists who celebrated the prospect of a politician of Indian origin — and a practicing Hindu — taking the reins of a former colonial power that once ruled their country. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi sent his congratulations to Sunak, referring to him as “the ‘living bridge’ of UK Indians” and expressing hope that together they would “transform our historic ties into a modern partnership.”
In Britain, Sunak’s heritage was being celebrated as “going against the grain of deeply racial hierarchies,” said Avinash Paliwal, a lecturer in diplomacy at the School of Oriental and African Studies. But in India, he added, “it’ll be celebrated and feed into the popular narrative of rising Indian — even Hindu — global power.”
Anuj Dhar, a Delhi-based author who has written about Indian freedom fighters, hailed the “incredible feat” that a person of Indian descent would lead Britain. And Priti Gandhi, a leader in the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, said she cheered “with great joy” the rise of a “proud Hindu who publicly acknowledges and respects his culture and roots.”
Moving into Downing Street will be step down for Sunak. He is one of the wealthiest people in Britain. Sunak, a former banker, and his wife, Indian tech heiress Akshata Murty, have an estimated fortune of about $827 million, according to the Sunday Times Rich List. On the same list, published before the death of Queen Elizabeth II, the monarch was estimated to have about $420 million.
The couple’s money comes primarily from Murty’s stake in her father’s company, Infosys, which also employs thousands of worker in Britain.
Earlier this year, Sunak’s wife was at the center of a tax scandal after it emerged that she had been filing in the United Kingdom as a “non-domiciled” resident, which allowed her to avoid paying British taxes on the substantial income she earned abroad.
Sunak was asked about his wealth during the last leadership contest. He denied that being wealthy made him out of touch. “I tend not to judge people by how much is in their bank account, I judge them by their value and their actions,” he said. | 2022-10-24T21:07:03Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Rishi Sunak to be Britain's new prime minister, first person of color in the role - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/24/rishi-sunak-britain-new-prime-minister/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/24/rishi-sunak-britain-new-prime-minister/ |
UNITED NATIONS — The new U.N. special envoy for Libya said Monday he plans to follow up on commitments by the country’s political rivals at the end of a meeting last week that reportedly include the need to hold presidential and parliamentary elections and ensuring that the divided north African country has a single executive power as soon as possible. | 2022-10-24T21:07:16Z | www.washingtonpost.com | UN envoy to pursue reported Libyan election commitments - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/un-envoy-to-pursue-reported-libyan-election-commitments/2022/10/24/044e4fb4-53da-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/un-envoy-to-pursue-reported-libyan-election-commitments/2022/10/24/044e4fb4-53da-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html |
A damaged building in Mykolaiv, Ukraine, after a Russian rocket attack on Sunday. (Bulent Kilic/AFP/Getty Images)
Mr. Putin guessed right that Western solidarity with Ukraine would be crucial; he has consistently guessed wrong about the willingness of Kyiv’s friends to stay the course, despite the costs of doing so. As Mr. Putin has no doubt noticed, however, there are incipient fissures in that united front, including — ominously — signs of a split within the Republican Party over U.S. aid to Ukraine, which has totaled $54 billion since the war began in February. Rank-and-file GOP voters, possibly influenced by messaging from former president Donald Trump and Fox News’s Tucker Carlson, are warming to the idea that U.S. aid is a waste of money better spent on domestic problems. A September Pew Research poll found that a significant minority of Republicans — 32 percent — say that the United States is providing “too much” aid, up from 9 percent in March. Small wonder 57 GOP members of the House and 11 GOP senators voted “no” on a $40 billion package in May. Trump-endorsed Republican candidates for Senate in Arizona, Nevada, New Hampshire and Ohio have disparaged aid for Ukraine, as have several House candidates. Republican Joe Kent, running for Congress in a historically red district in Washington state, has tweeted: “No aid to Ukraine unless they are at the [negotiating] table.”
If indeed the Republicans take one or both chambers of Congress in the midterm elections, it will be up to their leadership to contain isolationist sentiment and work with President Biden and Democrats on aid for Ukraine. Unfortunately, potential speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said over the weekend that next year “people are gonna be sitting in a recession and they’re not going to write a blank check to Ukraine.” Mr. McCarthy — who voted for the May bill — modified that remark slightly later, noting that he supports “making sure that we move forward to defeat Russia.” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell countered Mr. McCarthy by calling for “expedited” aid. To his credit, Mr. McConnell has been a strong supporter of a robust U.S. response to Russian aggression in Europe, based on the succinct, and apt, rationale that it is an investment in vital U.S. interests: “The future of America’s security and core strategic interests will be shaped by the outcome of this fight. Anyone concerned about the cost of supporting a Ukrainian victory should consider the much larger cost should Ukraine lose.”
The GOP’s mixed signals are music to Mr. Putin’s ears. Also unhelpful, in its own way, was Monday’s letter from a group of 30 progressive House Democrats to Mr. Biden, urging the president to open direct cease-fire negotiations with Moscow. The Democrats, unlike Mr. Biden’s critics in the GOP, said they want to “pair” this new diplomatic push with continued aid; there is no moral equivalence between the two parties in that regard. Still, Russia is all too likely to advertise the progressives’ letter, which includes the suggestion that ending the war would help ease high gas prices, as evidence of flagging U.S. resolve. The White House politely but firmly rebuffed the idea, as it should have. This is no time to go wobbly — and that goes for lawmakers in both parties. | 2022-10-24T22:27:39Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Republicans and Democrats must maintain unity on aiding Ukraine - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/24/ukraine-aid-republicans-democrats-congress/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/24/ukraine-aid-republicans-democrats-congress/ |
AARP recognizes 5 innovators for work with Indigenous farmers, refugees, aging LGBTQ people, among others
The Purpose Prize goes to those 50 and older who use their life experience to start nonprofits with social impact
Imani Woody, a recipient of the AARP Purpose Prize, is creating a community for LGBTQ+ seniors. (Jared Soares)
Twelve years ago, D.C. native Imani Woody pulled her father out of a nursing home and brought him home after realizing the facility was understaffed and that he was declining. The experience sparked a mission.
“It just kind of jolted me awake,” said Woody, 70, who is a lesbian. “He has enough pennies, he has advocates, he has me and my wife, he has his wife — and he’s cisgender,” she said. “So I was thinking, what would an openly gay man do, or if this person was a trans person or a lesbian?” LGBTQ seniors often have fewer resources and less family support than cisgender people, she said, adding that they often return to the closet to avoid discrimination in senior facilities.
To serve them, Woody started Mary’s House for Older Adults, a nonprofit that creates welcoming environments for LGBTQ seniors, and she plans to build a residential facility on the site of Woody’s childhood home.
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Woody is one of five recipients of AARP’s 2023 Purpose Prize, which recognizes people 50 and older who use their life experience to found a nonprofit with social impact. The winners will be honored at a ceremony in the District on Tuesday night.
The others are Zerqa Abid, founder of MY Project USA, which creates leadership opportunities for youth in Columbus; Jamesetta Ferguson, who founded Molo Village CDC, which helps residents of a distressed neighborhood in Louisville; Sharron Rush of Austin, who founded Knowbility, an organization creating an inclusive digital world for people with disabilities; and Bill Toone of Escondido, Calif., founder of Ecolife Conservation, whose mission is to protect wildlife, natural resources and people who depend on them.
The annual award was started in 2005 by CoGenerate (formerly Encore.org), a nonprofit that works to bridge generational divides; it was transferred to AARP in 2016. Winners receive $50,000 for their organization, along with help in areas such as data and evaluation, leadership succession, and media.
“It just demonstrates and shows a new picture of aging,” said Barb Quaintance, AARP’s vice president of enterprise awards. “Sometimes aging is portrayed as loss, or retirement.”
She added that the Purpose Prize underscores a “can-do” element of aging that is often overlooked. “They saw a social problem and they went after it,” Quaintance said, “and they (drew from) a lifetime of skills to make a difference.”
On Tuesday night, AARP also will announce which of the five will receive its Inspire Award, which is voted on by the public and grants the winner an additional $10,000 for the organization.
Toone, 67, a native Southern Californian, worked at the San Diego Zoo and helped with the California condor recovery program. But over the years, he came to realize that protecting animals was intricately connected with helping human beings. One way to do both was to improve the way Indigenous people cook and farm.
Chopping down trees to build open fires is not only a leading cause of deforestation and species extinction, but it is bad for people’s health, he said.
“Indoor cooking smoke, according to the World Health Organization, is the largest killer of human beings in the world,” he said. His nonprofit, Ecolife Conservation, has given 11,500 free, highly efficient stoves to Indigenous people living near a monarch butterfly reserve in the Mexican state of Michoacán. It has a similar program near a mountain gorilla habitat in Uganda and plans to expand to other African countries that surround the gorilla’s home. The group also advocates for aquaponics, a low-impact agricultural approach that uses 90 percent less water and land than conventional methods.
“It’s a win-win, because we can take smoke out of people’s homes, improve their health and help the environment,” Toone said.
Ferguson, 67, was a pastor in 2011 when she founded Molo Village CDC in Russell, a distressed neighborhood in West Louisville. The once-robust African American community had declined after World War II, decimated by redlining and urban renewal. Molo, which means “welcome home” in Xhosa, a South African language, last year opened a 30,000-square-foot, mixed-use facility in Russell that includes a community bank, a sit-down restaurant, an Early Head Start program, and an incubator for minority-owned businesses. A second site includes substance abuse groups, elementary school programs and a food pantry, and the organization works with recently incarcerated citizens reentering the community.
In 2013, Abid, now 53, heard about local Muslim girls who had run away from parental abuse and were trafficked. A Muslim American immigrant, Abid decided to start an organization to support refugee and immigrant youth and families who live in underprivileged, crime-ridden neighborhoods. MY Project USA has served more than 170,000 people, distributed more than 4 million meals and snacks, and donated 50,000 clothing and household items. It also helps youth avoid gangs, drugs, violence and trafficking through a program that combines a soccer club, English classes, mentorship and community service, and youth leadership opportunities.
Sharron Rush, 72, co-founded Knowbility in 1999 to help bridge the digital accessibility gap for the billion people in the world who live with an auditory, cognitive, neurological, physical, speech or visual disability. She said this mission became all the more crucial during the pandemic when so many relied on remote communication.
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Woody’s organization seeks to combat the problems many people face as they age, especially in large apartment complexes where they can feel invisible. The group runs a “virtual village” where seniors receive weekly check-in calls, and it expects to open a brick-and-mortar facility in the fall of 2023 in the District’s Fort Dupont neighborhood, with 15 single-room occupancy units and a rooftop garden, gym, computer room, meeting room and hydrotherapy tub.
“In Mary’s House, somebody’s going to look in your eyes and knock on your door,” Woody said. “It’s just like building family, communal life. ... Just come, bring your whole self, and not have to hide who you are.” | 2022-10-24T22:36:22Z | www.washingtonpost.com | AARP recognizes 5 innovators for work with Indigenous farmers, refugees, aging LGBTQ people, among others - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/24/purpose-prize-winners/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/24/purpose-prize-winners/ |
The Hindu community of Southall, in west London, is marking Diwali on the same day Rishi Sunak was tapped as the first person of color, first Hindu and first person of Indian descent to lead Britain. (James Forde for The Washington Post)
LONDON — It seemed like it a made-for-television moment: Rishi Sunak was named the next prime minister of the United Kingdom on Diwali, the celebration of the festival of lights.
For many in Southall, an area in west London that is sometimes called “Little India” for its large Indian diaspora, that meant there were multiple reasons to celebrate on Monday night.
“If Rishi Sunak ever dreamed he would be prime minister on Diwali day, well, you couldn’t take bets on this. What a wonderful thing,” said Davinderpal Singh Kooner, 67, a dental surgeon, who was speaking outside of a temple where families were lighting tea light candles and placing them in sandboxes on the ground.
“It’s a unique moment to have an Asian PM, and probably not something I thought would happen in my lifetime,” he said — pausing as red fireworks fanned out in the sky — “it’s a pivotal moment in the politics of this country.”
Southall is not an area that’s typically friendly to Sunak’s Conservative Party. The current member of Parliament is a British Indian Labour Party politician, and the constituency has voted Labour ever since it was formed in 1974. The majority of residents in this diverse, vibrant community are South Asians. Film buffs may remember it as the area of London where the hit “Bend it Like Beckham” was set.
Monday’s celebratory displays were clearly for Diwali, not for Sunak. Kids were running around with sparklers. Adults were setting off fireworks. Residents were flooding into temples to pray and light candles.
“On social media, a lot of my friends are saying it’s an Obama moment,” said Hardeep Marwa, 45, IT project manager for the National Health Service who was on his way to a temple to pray. “It’s opening the door for South Asians to go into politics. I was born here, my mom is from Kenya, my dad is from India, so a similar situation to Rishi. It does resonate — that someone has broken through the ranks.”
Harmeet Singh Gill, 31, an accountant, said there was a generational divide at his temple in Southall, with the younger generation more excited about Sunak’s appointment, the older ones more ambivalent. “For people my age, it’s interesting and a little bit exciting seeing someone of Punjabi descent climb all the way to the top of the food chain. His upbringing is a little different to ours … but still, he got there.”
Sunak went to a private boarding school when he was younger, where annual fees, by today’s figures, exceed $52,000. He went on to study philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford University and to get an MBA at Stanford University.
While being from an ethnic minority was important, Gill said it was more important that Sunak solve the many problems facing the country, including a cost-of-living crisis. He said he’s noticed people increasingly relying on food donations to his temple.
“The day has started for him and he needs to crack on,” Gill said.
The sentiment that this was a moment to mark — even if people disliked Sunak’s policies and the way he was selected by Conservative Party insiders — was expressed by many around the country.
“I disagree profoundly with @RishiSunak’s politics and with the process by which he’s become Prime Minister,” tweeted Munira Wilson, a Liberal Democrat lawmaker. “But my family & I are heartened to witness the first ever brown PM in Downing Street. My parents were convinced it couldn’t/wouldn’t happen. Glad they were proved wrong!”
Hardip Sembhi, 37, a beautician who was with her two children in Southall, said she was “hopeful” Sunak would do “some good stuff for the Indian community” but said “he will be judged on his record.”
She said she hoped having a prime minister of color now wouldn’t mean that, in the future, other people of color would be overlooked, because the Conservatives “could say, we ‘ticked that box.’” She stressed that Sunak will be judged on his policies and actions “like all leaders should.” But nonetheless, she said the fact that a person of Punjabi descent will be invited by King Charles III on Tuesday to form a government “really resonates with our community.” | 2022-10-24T22:38:22Z | www.washingtonpost.com | London’s Southall, ‘Little India,’ marks Diwali and Rishi Sunak's win - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/24/rishi-sunak-diwali-southall-london/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/24/rishi-sunak-diwali-southall-london/ |
Lauren Lumpkin
Third-graders at Forestdale Elementary School in Springfield, Va., in August. (Craig Hudson for The Washington Post)
The remarks from Gov. Glenn Youngkin of Virginia, Maryland State Superintendent of Schools Mohammed Choudhury and D.C. State Superintendent of Education Christina Grant came as the National Center for Education Statistics released a report showing that student math and reading scores on the National Assessment of Education Progress, or NAEP — known as “the nation’s report card” — have declined across the country.
Nationally, math scores for eighth grade fell by eight points between 2019 and 2022, while fourth-grade math scores fell by five points, representing the steepest decreases in two decades.
The Washington region is not immune to the trend: In Virginia and Maryland, reading and math scores dropped significantly this year for fourth-graders and eighth-graders. The District experienced the largest drops in math and fourth-grade reading, but eighth-grade reading scores held steady from 2019 — representing a bright spot in otherwise sobering data, Grant said.
In response, leaders are vowing heavy investments to improve students’ performance. Youngkin debuted a seven-step plan Monday that includes spending $30 million on “learning recovery grants” meant to support a range of tutoring options including small-group sessions and online lessons. He also asked schools to consider paying parents to serve as volunteer tutors in their local schools.
Officials in the District said they will spend nearly $1 billion in federal stimulus funds on efforts that include tutoring, summer programs and curriculum changes. About $40 million is slated for frequent, small-group tutoring, with plans to provide services to more than 8,000 children over the next two years.
Among leaders in the D.C. area, Youngkin was harshest in his assessment of the dropping scores. In a speech Monday, he lambasted the leadership of previous Democratic administrations, taking particular issue with a 2017 revision of school accreditation standards that allowed students’ academic progress to count toward accreditation along with their tests scores, as well as with pandemic-era decisions to shutter schools for safety reasons. A well-known champion of parents’ rights, Youngkin also criticized previous administrations for paying too little attention to parents. His arguments Monday echo criticisms he has offered before.
The fallen scores show what happens “when state leaders lower academic standards, dismantle accountability, fail to support and honor teachers and ignore parents,” Youngkin said. “We must empower parents, empower teachers and have high expectations for all students.”
In Virginia, fourth-grade reading scores dropped an average of 10 points between 2019 and 2022 while fourth-grade math scores dropped by 9 points. Eighth-grade reading scores, by contrast, held almost steady, falling only two points between 2019 and 2022, while eighth-grade math scores dropped eight points.
Youngkin said he is directing the Board of Education to revise state testing standards to make them more rigorous this spring, and that he is launching partnerships with national education groups like Khan Academy to offer students free group math tutoring and homework support. He also urged districts to better spend the millions in pandemic relief funding they have received.
He also said Virginia must make it easier and more attractive to become a teacher and overhaul its accreditation system. He said Virginia will soon debut an “easy-to-navigate platform” that lets parents, students and teachers track their academic progress. Youngkin had outlined many of these steps previously in a May report on student achievement and a September announcement about teacher shortages.
The newest initiative is the $30 million that is going toward the learning recovery grants. Youngkin said parents will be able to apply for the grants starting in January.
“These grants will support a range of options, like one-on-one lessons with a retired teacher, or virtual tutoring,” Youngkin said.
Still, the news is not all bad — Virginia students appear to be doing at least as well as or somewhat better than students nationally.
Fourth-grade students scored two points below the national average reading score (216) and three points above the national average math score (235). Eighth-grade students scored one point above the national average reading score (259) and six points above the national average in math (273).
The NAEP also measures how many students score “at or above basic" on their tests, which educational analysts have said is the best indicator of whether a student is at grade level. Here again, Virginia students were about on par with national performance.
Seventy-five percent of Virginia fourth-graders scored basic or higher in math, compared to 74 percent nationally. Sixty percent of Virginia fourth-graders scored basic or higher in reading, compared to 61 percent nationally. Meanwhile, 65 percent of Virginia eighth-graders scored basic or above in math — compared to 60 percent nationally; and 69 percent of Virginia eighth-graders scored basic or above in reading, compared to 68 percent nationally.
In Maryland, the largest decline was observed in math scores — about 69 percent of fourth-graders and 75 percent of Maryland eighth-graders scored at or below basic achievement in math.
The average fourth-grade reading score was 212 this year; in 2019, it was 220. Similarly, for eighth-graders, the reading score this year was 259. In 2019, it was 264.
In math, the average scale score was 229 for the state’s fourth-graders. In 2019, it was 239. Eighth-graders’ average math score was 269 this year, down from 280 in 2019.
The scores for White students remained unchanged, except for in eighth-grade math. Black students experienced decreases in fourth-grade math, eighth-grade reading and eighth-grade math. Hispanic students saw decreases in fourth-grade reading and math, and eighth-grade math, according to the results.
Both grade levels of economically disadvantaged students saw declines in reading and math.
Choudhury said the results confirmed that learning suffered through the pandemic and opportunity gaps persisted for the state’s Black, Hispanic and economically disadvantaged students. He added that the state has seen a downward trend in scores since 2013, and that “a return to normal is not good enough.”
“The current struggles of our students cannot be solely attributed to the pandemic,” Choudhury said in a statement.
Solutions “must be innovative, collaborative and bold,” he said, as the state implements the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future, a landmark education bill that funnels billions into public schools over nearly the next 10 years with investments including boosting teacher pay and increasing special education funding.
D.C. schools saw a 10-point decline in eighth-grade math. Fourth-graders, a group of students who have had 40 percent of their time in school interrupted by the pandemic, lost the most ground in the subject, with a near 12-point drop in scores. Fourth-grade reading scores fell by 8 points.
Grant said the city was prepared for these results and expressed optimism at reversing the trends.
“We should not lose sight of the fact that we have closed the gap with other states over time,” she said, “and we can continue to do so with the strategic investments we have in place to accelerate learning.” | 2022-10-24T23:33:17Z | www.washingtonpost.com | D.C.-area officials vow to improve low student math, reading scores - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/10/24/dc-maryland-virginia-math-reading-scores/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/10/24/dc-maryland-virginia-math-reading-scores/ |
Visitors at the Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd. booth at India Mobile Congress 2022 exhibition in New Delhi, India, on Saturday, Oct. 1, 2022. Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister, announced the launch of 5G services in India during the event on Oct. 1. (Bloomberg)
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This Oct. 21, 2022, photo provided by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabiliatation shows Scott Peterson. Peterson has been moved off death row more than two years after the California Supreme Court overturned his death sentence for killing his pregnant wife two decades earlier, corrections officials said Monday, Oct. 24, 2022. Peterson was moved last week from San Quentin State Prison north of San Francisco to Mule Creek State Prison east of Sacramento. (California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation via AP) (Uncredited/California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation) | 2022-10-25T00:08:24Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Scott Peterson finally moved off California's death row - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/scott-peterson-finally-moved-off-californias-death-row/2022/10/24/04c55e38-53ee-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/scott-peterson-finally-moved-off-californias-death-row/2022/10/24/04c55e38-53ee-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html |
John Jay Osborn Jr., author of ‘The Paper Chase,’ dies at age 77
His coming-of-age novel — about an idealistic Harvard Law School student obsessed with the law and his imperious contracts professor — was adapted for film and television
Writer John Jay Osborn Jr. in 2018. (San Francisco Chronicle/Hearst Newspapers via Getty Images/San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images)
John Jay Osborn Jr., author of the best-selling 1971 novel “The Paper Chase,” a coming-of-age story about an idealistic Harvard Law School student who becomes obsessed with both contracts law and his imperious professor, died Oct. 19 at his home in San Francisco. He was 77.
The cause was squamous cell cancer, said his daughter, Meredith Osborn.
Mr. Osborn wrote “The Paper Chase” as a third-year student at Harvard Law School, drawing on the personalities and teaching styles of several professors to create Professor Charles W. Kingsfield Jr., who conducted contracts class in ways ruthless and inspiring.
The novel was made into a 1973 movie staring John Houseman as Professor Kingsfield and Timothy Bottoms as James Hart, a Minnesota farm boy navigating the cutthroat world of students in bow ties and blazers grappling with arcane contract law. Hart also falls in love with a woman who turns out to be Kingsfield’s daughter.
Critics praised the book and film — the story was later adapted as a television series — for bringing an unvarnished portrait of intellectual life to the page and screen, as students battle their classmates and their own sanity to survive the demands of their towering and often terrifying professors.
“It is refreshingly free both of collegiate sentiment and — in John Updike’s memorable phrase — the dim rumble of hobbyhorses being ridden back and forth across the floor,” Washington Post book reviewer L.J. Davis wrote. “Seldom has the bleakness and despair of American college life been portrayed with such immediacy and truth — the paranoia, the Sisyphean striving, the illusive goals, the strange symbiosis that springs up between student and professor.”
Film critic Roger Ebert observed of the film, written and directed by James Bridges, that “we hardly ever get movies about people who seem engaging enough to spend half an hour talking with.”
“What’s best about the movie,” he added, “is that it considers interesting adults — young and old — in an intelligent manner.”
Mr. Osborn was born in Boston on Aug. 5, 1945. He was a direct descendant of John Jay, the first chief justice of the United States, and Cornelius Vanderbilt, the railroad titan. When Mr. Osborn was 9, the family moved to the Bay Area, where his father, a physician, worked at Stanford’s medical school.
After graduating from high school in 1963, Mr. Osborn enrolled at Harvard. He was, as he later wrote, “an outsider” to the “legendary eastern educational institution” — sort of like Hart, but from the West Coast, not the Midwest. Mr. Osborn and Hart viewed Harvard Law School in vastly different ways.
“Harvard Law School is like the Emerald City of Oz, or like a great European capital, like London or Paris,” Mr. Osborn wrote in the preface to the 40th anniversary edition of his novel. “Hart wants to break out, to change, to explore. Hart wants a romantic transcendental experience, right now, as a first year law student.”
Mr. Osborn’s daughter, Meredith, said her father viewed Harvard Law School as a way to sidestep the Vietnam War draft and, more important, remain in Cambridge with his girlfriend Emilie Heffron Sisson, a student at Radcliffe College whom he married in 1968. (Unlike Hart’s girlfriend, Sisson was not the daughter of a Harvard professor, but like the novel’s character she was an intellectual and romantic soul mate.)
As Mr. Osborn’s third year of law school began, he realized, as he later wrote, that “unless I did something to change direction, I was going to end up with a cushy job in a big law firm on Wall Street.”
That wasn’t a future that sat well with him.
“I had worked on Wall Street as a summer clerk and saw the work for what it was — boring and at times even mind numbing,” he wrote.
“The Paper Chase” was, he wrote, “an attempt to create more options for myself, a new story with a new ending.”
For his third-year writing project, Mr. Osborn wanted to do something more creative than analytical. Told he had to find an adviser to sponsor the effort, Mr. Osborn approached William Alfred, a playwright and poet at Harvard who had written “Hogan’s Goat,” a 1965 off-Broadway play starring Faye Dunaway.
Alfred helped Mr. Osborn find a publisher, and the book was quickly sold. Two years later, in 1973, it premiered on screen.
Moviegoers and reviewers were riveted by Houseman’s portrayal of Kingsfield, for which he won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. Early in the film, the bow-tied professor stands at the lectern and declares that “the study of law is something new and unfamiliar to most of you — unlike any schooling you’ve ever been through before.”
As Hart had discovered on the first day of class, after which he threw up, that meant rigorous, spontaneous questioning — the Socratic method.
“I call on you, ask you a question, and you answer it,” the professor says. “Why don’t I just give you a lecture? Because through my questions you learn to teach yourselves.”
The point was to teach them how to analyze complex sets of facts.
“In my classroom there’s always another question, another question to follow your answer,” the professor says. “Yes, you’re on a treadmill. My little questions spin the tumblers of your mind. You’re on an operating table. My little questions are the fingers probing your brain. We do brain surgery here. You teach yourselves a law, but I train your mind.”
“The Paper Chase” became a sort of prelaw school bible that students read before embarking on a career in law. One of them was Mr. Osborn’s daughter, who enrolled at Harvard Law School in 2003. Elena Kagan, then dean of the law school and now a Supreme Court justice, made a point of telling students that Mr. Osborn’s daughter was among their classmates.
“What my father was describing, that sense of competition and cutthroat-ness and coldness, that still existed when I went there,” Meredith Osborn said. “But the whole thing is way more civilized now. That doesn’t mean that people weren’t incredibly competitive. And there were still some professors, including Kagan, who could be pretty ruthless and cold, calling on and humiliating them if they showed up unprepared.”
But that was never the whole story, she said. And her father agreed.
“Over the years, somehow the good things I experienced at the law school floated to the surface,” he wrote in 2003. “Now I think about Lon Fuller, who was such a wonderful teacher, and Lloyd Weinreb, who walked through a blizzard to my house for dinner, just because he’d told a student (me) that he would come. And I remember Assistant Dean Stephen Bernardi, going out of his way to find me a clerkship, for no other reason than he wanted to be helpful.”
In addition to writing novels and television scripts, Mr. Osborn practiced contracts law and taught at several universities. His works include “Listen to the Marriage,” a novel set entirely in a marriage counselor’s office, and episodes for several television series, including “L.A. Law.”
He is survived by his wife, Emilie; daughter Meredith Osborn and two sons, Samuel Osborn and Frederick Osborn; three brothers and three sisters; and six grandchildren.
Mr. Osborn taught contract law quite differently than Kingsfield. On the first day of class, he once wrote, “I explain that I’m not going to call on anyone. They will have to volunteer if they want to talk.”
“I am not clairvoyant like their other professors,” he added. “I have no idea which students have something to contribute to the discussion. Therefore I’m going to have to rely on them to tell me when they have something to say. (What I am really doing is giving them permission to take control of the class.)”
And the students respond with confidence, raising their hands on those anxious first days.
“Months later, when it’s winter and the cases are more difficult, it is possible that no hand will go up,” Mr. Osborn wrote. “If that happens, I wait. I might have to wait thirty-seconds, maybe a bit more. But someone always raises a hand to move the class along. Someone will do it, even someone who is not sure of the answer. Why? Because by this time, it will be clear we are in it together. They will understand that it is their class not mine.” | 2022-10-25T00:08:30Z | www.washingtonpost.com | John Jay Osborn Jr., author of ‘The Paper Chase,’ dies at age 77 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/10/24/john-osborn-author-paper-chase-dead/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/10/24/john-osborn-author-paper-chase-dead/ |
New documents show that the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics invested in food stocks and accepted donations from junk food, sugar and soda makers, even as it trained the dietitians who teach us how to eat
(Chelsea Conrad/Washington Post illustration)
Few institutions have as much influence on the public’s eating habits as the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, which helps shape national food policy and trains thousands of dietitians who help people decide what to eat.
But newly released documents show that the academy has a long history of financial ties to big food companies, including many that sell and market ultra-processed foods that have been linked to obesity, Type 2 diabetes and other chronic diseases.
The documents, described in a report published on Monday in Public Health Nutrition, a peer reviewed journal, include thousands of pages of the academy’s financial records, tax returns and internal emails. They show that between 2011 and 2017, the organization took more than $4 million in donations from food companies and industry groups, including some of the world’s largest producers of soda, sugar, candy and ultra-processed foods, such as Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Nestlé, Hershey, Kellogg’s, and Conagra.
The academy not only accepted sponsorship money from big food companies but invested money in food industry stocks. For example, the documents show that in 2015 and 2016 the academy held more than a million dollars worth of stock in PepsiCo, Nestlé and J.M. Smucker.
The documents were obtained by U.S. Right to Know, an investigative group long at odds with big food companies but also saddled with its own controversies. U.S. Right to Know disclosed on their website that they accept funding from the Organic Consumers Association, which has been linked with the anti-vaccine movement. The organization has also said it’s investigating uncertainty over the origins of covid-19.
The academy has long been criticized for partnering with processed food companies, but the full extent of its financial ties to the food industry had not been publicly disclosed.
In a statement, the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics called the new report inaccurate and misleading, and said that it had stringent guidelines and principles for its corporate sponsors and supporters, which “prohibit external influence.”
“The Academy’s programs, leadership, decisions, policies and positions are not influenced by sponsors,” it said in its statement. “The Academy’s procedures and formal agreements with external organizations are designed to prevent any undue corporate influence.”
The academy said that less than 9 percent of its funding comes from sponsorships, and that less than 3 percent of it and its foundation’s investments are in food companies. It said that all sectors of the S&P 500 are represented in its stock portfolios.
The academy is a powerful force in nutrition. It boasts that it has 112,000 credentialed practitioners, including tens of thousands of registered dietitian nutritionists and other nutrition professionals. The academy’s members lobby Congress on health issues and routinely serve on the advisory committee that shapes the federal government’s Dietary Guidelines for Americans.
While the academy has faced criticism over its ties to big food companies for years, it is a private organization and its confidential financial records are shielded from public scrutiny. The new trove of documents only came to light because Donna Martin, a former academy president who works for a public school district in Georgia, used her school email for matters related to the academy, putting those communications into the public domain.
U.S. Right to Know says it spent five years acquiring more than 50,000 pages of documents largely through Freedom of Information Act requests.
The disclosures provide a rare glimpse into how the food industry maintained close relationships with the very organizations and individuals who are supposed to be advising consumers on healthy eating. Here’s what the report found:
Many of the academy’s biggest contributions between 2011 and 2017 came from some of the world’s largest producers of soda, sugar, candy, and ultra-processed foods. Conagra, which owns brands like Slim Jim, Duncan Hines, Reddi-wip and Chef Boyardee, gave the academy at least $1.4 million. PepsiCo provided more than $486,000 in funding and Coca-Cola gave the academy at least $477,000. Hershey gave the academy roughly $368,000 and Nestlé gave the academy over $200,000 during this period.
The academy’s financial supporters included sugar industry trade groups like the Sugar Association and the Corn Refiners Association, as well as influential lobbying groups for the soda, beef and dairy industries.
The National Dairy Council was among the academy’s largest sponsors, giving it at least $1.5 million between 2011 and 2017.
The records indicate that the academy acknowledged that certain levels of financial support gave contributors more influence. Companies that paid “sponsorship” fees were given “specific rights and benefits.” Meanwhile, donors, grantors and supporters were defined as those who made “a charitable contribution with no expectation of a commercial return.”
Internal emails show that in 2014, Martin, who was then the group’s treasurer, dismissed ethical concerns about investing in PepsiCo and suggested in a message to another academy executive that it would be fine for the group to invest in Coca-Cola as well.
“I personally like PepsiCo and do not have any problems with us owning it, but I wonder if someone will say something about that,” wrote Martin, who couldn’t be reached for comment by The Washington Post. “Hopefully they will be happy like they should be! I personally would be OK if we owned Coke stock!!”
“I’m stunned,” said Marion Nestle, a professor emerita of nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University, and the author of “Unsavory Truth,” a book about the food industry’s involvement in nutrition science. “These are people who are supposed to be talking about healthy diets. How can they be investing in companies that are making products that are ultra-processed and making people sick?”
The academy said that its sponsorship agreements with Coca-Cola and Hershey ended in 2015, and that PepsiCo’s sponsorship ended in 2016.
Today, the Academy lists more than two dozen “supporters” on its website, ranging from the Hass Avocado Board and the Mushroom Council to Tate & Lyle, one of the world’s largest producers of high fructose corn syrup and other sweeteners. Another one of the group’s supporters is the National Confectioners Association, a trade and lobbying group for the candy industry whose members include Hershey, Mondelez International, Mars, and the Jelly Belly Candy Company. | 2022-10-25T00:09:34Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics Group earned millions from junk food makers - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2022/10/24/nutrition-academy-processed-food-company-donations/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2022/10/24/nutrition-academy-processed-food-company-donations/ |
Peter Schjeldahl, revered art critic for the New Yorker, dies at 80
Passionate, knowledgeable and incisive, he had a gift for conveying complex or surprising thoughts in melodious sentences
Art critic Peter Schjeldahl at the New Yorker Festival in 2011. (Neilson Barnard/Getty Images for the New Yorker)
Peter Schjeldahl, a college dropout from Minnesota who became one of New York’s most durable and revered art critics, writing with wit, humanity and lyrical precision about old masters like Velázquez (“If he were a rock singer, he would be Roy Orbison”) and 20th century giants like Lucian Freud (“hard to like and almost impossible not to admire”), died Oct. 21 at his home in Bovina, N.Y. He was 80.
The cause was lung cancer, said his daughter, author Ada Calhoun. Mr. Schjeldahl had written about his illness in “77 Sunset Me,” a typically good-humored New Yorker essay that was published in 2019, soon after he was diagnosed. He had been given six months to live, he wrote, but showed “marked improvement” through immunotherapy, which his daughter credited with extending his life.
Mr. Schjeldahl (pronounced SHELL-doll) began writing criticism in 1965 while trying to support himself as a poet, and he continued writing reviews and essays with occasional breaks until his death. Passionate, knowledgeable and frequently incisive, he had a gift for conveying complex or surprising thoughts in melodious sentences, and for bringing works of art to life on the pages of the Village Voice and the New Yorker, where he had been a staff writer since 1998.
Describing Alexander Calder’s 1963 sculpture “Southern Cross” in a 2001 New Yorker essay, he sought to convey the work’s “bothered urgency,” writing: “Imagine someone using gestures to describe a tree to people who have never seen one: ‘This thing comes out of the ground and goes up, and there’s stuff above that spreads out and hangs down — aw, the hell with it.’ ” Calder’s “style,” he added, “touches something heroic and hapless in us all.”
Raised in small towns across North Dakota and Minnesota, Mr. Schjeldahl was fascinated by language ever since he was a boy — “At breakfast, I’d pore over every word on a cereal box as if it were holy writ,” he recalled — and dreamed of a bohemian, big-city life somewhere on the coasts. He found it in New York, where he wrote poetry, mingled with New York School writers John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara, and learned art criticism on the job, keeping at it until, he said, “the art criticism ate the poetry.”
Over the years his career was buffeted by drug use and alcoholism (he got sober in the early 1990s), and by a tendency to alienate himself from longtime friends in and out of the art world. “I’m compulsively impolitic and tactless. … I can’t write about people, which is why I write about inanimate objects,” he told Interview magazine in 2014. Yet he remained a renowned and widely read critic for more than half a century, delighting generations of art lovers with reviews that often suggested the visceral impact of a great painting or sculpture.
“A voice is what he always had: distinct, clear, funny,” wrote the New Yorker’s top editor, David Remnick, in a tribute. “A poet’s voice — epigrammatic, nothing wasted.”
Writing about an exhibition of 16th-century Italian portraits mounted last year by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Mr. Schjeldahl observed that “a wall in the last room of the show, hung with five tip-top Bronzinos, staggered me like a sequence of Sunday punches.” A retrospective of painter Robert Colescott made him feel “delightfully knocked about like a sensitized pinball,” while the work of Edward Hopper left him with “a lonely sensation, a congestion of feeling incapable of articulation, like being tongue-tied with love.”
In a New York Times review of “Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light” (2019), the most recent collection of Mr. Schjeldahl’s articles, author Charles Finch praised the “remarkable tensile beauty” of Mr. Schjeldahl’s writing, adding, “He has the ability to freeze an artist cold in a line, not through aphorism, which implies a slinking away from the specific, but with meticulous, writerly precision.”
At times he could be withering, cutting down the work of artists like Kaws, an auction-house favorite known for appropriating cartoon characters like Mickey Mouse. “Like a diet of only celery, which is said to consume more calories in the chewing than it provides to digestion, KAWS activates hallucinatory syndromes of spiritual starvation,” he wrote, using the artist’s stylized, all-caps name.
For him, Matisse and Kaws — as well as Basquiat and Rembrandt, Hopper and Koons — all existed in the same contemporary realm, and were all worthy of consideration. “I define contemporary art as every work of art that exists at the present moment, 5,000 years or five minutes old,” he told the journal Brooklyn Rail in 2015. “We look with contemporary eyes. What other eyes are there?”
The oldest of five children, Peter Charles Schjeldahl was born in Fargo, N.D., on March 20, 1942. His mother, Charlene (Hanson), was a voracious reader who worked as an office manager for his father, Gilmore, who fought in the Battle of the Bulge during World War II and worked with plastics, adhesives and circuitry to build one of the world’s first communications satellites, Echo 1. His other inventions included the plastic-lined airsickness bag.
Mr. Schjeldahl said he acted out, sometimes driving his mother to tears, in an effort to attract the attention of his father, who was focused almost exclusively on his work. Decades later, Mr. Schjeldahl showed a similarly single-minded focus as an adult, throwing himself headfirst into writing at the expense of parenting his daughter, Calhoun. In June, she published a memoir, “Also a Poet,” that described him as a loving but neglectful parent who seldom showed interest in her life. (Mr. Schjeldahl told Calhoun that he loved the book, calling it “such a gift.”)
Ada Calhoun comes to terms with a neglectful father in ‘Also a Poet’
“Writing consumes writers,” he noted in his New Yorker essay about cancer. “No end of ones better than I am have said as much. The passion hurts relationships. I think off and on about people I love, but I think about writing all the time.”
After graduating from high school in Northfield, Minn., Mr. Schjeldahl studied English at nearby Carleton College. He dropped out in 1962, at age 20, and drove east, talking his way into a job as a newspaper reporter in Jersey City. He later returned to college for a year before dropping out for good.
Over the next decade, Mr. Schjeldahl got married (“unwisely,” he said) to a fellow writer, Linda O’Brien; traveled across Europe; wrote for ARTnews and the New York Times; got divorced in Mexico; and avoided military service in Vietnam by staying awake “for three days and nights on speed,” as he told it, before showing up at the induction center covered in dirt and looking like a madman.
Mentored by Seymour Peck, an arts and culture editor at the Times, he began to gain confidence as a critic in the 1970s. “Most of what I know in a scholarly way about art I learned on deadlines,” he recalled, “to sound as if I knew what I was talking about — as, little by little, I did. Educating yourself in public is painful, but the lessons stick.”
In 1974, Mr. Schjeldahl married Brooke Alderson, an actress and comic whom he met at a Whitney Museum opening. In the 1980s, they bought a country home in the Catskills town of Bovina, where for many years they hosted raucous, pyrotechnic Fourth of July celebrations, with Mr. Schjeldahl overseeing the elaborate fireworks show. Artists, writers, gallery owners and movie stars came to the event, which drew some 2,000 people in 2015 before the Schjeldahls decided to retire the event.
In addition to his wife and daughter, survivors include a brother, three sisters and two grandsons.
Although Mr. Schjeldahl ultimately let poetry go by the wayside, he published several books of verse and briefly quit criticism to focus on poetry in the mid-1970s. He announced his decision in part through a cheeky poem called “Dear Profession of Art Writing,” in which he went after fellow critics such as Hilton Kramer (who “makes art sound as appealing / as a deodorant enema”) and Harold Rosenberg (a “honey-tongued blowhard”).
In the last stanza, he referred to art critics as “a tiny guild on the fringe of useful human endeavor” and then addressed the profession itself, reflecting modestly on his own contributions:
I neither enriched nor eroded you, as others have,
but I would hope I’ve done my bit for pleasure,
a fleeting kind that is sweet to the serious.
I intended no harm. May my sins be forgotten. | 2022-10-25T00:55:40Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Peter Schjeldahl, revered art critic for the New Yorker, dies at 80 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/10/24/art-critic-peter-schjeldahl-dead/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/10/24/art-critic-peter-schjeldahl-dead/ |
Boy, 4, wounded in triple shooting in Northwest D.C.
A child was among three people shot in the Brightwood Park area of Northwest D.C. Monday evening. (Emily Davies/The Washington Post)
A four-year-old boy was among three people wounded in a shooting in the the Brightwood Park area of Northwest D.C. Monday evening, according to police.
The incident occurred about 6:30 p.m. in the 100 block of Kennedy Street NW, Police Chief Robert J. Contee III said at the scene Monday night. The chief said two men, who were found near a vehicle, and a four-year-old were wounded, but their injuries were not thought to be life threatening.
Contee said the four-year-old was not the intended target of the shooting, and was not related to the others injured. He said police believed there was an exchange of gunfire, and investigators had taken one person believed to be involved in the incident into custody.
“A four year old was shot today. We think the injury is relatively minor, but that’s hard to say with a 4-year-old with a gunshot wound,” Mayor Muriel Bowser (D) said at the scene.
The shooting was among several in D.C. Monday night. | 2022-10-25T01:08:43Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Child wounded in triple shooting in Northwest D.C. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/24/child-shot-brightwood-park-dc/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/24/child-shot-brightwood-park-dc/ |
Injury-struck Jets swing trade for Jaguars RB James Robinson
Breece Hall is seventh in the NFL with 681 yards from scrimmage, but his season is now over. (Dustin Bradford/Getty Images)
After getting confirmation Monday that standout rookie running back Breece Hall was lost for the season to a knee injury, the New York Jets acquired James Robinson in a trade from the Jacksonville Jaguars, per multiple reports.
In exchange, the Jets are reportedly giving up a sixth-round pick that can become a fifth-rounder if certain conditions are met.
The deal comes on a day when New York was dealt a double dose of bad news. In addition to confirming a torn ACL for Hall, who had been a leading contender for NFL offensive rookie of the year honors, Coach Robert Saleh revealed that versatile offensive lineman Alijah Vera-Tucker also suffered a season-ending torn triceps during Sunday’s 16-9 win Sunday over the host Denver Broncos.
It remains to be seen if the Jets will swing a deal to help replace Vera-Tucker, a 2021 first-round pick who ably started games this season at left tackle, right tackle and right guard. At a news conference Monday, Saleh praised Jets running backs Michael Carter and Ty Johnson, but several hours later the team showed it wanted significant reinforcement at the position.
A third-year veteran who went undrafted in 2020 out of Illinois State, Robinson is coming off a torn Achilles’ tendon suffered in December. He made a relatively quick recovery and was given a sizable role right away when Jacksonville started this season. However, with the emergence of Jaguars running back Travis Etienne — a 2021 first-round pick whose rookie season was lost to a foot injury — Robinson began to lose playing time, and he was only on the field Sunday for 17 percent of the team’s offensive snaps in a home loss to the New York Giants this weekend.
For the season, Robinson has 81 carries for 340 yards and three touchdowns, with nine receptions for 46 yards and another score. Hall, a second-round pick out of Iowa State this year, racked up 463 rushing yards, good for eighth-best in the NFL thus far, and a seventh-best 681 yards from scrimmage. That accounted for almost 30 percent of the Jets’ total scrimmage yards, and Hall not only scored five of the team’s 16 offensive touchdowns but set up a couple of more on plays that reached the 1-yard line. Despite sharing a backfield with Carter and only starting New York’s past two games, he was also among the league leaders in these areas:
Seventh in rushing yards over expected per attempt (5.8)
Sixth in Football Outsiders’ running back DVOA
Fifth in Pro Football Focus’s halfback rushing grades
Fourth in explosive runs (over 10 yards)
Hall got hurt in the first half Sunday not long after authoring one of Week 7′s highlight plays, a 62-yard scoring run in which he burst through the left side of the line. His top speed of 21.9 mph on that play, per the NFL’s Next Gen Stats, was the highest in the league this season until later in the day, when Seattle Seahawks running back Kenneth Walker III hit 22.1 mph on a 74-yard touchdown run.
Late in the same first half, Vera-Tucker suffered what was initially described as an elbow injury.
“It’s always tough,” Saleh said Monday of losing two young stars who were arguably his team’s top offensive performers. “Those are two potential Pro Bowlers.”
Saleh then told reporters that the NFL’s mantra was “next man up” before noting that when he was the defensive coordinator for the San Francisco 49ers in 2020, that team saw several significant contributors suffer injuries in a game at the Jets’ MetLife Stadium.
Those 49ers started off 4-3 but finished the season with a 6-10 record after losing the likes of Nick Bosa, George Kittle, Jimmy Garoppolo, Deebo Samuel and Richard Sherman for parts of the season. At 5-2, the Jets are enjoying their best start since 2010 but suddenly will have to make do without their early season offensive engine and his best run-blocker.
The 220-pound Robinson is bigger than Carter and Johnson, and the former Jaguar, who tied for the fifth-most rushing yards in the NFL as a rookie, figures to get much of the early down work with New York. Robinson is also an adept pass-catcher, as evidenced by his 80 receptions over the previous two seasons.
A 2021 fourth-round pick out of North Carolina, Carter led last season’s Jets in rushing attempts (147) and yards (639), while Johnson added 610 yards from scrimmage.
“Michael Carter has proven he can carry the load, and Ty Johnson has done a really nice job,” Saleh said, before news of the trade emerged. “With our offensive line, it’s been all year with guys shuffling in and out. We’ve just got a lot of faith in the guys that are here to be able to step in and continue to do the job that was done before them.”
Put the doctor who oversaw James Robinson's Achilles recovery in charge of everything pic.twitter.com/fsOizQhdJa
— FantasyPros (@FantasyPros) September 25, 2022
Eighth-year veteran Cedric Ogbuehi, whom Saleh described as having “a ton of talent,” took over at right tackle Sunday and is expected to continue in that role, at least until two other tackles, veteran George Fant and rookie Max Mitchell, return from injury. The Jets lost offensive tackle Mekhi Becton, a 2020 first-round pick, to a season-ending right knee injury in August.
If he stays healthy this season at a position notorious for its injury rate, Robinson will get a crack at his former team in Week 16, when the Jets host the Jaguars on Dec. 22. Next up for New York, which has the NFL’s longest active playoff drought, is a test against longtime nemesis New England.
It is unclear if Jets wide receiver Corey Davis, who suffered a knee injury in the Broncos game, will be ready to face the Patriots. Saleh described Davis as “day-to-day” and said the sixth-year veteran would be evaluated over the course of the week.
The Jets went into Denver amid some controversy over a trade request reportedly lodged by second-year wide receiver Elijah Moore, who didn’t receive an official pass target during a Week 6 win over the Green Bay Packers. The Jets reportedly turned down his request and, in the wake of Hall’s injury, could now have greater need for Moore’s playmaking ability. Saleh said that Moore, who led the Jets last season in receiving yards (538) and touchdowns (five), was in the team’s facility Monday and was expected to play against the Patriots.
Asked about his team’s mind-set in the wake of the injuries to Hall and Vera-Tucker, Saleh said he thought his players would be “fine.”
“I’m more hurt for Breece and AVT,” Saleh added, “because of the seasons that they’ve been having.” | 2022-10-25T03:01:59Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Injury-struck Jets swing trade for Jaguars RB James Robinson - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/24/jets-trade-james-robinson-jaguars-breece-hall/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/24/jets-trade-james-robinson-jaguars-breece-hall/ |
JOINT BASE PEARL HARBOR-HICKAM, Hawaii — The U.S. military said Monday it’s ready to begin draining 1 gallons (3.79 million liters) of fuel from three pipelines as part of an initial step toward closing a World War II-era fuel storage facility that leaked petroleum into Pearl Harbor’s tap water last year. | 2022-10-25T03:10:36Z | www.washingtonpost.com | US military to begin draining Pearl Harbor pipelines - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/us-military-to-begin-draining-pearl-harbor-pipelines/2022/10/24/7f060a90-540b-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/us-military-to-begin-draining-pearl-harbor-pipelines/2022/10/24/7f060a90-540b-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html |
DeSantis dodges questions on 2024, abortion at Florida gubernatorial debate
There were fiery exchanges in the only debate between the Florida governor and his Democratic challenger, Charlie Crist
DeSantis is favored to win reelection in a state where Democrats have struggled in recent years, polls show, and he is widely considered a potential contender for the GOP presidential nomination in 2024. When Crist asked DeSantis if he would commit to serving a full second term as governor, DeSantis did not answer directly — saying only that his opponent is “the only worn-out old donkey I’m looking to put out to pasture.”
While DeSantis has built a national profile leaning into some of the country’s most divisive social issues, he has been vague about his position on one fiercely debated topic: abortion restrictions. Asked Monday to specify at what point in pregnancy that abortion should be banned, DeSantis said he was “proud” of Florida’s existing ban on the procedure after 15 weeks but did not endorse anything more restrictive, underscoring many Republicans’ hesitance to push for the toughest bans in a state that has become a haven for abortion access in the South.
Crist, a former Republican governor of Florida who switched parties and most recently served in Congress as a Democrat, has sought to attack DeSantis on abortion as well as his ambitions beyond Florida. On Monday, Crist continued to pitch himself as a moderate who wants to “bring the state back together and not have a divider as a governor” and avoid “all these cultural and political wars that Ron loves.”
DeSantis touted Florida’s economy under his leadership and his decision to lift coronavirus restrictions earlier than many other governors, saying that when the pandemic hit, he “led based on facts not based on fear” and eschewed shutdowns. Echoing speeches he has made around the country this fall while stumping for other GOP candidates, DeSantis said he “took a lot of flak” for decisions that saved jobs. “I took the arrows so you wouldn’t have to,” he said.
DeSantis also doubled down on some of his most divisive policy fights. Defending his opposition to gender-affirming care for minors and legislation he championed that restricted discussion of gender identity in schools, he likened the treatments to “genital mutilation.” “It’s inappropriate to tell an 8-year-old that they may have been born a girl but maybe they’re really a boy,” he said.
His statements echoed a memo Florida’s surgeon general released in April that advised physicians against prescribing puberty blockers or hormone therapy for transgender youths and said social gender transition — a nonmedical process in which a person uses a name, pronouns or clothing that matches their gender identity — should “not be a treatment option for children or adolescents.” The memo contradicted guidance from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the country’s largest medical organizations.
DeSantis’s dodge on 2024 comes amid a campaign season during which he has spent time building his profile outside the state. His political operation has broken records for a gubernatorial race, with more than $177 million raised through early September. He has been cultivating relationships with donors nationwide and appearing with GOP candidates in swing states.
He also drew national attention and criticism last month for flying undocumented immigrants from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard, a liberal enclave off the coast of Massachusetts. Crist and other Democrats condemned it as a cruel stunt, while Republicans cheered it as a protest of the Biden administration’s border policy.
At Monday’s debate, Crist said “we need to secure the border” and accused DeSantis of using the issue for political gain.
“You want to have it as a wedge issue,” he said, “and you want to pull political stunts like you did with the taxpayers’ dollars of the people of Florida.”
DeSantis criticized Biden on immigration and said the border was “in much better shape in January 2021,” when the president took office.
U.S. immigration arrests along the southern border topped 2 million in a year for the first time, according to figures released by the Biden administration last month. Republicans as well as some border-state Democrats have criticized the federal government’s approach.
Throughout the debate, Crist suggested DeSantis was eager to take on Biden. “Ron, you talk about Joe Biden a lot,” he said. “I understand. You think you’re gonna be running against him. I can see how you might get confused.” He asked DeSantis to “look in the eyes of the people of the state of Florida” and say whether he would serve a full four-year term if reelected.
“He won’t tell you,” said Crist, who has framed his race as “Democrats’ last chance to stop” DeSantis before he seeks national office.
DeSantis hesitated for a moment before the moderator cut in to say: “We did not agree on the candidates asking each other [questions].” The governor then said Crist was the one interested in discussing 2024 and called him an “old donkey” before moving on to taxes, saying he decreased them in Florida while Crist has signed off on raising them.
“Ron, we know you love to bully people, and the little name calling you just exchanged, I can take it,” Crist replied.
DeSantis and Crist also sparred over DeSantis’s response to Hurricane Ian, which killed more than 100 people and was especially deadly in Lee County, where some say officials should have evacuated earlier. “Whether it comes to covid or it comes to the hurricane, Ron ignored science. … He thinks he knows better than everybody,” Crist said.
DeSantis defended his response and the evacuations and said, “I stand by every one of our local counties. … They made the best decisions they could with the information they had.” He also noted the state’s swift restoration of access to islands cut off by the storm.
When the hurricane wiped out bridges, he said, “people thought those islands were going to be severed from the mainland for six months to a year.” One island was reconnected in a few days, he said. | 2022-10-25T03:10:36Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Florida gubernatorial debate: DeSantis dodges questions on 2024, abortion - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/24/florida-governor-debate-desantis-crist/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/24/florida-governor-debate-desantis-crist/ |
HOUSOTN — Kevin Porter Jr. scored 26 points and Jalen Green added 25 to lead the previously winless Rockets to a victory over the Jazz, handing them their first loss of the season.
MIAMI —- Fred VanVleet scored 24 points, Pascal Siakam added 23 and the Raptors rallied in the fourth quarter to beat the Heat. | 2022-10-25T03:10:55Z | www.washingtonpost.com | 76ers win for first time this season, top Pacers - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/nba/76ers-win-for-first-time-this-season-top-pacers/2022/10/24/2bbb3170-5411-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/nba/76ers-win-for-first-time-this-season-top-pacers/2022/10/24/2bbb3170-5411-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html |
On the day of Diwali, a major Hindu festival, it became clear Britain will get its first Indian-origin prime minister. The ascension of Rishi Sunak, a former finance minister, to the top leadership post in the country’s ruling Conservative Party may finally cap months of intra-Tory drama, which saw two successive prime ministers bow out in the face of political scandal and economic crisis. It also marks the first time Britain has a prime minister of color and a prime minister who is a practicing Hindu.
Nevertheless, Bommai invoked the pride for the diaspora widely felt in India: “Indians are second to none in the world and they’re at the forefront in many sectors, including politics and administration," he said. “In many countries, there are Indian MPs. But becoming the British PM is special.” | 2022-10-25T04:41:58Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Rishi Sunak, Britain’s first Indian-origin prime minister, and the curious arc of history - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/25/rishi-sunak-indian-history-empire/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/25/rishi-sunak-indian-history-empire/ |
My husband recently learned that his son and the son’s girlfriend of three years are only using condoms for birth control. This upset my husband. He’d assumed that his son’s girlfriend used some form of birth control as well.
Neither of them wants to have children, and we live in a state where trigger laws went into effect after the Dobbs decision [overturning Roe v. Wade]. My husband is worried that this young couple is going to end up with an unwanted pregnancy.
Yesterday, the girlfriend called and told me these conversations had upset her. I told her my husband has a good heart and wants what’s best, but I agreed with her that he overstepped and said I would speak with him.
I understand why he is upset, but this is a decision to be made solely by these young adults. Was I disloyal to my husband?
Stepmom: If your son’s girlfriend is upset having birth control discussed, imagine how upset she might be if she experienced an unwanted pregnancy and it became the family’s business.
Dear Amy: I need your recommendation on how to appropriately thank my bosses and co-workers.
My bosses and co-workers from all departments have jumped in to help me — not only with my daily tasks, but they have created a new position just for me while I recover.
I love my job. I work with amazing people, residents and staff. I feel so blessed to work with so many that I count as friends as well as co-workers.
Loving: This is a sweet tribute to the generosity of your co-workers.
You should write a letter to your supervisor and ask that person to share it wherever appropriate. (Note: It would be illegal for your employer to terminate your job when you’re recovering from an injury sustained on the job.)
When my mother lived in an assisted-living home, I got a friend to play the piano, my sisters all brought home-baked goods, and we hosted a little gratitude-reception. You might sponsor a taco meal, or bring in KFC and sweet tea. Keep it simple, affordable and sincere.
Let's assume that he vowed to “forsake all others until death do we part.”
Disappointed: This is a tough ethical dilemma, but yes — you’re right about my point of view. | 2022-10-25T04:42:04Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Ask Amy: My husband is upset about his son’s birth control choices - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/10/25/ask-amy-stepmom-birth-control/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/10/25/ask-amy-stepmom-birth-control/ |
Dear Miss Manners: I can’t believe I have to write this. When my daughter, who lives in a large city that had a recent mass shooting, hosted a party at her home, one of the guests, who had recently obtained a concealed carry permit, brought his loaded gun.
But you say this is a close family friend. Cannot close friends discuss an important issue on which they differ without causing a rift?
Your daughter could try that before avoiding this couple. The tactful way to put it would be, “I know you are bringing your gun with the idea of protecting us, which we appreciate. But the fact is that we are frightened to be in a room with a loaded gun. We hope to see you here without it, but would appreciate it if you tell us if you are bringing it wherever else we might meet.”
Dear Miss Manners: In a Paris Metro, a well-behaved young man offered me his seat (I am 68, and I guess it showed). Before I could thank him, my husband of more than 40 years said “thanks.”
When the wife has not done it, oui. Miss Manners is afraid that by the time you thought of the word “merci,” the well-behaved young man would have moved on.
Dear Miss Manners: Over the past few years, I’ve noticed that when I approach the counter at a coffee shop or takeaway restaurant, instead of asking “How may I help you?,” “Would you like to place an order?” or something of that nature, the staff person simply stares at me expectantly.
By stating your order, or whatever question you might have before doing so. As you point out, the roles are understood, and Miss Manners sees no reason to require an invitation. | 2022-10-25T04:42:17Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Miss Manners: Guest brought their loaded gun to daughter's party - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/10/25/miss-manners-loaded-gun-party/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/10/25/miss-manners-loaded-gun-party/ |
David L. Stern
People use light from their mobile phones in an underground walkway during a power outage in Kyiv, Ukraine, on Oct. 24. (Oleg Petrasyuk/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)
Western officials have condemned the attacks on infrastructure as a war crime, saying they are intended to sow terror in the civilian population. The campaign has been relentless and highly strategic — unlike the Russian military’s ground tactics, which often seem ill-conceived, Ukrainian officials said.
Ukraine is still able to generate enough electricity for its needs — and until just two weeks ago, was actually exporting its surplus to European neighbors. But its ability to move electricity from power plants, many of which are in Ukraine’s north and west, to the places where it is needed, near the front lines in the south and east, is rapidly diminishing.
Another objective — after Russia has run into battlefield challenges on the front lines and is retreating from the southern city of Kherson and other areas — is to undermine the Ukrainian military from the rear.
Stern reported from Kyiv, and Rauhaula reported from Brussels. Beatriz Ríos in Brussels contributed to this report. | 2022-10-25T05:34:12Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Russia’s methodical attacks exploit frailty of Ukrainian power system - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/25/russias-methodical-attacks-exploit-frailty-ukrainian-power-system/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/25/russias-methodical-attacks-exploit-frailty-ukrainian-power-system/ |
The poet Shelley once described poets as “the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” In today’s America, that honor belongs to the armchair warriors of the culture wars. Already on the ascent, left-wing academics such as Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo gained even more influence in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder. In reaction, a new generation of conservative culture warriors is rising, taking aim not only at their ideological opponents but also at some of the country’s biggest corporations as their chief executive officers and boards weigh which, if any, side to take.
Few of these new warriors on the right have been more effective sharpshooters than Christopher Rufo, who is devoting his life to doing battle with what he regards as the monsters of “critical race theory” and “gender ideology.” Rufo’s articles, social media posts and TV appearances have garnered widespread attention and influence. He has written model legislation for several Republican states, inspired one of Donald Trump’s executive orders and produced a guide on how to talk about culture. In one profile, the New Yorker described him as the man who “invented the conflict over critical race theory.” In another, New York magazine accused him of being a specialist in moral panics. Yet notwithstanding the boiling anger that he has stirred, he came across in our recent conversation as a relatively happy warrior who relishes the daily struggle. (He adds for good measure that his neighbors are heavily armed Republicans so he doesn’t fear for his safety.) He’s much less angry than Steve Bannon, who often gives the impression that he has steam coming out of his ears, and much more measured than Ann Coulter, avoiding making outrageous statements except when they’re ascribed to the other side and happily discussing serious thinkers in a serious way.
Rufo’s early targets were in the public sector. Trump acknowledged his influence in issuing an executive order banning programs that taught federal employees and members of the military that the “United States is an inherently racist or evil country or that any race or ethnicity is inherently racist or evil” (Joe Biden has rescinded the order). Republican newcomer Glenn Youngkin unseated Terry McAuliffe from the governorship of Virginia in November 2021, in part because he promised that “On Day One, I will ban critical race theory in our schools.” (A CBS News poll a month before the election found that 62% of likely voters considered “school curriculums on race and history” a “major factor” in how they would vote.) Rufo helped shape DeSantis’s “Stop the Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees” (WOKE) Act and appeared on stage immediately after he unveiled it.
More recently, he has added “woke capital” to his list of targets. He was the mastermind behind DeSantis’s assault on Walt Disney Co, for promoting CRT and “gender ideology” and thereby, in the governor’s opinion, polluting its brand as a family-friendly company. This assault plunged “the wokest place on earth,” as Rufo dubbed it, into crisis, reducing its share price, putting off conservative subscribers and almost toppling its CEO, Bob Chapek. Other Rufo targets have included Walmart Inc., AT&T Inc., CVS Health Corp., Verizon Communications Inc., Raytheon Technologies Corp., Lockheed Martin Corp., Bank of America Corp. and Amex Corp.
Why has a man who, only a few years ago, was an unsung film producer become so influential? The standard left-wing answer is that he’s part of a vast right-wing conspiracy that is fueled by “dark money” and proceeds by distortion. Rufo is certainly a hero of the right, with a senior fellowship at the Manhattan Institute and regular appearances on Fox. He is also guilty of putting lots of topspin on his findings — he told me that he’s an “activist who does journalism rather than a journalist.”
Yet much of the Republican establishment was nervous about sponsoring a self-conscious culture warrior, preferring to focus on economic issues. His natural audience was the “petty bourgeoisie” who felt that something odd was going on and couldn’t explain it. Rufo made a name for himself in the wild west of the internet long before the likes of Fox and the Manhattan Institute came calling. He told me that he was radicalized in the process of research — he didn’t know anything about CRT, a somewhat abstruse brand of theory developed by Derrick Bell, of Harvard Law School, and Kimberle Crenshaw, of Columbia and UCLA, until he investigated the footnotes of the documents he received and started reading Kendi and others.
Rufo’s own answer to the question of his success is that he has invented a highly effective business model. He receives tips from sympathetic sources in institutions the length and breadth of the land. The pandemic provided a windfall because so much business that once went on behind closed doors had to be conducted through Zoom meetings and e-mailed documents. He says that he has some 5,000 sources, including contacts in half of the country’s 500 biggest companies.
He then publicizes his best scoops on social media — his aim is to produce one big story a week — which is then taken up by mainstream conservative media, not least Fox News, and then bleeds into the rest of the media. “I have the easiest job in the world,” Rufo said. “I just have to find their own information and show it to the world.”
This is all self-reinforcing: The higher his profile rises, the more stories he receives. During the dispute with Disney, for example, an inside source sent him a video in which a producer spoke of injecting “queerness” into programming and proclaimed her “not-at-all-secret gay agenda.” It is also carefully managed: Rather than just releasing outrageous stories (of which there are bound to be plenty in a country as big as the United States), he fits them into the ideological category of CRT and gender ideology. The aim is to drive up the “negatives” of vaguely understood terms such as CRT and gender ideology by linking them to a constant stream of unsettling revelations. He then tries to turn outrage into legislation.
There is more than a hint of Marxism-Leninism about all this. Rufo admits to admiring the left’s discipline and patience. He also talks about learning lessons from leading leftists — particularly the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, who talked in the 1930s about “capturing the culture via infiltration of schools, universities, churches,” the German student revolutionary Rudi Dutschke, who favored “the long march through the institutions,” and the American community activist Saul Alinsky, who emphasized the power of popular agitation.
Rufo believes that the left has achieved most of its aims: The culture is saturated with progressivism and the institutions, from the federal government to the human resources departments of big companies, have been captured by progressive cadres. Now the combination of the rise of social media and the birth of conservative populism provides a chance to reverse all this. Rufo wants to create an army of activists and outraged citizens who will turn up to school-board meetings or governors’ rallies and demand change.
Rufo has grasped two big things about today’s politics. The first is that the culture wars are back in a new form. Irving Kristol once famously told Joseph Epstein, “The culture wars are over. We lost.” The religious right had imploded in scandals and gay marriage was legalized. Now the rise of a new generation of progressives who regard America as structurally racist and sex as socially constructed has reignited them.
The second is that the growing gap between American institutions and broader citizenry creates massive political opportunity. The institutions are largely run by a credentialed elite that has absorbed progressive values along with their college degrees. This is increasingly true of corporations as well as public-sector bureaucracies. The citizenry is increasingly skeptical about those institutions, particularly when they touch on family life. The moment when Terry McAuliffe likely doomed his campaign to retain the governorship was during a debate when he said, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”
What should companies do about the rise of Rufo? Continuing with business as usual is an increasingly risky strategy. Conservatives now have a formidable machine that has already humbled one of the world’s most successful media companies and is geared up for more battles to come. Although opinion polls about CRT and gender ideology are something of a methodological minefield, both issues are clearly red rags to Republican voters. Leading Republicans, not least DeSantis, are toying with an anti-corporate strategy based on Teddy Roosevelt’s war on giant corporations, but this time focused on concentrations of cultural power, particularly in the hands of media and tech companies, rather than concentrations of ownership. “The corporation is chartered by the state. It has a duty to serve the common good of the country,” Rufo points out, in words that could easily have come from the left. It is a bold company that sides with controversial cultural positions at a time of squeezed living standards and boiling populism.
The simplest answer for companies is to declare neutrality in the culture wars. Rufo’s overall aim when it comes to “woke capital” is to make it clear that companies will pay a price for progressive political activism. “I want them to fear transgressing the political right,” as he puts it. Many companies have embraced activism because, especially after George Floyd’s murder, they were frightened of falling foul of the progressive left. Hence the recent surge in diversity, inclusion and equity training courses. Now they are learning that they will also pay a high price if they don’t back down. Rufo points to Disney as an example. DeSantis has kept up a drumbeat on CRT and LGBTQ issues since his battle with Disney. The Supreme Court has also overturned Roe v. Wade. Disney has kept a notably low profile in response.
Rufo argues that many companies opting for progressive policies for fear of the left and wanting nothing more than to be left alone would welcome neutrality. But what about companies that are genuinely worried about promoting social justice either for moral reasons (the parlous state of much of Black America remains a moral stain) or strategic ones (America cannot thrive without harnessing the skills of its entire population)?
Here, the best advice is to think much more carefully about DEI policies rather than contracting them out to consultants who have drunk deep in the saloon of critical theory or to activists within the corporation. It is true, for example, that there is more to racism than just individual bias as many conservatives would have it. Thanks to the legacy of slavery, Jim Crow and red-lining, African-Americans have significantly less wealth than other Americans. But that doesn’t justify CRT claims that all Whites are guilty of unconscious racism requiring an intrusive program of retraining. That will only create resentment. It is also true that the classic liberal formulas of open competition and non-discrimination need to be supplemented if they leave some ethnic groups languishing permanently at the bottom of society. But that doesn’t justify endorsing CRT activists who believe that you can’t cure racism without abolishing capitalism. That way lies Venezuela. Companies need to remember that the best way to deal with culture warriors on both the left and the right is to embrace the great meritocratic ideal of race and gender blindness that tries hard to rectify past injustices but ultimately judges people not as members of biological or social categories but as individuals.
DeSantis Attack on ESG Repudiates Its Superior Returns: Matthew A. Winkler
Biden’s Debt Relief Plan Will Make American Politics Worse: Clive Crook
Stop Calling Everything You Disagree With ‘Anti-Democratic’: Tyler Cowen | 2022-10-25T06:13:22Z | www.washingtonpost.com | An Anti-Woke Warrior Has US Companies Running Scared - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/an-anti-woke-warrior-hasus-companies-running-scared/2022/10/25/b370fdf0-5422-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/an-anti-woke-warrior-hasus-companies-running-scared/2022/10/25/b370fdf0-5422-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html |
Yevgeniy Prigozhin, the Russian tycoon behind the mercenary group Wagner, personally told Putin that his military chiefs are mismanaging the war, U.S. officials said
Yevgeniy Prigozhin and Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin in 2010. (Alexey Druzhinin/Sputnik/AFP/Getty Images)
The confidant who vented to Russian President Vladimir Putin recently about his military’s handling of the war in Ukraine was Yevgeniy Prigozhin, the founder of a Russian mercenary group that is playing a critical role for Moscow on the battlefield in Ukraine, according to two U.S. officials familiar with the matter.
Prigozhin’s criticisms echoed what he has been saying publicly for weeks, the officials said, speaking anonymously to discuss sensitive intelligence. But the revelation that he felt comfortable sharing such a harsh rebuke of the Russian military effort with Putin in a private setting shows how his influence is rising as Moscow’s war falters. It also highlights the shaky standing of the Russian defense establishment’s formal leadership, which has come under fire from Prigozhin and others after months of battlefield errors and losses.
The Washington Post previously reported that a Russian insider confronted Putin personally to spotlight mismanagement of the war effort but did not name that individual. The Post reported that the exchange was considered significant enough to include in the daily intelligence briefing provided to President Biden.
Prigozhin’s frustration with the Russian defense ministry and his growing tension with Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu are also the subject of a separate U.S. intelligence report that has been circulating among officials in Washington, according to people who have read the file.
For years, Prigozhin operated in the shadows of Russian power, denying links to Russia’s notorious Wagner mercenary group and the St. Petersburg internet troll factory that U.S. authorities said he financed to meddle in the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign. He helped advance the Kremlin’s foreign aims outside formal structures, and earned the nickname “Putin’s chef” owing to his ownership of a St. Petersburg restaurant Putin once frequented and a catering company boasting lucrative Russian state and city contracts.
But in recent weeks, Prigozhin has stepped into the open in a dramatic debut in Russian public life, admitting his leadership of Wagner for the first time and publicly assailing the Russian military leadership for its mistakes.
In Ukraine, a Russian mercenary group steps out of the shadows
“That’s the political public position that he has been striking: I am Yevgeniy Prigozhin. I’m here to tell you the truth, and I’ll get the job done,” said a U.S. official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the matter’s sensitivity and speaking generally about Prigozhin, not about the intelligence regarding his interactions with Putin.
According to the U.S. intelligence report that has been circulating in Washington, Prigozhin has expressed his view that the Russian defense ministry relies too much on Wagner and is not giving the mercenary group sufficient money and resources to fulfill its mission in the conflict, the people who read the report said.
U.S. intelligence officials believe that Prigozhin staged a recent video on social media depicting Wagner soldiers complaining about a lack of basic food and provisions as a means of pressuring the Kremlin to boost funding to his mercenary group.
“Prigozhin’s decision to confront Putin is only the latest sign of his dissatisfaction,” said a person who read the report.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov declined to comment on the interaction between Prigozhin and Putin. Prigozhin didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment sent through his catering firm.
Since the war started, Prigozhin has used Defense Minister Shoigu and top uniformed generals as his foils, positioning himself as a no-holds-barred leader able to show results on the battlefield in Ukraine.
His paramilitary group — staffed by battle-hardened veterans accused of human rights violations who operate outside the formal Russian military structure — has been waging an offensive to take Bakhmut, a city in the Donetsk region held by Ukrainian forces. Some analysts see it as an attempt to show that his soldiers can make progress even while the rest of the Russian military is on the back foot.
The result is an apparent revival of his status in Putin’s inner circle, which reportedly had been jeopardized before the war by squabbling with top Russian officials.
“He has been really rising all these last months,” said Marlene Laruelle, director of the Institute for European, Russia and Eurasian Studies at George Washington University. “The war gave him the possibility of accessing Putin more than ever before.”
With figures such as Prigozhin and Kremlin-appointed Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov publicly voicing criticism of the Russian military, “the shadow aspect of the Russian state is becoming more and more visible,” Laruelle said.
The interaction between Putin and Prigozhin has been followed by a more ruthless Russian approach to the war.
After the Russian military’s repeated setbacks, which involved losing more than 3,000 square miles of territory, Putin for the first time chose an overall commander to lead the Ukraine war effort. The appointment this month filled a leadership void that military analysts had cited as one reason Moscow had been struggling with the command and control of its forces.
Prigozhin hailed Putin’s choice in a statement released by his catering company on the Russian social media site VK, calling Sergey Surovikin, the new general in charge, a “legendary character” born to serve the Motherland and “the most competent commander” in the Russian military. Surovikin earned the nickname “General Armageddon” in Syria after the Russian military became known for its indiscriminate attacks on civilian targets.
In Ukraine, Russia has also recently pivoted to harsher tactics impacting civilians, particularly after the humiliating bombing in early October of the Crimean Bridge linking Russia to Crimea. Moscow has landed missiles in the center of Kyiv for the first time in months and taken aim at Ukrainian energy infrastructure with a limited supply of precision-guided munitions to cause blackouts. And it has begun to use Iranian combat drones to hit critical infrastructure and terrorize civilians.
Hard-liners, including those who support Prigozhin, had long been urging the Kremlin to use more scorched-earth tactics against urban centers, regardless of their impact on Ukraine’s civilian population. Putin’s latest moves have played to them.
“He thinks he still can win, which is why he’s throwing everything he can at the situation,” said Fiona Hill, a former senior White House official handling Russian and Eurasian affairs. “We’re in that period now where he’s trying to push us into his version of the endgame. The guy thinks he can pull it off.”
Earlier this month, Prigozhin said in a statement posted to social media that the Russian military’s top brass was out of touch with the situation on the ground in Ukraine. “I think that we should send all these bastards barefoot to the front with machine guns,” he said.
It’s unclear if Prigozhin is primarily focused on wresting more influence within the Russian defense establishment or if he harbors greater political ambitions for himself or those close to him.
With public criticism of Putin still taboo, Shoigu has borne the brunt of frustration over the conflict and in recent months has been “sidelined within the Russian leadership, with operational commanders briefing President Putin directly on the course of the war,” according to an assessment by Britain’s defense ministry in August.
The ministry said Shoigu is struggling to overcome his reputation as “lacking substantive military experience, as he spent most of his career in the construction sector and the Ministry of Emergency Situations.”
Russia’s ultimate political survivor faces a wartime reckoning
Prigozhin, meanwhile, is presenting himself as a more extreme, unvarnished alternative.
A video that began circulating on Russian social media in September showed Prigozhin recruiting potential fighters at a Russian prison. Prigozhin later responded to criticism of his prisoner recruitment efforts in a statement released on VK by his catering firm.
“Those who do not want mercenaries or prisoners to fight … who do not like this topic, send your children to the front,” Prigozhin said. “It’s either them or your children, decide for yourself.” About a week later, Putin ordered a mobilization of what the Russian defense ministry said would be 300,000 reservists to replenish depleted forces. The move sent hundreds of thousands of eligible men fleeing Russia to avoid being called to battle.
Before the war began to go badly for the Russian military, “it wasn’t propitious” for critics to seize the spotlight. But “people like Prigozhin now see a chance to grab for the brass ring,” said Hill, now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Center on the United States and Europe. “This really shows the system is under stress, when people start pushing themselves forward like this.”
Prigozhin has risen far above his humble roots as a hot dog vendor in Putin’s home city of Leningrad. He spent nine years in prison for robbery and other crimes, then co-founded casinos and a floating restaurant, where he personally served Putin, then Russia’s new president, as well as President George W. Bush. He then opened a catering business that won contracts with the Russian government. After years of denials, he only recently publicly admitted he founded Wagner in May 2014 to support Russian-backed separatists in their effort to seize control of the Donbas region of Ukraine.
The U.S. Treasury Department imposed new sanctions on Prigozhin in March due to the Wagner Group’s involvement in the war. Prior to that, he was already sanctioned and indicted by the United States for financing the Internet Research Agency, a Russian troll factory that U.S. intelligence agencies said was part of a Kremlin effort to interfere in the 2016 election. The United States has said the group has sought to spread “false narratives online” seeking to undermine governments in the U.S., Asia, Europe and elsewhere.
His years in prison and hardscrabble beginnings likely built resentment against the political elites and those who enjoyed privilege after the Soviet Union’s collapse, Laruelle said.
The war has aided his ambition. “He wants political recognition,” she said. “Money is not enough. I think he really cares about having an official status.”
The increasingly prominent public role of figures such as Prigozhin and Kadyrov in the war effort is irritating some Russian officials, who see them as rogue actors who play by their own rules. “To have leaders like Prigozhin and Kadyrov — they [the establishment] can’t live with this any more,” one Russian official said in an interview. “This is not Russia. It’s a criminal brotherhood based on the principles of the Middle Ages.”
Greg Miller, Robyn Dixon, Mary Ilyushina and Catherine Belton contributed to this report. | 2022-10-25T06:13:40Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Russian mercenary chief vented to Vladimir Putin over Ukraine war bungling - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/10/25/putin-insider-prigozhin-blasts-russian-generals-ukraine/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/10/25/putin-insider-prigozhin-blasts-russian-generals-ukraine/ |
By Majdi Mohammed | AP
NABLUS, West Bank — Israeli forces raided a stronghold of an armed group in the occupied West Bank’s second largest city, blowing up an explosives lab and engaging in a firefight, the military said Tuesday. Five Palestinians were killed and 20 were wounded, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry. | 2022-10-25T06:14:17Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Israeli troops raid gunmen's hideout; 5 Palestinians killed - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/israeli-troops-raid-gunmens-hideout-5-palestinians-killed/2022/10/25/a4227640-5426-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/israeli-troops-raid-gunmens-hideout-5-palestinians-killed/2022/10/25/a4227640-5426-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html |
Man killed in hit-and-run, Prince George’s police say
The death was the third pedestrian fatality in the county since Thursday.
A pedestrian was killed in Prince George’s County around midnight Monday night in a hit-and-run incident, the police said.
Police said they were notified about 12:10 a.m. of the incident on Martin Luther King Jr Highway and Ardwick Ardmore Road. The man was found unresponsive and died at the scene, according to police.
They said the driver of the vehicle that hit him did not remain at the site, just inside the Capital Beltway in the Ardwick/Glenarden area.
The victim was the third pedestrian killed in the county since Thursday. | 2022-10-25T07:45:10Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Pedestrian killed in Prince George's hit and run. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/25/killed-pedestrian-hitandrun-princegeorge/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/25/killed-pedestrian-hitandrun-princegeorge/ |
James Corden admits to ‘rude,’ ‘ungracious’ remarks at Balthazar
James Corden attends the BFI London Film Festival this month. (Jeff Spicer/Getty Images/BFI)
James Corden faced a choice when hosting the first episode of his “Late Late Show” to film since last week, when he became the center of controversy after the owner of a New York restaurant accused him of abusive behavior toward his staff.
Apology or excuse?
The “Carpool Karaoke” funnyman chose a little bit of both, though he did admit to being “ungracious” and making a rude remark to a server who brought his wife an incorrectly prepared meal at the Balthazar, which owner Keith McNally described in an Instagram post last week.
“When you make a mistake, you’ve got to take responsibility,” Corden said in the opening of his CBS show that aired early Tuesday morning.
The TL;DR recap of the drama surrounding the late-night host began last Monday, when McNally, who has a reputation for being provocative, announced on Instagram that he had banned Corden from his Manhattan-by-way-of-Paris bistro, Balthazar. The restaurateur detailed two instances in which the comedian had allegedly been abusive to his staff, including a recent visit during which Corden was said to have yelled at a server over his wife’s meal, an all-yolk omelet that had not been made as instructed.
Corden, McNally said, had sent the omelet back because it contained a small amount of egg white. The kitchen remade the dish but sent it back out with the wrong side, prompting Corden to yell. “You can’t do your job! You can’t do your job!” Corden said, according to McNally, who cited a manager’s report about the incident. “Maybe I should go into the kitchen and cook the omelet myself!”
Hours after McNally’s initial post, though, all seemed copacetic when he posted that Corden had apologized and was once again welcome.
But the peace didn’t last long: In an interview with the New York Times published Thursday, Corden seemed to deny the accusations. “I haven’t done anything wrong, on any level,” he said, prompting McNally to reinstate his beef. “If he goes one step further and apologizes to the 2 servers he insulted, I’ll let him eat for free at Balthazar for the next 10 years,” McNally wrote.
In his opening monologue on Tuesday, Corden offered a more innocent account of the scene than what McNally had suggested. He said his wife specified that the omelet be made with all yolks because she has a “serious allergy,” which they had explained to the waitstaff.
Corden said his wife was served food she was allergic to, and they sent it back without any static. “As her meal came wrong to the table the third time, in the heat of the moment, I made a sarcastic, rude comment about cooking it myself,” he said. “It is a comment I deeply regret.”
Corden also offered an explanation for his initial denial that he hadn’t done anything wrong, indicating that he had done some reflecting on the incident. “Because I didn’t shout or scream or call anyone names … I’ve been walking around thinking that I haven’t done anything wrong, but the truth is, like, I have,” he said. “I made a rude comment, and it was wrong. It was an unnecessary comment. It was ungracious to the server.”
Corden said he called McNally to talk it out and thought they had “cleared the air … privately.” But, he said, “at that point, the story was out there, and people were upset.”
The late-night host, who is leaving his longtime gig next year, indicated he might take McNally up on the offer that would grant him free meals.
“I love that restaurant, I love the staff there, and I hope I’m allowed in one day so when I’m back in New York, I can go there,” he said. “And apologize in person, which is something I will absolutely do.” | 2022-10-25T07:45:16Z | www.washingtonpost.com | James Corden on claims that he was an 'abusive' restaurant customer - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/food/2022/10/25/james-corden-admits-rude-ungracious-remarks-balthazar/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/food/2022/10/25/james-corden-admits-rude-ungracious-remarks-balthazar/ |
He was paddling across the water. Then a shark tore a hole in his boat.
Nat Drummond was racing his surf ski off the coast of South Australia when a shark attacked, tossing him into the water
Nat Drummond's surf ski after a shark ripped a hole near his legs as he took part in a nine-mile race on Sunday. (Surf Life Saving South Australia)
Unaware of the danger below, Nat Drummond paddled his kayak-like surf ski Sunday morning, racing dozens of competitors off the South Australia coast.
Then, the strike.
Drummond, 19, was one of about 65 surf skiers racing more than nine miles in Gulf St. Vincent along the coast near Adelaide, Craig Burton, race director for South Australian Ocean and Surf Ski Paddlers, told The Washington Post. Drummond had scarcely made it 20 seconds into the race when a shark shot up from the depths and ripped off a chunk of his surf ski, upending the watercraft and tossing him into the water.
65-year-old surf-skier survives shark attack in New South Wales
Drummond relied on his training, he told reporters the day of the incident. He ripped off the leg rope tying him to his surf ski and started swimming toward other competitors who, having witnessed what happened, raced to help. They pulled him from the gulf waters. Rescuers transferred him to their boat and took him to shore.
As the official timer, Drummond’s father, Murray, was watching the start of the race from shore, the elder Drummond told reporters. It had barely started when he noticed a commotion out on the water, and then paddlers shooting in different directions. Murray suspected a false start and hurried to recalibrate the timer on his iPad.
Then he heard through radio traffic that the surf skiers had encountered a shark. Murray said he still wasn’t worried. He knew sharks roamed those waters and sightings weren’t unusual. Even when he learned that the shark in question had bitten one of the surf skis, Murray thought things didn’t sound too bad. He only panicked when he saw the “massive hole” in his son’s watercraft and couldn’t see the color of his life jacket as he looked out on the water.
“My heart just sunk,” he said.
Then, he spotted his son on the rescue boat as it came ashore — beaming.
“The emotion drained out of me,” Murray said.
He ran to his son, hugged him and showered him with a lot of “I love yous.”
“You don’t realize how much you absolutely love your kids until something like that happens.”
Murray said he’s proud of his son, who has been competing in water sports since he was 6. He and the paddlers who pulled him out of the gulf relied on years of training to prevent an unfortunate situation from turning into an unspeakable tragedy.
U.S. shark mania began with this attack more than a century ago
Sunday’s race was canceled, and organizers say they’re hoping to reschedule.
Drummond seems to be doing fine, his father said — much better than his parents. In fact, he’s more worried about the shark than himself. Officials collected a tooth and flesh from Drummond’s surf ski and sent it to be analyzed, Danny Willetts, manager with Surf Life Saving South Australia, told reporters. Researchers hope to determine the species and size of the shark that, after falling back into the water, eluded officials’ efforts to find it.
Willetts said officials believe the shark might be a Great White but are awaiting confirmation.
Drummond told reporters he knows he’s lucky. The shark bit off a hunk of his surf ski where his legs were, race director Burton told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. If it had struck from a different angle, “it might have been a different story.”
“I might buy a lottery ticket,” he said.
Drummond called his brush with the shark “an absolute freak accident … a one-in-a-million thing that probably won’t happen again in my lifetime.” As Australia’s summer approaches, he said he hopes that news of what happened doesn’t scare people from getting into the water, something he’s enjoyed his entire life.
When asked how Drummond was coping, Willetts said he expected he would be back on the water within a couple days. | 2022-10-25T07:45:22Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Shark attacks surf ski boat off South Australia coast - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/10/25/shark-bite-australia/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/10/25/shark-bite-australia/ |
FOXBOROUGH, Mass. — Justin Fields threw for 179 yards and a touchdown and ran for 82 yards and another score, and the Bears’ defense forced returning Patriots starter Mac Jones back to the bench to give Chicago a 33-14 victory over New England.
JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — The New York Jets moved quickly to replace injured rookie running back Breece Hall.
INDIANAPOLIS — The Indianapolis Colts thought Matt Ryan would help them make a playoff run, maybe even win a championship. Instead, the bruised and battered 15-year veteran is getting benched.
LAS VEGAS — Phil Kessel matched the NHL record for consecutive games played in the Vegas Golden Knights’ 3-1 win over the Toronto Maple Leafs. | 2022-10-25T07:45:28Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Monday's Sports In Brief - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/mondays-sports-in-brief/2022/10/25/8dc55498-5436-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/mondays-sports-in-brief/2022/10/25/8dc55498-5436-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html |
Senior Pakistani journalist Arshad Sharif poses for photograph prior to recoding an episode of his talk show at a studio, in Islamabad, Pakistan, Dec. 15, 2016. Sharif, 50, had been in hiding abroad after leaving Pakistan to avoid arrest on charges of criticizing his country’s powerful military. Sharif was shot and killed by police after the car he was in sped up instead of halting at a roadblock near Nairobi, the police said Monday, Oct. 24, 2022. The police said it was a case of “mistaken identity” during a search for a similar car involved in a case of child abduction. (AP Photo) (Uncredited/AP)
ISLAMABAD — The body of an outspoken Pakistani journalist who was shot and killed by Nairobi police while living in hiding in Kenya is being repatriated to Islamabad on Tuesday, the government said. The killing has stunned Pakistan’s journalist community, which has demanded a detailed probe into the incident. | 2022-10-25T07:45:46Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Pakistan bringing home body of journalist killed in Kenya - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/pakistan-bringing-home-body-of-journalist-killed-in-kenya/2022/10/25/9df3db86-5437-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/pakistan-bringing-home-body-of-journalist-killed-in-kenya/2022/10/25/9df3db86-5437-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html |
WhatsApp outages reported in many countries across the world
By Sofia Diogo Mateus
Whatsapp suffered a global outage Monday morning. (Lionel Bonaventure/AFP/Getty Images)
LONDON — WhatsApp, the instant messaging app used by more than 2 billion people worldwide, is experiencing an outage in many countries, with users in the United Kingdom, South Africa and Asia reporting problems sending and receiving messages.
A spokesperson for Meta, the parent company of WhatsApp, said via email: “We’re aware that some people are currently having trouble sending messages and we’re working to restore WhatsApp for everyone as quickly as possible.”
Downinspector and Downdetector, which track reports of outages, cited problems with the app in countries across the U.K. and Europe and in Africa and South Asia.
WhatsApp, purchased by Meta (formerly Facebook) in 2014, has emerged as a wildly popular alternative to text messages, especially in developing nations where telecommunications services can be prohibitively expensive.
Much of the world relies on WhatsApp. Its outage ground their virtual lives to a halt. | 2022-10-25T08:50:02Z | www.washingtonpost.com | WhatsApp down in U.K., Asia, Africa, sites tracking outages report - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/10/25/whatsapp-down-global-outage/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/10/25/whatsapp-down-global-outage/ |
The legendary journalist said audio recordings of his Trump interviews offer deeper understanding of the man. They are also a surprising window into Woodward’s method.
By Elahe Izadi
“The Trump Tapes,” Bob Woodward’s new audiobook, centers on 20 interviews he conducted with Donald Trump while reporting his 2020 book “Rage.” (Washington Post illustration; Matt McClain/The Washington Post; Sarah Rice for The Washington Post; iStock)
In June 2020, Bob Woodward received one of his many unexpected phone calls from Donald Trump. When their conversation turned to the rapidly growing protests following the police murder of George Floyd weeks earlier, the journalist took a personal tack in pressing the president of the United States on the nationwide outpouring of grief and anger.
“I mean, we share one thing in common,” Woodward told Trump. “We’re White, privileged. … Do you have any sense that that privilege has isolated and put you in a cave, to a certain extent, as it put me — and I think lots of White, privileged people — in a cave? And that we have to work our way out of it to understand the anger and the pain, particularly, Black people feel in this country? Do you see —”
“No,” he said sharply. “You really drank the Kool-Aid, didn’t you? Just listen to you. Wow. No, I don’t feel that at all.”
The exchange is captured within “The Trump Tapes,” Woodward’s new audiobook centered on 20 interviews he conducted with Trump for his 2020 book “Rage.” Woodward, an associate editor at The Washington Post, said he took the unusual step of releasing the audio because he felt it offered new insight into Trump’s worldview. “When you get the voice out there, it’s a total, completely different experience,” Woodward told The Post. In the Kool-Aid exchange, Trump holds forth in a mocking tone, with a hint of a sneer. At other points, sounds meanderingly repetitive, or blazingly defiant.
Yet “The Trump Tapes” also offers a surprising window into the legendary investigative reporter’s process — a perennial focus of both mystique and critique. At various points, Woodward argued with Trump, sympathized with him, and — in one phone call that Woodward’s own wife suggested crossed an ethical line for a journalist — seemed to advise the president on how to manage the pandemic.
Woodward, 79, has written books about U.S. presidents since Nixon. “In my process I do deep background interviews with dozens, hundreds of sources,” he said, though all of his interviews with sitting presidents, going back to George W. Bush, have been on-the-record. Yet the experienced interviewer said that in re-listening to his Trump interviews, he regretted some of his choices.
When Woodward asked Trump in another June 2020 conversation if he would refuse to leave the White House if the election was close or contested, Trump refused to comment — a rarity in their conversations — and changed the subject.
“As I listen to that again, I fault myself for not following up on that,” Woodward told The Post.
Listening to “The Trump Tapes” may be a jarring experience for audiences accustomed to more polished radio or television news interviews, in which broadcast journalists ask rigorously crafted questions meant to inform the audience as well as prompt the subject — and then respond to their subjects in the moment by fact-checking, pushing back or calling attention to shocking comments.
Woodward, though, did not audibly react to many of Trump’s more startling quotes. (Even when, as he described of one exchange in the voice-over commentary that provides an overlay of fact-checking throughout the audiobook, he was “absolutely stunned.”) And he did not take a confrontational stance — which he says was intentional. Arguing would have proved counterproductive, he said, for interviews that were designed simply for his own information-gathering.
The tapes also show Woodward struggling to extract basic information from Trump, as the former president spins off on tangents or repeats himself about unrelated matters. Yet Trump would often initiate phone conversations at unexpected hours and talk at length, Woodward told The Post — even as Trump claimed that he didn’t have time to sit down with the White House’s top infectious-disease expert, Anthony S. Fauci.
In one exchange, Woodward highlighted for Trump their shared disdain for the Steele dossier — a compilation of memos by a former British intelligence agent suggesting Trump ties to Russia.
In early 2017, Trump had happily tweeted about Woodward calling the dossier “a garbage document” during a “Fox News Sunday” appearance, and Woodward reminded Trump of this in a 2019 conversation. “You tweeted a thing, ‘thank you,’ and everyone piled on me: How can you say that?! This is a holy document!'” the journalist added with a tinge of sarcasm aimed at his naysayers.
Woodward told The Post that his past comments about the dossier may have encouraged Trump to speak with him. But he also thinks Trump was also influenced by Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), who reassured him that Woodward would not put words in his mouth.
Meanwhile, the audiotapes suggest that Trump was determined he could win Woodward’s esteem, repeatedly referring to his prowess as a leader in terms like “nobody else” or “I’m the only one.”
Woodward’s interviewing style turned more confrontational during an April 2020 call, amid the growing pandemic crisis — to the point that he found himself lecturing Trump. The tapes show the journalist pushing Trump to take a more forceful government response.
“If you come out and say ‘This is a full mobilization, this is a Manhattan Project, we are going — pardon the expression — balls to the wall,’ that’s what people want,” Woodward told Trump, sometimes shouting and interrupting the president to make his argument.
“I’m going to do what you would like me to do, which I am doing,” Trump later replied, after hearing Woodward’s case.
“No, no, that’s not — ” Woodward said, apparently aware that his comments had come across like advocacy, but Trump cut him off.
In his interview with The Post, Woodward acknowledged that his approach in that conversation “really unusual for a reporter.” But he had previously spent several weeks talking to top health experts in the government who said they couldn’t get through to Trump about the seriousness of the crisis, and he felt an obligation to present their list of recommended actions to Trump, to make sure the president knew what the experts were saying.
“We were in a different world,” Woodward told The Post, citing the accelerating death toll. “You have to take the public interest first in this case.”
Though Woodward repeatedly told Trump that the recommendations were “based on my reporting” and that he was speaking “as a reporter,” after the call, his wife, journalist Elsa Walsh, told him it sounded as if he were telling the president what to do.
In July, Woodward pressed Trump again on his plan for tackling the pandemic. “You will see the plan. Bob — I’ve got 106 days. That’s a long time.” By mentioning the 106 days until the election, Trump seemed to be viewing questions about the crisis through the lens of his reelection bid. In his voice-over commentary, Woodward noted: “I did not know what to say.”
In the audiobook, Woodward also revisits an interview that previously generated criticism of his reporting methods.
When “Rage” was released in September 2020, some readers were shocked by Woodward’s revelation that Trump — who had spent months downplaying the threat of coronavirus — had told the author in February of that year that the coronavirus was far deadlier than the flu.
From 2020: Should Bob Woodward have reported Trump’s virus revelations sooner? Here’s how he defends his decision.
Woodward found himself on the defensive from critics who asked why he hadn’t published that interview as soon as it happened — along with a later interview in which Trump said he downplayed the virus “because I don’t want to create a panic.”
The writer explained at the time that he was aware that Trump frequently uttered falsehoods during their interviews and that it took him months of additional reporting to corroborate Trump’s comments on the coronavirus and perceive their relevance.
“The Trump Tapes” makes Woodward’s reporting journey more clear with its chronological presentation. When Trump told him covid was deadlier than the flu, both men were talking about it as a problem confined mostly to China. But in May and June, several top officials told Woodward they had warned Trump as early as January that coronavirus would be the top national security threat the president would ever face.
Woodward says that it was only when he viewed the February conversation in hindsight that he decided that “what this shows is the coverup.”
On Friday, after news of the project broke, Trump told Fox News host Brian Kilmeade that he had no objection to the content of the audiobook but hinted vaguely that he might attempt to assert rights over the project, arguing he hadn’t agreed to their release and that “the tapes belong to me.” Woodward said that he had not informed Trump about the closely guarded plan to release their interviews in audiobook form and said he didn’t need to “because it was all on the record.”
For both Woodward and his publisher, Simon and Schuster, the audiobook is something of an experiment. It’s unusual for a journalist to make raw reporting so public. And while research materials and interview transcripts often find welcoming homes in library archives, “The Trump Tapes” also aims to be a commercial product.
Will it sell? Interest in Trump books remains high; “Confidence Man,” the new biography of the former president by New York Times journalist Maggie Haberman, debuted at the top of the bestseller lists this month. And if “The Trump Tapes” is a success, other journalists might consider releasing their tapes, said Chris Lynch, president of Simon and Schuster’s audio division. On Monday, a day before its official release, it was already the No. 1 seller on the Audible platform.
“Because I’ve heard it and I think it’s compelling listening, I think there’s going to be a market for anybody who’s interested in politics, history and Trump in particular,” said Lynch, adding that the insight into Woodward’s techniques could also make the audiobook useful to journalism educators.
But “The Trump Tapes” raises another question: Does it demystify the Woodward reporting process or expose too much of his tactics? If so, what does that mean for his future reporting projects?
Woodward said he may yet write another presidential book, but “I’m just not sure.” He does, however, want to write a book about the process of reporting stories.
“It’s an endless process,” he said, “learning about reporting.” | 2022-10-25T09:16:21Z | www.washingtonpost.com | What ‘The Trump Tapes’ reveal about Bob Woodward - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/media/2022/10/25/trump-tapes-bob-woodward-reporting/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/media/2022/10/25/trump-tapes-bob-woodward-reporting/ |
California police unearth a Mercedes that was reported stolen in 1992
Police investigate last week at a Silicon Valley mansion where a car was found buried. (Nhat V. Meyer/Bay Area News Group/AP)
Landscapers made a bizarre discovery last week at a home in the heart of California’s Silicon Valley: A Mercedes-Benz that was reported stolen decades ago buried four to five feet underground, with bags of unused concrete inside.
Cadaver dogs searched the Atherton property on Friday, and authorities used a ground-penetrating radar to search for “anything unusual,” the Atherton Police Department said in a news release.
Despite the dogs making what authorities described as “a slight notification of possible human remains,” police said no remains were found at the scene. The Mercedes, a convertible, was reported stolen in 1992 in nearby Palo Alto. The car, police said, may have been buried on the property sometime that decade.
Police have not said to whom the car belonged. They said they believe the owner is dead, though they are awaiting confirmation from the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles. Police added that they believe the vehicle was buried long before the current owners moved into the $15 million home. The owners notified police when the landscapers made the discovery.
The owner of the house at the time the car was reported stolen in 1992 was Johnny Bocktune Lew, who property records show sold the house in 2014. Lew had a criminal history and spent time in prison after convictions for murder and attempted murder.
So far, police have not confirmed a connection between Lew and the buried car. Lew built the Atherton house in 1990, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. His daughter, 34-year-old Jacq Searle, who once lived there with Lew and her mother, told the paper that she was shocked to learn the car was buried on the property. Her father died in 2015 while living in Washington state, she said.
Lew grew up in Hong Kong and worked there as a police officer before moving to the United States in 1959, according to court records. About two years later, he married his first cousin, Marguerite, in South Carolina. The pair later moved to Southern California, where Lew attended El Camino Junior College and met Karen Gervasi, the woman he’d eventually be accused of killing.
Lew and Gervasi were romantically involved in 1965, and Marguerite learned about the affair, according to court records. That December, Gervasi was fatally shot in the head while at Lew’s apartment. Lew said Gervasi had accidentally shot herself in the temple while he was showing her one of his handguns, court records state. He was convicted of second-degree murder and went to prison. In 1968, the California Supreme Court overturned the conviction, citing hearsay statements that were improperly admitted into evidence.
Less than a decade later, in 1977, Lew was convicted of two counts of attempted murder in Los Angeles County in a separate crime and spent three years in prison, the Chronicle reported.
“I feel like all of us grew up with a certain amount of trauma in the household,” Searle told the paper.
And of the car found buried in her childhood yard, she said: “This wouldn’t surprise me, just based on how sketchy my father was.”
The Mercedes was removed from the property over the weekend, KNTV reported. Atherton Police Cmdr. Daniel Larsen told reporters at a news conference on Friday that the cadaver dogs’ “slight notification” of possible remains could have been a reaction to old bones, vomit or blood. He added that police haven’t yet determined whether their investigation is “criminal or noncriminal.”
Asked about Lew, Larsen said, “We have heard that name come up, but we have not confirmed through our sources that he in fact owned that vehicle through the DMV.” | 2022-10-25T09:16:27Z | www.washingtonpost.com | California police unearth a Mercedes that was reported stolen in 1992 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/10/25/atherton-mercedes-benz-lew/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/10/25/atherton-mercedes-benz-lew/ |
Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.), greets attendees during the Conservative Political Action Conference CPAC on Feb. 25 in Orlando. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
Republican leaders say the dissatisfaction with President Biden’s policies, combined with an electorate that says the Democratic Party is moving too far to the left, will lead voters to back more Black Republicans this fall. The party has experienced a small increase in support among Black voters in the past two election cycles and officials hope that will continue as more Black Americans — candidates and voters — seek an alternative to the Democratic Party.
“What you’re seeing with these Black candidates is that we understand public policy, we understand the Constitution, we support rule of law, we support limited government,” he said. “And I think what you’re finding in some of these areas is we also happen to be the best candidate in the field.”
The National Republican Congressional Committee counted 81 Black Americans running as Republicans in 72 primary congressional districts this year, up from 27 candidates in the 2020 election cycle. The nominees for next month’s elections include 22 men and six women. Some are first-time candidates, while many have repeatedly run for office, albeit unsuccessfully. Very few have political experience in local and state offices, but many have military experience. And they are running from states as varied as California, Missouri, Florida and New Jersey.
In addition to the House candidates, three Black Republicans are running for seats in the Senate. South Carolina’s Tim Scott is heavily favored to win reelection. In Georgia, college football star Herschel Walker is challenging Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock, and conservative commentator Joe Pinion in New York is running against Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.).
Republicans are especially hopeful about House candidate Wesley Hunt, a West Point grad and Army veteran, who won the GOP primary in a new conservative-leaning district outside of Houston and is leading his Democrat opponent in the polls. The lifelong Republican said voters — including Black and Latino Americans — are drawn to his campaign out of frustration with Democrats and a desire to have their voices heard.
“From a policy standpoint, a lot of people aren’t satisfied or happy with what we’ve seen in the last 20 months since the Biden administration started,” he said.
“And you’re seeing Black conservatives no longer hiding from what we do traditionally and how we’re supposed to vote and stepping up and saying, ‘It’s okay to be Black and conservative,’ ” Hunt added.
GOP efforts to win Black voters and slow the defection of those remaining in the party are not new, said Leah Wright Rigueur, author of “The Loneliness of the Black Republican.” But she said the party’s attitudes toward Black candidates this cycle is noteworthy.
“What is far more surprising is the Republican institution’s actually investing in Black candidates, be it through endorsements or more importantly, money,” the John Hopkins University history professor said. “That is what’s rare.”
The most recent efforts to diversify the GOP started a decade ago after Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) attracted a smaller percentage of Black voters than any of the recent Republican presidential nominees before him. He won 6 percent of the Black vote that year, according to exit polls.
Some critics on both sides of the aisle argued that the Republican Party’s decision to make Donald Trump, then a businessman and former reality television star, its 2016 presidential nominee would reverse the effort made to show Black voters that the GOP could be their political home. But although polls showed him to be a wildly unpopular candidate with Black voters, Trump did better than Romney. He received the support of 8 percent of Black voters in 2016, and it grew to 12 percent in 2020. Although the former president did not win reelection, that year saw Trump and Burgess win their congressional contests.
“Last cycle, we actually flipped 15 seats in the House and every seat was a candidate who was Black, a woman, a veteran or Hispanic,” she said. “And we’re seeing even more diverse candidates running.”
“I think this administration is devastating Americans and especially diverse and minority communities,” Alvarez added. “And I think that’s why you’re seeing interest in folks running for office. And you’re seeing a trend where the Republicans are growing our party” within diverse communities.
“If they’re waving a MAGA flag, I don’t know that that’s going to sell in the Black neighborhoods, but I’ve been known to be wrong,” said Steele, a frequent critic of today’s GOP.
The GOP was the preferred party of Black voters before Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal put forth a number of programs that helped low-income Black Americans secure housing and jobs, prompting more Black voters to back the Democrat Party. Further efforts to desegregate the U.S. military and the federal government spearheaded by Harry Truman increased Black support of the Democrat Party. And Lyndon B. Johnson’s signing several pieces of civil rights legislation into law solidified what is now a decades-long relationship between Democrats and Black voters, although an often vocal contingent of Black conservatives have always remained.
The current number of three Black Republicans in Congress is the largest number to serve simultaneously since Reconstruction, when the political power and rights of Black Americans were expanded, albeit temporarily. Between the years of 1873 and 1877, the end of Reconstruction, seven Black Republicans served in the House and two Black Republicans held seats in the Senate. Only one Black Republican woman has ever been elected to Congress: Rormer Rep. Mia Love was elected to represent Utah’s 4th Congressional District in 2014 and served two terms. She lost her bid for bid for a third term in 2018.
This year’s group of Black GOP candidates appear to have a level of support from national party leaders and donors that could swell the number of Black Republicans serving in the House and Senate.
“In the past, Black Republicans struggled to get money and support from the Republican infrastructure even when candidates were able to raise a lot of money,” Riguer said, referencing candidates like Kimberly Klacik, who lost her 2020 special election to Democrat Kweisi Mfume by 40 points despite a viral ad that caught Trump’s eye blaming Democrats for Baltimore’s blight, crime and other urban challenges.
“They’re not endorsing every single Black Republican that is running now,” Wright Rigueur added. “But if they are endorsing a candidate, they either believe that the candidate could win or at least be disruptive enough to shift the texture of the race.”
Hunt, the Texas congressional candidate, said more Black GOP lawmakers in Congress could help close the country’s racial and cultural divides. He told The Post that the absence of more Black Republicans to advocate for the Black community at Republican tables has ultimately put Black Americans at a disadvantage.
“We need Black voices as Democrats and Republicans,” he said. “To not have many people of color on both sides of the aisle really diminishes our ability to articulate the Black experience in America.” | 2022-10-25T09:16:46Z | www.washingtonpost.com | More Black Republicans hope to join Scott, Donald and Burgess in Congress - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/25/black-republicans-congress/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/25/black-republicans-congress/ |
For Karim Benzema, it’s an opportunity to showcase the talent that led him to winning the prestigious Ballon d'Or at nearly 35 years old.
They’ve since shown how effective they are in tandem — sharing six goals in one World Cup qualifying win that France coach Didier Deschamps called "a beautiful night of soccer.”
Mbappé has had other things on his mind, too, recently denying he's unhappy at PSG and that he’s pushing for a move to Real Madrid — which has twice failed to sign him. | 2022-10-25T09:17:15Z | www.washingtonpost.com | France looks to Mbappé and Benzema to win a 3rd World Cup - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/soccer/france-looks-to-mbappe-and-benzema-to-win-a-3rd-world-cup/2022/10/25/48584db8-543e-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/soccer/france-looks-to-mbappe-and-benzema-to-win-a-3rd-world-cup/2022/10/25/48584db8-543e-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html |
Qatar has repeatedly faced accusations of repressing sexual minorities ahead of next month’s World Cup, to be hosted in Doha. (Hamad I Mohammed/Reuters)
Qatari officials have arbitrarily arrested and mistreated LGBT people, in some cases as recently as last month, Human Rights Watch said Monday in a report that comes less than four weeks before the Gulf nation hosts the 2022 soccer World Cup.
The New York-based group said it had documented “six cases of severe and repeated beatings and five cases of sexual harassment” by Qatari authorities between 2019 and 2022. Human Rights Watch said it had talked to four transgender women, one bisexual woman and one gay man who were all held in an underground prison in Doha.
“All were detained without charge, in one case for two months in solitary confinement, without access to legal counsel,” the report said. “None received any record of having been detained. These acts could constitute arbitrary detention under international human rights law.”
The Washington Post could not immediately verify the accounts from the report. But it adds to concerns expressed by rights groups and soccer players about the safety of LGBT people attending next month’s World Cup.
Qatari law prohibits consensual same-sex sexual acts between men, but doesn’t explicitly prohibit them for women, according to the 2021 U.S. State Department human rights report. Same-sex relations between men can land them in prison for up to seven years.
The Qatari government and FIFA did not immediately respond to requests for comment Monday evening. But Qatari officials have disputed the allegations, saying the report had “information that is categorically and unequivocally false,” without elaborating further, according to Reuters.
The people interviewed by Human Rights Watch said they were slapped, kicked and punched while in custody. At least one woman said she had lost consciousness. Members of Qatar’s Preventive Security Department, an agency under the country’s Interior Ministry, forced all six to sign pledges to “cease immoral activity.”
One of the transgender women told Human Rights Watch that she had been arrested on the street in Doha, and accused of “imitating women.” Once inside a police vehicle, authorities beat her, bloodying her lips and nose, and kicking her in the stomach. One of the authorities told her that “You gays are immoral, so we will be the same to you,” according to the report.
“I was detained for three weeks without charge, and officers repeatedly sexually harassed me,” she said. “Part of the release requirement was attending sessions with a psychologist who ‘would make me a man again.’ ”
The woman also reported seeing at least seven other LGBT people locked up in the same underground prison.
A second transgender woman said she was arrested for wearing makeup. Authorities shaved her hair, and asked her to sign a vow that she would never wear makeup again as a condition of her release, she said. Transgender women were required to receive “conversion therapy” at government-sponsored centers, the report said.
Human Rights Watch said the arbitrary arrests of the people interviewed appeared to be based on a law that allows provisional detention if “there exist well-founded reasons to believe that the defendant may have committed a crime,” including “violating public morality.”
Qatar has faced pressure from foreign officials, soccer players and FIFA over its stance toward LGBT people in the lead-up to the World Cup, which begins Nov. 20. Qatari officials have said that everyone is welcome to attend, regardless of their background — but with caveats such as respecting the country’s culture.
Last month, participants at a human rights congress hosted by the German soccer federation urged the Qatari ambassador to Berlin to abolish penalties for homosexuality in Qatar, the Associated Press reported. Josh Cavallo, an Australian soccer player who came out as gay last year, has expressed concerns about the country’s homophobic laws. In March, 16 LGBT groups urged Qatar to repeal those laws, among other demands.
FIFA has pushed Doha to host an inclusive tournament, and fans will be allowed to fly the rainbow-colored LGBT flag during matches after Qatar said it would comply with the soccer body’s rules promoting tolerance and inclusion, according to reports in 2020. But in March, a Qatari official warned that law enforcement officials could take away rainbow flags from fans to “protect” them from being attacked by locals who could be angered by their support, the Associated Press reported. | 2022-10-25T10:04:02Z | www.washingtonpost.com | LGBT abuse, arrests continue in Qatar before World Cup, HRW says - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/25/qatar-world-cup-lgbt-arrest-human-rights/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/25/qatar-world-cup-lgbt-arrest-human-rights/ |
Mayor Muriel E. Bowser, left, stands next to Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton at a news conference. (Bill O’Leary/The Washington Post)
When D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) asked Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D) for legislation wresting control of the District’s parole system from the federal government — naming it critical on “our path to statehood” — she estimated the city would need two years to prepare.
That was in July 2020. But today D.C. today remains in virtually the same position: with no agreement on a path forward for a new parole system, even after agreeing to pay a company at least $756,000 to work on this and another criminal justice matter. Last Wednesday, the city told Congress in a closed-door meeting that it would need at least another two years to get it done, District officials said.
The delay means the city missed an opportunity to secure more local autonomy under a Democratic-controlled Congress. The fallout revealed stumbles in how the Bowser administration managed the work as officials — while asserting that D.C. knows best in arguing for local control — vexed local criminal justice experts by bringing in an outside firm. The holdup has an outsize impact on Black D.C. residents, who data show are overrepresented in the parole system.
The efforts come amid faltering commitments nationally to target the disproportionate impact policing and incarceration practices have had on communities of color. Urgency fueled by the 2020 murder of George Floyd waned as violent crime rates ticked up. And although lawmakers have sought to draw down prison populations across the United States, which incarcerates its citizens at higher rate than any other country, post-conviction reform lags.
In a statement on Friday, City Administrator Kevin Donahue said the administration “recognizes the importance of having local control over parole functions and its impact on the lives of incarcerated residents and their families.” He noted that the city needed to pass local legislation establishing a new parole system, with budgetary support, before Congress could transfer the authority to the District.
For now, D.C. parole decisions lie in the hands of the U.S. Parole Commission, a federal entity that reform advocates argue is overly punitive: slow to release eligible people from prison early and quick to return them for alleged violations.
District wants to take back parole from feds but takes little action
“The longer the delay, my fear is that you have people in jail for technical violations, losing their jobs, housing and gains they may have made, with the possibility of more prison time as a result,” said Michelle Bonner, a local attorney with parole expertise who the city briefly hired to help develop a local system. “And that is the biggest concern. The city had time to get this done and that did not happen.”
Norton, who had questioned earlier this year whether D.C. “really wants this” given the lack of progress, said through a spokeswoman that there was nothing more Congress could do this year since the city had not agreed on its own model yet. The mayor on Friday sent a letter to Congress formally asking for more time to “develop and fund the necessary infrastructure for assuming the commission’s parole functions.”
The District’s work toward designing a local parole system progressed slightly in the past year under the purview of former D.C. deputy mayor for public safety Christopher Geldart, who assumed that role in January 2021 and resigned this month after getting into an altercation in a parking lot. (Donahue is serving as interim.) But local criminal justice advocates and attorneys have criticized his decision to bring in an outside contractor to facilitate the project, frustrating local experts including Bonner.
Over the course of more than three months, spokespeople for the Bowser administration and Geldart would not make him available for an interview with The Washington Post about the progress, and ultimately declined the request without answering written questions.
‘A profound impact’
The U.S. Parole Commission (USPC) took over the D.C. parole system in 1997, when the city was on the brink of bankruptcy and the Revitalization Act transferred most of its criminal justice functions to the federal government.
Bowser has said an agency whose commissioners do not live in D.C. should not be making decisions affecting District residents, and advocates have decried what they consider a harsh approach from the commission that leads to more incarceration. In just over the first half of 2022, roughly 12 percent of people booked into the D.C. jail were brought in for allegedly violating parole, according to D.C. Department of Corrections data from July.
Bowser echoed this concern in her July 2020 letter to Norton, saying USPC decisions have a “profound impact on thousands of D.C. residents and their families,” and that each year, “hundreds of D.C. parolees are returned to prison, often for technical violations.”
In a statement to The Post, USPC spokeswoman Nicole Navas Oxman said that the commission has “worked diligently in the last 10 years to drastically reduce the number of persons returned to prison for violations of parole and supervised release, especially for noncriminal violations.”
District officials unfazed while statehood could cost over $1 billion
She pointed to data showing significant reductions since 2011 and says the agency has tried to change its approach to alleged supervision violations with sanctions other than prison, particularly for people with substance abuse or mental health issues.
Still, the agency said it would cooperate with the city if D.C. wants to take the parole authority back. And that is largely because USPC now operates as a de facto D.C. agency. The federal government abolished parole in 1984 and so did D.C. in 2000. About 86 percent of the nearly 6,000 people under its jurisdiction are District residents, most of whom are on supervision following their release from prison, according to data the agency submits to Congress.
District officials have considered parole models such as a purely local board that would make all decisions about releasing people from prison on parole or terms of supervision after they are released. It has also considered involving D.C. Superior Court to varying degrees. The city in 2019 commissioned a lengthy review from the Justice Policy Institute, which explored some of those options and recommended D.C. invite community input to select the best proposal.
But at this point, the District has not agreed on what the mission of its parole board should be: How should it approach decisions about early release, supervision and returning people to prison? Some local advocates and attorneys do not want to see a new local parole board at all, believing that agencies with political appointees or who answer to government officials have incentive to keep people in jail to avoid political jabs that they are soft on crime, like some Republicans in Congress have said of the District.
The D.C. Public Defender Service, which represents people in parole hearings before USPC, said the District should put D.C. Superior Court exclusively in charge of parole and supervision decisions, calling parole boards “failed institutions and major drivers of mass incarceration.” D.C. Attorney General Karl A. Racine had previously echoed that belief in a hearing last year, citing an assessment from the American Law Institute.
“The District must prioritize shrinking the criminal legal system and protecting liberty and due process interests by listening to local experts who have deep knowledge from representing clients in the parole context,” Rashida Edmondson, chief of the parole division at the D.C. Public Defender Service, said in a statement.
Marc Schindler, executive director of the Justice Policy Institute said he completely understood that, after the pandemic hit, D.C. may not have be able to prioritize the parole project as much as he and others may have hoped. But since then, he said, “the length of time they have taken to return to this is inexcusable.
“The fact that it has not been reprioritized and advanced, there is no excuse for that,” Schindler said. “They needed to move forward much more quickly than they have.”
In August 2021, Geldart began discussions with Bonner and Olinda Moyd, another expert who spent 17 years as the chief attorney for the D.C. Public Defender Service’s parole division, to formally consult with D.C. on developing a structure for local parole.
Moyd and Bonner put together three draft proposals and began developing skeletal outlines of local legislation, with input from the community, including criminal justice and victim advocates. But they say the effort grew more complicated in December after Geldart sought external help to facilitate the parole project, as Washington City Paper and DCist have also reported.
The District paid the Center for Naval Analysis to support its efforts to develop a new parole board as well as map out violent crime in the District, which together cost at least $765,000 in one contract, according to city records, which do not show how much the city spent on each individual project, only on the whole contract. D.C. Council is not required to approve contracts under $1 million, and in this case the letter contract expired Sept. 30 without council review, according to the Office of Contracting and Procurement.
The company’s proposal included a detailed timetable of tasks D.C. would need to complete to develop a new parole system by this November, many of which the city did not accomplish. District officials have said that in the past two years, the coronavirus pandemic as well as the city’s challenges with reducing violent crime have consumed much of its attention.
But even before the contractor began managing the parole project, Geldart’s office had begun detailing the structure of a potential new parole agency, including how many employees and how much office space it might require, according to documents reviewed by The Post that reveal some of the city’s work and communications related to the local parole efforts.
In February, the D.C. Department of General Services published a still active solicitation stating that the District was seeking an administrative space for a new parole agency, identified as the “Parole and Supervised Released Council.” It said the mayor “plans to introduce legislation in the coming months.”
For months, even into April, officials in Geldart’s office expressed tenuous hope that D.C. Council could pass a bill this year and that a local parole system could be up and running sometime in 2023. But behind the scenes, conflicts arose with the contractor, CNA.
By spring, Moyd and Bonner felt that they could no longer work with the company, feeling as though they were now reporting to the firm rather than Geldart’s office, as originally discussed. In April, they both decided to stop working directly with the city.
“If we are working toward creating a local parole entity, and the number one complaint is that USCP is so far removed from D.C. residents, I felt uncomfortable being part of a process that included CNA which also had no connections to D.C. and no parole expertise,” Moyd said in an interview.
Bonner agreed: “The bottom line was that no, we could not work with them. I agreed to provide recommendations to the deputy mayor, not to provide recommendations to a company I know nothing about.” In response to a request for comment, a spokeswoman for CNA referred questions to the District.
‘A lack of willpower'
The Bowser administration has not responded to written questions from The Post about the scope of CNA’s work. D.C. Council member Charles Allen (D-Ward 6), who chairs the legislature’s judiciary committee, sent an information request to Geldart in July with similar questions, including CNA’s qualifications to work on parole and why the relationship with Moyd and Bonner soured.
Geldart responded to some of Allen’s questions in September, writing in his own letter that CNA has “extensive management experience in the public safety and justice space” while detailing their administrative work on the parole effort. On Moyd and Bonner, Geldart said that having a project manager helped ensure the two experts were paid correctly. They were paid in April after parting ways.
But the Arlington-based company, which handles both defense contracts and other domestic research projects, is no longer with the city on this project either. And D.C. officials have not released its findings or detailed a path forward.
Allen said in a July interview that he was concerned about how much time it would take for the city to pass legislation, fund and ultimately stand up an entirely new parole system, which by some estimates, he said, could cost the up to $10 million per year. Like others, he pointed out that key parties are still split on whether local courts should be involved.
“There are credible people that are advocating for both of those scenarios, but the decision must get made,” Allen said. “Not everyone will be happy, but we have to make a decision because while the administration waits. It is real-life people who are being impacted.”
Frustrations flared up at a virtual September meeting that included representatives from the city as well as local criminal justice agencies, including public defenders and D.C. Superior Court, among others, to discuss a path forward on parole, according to two people in attendance who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal talks.
When a staffer from Geldart’s office began outlining granular details on D.C. parole, like how much staffing and computer space a new agency might require, some people at the meeting noted that they still had not come to an agreement on the best way to move forward.
Council Chairman Phil Mendelson (D) said in an interview this month that no one seemed to be “on the same page,” which is why the city had yet to select a parole system model from a slate of options. “As we push for statehood, there are many incremental steps, and this would be one of them,” he said. “Within that context, it is a priority.”
But should Republicans take control of Congress from Democrats after the November midterms, it is unclear that they would support a bill to give D.C. authority over parole given they have historically been hostile to the District, particularly on criminal justice matters. And while not all local advocates agree on what type of parole system D.C. should adopt, they have watched with dismay as the progress has stalled.
“It does not change the fact that we are missing a chance to do something really doable, that has been such an area of passion for advocates for so long, that has through lines with statehood, improving racial equity in a very disparate system and the overuse of incarceration,” said Misty Thomas, executive director of the Council of Court Excellence, a nonprofit civic organization that works to enhance the D.C. justice system.
Thomas continued: “We have studied this extensively. There is not a lack of information available to city leaders. There is a lack of willpower to close the loop.” | 2022-10-25T10:17:06Z | www.washingtonpost.com | D.C. asks for extension on localizing parole after dysfunction - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/25/dc-parole-congress-extension/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/25/dc-parole-congress-extension/ |
A guide to 2022 local elections in Pr. George’s and Montgomery county
Boxes of ballots to be reviewed by Montgomery County Board of Elections canvassers for the primary election on July 21 in Germantown, Md. (Bonnie Jo Mount/The Washington Post)
Early voting begins this week in Maryland, and voters in Prince George’s and Montgomery County will have the chance to decide — or in some cases, confirm — their choices for local elected officials alongside statewide offices.
Most local races in Prince George’s and Montgomery aren’t expected to be competitive — the Democratic nominees for county executive and county council historically have faced little opposition in November in these two deep-blue counties. But those elected will immediately be tasked with guiding their counties through a critical period: In Prince George’s, a potential shift in the county council’s balance of power has heightened tensions as the county begins to implement a rewritten zoning code, while an increase in violent crime over the summer prompted the county executive to announce a controversial curfew. In Montgomery, the county executive and county council have been split over support for a 30-year development plan as a series of workplace scandals dissolved the county planning board.
Candidates this election cycle have frequently emphasized strengthening public safety and increasing support for schools and businesses as they continue to recover from the pandemic. Candidates’ views on development, commonly among the most contentious issues in these two D.C. suburbs, are also at the forefront of voters’ minds. Both counties are poised to implement generational changes to planning and development plans, addressing concerns about population growth, equity and the environment.
Early voting begins Thursday and Election Day is on Nov. 8. Here’s what you need to know about the candidates on the ballot in November: | 2022-10-25T10:17:12Z | www.washingtonpost.com | A guide to 2022 local elections in Prince George’s, Montgomery county - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/25/prince-georges-montgomery-election-guide/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/25/prince-georges-montgomery-election-guide/ |
Since Dani Izzie got pregnant, she’s had to deal with strangers saying she’s selfish and she can’t possibly take care of her babies
Dani and Rudy Izzie with their twins Lavinia, and Giorgiana in August 2021. (@Dani's Twins Film)
Before Dani Izzie became one of the few quadriplegic women known to give birth to twins, the odds were stacked against her.
She was 23 when she suffered a spinal cord injury and woke up in a hospital bed in D.C., unable to move. She had been a healthy young woman, building her life and career in the nation’s capital.
She was devastated to learn after her accident in 2009 that she would be paralyzed from the chest down, and would also have limited use of her arms.
“Initially, learning that I had a spinal cord injury was both emotionally traumatic and physically grueling,” said Dani, now 36.
After taking time to absorb her new reality, she made a decision to fight for her life back. She moved out of her parents’ Virginia home, settled in California, did rehab and got a Master’s degree.
“It took me two or three years to get back to a place of harmony and acceptance,” she said.
Then she fell in love with a man.
She met Rudy Izzie in 2015 on a dating app, and after their first meet up, they were both smitten.
“For our first date, we went to a restaurant in Old Town Alexandria, then visited the National Portrait Gallery,” she said. “It was an instant attraction.”
“Her disability was not a dealbreaker — we didn’t even talk about it for the first couple of dates,” added Rudy Izzie, 38. “We really connected. And of course, I thought she was very beautiful.”
The pair found they had a lot in common: they both grew up in Virginia and loved the outdoors, and Dani worked in digital marketing while Rudy was in digital sales.
“He loved me for who I am,” Dani said. “I’d been rejected a lot in the past. But he had no qualms about me having a disability.”
They married in 2018 and moved into a home in Culpeper County, Va.
Soon, the couple was facing a dilemma. They had always wanted a family. Could she as a quadriplegic provide her children with the care they needed?
“I had some insecurity and doubt, wondering, ‘How am I going to take care of a baby if I can barely take care of myself?’ ” she said. “Everyday life was already challenging.”
But as she thought deeper about it, she decided that while her husband helps her put on her pants and shoes in the morning, she does a lot to take care of herself — and her husband, as well.
“I came to realize, ‘Well, I do take care of myself — I’m healthy, I’m happy and I’m alive, and I’ve learned to do things in different ways,’ ” she said. “Even though I had a profound disability, I was actually pretty competent.”
Rudy was just as excited as she was to have a baby, but they didn’t know if it was a good idea medically.
Their fears were put to rest by her doctor, who told her that a spinal cord injury would not prevent her from having children, she said.
When she became pregnant in 2019, she received the shocking news at her first ultrasound that she was having twins.
“I said, ‘You have to be [kidding] me,’ ” Izzie recalled. “I had developed a plan on how to take care of one baby. And now there were two?”
“It was definitely a surprise, but it was also magical,” Rudy added. “I’d always wanted to have two kids.”
The Izzies consulted with a team of doctors led by Robert Fuller, a maternal-fetal medicine specialist at UVA Health. They reassured Dani that she could have a healthy pregnancy with careful monitoring.
“I’ve taken care of a variety of people with mobility issues over the years, and it’s quite rare to have a quadriplegic mom with twins,” Fuller said. “In fact, there are only a handful in the world.”
Fuller said he told Dani the determination that brought her to his office was a good indication she was going to be fine.
Spinal cord injuries often cause a fluctuation in blood pressure, Fuller said, noting that high blood pressure could have put Dani at risk for a heart attack or stroke, and low blood pressure could have deprived the twins of oxygen.
As it turned out, Dani had another stressful challenge.
“The pandemic came along and my lungs only work at 30 percent of normal,” she said. “So I had to stay really isolated to avoid getting sick.”
When she went into labor six weeks early, “I could feel something similar to contractions,” she said. “Even with paralysis, I do have some sensation in my body.”
Then, on April 24, 2020 — at the height of the coronavirus pandemic — Izzie became one of the rare quadriplegic women in the world to give birth to twins — Lavinia and Giorgiana Izzie.
Her daughters were delivered via an emergency Caesarean section and placed next to her face for a moment before they were whisked away to the NICU, she said.
“They weighed four pounds each, and it was really emotional and joyful to see them,” Izzie said.
The girls are now healthy and talkative 2½-year-olds who love to climb all over their mom on the floor and read storybooks, Rudy noted.
“They go to day care while we work, then we all enjoy quality time together,” he said. “We’re cherishing these days because we know it goes fast.”
Their story is the subject of “Dani’s Twins,” a 39-minute documentary that will be shown on Nov. 3 at the Virginia Film Festival in Charlottesville.
“I’m hoping that the film will have an impact on how people view parents with disabilities,” said Dani, who writes a blog about her life as a disabled mom and was one of the documentary’s producers.
“The most disabling thing is not my medical diagnosis, but stigma and social attitudes,” she said. “People rarely see disabled people represented in caregiving roles. I want them to see me and realize that disability is just a normal part of life.”
Lavinia and Giorgiana enjoy snuggling in her lap, reading stories and going for wheelchair rides, she said. The family makes frequent trips to the playground, and dinner at home is always a noisy affair.
“The girls are pure joy,” she said. “Yes, there are challenges. But I accept there are things that I need help with and I’ve learned to adjust.”
She said that because she still has partial use of her arms, she has learned to use her hands in some ways.
“It’s really about how I set up things in my home and how I coordinate care,” she said. “Rudy dresses the girls, and I pick out the clothes and I’m the stylist. And I also put the girls to bed.”
“We split up tasks in ways that work for us,” she said.
Dani said she doesn’t like to discuss what happened the day of her accident because “then my injury becomes the focus. I’m trying to get people to see my disability in a new way.”
“I want to make a point that [disabled people] don’t owe answers about our disabilities to anyone, unless we feel like sharing that,” she said.
“The whole reason I did this film was to encourage other women with disabilities and give them an example they rarely get to see,” she added. “I want them to feel empowered, whether it involves becoming a parent or anything else they’d like to do.”
She said she sometimes worries about how her girls will deal with her disability as they grow older. Since she got pregnant, she’s heard comments from strangers saying she’s selfish, she can’t possibly be able to take care of her daughters, and worse.
Izzie made a YouTube video addressing these comments, saying there’s a common sentiment of “the moral policing of disabled people and the belief that they do not have autonomy over their own bodies.”
Her beautiful babies are the antidote to that, she said.
“The painful reality is that there are stigmas out there about disabled parents,” she said. “But if [my girls] have a personality like mine, they’ll be able to stand up to that.”
“Everybody has their challenges, whether they have a disability or not,” Dani added. “I have high hopes that my film will show we all have universal experiences that bring us together.”
“We need to be more supportive and inclusive of each other,” she said. | 2022-10-25T10:17:18Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Quadriplegic woman in Va is among rare few to deliver twin babies - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/10/25/quadriplegic-mother-twins-dani-izzie/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/10/25/quadriplegic-mother-twins-dani-izzie/ |
In January 1977, when I was a small boy and sitting at a restaurant table in Manhattan, a reporter for the New York Times asked me if I wanted to be a weightlifter.
It would have been a strange icebreaker for an interview with a 4-year-old, except that I was at a party for the New York premiere of “Pumping Iron.” It was a film directed by my father, George Butler, about the strange and amazing and wonderful subculture of American bodybuilding. By that point, I was pretty used to heavily muscled men, but the reporter was fascinated by Arnold Schwarzenegger, who was also there. She quipped in her story that “the 57-inch chest of Mr. Universe momentarily blocked passage to the buffet table” for a famous guest, Andy Warhol.
Schwarzenegger himself wasn’t yet a boldface name. He hadn’t been Conan or the Terminator, or a Kindergarten Cop — or the governor of California. But as the reporter noted, he was a three-time Mr. Universe, the top bodybuilder in the world. And “Pumping Iron,” an offbeat hit, would launch his Hollywood career.
Bodybuilder Franco Columbu, with Arnold Schwarzenegger, holds up the writer, Desmond Butler, when he was young. (George Butler/Contact Press Images)
Schwarzenegger was mesmerizing on the big screen — his physique, his charisma and his humor made him a natural star. And in the film, he explained how he had gotten that way. He saw himself as an artist:
“You look in the mirror and see you need a little more deltoids to make symmetry. So you exercise and put more deltoid on. A sculptor will slap stuff on,” he tells the camera.
The bodybuilder’s chisels are barbells and dumbbells and 45-pound plates that clank in sweaty gyms. To be a top bodybuilder takes countless hours of exertion in the weight room and the consumption of absurd amounts of food. It takes extreme discipline and determination, qualities that I was taught as a boy to admire.
My father was a photographer before he was a filmmaker, and “Pumping Iron,” the book, preceded the film. Through his photos and the writing with Charles Gaines, the book makes the case that bodybuilding is based on a yearning for the classical ideal. It suggests that the top bodybuilders of the 1970s were modeled on Michelangelo’s “David.” “Pumping Iron” made a compelling case that bodybuilding wasn’t a freak show, but a real sport to be taken seriously.
Desmond Butler on the family's farm in Holderness, N.H. (Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post)
The film propelled not only Schwarzenegger’s stardom but also the fitness craze of the 1980s. In my father’s house, the sport was with us long after the movie left cinemas. His black-and-white photographs have hung on the walls of our family home for as long as I can remember.
When he made “Pumping Iron II” about female bodybuilders, he sometimes brought me to his shoots. At age 10, I went with him to Australia to film one of the documentary’s stars, Bev Francis, who was among the top female powerlifters in the world. It was the kind of adventure that my father loved and taught me to love. He would go on to make films on topics as diverse as Theodore Roosevelt’s African safari, the exploration of Antarctica and the fate of the ivory-billed woodpecker.
I never became a bodybuilder. I was never drawn into film or photography. But I did become a storyteller — a reporter — and it wasn’t long after starting my career abroad that I was drawn to the investigative side of journalism. I like the hunt for evidence, the challenge of solving mysteries and the focus on injustice.
I’ve worked in London, Berlin, Istanbul, New York and D.C. and investigated issues of terrorism, war, lobbying and bad government. I covered the war in Syria and the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, and I once spent a year looking into a madcap plan by the U.S. government to set up a Twitter-like social network in Cuba. But until recently, it hadn’t occurred to me to look at bodybuilding, though I had sometimes heard shocking and unreported stories. Now, at age 50 and a year after my father’s death, I am investigating the sport that he made famous.
George Butler photographs Arnold Schwarzenegger in the early 1970s. (George Butler/Contact Press Images)
Where my father once focused his cameras on the big personalities of the athletes, our reporting focuses on the stewards of the sport and where they have taken it since 1977.
Last autumn, he died after a long battle with Parkinson’s disease. Despite his illness, he kept working until nearly the end. In 2013, deep into the disease’s ravages, he traveled to a remote part of Bangladesh called the Sundarbans to shoot footage of swamp-dwelling tigers for a forthcoming Imax film. It was the kind of determination he illuminated in “Pumping Iron.”
At a memorial service in December, a lot of old friends turned up at a church near his former apartment and office in Manhattan. Some of them were people I knew from my childhood window into the bodybuilding world. Bill Grant, a top competitor from the Muscle Beach era captured in “Pumping Iron,” was there. So was Carla Dunlap-Kaan, one of the stars of “Pumping Iron II.”
The conversations at a time of loss brought me back to my earliest days with my father and the bodybuilding giants. At the church, an old friend of my dad’s stopped me. It was Wayne DeMilia, who had run a professional bodybuilding federation years ago and had often been my father’s guide to the bodybuilding underground.
“This is not the time to talk about this, but I want to tell you about a possible investigation,” he said. In a meeting weeks later, he laid out alarming stories of recent abuses.
Since then, in dozens of interviews with some of the most knowledgeable people in the sport, my Washington Post colleagues and I have uncovered disturbing charges about the top bodybuilding federations in the world — and the exploitation of athletes.
As I was beginning the investigation early this year, I went to Schwarzenegger’s annual contest, the Arnold Classic, one of the two most important competitions in the sport. The most famous bodybuilder of all time has also cast skepticism on elements of the contemporary sport, especially the extreme use of steroids that has pumped the athletes’ musculature far past the ideal to something approaching the grotesque. The abuse has led to a stunning number of athletes dying young. In response, Schwarzenegger has boosted the prize money for a contest category called “classic physique” that harks back to the muscular aesthetic of his own prime.
My admiration for the sweat and determination that animate the top bodybuilders remains. But where my father once focused his cameras on the big personalities of the athletes, our reporting focuses on the stewards of the sport and where they have taken it since 1977. It’s a more critical look at the strange subculture captured in “Pumping Iron,” because our job as investigative reporters is to uncover injustice and invite accountability.
From left, Franco Columbu with an unidentified cameraman and George Butler during the filming of “Pumping Iron.” (George Butler/Contact Press Images)
Photography by Marvin Joseph and George Butler/Contact Press Images. Photo editing by Robert Miller. Illustration by Tim McDonagh.
Copy editing by Mike Cirelli and Wayne Lockwood.
Additional editing, production and support by Jeff Leen, Whitney Shefte, Nick Trombola, Jordan Melendrez and Jenna Lief. | 2022-10-25T10:30:29Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The origin of The Post’s bodybuilding investigation - Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/interactive/2022/bodybuilding-then-and-now/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/interactive/2022/bodybuilding-then-and-now/ |
Amy Brittain
Alice Li
For more than 15 years, J.M. Manion, whose father, Jim, has been running amateur and professional bodybuilding contests for decades, shot the photos and operated a network of paid soft-core pornography websites that at one point advertised “over 30,000 images” of competitors in the sport. A Post review of website archives identified more than 200 female athletes in photos ranging from casual bikini shots to graphic, sexual images, including those of nude women together in beds, bathtubs and showers. One of J.M.'s sites, Fitness Divas, bluntly stated: “Your Favorite Fitness Athletes …Naked!”
Jenn Gates, who won the figure category at the prestigious Olympia contest in 2008, graced the covers of fitness magazines and earned enough sponsorship money to quit her nursing job. Her manager, J.M., asked her to take off her bikini top and bottom for photos. Gates refused, and was surprised recently to learn from Post reporters that her swimsuit photos had been featured alongside nude female competitors on one of J.M.’s pornography sites.
Three years after winning a prestigious Olympia title, bodybuilder Jenn Gates gave up the sport in disgust. (Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post)
“I never consented to having my pictures put on a soft-porn site,” Gates said during an interview at her home in Indianapolis. Less than three years after winning the Olympia, Gates gave up the sport in disgust — and warns young women to stay away from the contests.
Interviews with dozens of competitors, judges, officials and others connected to the sport reveal the systematic exploitation of female athletes often rendered vulnerable by extreme dieting and workouts, lack of financial stability and a drive to win. The Post found that some women believed their scores depended on their willingness to pose for sexual photos or to please the sport’s leading judges, promoters and managers, almost all of whom are male.
J.M. did not respond to questions The Post emailed him about the allegations. Rob Rosetti, a prominent trainer who sometimes attended the photo shoots for J.M.’s pornography websites, said the women had consented.
“In the very few photo shoots I was asked to attend, I witnessed no athlete being forced, pressured, persuaded, intimidated or coerced into posing nude by J.M. or any other individual assisting in the photo shoot,” Rosetti texted The Post.
“It was done completely on the athlete’s own free will,” he said.
Mandy Henderson, a former sheriff’s deputy in Santa Clara County, Calif., detailed in an interview how the pressure was exerted on women. She agreed to nude photography with the expectation of winning a pro card, which allows athletes to move from amateur competitions to the professional league. A pro card can mean more money, sponsorships, and the chance to compete in the headlining competitions: the Arnold Classic and the Olympia.
At an amateur contest in 2009, she placed fourth and was surprised that it was taking so long for her to earn her pro card. When she asked why, she said, a prominent judge told her: “Because you didn’t come to my room last night.”
Another athlete, who was at a shoot attended by Rosetti, described a “humiliating” experience in which J.M. told her to undress and enter a shower with two naked women to pose for photographs — even though she’d previously told Rosetti she didn’t want to pose nude, said the woman, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. “I cannot tell you how terrible of an experience it was.”
Aly Garcia said she abandoned the sport after it became clear she wouldn’t get a top win unless she had sex with power brokers. (Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post)
Aly Garcia, a bikini competitor, said she refused to do the nude photos, and had to fend off advances from judges and promoters as gently as she could to keep her career alive. She abandoned the sport in 2017 when she concluded that she would never get a top win if she didn’t have sex with the power brokers. “This is the only way I’m going to hit my goal?” she thought. “Guess I’m not going to hit my goal.”
The leading amateur and professional federations are run by Jim Manion, J.M.’s father, a 78-year-old ex-bodybuilder, from his offices in Pittsburgh. Jim Manion presides over the amateur National Physique Committee (NPC) and the International Federation of Bodybuilding and Fitness Pro League, known as the IFBB Pro League.
In response to a detailed query from The Post sent to Jim Manion, the two organizations issued a statement through Hammond Strategies, a crisis communications firm, but did not respond directly to any of the questions.
“As part of our efforts to grow the sport we have expanded events and opportunities for all competitors, grown prize purses for female athletes, and improved communications for our competitors to raise any concerns they may have with an event or their experience,” the statement said. “We address all concerns raised with the utmost care, concern, and timeliness.”
The statement said that more than half of registered competitors are women and that many shows feature all-female judging panels.
At bodybuilding’s biggest competitions, J.M. can be found front and center, his baseball cap worn backward as he snaps pictures of muscled competitors onstage. J.M. was a teenager when his father took the helm of bodybuilding’s newly created amateur organization. In 1977, with the release of the film “Pumping Iron,” starring Schwarzenegger, bodybuilding exploded onto the public consciousness and spawned a fitness boom in the 1980s.
[How a Post reporter wound up investigating the sport his father made famous]
Bodybuilding is both a sport and an art form. Athletes sculpt their bodies through weight training and diet to compete in contests where they are judged on their muscular development after performing poses onstage. The sport has multiple categories based on weight classes and the degree of musculature, ranging from the most muscled (bodybuilding) to the lesser-built categories of figure and bikini. The latter two are for female athletes only.
Prize money is awarded to the top five winners in the pro contests. At the top of the game is the Olympia, with Mr. Olympia claiming a reported $675,000 last year, and Ms. Olympia just $60,000. Most of the hundreds of contests each year pay far less.
J.M., who runs the sport’s online news operation, also oversaw a management company that directed the careers of the top female competitors, including Gates. He served as a gateway to endorsement deals, magazine covers and other financially promising opportunities and could shut down income potential or competitive success if an athlete crossed him, numerous competitors said.
Two former officials told The Post that they witnessed other officials either inflating scorecards in favor of competitors managed by J.M. or trying to.
Steve O’Brien, who served as a judge and district chairman of the NPC for Northern California, recounted two incidents when he said John Tuman, a judge, changed scores, once after O’Brien observed him discussing the placings with Jim and J.M. Manion.
Jim Rockell, who was once the head judge of the Olympia and a close associate of Jim Manion’s before a falling out, said that Tuman once chided him at an event about his placings and suggested he make changes.
“Tuman leans over to me and says, ‘You know that girl that you got in fourth or fifth place? That’s one of J.M.’s girls,’ ” Rockell recalled. He said he did not change his scores.
O’Brien and Rockell said that some years ago, Tuman was suspended as a judge after his then-fiancee provided evidence that Tuman had affairs with contestants while he was judging. Several athletes also complained to officials about Tuman’s behavior, they said. Months later, Jim Manion called O’Brien to discuss reinstating Tuman, which O’Brien resisted. But Manion overruled him.
“Jim’s remedy was: ‘I’m not going have him judge women,” O’Brien said. “Well, that didn’t last very long.”
Soon, Tuman was back to judging all kinds of contests across the country, O’Brien said.
Tuman declined to comment on specific allegations.
Competitors at the 2022 Arnold Classic in Columbus, Ohio. The Post attended the event, but did not interview these women on the allegations of sexual exploitation in the sport. (Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post)
Rockell said he often observed Jim Manion complimenting J.M.’s clients to the judges during contests. “And these are the women that were winning,” he added.
The federations declined to answer questions about J.M’s influence on the contests. But The Post found that at the 2013 Olympia, among the 20 athletes who placed in the top 10 of the bikini or figure divisions, at least 18 were at one time listed on J.M.’s business websites as clients.
The Post attempted to contact more than 80 of the 200 athletes who appeared on J.M.’s websites. The majority did not respond to requests for comment. Twenty women agreed to speak to Post reporters about their experiences. Of those, nine women who had posed nude agreed to be interviewed — with eight speaking on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retribution from the Manion family and damage to their current careers if the photos received public attention.
Several women described personal problems and vulnerabilities that made them susceptible to posing nude: financial strain, troubles at home or feeling they had no other option if they wanted to advance in the sport.
The women told The Post that nude photo shoots were often held a day or two before the weekend competitions, and they believed that their odds of winning depended on their state of undress. The events were so regular, a former judge and top Manion lieutenant, Lee Thompson, told The Post, that they were called “Thursday shower nights.”
Thompson, who split with the Manions several years ago, said that Jim Manion would sometimes clear out of his hotel suite so that J.M. could do the shoots there, indicating that the elder Manion was aware of his son’s photo shoots.
J.M. advertised “fan clubs” of certain women, charging roughly $10 a month for access to their photos. Several women said they did not know they had been featured on the websites until Post reporters notified them. Other women described signing contracts that promised a 50-50 profit split with J.M.’s company, along with a regular review of invoices. With one exception, the women told The Post they did not recall receiving money from income the websites generated. One woman said she got just $40. Post reporters reviewed three athlete contracts, along with emails exchanged between J.M. or his associates and some of the competitors.
Nancy Hogshead-Makar runs Champion Women, a group that advocates for girls and women in sports. (Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post)
“It’s not consent when it’s your boss and it’s someone that holds power over you.”— Nancy Hogshead-Makar, Olympic gold medalist swimmer and lawyer
Nancy Hogshead-Makar, an Olympic gold medalist swimmer and a lawyer who runs Champion Women, a group that advocates for girls and women in sports, said that bodybuilding managers, judges or promoters may have more sway over athletes because the sport is based on subjective scoring.
That power dynamic means that the sport has a responsibility to protect its athletes, she said: “The bodybuilding industry should be subject to very strict precautions for athletes.
“It’s not consent when it’s your boss and it’s someone that holds power over you.”
The Manions’ bodybuilding empire is a private, for-profit company, with no oversight structure or requirement to share revenue or membership numbers. Competitors described an overall lack of transparency within the sport. They told The Post that the organizations are devoid of any meaningful safeguards for athletes, such as a human resources department, health insurance or unions that could protect against abuses of power.
For Gates, the sport lost its way with the addition of the bikini division, which was introduced to the Olympia competition in 2010.
More competitors at the 2022 Arnold Classic. The Post attended the event, but did not interview these women on the allegations of sexual exploitation in the sport. (Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post)
“I don’t know what woman would want other women to stand up onstage and turn around and show their behinds and then be told to walk halfway across the stage and poke their butts out,” she said. “Why are we doing this?”
While Gates said that her ability to say no to powerful men, including J.M., spared her from the most degrading situations, others said they sometimes felt trapped in hotel rooms with power brokers who could make or break their careers.
Former competitor Amber Littlejohn, who now works as a lawyer in D.C., said the culture values compliance and punishes those who speak out. She said women in the sport find themselves “ripe for predation” because of the amount of money they invest and their dependence on the Manion family to succeed.
Jeweled posing bikinis can cost $1,000, and women reported spending thousands of dollars to compete.
“I am not at all surprised by anything that can be said about these people, because I’ve watched them do it for so long,” said Littlejohn, who posed one time in a bikini for J.M. “Nothing has changed for the athletes. If anything, it’s gotten worse.”
‘Epic booty pose’
After an amateur event in New Jersey earlier this year, J.M. lined up nine of the top female competitors on the asphalt in front of a New Jersey Marriott, their backs to him.
“All right, so this will be the epic booty pose,” he tells them, according to video footage posted on the NPC News Online website.
He directs the women to stick out their butts and brace themselves with a hand on the athlete next to them.
J.M., now 59, grew up in the bodybuilding world, and then became official photographer and senior writer for NPC News in the mid ’80s when it was a magazine.
J.M.’s ventures converged in the late 1990s when he launched his Erotic Fitness paid website to sell topless and fully nude photos of star female bodybuilders. “Gym workouts sans tops are too rare!” the website stated. “How many times have you been in a gym, seen a fine babe, and wished she was doing those chest flys topless?”
J.M. Manion at the 2022 Arnold Sports Festival in Columbus. (Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post)
Erotic Fitness folded in 2000, but J.M. soon launched larger websites: Alluring Fitness and Fitness Divas. Over time, his photography grew more sexually graphic and targeted in its attempts to lure paid subscribers. The websites disappeared in 2015 with no explanation. It is unclear how much income J.M. collected from the sites.
A Post review of J.M.’s past websites found that of the more than 200 featured athletes, a third posed in bikinis, which are traditionally worn for bodybuilding and fitness competitions. More than a quarter of the women posed either fully or partially nude or in suggestive settings, according to archived images of the websites reviewed by Post reporters. A smaller number posed in lingerie. For others, the nature of the photography could not be discerned from archival screenshots.
A handful of women said that they had no problem with lingerie or sensual photographs and did not view the photography as a significant departure from a sport judged on one’s appearance in little clothing.
“I actually loved doing pictures,” said Timea Majorova, a former professional competitor who was born in the former Czechoslovakia. She said she benefited from J.M.’s career management in the 1990s when, then in her early 20s and knowing little English, she tried to adjust to life in the United States.
“He was very nice to me. He never pushed me to do anything,” she said, noting that she never posed nude, nor did J.M. ask her to do so. “As far as I know, the girls I worked with, they never told me they were pushed to do anything.”
Several women spoke to The Post about their experiences on the condition of anonymity to protect their privacy and out of fear of retaliation.
One woman who competed from 2008 to 2010 said that she signed with J.M. because she believed he would look out for her and help her gain a platform in the fitness industry. Her first photo shoot took place with other women, all in bikinis, on a California beach. But the next photo shoot took a troubling turn, she said.
A couple of days before a competition, she said, she was asked to join two women in a hotel room, wearing lingerie and posing in bed. Then, J.M. asked her to remove her clothing. She agreed.
“I felt that if I said no, that could end my career,” she said. “But that could have just been me. I knew how known and powerful [J.M.] was in that world. And that was the choice I made. I call it the dark side.”
A Fitness Management Group contract shared by bodybuilder Mandy Henderson.
Agreeing to the photography stripped the joy from the sport, she said.
“I felt ashamed,” the woman said. “I felt like a failure. I felt scared. I felt like I made poor decisions, and then I felt trapped.”
A second woman — then a single mother who competed in the early 2010s — described a similar, rapid progression from an initial bikini shoot to nude photography. “That’s how he operates,” she said of J.M., noting that women developed a whisper network to warn one another of what was next.
She said holding such photo shoots before competitions amounted to “taking advantage” of women who dieted and trained to the extreme for months, knowing that contest results were on the line.
A third woman, who competed in the mid-to-late 2000s, said that J.M. once suggested she dress in comic hero costumes, catering to his fascination with comic book culture and his desire to show real-life female bodybuilders as fictional, sensual superheroes who fought off villains.
Then, she said, he directed her to strike a sexy pose and undress.
Though she could not locate the document, she recalls signing a contract that included language about photo shoots and paid websites and promised a 50-50 profit split with J.M.’s company. She did not have a problem with “tasteful” nudity and needed the money. Bodybuilding “was not cheap,” she said.
But after being photographed, she felt “mortified,” especially when several contest judges remarked that they had seen her photos. J.M. wanted her to promote the website to drive up membership numbers, she said, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it.
“I never got one dollar,” she said. Not too long after, J.M. terminated her contract, telling her: “I never made any money off of you,” she said.
‘Absolutely disgusting’
The effort to recruit women to pose provocatively extended beyond the Manions. Multiple women described close associates of the family who introduced them to J.M. and encouraged them to do whatever he asked, saying that it would launch their careers from amateur status to professionals. Earning a coveted pro card could make bodybuilding less of an expensive hobby and more of an income-generating career.
The women said the network of enablers allowed sexual harassment to thrive in plain sight. They described judges and promoters requesting private visits to their hotel rooms and sponsors making sexual passes.
When Gates traveled to Los Angeles in 2009 to promote a supplements company, the owner, Moe Elmoussawi, asked her to stay with him. She called J.M. to ask how to handle the request since she did not feel comfortable. J.M. told her she risked making the sponsor “angry.” She booked her own hotel.
On a trip to New Zealand, Gates said Elmoussawi made an “aggressive” pass at her while the two were traveling together. She bolted from his truck to escape, she said, and shortly afterward recounted the story to her then-partner, whom she has since married, and a coach. The Post confirmed that account with both of them.
Reached for comment in New Zealand, Elmoussawi denied any impropriety.
“I honestly can’t believe that she would say anything negative about me,” he texted The Post. “I have always treated her with ultimate respect and when she came to NZ she met with my wife and kids.”
Henderson, the former sheriff’s deputy, heard about J.M.’s success as a manager from Tuman, whom she met through a trainer at her gym. Tuman assured her that if she signed with J.M. and did the photo shoots, she said, she would win her pro card.
Henderson recalled that in about 2005, the day before her first competition, Tuman told her to visit his hotel room to learn how to pose.
“I was a little nervous to meet anybody in their hotel room by myself,” she said. “I was a cop at this time, so I did have a little bit of a clue that maybe going to someone’s room, a male that I just met, would not be a good idea.”
Her husband and young son tagged along. Tuman was clearly surprised when he opened the door, she said.
“The look on his face, it was kind of like, ‘Oh, you brought your husband and your son,’ ” she said. “It was kind of like, ‘Oh, I didn’t expect that.’ ”
Bodybuilder Mandy Henderson. (Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post)
“The look on his face, it was kind of like, ‘Oh, you brought your husband and your son. It was kind of like, ‘Oh, I didn’t expect that.’ ”— Mandy Henderson
Tuman also served as the competition’s head judge. She placed poorly, and Henderson said that Tuman then suggested she meet J.M. for career guidance.
Over the next two years, despite posing for J.M. in a bikini photo shoot, Henderson continued to struggle in competitions. She said Tuman assured her that doing more photo shoots and signing with J.M. would result in a pro card. In an email to J.M., which Henderson shared with The Post, she wrote that she had no issue with nudity and was eager to take photos. J.M. sent her a contract with her name filled in, promising a 50-50 profit split for websites that involved “Playboy-style” photos. Henderson recalls signing it and faxing it back, although the emails do not confirm that the agreement was ever finalized.
Her first nude photo shoot occurred in a Las Vegas hotel room with two other women during a competition weekend. She said J.M. took the photos while Tuman directed the women.
In one photo, Henderson appears nude with the other athletes, according to archived website images. In another photo, the three women pose in bed together, wearing high heels and red lingerie.
“It was, you know, John saying, ‘Okay, take off your tops’ and ‘Okay, you tug on that’ and ‘You guys pretend to look at each other and pretend to kiss’ or ‘Do this’ or ‘You turn around and stick out your butts.’ And you know, we’re fully naked,” she said. “I just remember thinking to myself, ‘Okay, this is all worth it.’ … I was now doing this shoot and I was going to get my pro card, and then I was going to go and be this big, famous fitness girl.”
During the shoot, she said, Tuman approached her from behind. “He put his arms, his hands, on my shoulders, and he put his groin against my rear end,” she said. He told her that she looked “really, really good” and that the photo shoot looked “really hot.”
She laughed it off but felt deeply uncomfortable. “It was absolutely disgusting,” she said.
Reached last week by The Post, Tuman said, “I don’t know what you are talking about. I’m a married man. I’m a family man. I have no idea what you are talking about.”
Asked whether he wanted to hear about specific allegations, Tuman said: “No, I don’t. Because it’s all lies.”
Henderson posed nude for at least one other group photo shoot. Her husband, Kenneth Henderson, said in a phone interview that his wife frequently confided in him about what was happening.
“There was a normalcy,” he said. “It wasn’t like you said no. I never heard of someone saying no.”
At a 2009 national competition, Henderson placed fourth. She was livid that her pro card status remained elusive despite agreeing to nude photography. Once offstage, she confronted Tuman, saying: “What the f---? Why didn’t I get my pro card?”
When he told her she hadn’t visited him the night before, she grew even angrier.
Henderson raised her voice and asked, “So you’re saying that because I didn’t go to your room and give you a blow job or f--- you, I didn’t get my pro card today?”
Tuman told her that she had misunderstood his comment, she said.
In 2010, Henderson placed first in the USA Championships, an NPC competition, and finally earned her pro card. Then she quit the sport.
“It was not the best person onstage that was winning,” she said. “It was the person that was J.M.’s favorite or whoever was doing the most for J.M. and whoever would bring in the most money.”
Henderson’s law enforcement career later ended in scandal after she was accused of faking an injury and improperly collecting workers’ compensation benefits. In 2019, she pleaded no contest to a felony count of making a false or fraudulent claim or statement and was sentenced to six months of house arrest. After successfully completing probation, Henderson’s record was expunged, according to county court records.
Contestants warm up before taking the stage at the 2022 IFBB Miami Grand Prix. The Post attended the event, but did not interview these women on the allegations of sexual exploitation in the sport. (Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post)
She has returned to the sport, competing in the Manions’ IFBB Pro masters’ bikini division for athletes over 40. She said that this time, her eyes are open.
“It still is a toxic environment. It hasn’t changed much,” she said. “I am truly competing for myself.”
Team Bombshell
Thompson, a former senior judge on the bodybuilding circuit, admits to witnessing inappropriate behavior and engaging in it himself — sins, he said, that he acknowledged only after finding religion.
In 2005, during his first judging experience, he got a quick education in the power that judges hold over athletes. While in his hotel room, Thompson said, he got a call from Shannon Dey, who alongside her then-husband, Rosetti, led a Florida-based group of competitors called Team Bombshell.
Dey told him that she wanted to send a woman to his room to make sure that she looked ready for the next day’s competition. “I’m like, ‘Yeah, okay, that’s great,’ ” Thompson said. “Like, I don’t even know what judges do at this point.” Then, he said, the woman walked into his room, dropped her robe and was naked underneath. He said she began to spin around and asked him, “Is there anything that I might do to make your life a little easier today?” Thompson sheepishly said no. Later that evening, he said that Tuman, the show promoter, quipped: “I heard you didn’t partake of the fruit.”
A spokesman for Team Bombshell, Art Sims, said that they had no “official comment.”
After that, Thompson said his life “spun out,” and he had frequent sexual encounters with competitors. In 2015, Thompson fell out publicly with the Manions after a legal dispute over the future of the organization, in which he tried to establish a rival bodybuilding federation.
Several of the women who posed nude described being recruited by Bombshell’s Dey and Rosetti. The couple have since divorced, but Dey continues to run Bombshell.
One woman, a former Bombshell team member who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of privacy concerns, shared emails from Dey that instructed her top athletes on how to keep J.M. happy during photo shoots.
Contestants in the women’s fit model category at the 2022 IFBB Miami Grand Prix. The Post attended the event, but did not interview these women on the allegations of sexual exploitation in the sport. (Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post)
“This is a once in a lifetime opportunity to shoot with the Man who made the careers of some of the greatest IFBB Pro’s,” Dey wrote in April 2009. “I can not stress enough how fortunate we are to have been chosen.”
The email included numbered rules for the shoot at Manion’s studio in Pittsburgh. “No full bottom suits. Brazillian and thong bottoms only,” Dey wrote. “ABSOLUTELY NO COMPLAINING. If it’s cold you don’t act cold, if it’s hot don’t act hot, hungry don’t say a word, etc.”
She added that no boyfriends or husbands could attend.
The Bombshell team member said she attended a photo shoot in a hotel room with J.M., another female competitor and edible props, including whipped cream and chocolate. J.M. photographed the scene.
“I kind of felt like this is the game and you’ve got to play along because this is the son of the head of the sport,” she said.
A second Bombshell member who spoke on condition of anonymity to protect her privacy recalled that she had repeatedly made it clear to both Rosetti and J.M. that she would pose topless but would never agree to full nudity.
At a national competition roughly a decade ago, J.M. requested that she attend a photo shoot involving two other women.
“I hear J.M. call my name, and I’m thinking he needs me to hold a reflector or a light or something,” she said. She rounded the corner in the hotel and saw J.M. standing near a bathroom and Rosetti sitting on a love seat. “I’m like, ‘Hey, yeah, what do you need?” she recalled. J.M. nodded toward the two women, who were naked in the shower.
“And he says, ‘Get in.’ And I’m like, ‘What?’ ” she said. “And he says, ‘Get in with them.’ ”
She looked to Rosetti for help, she said, because he also knew her objections to fully nude photographs. But he did not intervene. “You pulled the rug out from under me and set me up,” she thought.
The woman said she viewed noncompliance as “career suicide.” She undressed and stood in the corner of the shower, as far away as possible from the other two women.
When it was over, she went back to her hotel room, sick to her stomach.
Rosetti told The Post that at the shoots he attended the women signed a release form before the shoots and were “well aware days in advance” that they “were ‘glamour’ fitness photography sessions,” he said in a text message.
“What the athletes brought to the shoots was their decision. Outfits were not provided by anyone. If they wished to be photographed in swim suits, lingerie, implied nude or nude, it was done completely on the athlete’s own free will.”
“I kind of felt like this is the game and you’ve got to play along because this is the son of the head of the sport.”— Former Bombshell team member
‘Blacklisted’
Many of the women interviewed said that saying no to the Manions had its price. Ava Cowan, who competed professionally in the figure category, said J.M. attempted to sign her in the mid-2000s after she showed early promise. But a friend who was a lawyer reviewed the contract, telling Cowan she would be “out of your mind” to sign.
“He will own you,” the friend warned. After she “blew off” J.M.’s proposed contract, Cowan said, she placed poorly in a national show. Frustrated, she took to an online bodybuilding forum to voice her objections over the family’s outsize influence.
“I posted a paragraph about how corrupt everything was, how you have to sign a contract to place well, how it’s like the mafia,” she said. Less than an hour later, she deleted the post.
“But the damage was done,” she said, noting that she soon heard her remarks had gotten back to the Manions. Cowan said she was “blacklisted” for four years as she struggled to make any income.
Ava Cowan at the 2015 Arnold Sports Festival in Columbus. (Frank Jansky/AP)
“I wouldn’t do nudity. I don’t judge it, but what I do judge is when you feel like you have to do it to place well.”— Ava Cowan
“You can never come back. Even if you’re back, you’re ostracized forever,” she said. “I was just kind of drug through the mud eternally.”
After a potential sponsor said he did not want to upset the Manions by signing her, she said she was able to salvage the deal by apologizing to the family for her remarks.
Cowan also agreed to pose for J.M. in lingerie. “I wouldn’t do nudity,” she said. “I don’t judge it, but what I do judge is when you feel like you have to do it to place well.”
In 2011, she finished No. 3 in the figure category at both the Arnold Classic and Olympia competitions. Later, in a final attempt to reach the top, she said she signed with J.M. Her career fizzled soon after, she said, when she suffered a neck injury during a backstage accident.
Garcia, the bikini competitor who said she refused sexual advances, said that crossing J.M. could quickly kill a career. When her son had just turned 1 and was still breastfeeding, she entered her first bodybuilding contest. Her coach advised her to try to sign with J.M.’s Fitness Management Group. “The girls on that team, they usually place better,” Garcia said. “People know who they are.”
At the next show, she asked J.M. for a chance. Soon, she had a contract, a pro card and an invitation to Pittsburgh for a bikini shoot in his studio. She was short on money and caring for her baby but did not hesitate to make the four-hour drive from D.C.
J.M. began setting her competitive schedule, and Garcia started to do well. At a show in Orlando in April 2013, she placed third behind two of his athletes who would later win the Olympia. The following day, she was invited to a hotel pool for a photo shoot with a male competitor.
While J.M. shot still photographs, a videographer filmed the scene under a pool waterfall with Garcia in a thong bikini and the male bodybuilder in tight shorts.
“I want the models to be themselves and loosen up,” J.M. says in the video.
At one point, Garcia bent forward laughing, while the man put his hand on her back. She says that the video was edited to make it look like the two were having sex.
Videographer John Hawley, in a text message to a Post reporter, said he edited the film to emphasize the look J.M. “appeared to be going for."
Garcia says she now cringes at the footage, particularly the flattery she directed toward J.M. At the time, she called the photos “hot” and said she was happy. “I’m pretty sure that I was just lying out of my face,” she now says.
J.M. soon approached her about shooting nude for “a website where the athletes make money.” He pulled out his phone, she said, and showed off some website photos: two athletes she knew, both naked and making out in a shower.
“I started to make the connections,” she said, recognizing some of the women who had bested her in recent competitions. “I was like, ‘Oh, my goodness.’ ”
Garcia said she viewed her contract termination as a direct result of refusing to take nude photographs. (Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post)
Garcia explained to J.M. that she drew the line at bikini shots. She had a young son and couldn’t imagine having nude photos online that he might someday find.
Not long afterward, a letter from J.M. arrived in the mail.
“At this time since we have nothing in the foreseeable horizon for you in terms of paid work we are officially terminating your Bikini-Fitness-Figure Competitor/Model Contract with Fitness Management Group,” read the letter Garcia shared with The Post.
Garcia said she viewed the termination as a direct result of refusing to take nude photographs. In the years since, she has struggled to maintain steady employment, survived a major car accident and experienced bouts of homelessness.
To Gates, the demands on female athletes were bad enough, but the bikini division horrified her. After she left the sport, women came to her and asked her to coach them so they could compete in the bikini contests for the NPC and potentially the Olympia.
Gates had never seen a bikini show.
“And then I started watching it online and like, there is no way I am going to work with a girl and tell her how to turn around and poke her ass out,” Gates said. “I just morally, I can’t do it.”
“I feel like it got a lot worse after I got out, which is kind of like a godsend for me — that I did get out.”
Photography by Marvin Joseph. Photo editing by Robert Miller. Illustration by Tim McDonagh.
Additional reporting by Jenn Abelson, Alice Crites, Nick Trombola, Kimberly Winston, Angela Hill and Whitney Shefte. Copy editing by Mike Cirelli and Wayne Lockwood.
Additional editing, video, production and support by Jeff Leen, Monika Mathur, John Sullivan, Jordan Melendrez and Jenna Lief.
By Amy Brittain
Amy Brittain is a reporter for The Washington Post's investigative team. Her coverage has focused on sexual harassment and criminal justice issues. She was a part of the team that won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for coverage of police shootings. Her investigative podcast, Canary, won the 2021 Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award & Edward R. Murrow Award. Twitter Twitter
Alice Li is a national visual journalist for The Washington Post, with a focus on stories out West. Twitter Twitter | 2022-10-25T10:30:35Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Female bodybuilders describe widespread sexual exploitation - Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/interactive/2022/women-bodybuilding-ifbb-pro-porn/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/interactive/2022/women-bodybuilding-ifbb-pro-porn/ |
Two senior attorneys drew attention to a program leveling massive, unprecedented fees on poor and elderly people.
Deborah Shaw and Joscelyn Funnié, senior officials in the Social Security Administration's watchdog division, say they have faced sustained retaliation since they came forward with concerns that the office was issuing massive penalties to poor claimants on disability benefits in violation of federal regulations (Sarah Silbiger for The Washington Post)
Two senior Social Security officials who exposed massive, unprecedented fines imposed on disabled and poor elderly people — prompting multiple inquiries and halting the practice — now say they’ve faced ongoing backlash from their supervisors for speaking out.
Joscelyn Funnié and Deborah Shaw, veteran attorneys in the Social Security Administration’s inspector general’s office, were removed from their jobs and placed on paid leave after expressing concerns about the fines, then eventually reinstated.
How a Social Security program piled huge fines on the poor and disabled
“I have literally begged for meaningful, senior-executive-level work,” Funnié wrote in an email to The Washington Post. “My pleas for meaningful work continue to fall on deaf ears, and I have no seat at the table with the Inspector General or her senior staff. They pretend I don’t exist, hoping that eventually I will exhaust my emotional and financial resources and walk away.”
Their colleagues and experts on whistleblowers describe the treatment described by the attorneys as significant evidence of retaliation in a case that’s generated national headlines and is the focus of three ongoing probes.
“They’re all common tactics and they’re all illegal,” said Tom Devine, legal director of the Government Accountability Project, a nonprofit group that represents whistleblowers in Washington.
Rebecca Rose, a spokeswoman for Ennis, declined to comment on a detailed list of allegations from the whistleblowers, writing in an email that “we are unable to comment on personnel matters.”
Funnié learned that the program in 2018 began levying fines that reached hundreds of thousands of dollars against more than 100 people. The penalties were issued without due process and disregarded federal regulations, as The Post reported, deviating from how the government had recovered money since the program’s inception in 1995. Attorneys were directed to stop taking into account claimants’ financial state, their age, their intentions and level of remorse, among other factors. One of those attorneys was Shaw, who, like Funnié, has spent her career at Social Security.
After Funnié and Shaw repeatedly pressed Ennis and her deputies to have the cases reexamined and the penalties lowered — and were told no changes were planned — they were escorted out of the inspector general’s headquarters in Woodlawn, Md., in September 2019 and placed on paid leave.
Following The Post’s reporting in May, the acting Social Security commissioner opened an investigation into Ennis’s oversight of the anti-fraud program. Two other inquiries into her conduct were launched, including one by the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency. The Office of Special Counsel, an independent office that protects federal employees and whistleblowers, also is investigating, according to Funnié and her attorney, who said they met with the special counsel investigator last week. (The special counsel’s office declined to confirm whether an investigation is open, citing agency policy). The civil penalty program was suspended amid mounting political pressure from Congress and the White House.
With her legal bills soaring and on the brink of bankruptcy, Funnié settled with Ennis’s office and returned to work last December as a special adviser. She kept her senior executive role making $185,000 a year, but with no staff.
For the first six weeks she was back on the job, her only assignment was to read two books on resilience and spirituality, she said. Her latest assignment, she said, is evaluating the department’s administrative functions — a task requiring auditing skills she doesn’t have. Her supervisor directed her in writing to seek his permission before speaking with colleagues to complete her assignments, she said.
Funnié was not given a performance plan — a key foundation of year-end appraisals and pay decisions — for more than seven months after repeated requests, she said; the plan she eventually received was not based on senior executive-level work.
Funnié’s supervisor at one point told her to join a committee redesigning a logo, emails show — a role for which she was turned down because she lacked the necessary skills.
“I am merely requesting the opportunity to work for the salary I am earning, at an SES level, free of interference, hostility, and retaliation,” she wrote in an email in September to Ennis and her deputies that detailed her claims she was sidelined. Funnié said she did not receive a response.
Shaw returned to work in early 2020 after four months. She, too, appealed the agency’s action to the Merit Systems Protection Board. She was demoted from a supervisory GS-15, the highest pay grade on the scale that sets salaries for civilian federal employees, lost the staff she supervised, and continued to face a 45-day unpaid suspension the inspector general’s office had proposed when she was marched out of headquarters.
In May, an administrative law judge ruled that Shaw had been the victim of “whistleblower reprisal” by Ennis’s office. Judge Craig A. Berg found “significant evidence” that Ennis and her top staff “had motive to retaliate” against Shaw as she became a “vocal advocate” to reopen close to 100 cases whose penalties she found unconscionable. The judge ordered Ennis’s office to give her back pay, return her to her supervisory role and remove potential for a suspension.
Ennis’s staff has appealed the ruling to the three-member board of the merit systems office, effectively putting the judge’s order on hold, with the exception that Shaw was returned to her GS-15 rank. Ennis’s chief counsel, Michelle Murray — one of the management officials the judge found had retaliated against Shaw — wrote and signed the appeal and is now her second-line supervisor, controlling her work assignments, requests for training and other aspects of her job, according to Shaw.
Murray also serves as coordinator of Social Security’s whistleblower protection program, according to the inspector general’s website. Murray declined to comment for this story.
She said she continues to be denied assignments in her area of expertise, anti-fraud investigations. This summer, emails show, she was directed to write a legal opinion on the soundness of starting a book club to improve morale on Ennis’s staff. (Ennis’s office came in last of 432 federal departments in the most recent survey of the Best Places to Work in the Federal Government.)
Shaw also was reprimanded for helping colleagues who asked for advice on a fraud case — then scolded for sending two emails after duty hours in response to her supervisors at 6:28 p.m. and 6:51 p.m., emails show.
“I continue to be marginalized and left out of the loop on work being done in my component,” Shaw wrote in an email to The Post. “Perhaps worst of all, my experience has become a cautionary tale for those who might otherwise speak about mismanagement, abuse of discretion and all sorts of serious wrongdoing within the [inspector general’s] office.”
The Senate finally confirmed a governing board at the merit systems office this spring after five years without a quorum, and thousands of appeals like Shaw’s are still pending.
“Winning an administrative judge ruling is just a placeholder,” Devine said. “If an agency appeals, the employee is left twisting in the wind until a decision by the full board, which with the current backlog can take years.” | 2022-10-25T10:43:12Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Social Security whistleblowers say they are sidelined for exposing fines on poor, elderly - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/21/social-security-whistleblowers-fines/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/21/social-security-whistleblowers-fines/ |
It is unclear whether the flood of poll watchers and workers that the former president’s allies have sought will materialize
Rosalind S. Helderman
Voters cast their ballot at a polling station during the Wisconsin primary Election Day at Riverside University High School on Aug. 9 in Milwaukee. (Joshua Lott/The Washington Post)
RACINE, Wis. — The Republican National Committee and its allies say they have staged thousands of training sessions around the country on how to monitor voting and lodge complaints about next month’s midterm elections. In Pennsylvania, party officials have boasted about swelling the ranks of poll watchers to six times the total from 2020. In Michigan, a right-wing group announced it had launched “Operation Overwatch” to hunt down election-related malfeasance, issuing a press release that repeated the warning “We are watching” 10 times.
“We’re going to be there and enforce those rules, and we’ll challenge any vote, any ballot, and you’re going to have to live with it, OK?” one-time Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon said on a recent episode of his podcast. “We don’t care if you don’t like it. We don’t care if you’re going to run around and light your hair on fire. That’s the way this is going to roll.”
But the appeal from GOP figures who deny the results of the last presidential vote has created a dilemma for election officials, who rely on ordinary citizens to do the grunt work of democracy — checking in voters, for instance, or opening absentee ballots — but now fear some of those who show up could become agents of disruption.
“The problems don’t need to be in a thousand polling places,” said David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research in Washington, D.C. “If there’s a violent incident in one polling place, that’s enough, because the election deniers have been pouring gasoline all over the country, and it just takes one match.”
In Michigan, where one of the state’s most populous counties — Macomb — was recently revealed to have hired an outspoken election denier to help recruit poll workers, the state’s top elections official said she was taking precautions. Even before the hiring became public, Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson (D) said she had made arrangements with law enforcement to ensure police can get to polling places within minutes if anything goes wrong.
“We know there’s certainly more activity this year than we saw in 2020 to place people either as observers, challengers or poll workers who have been trained through misinformation and potentially having been told to disrupt the process,” Benson said. “So we’re preparing for that.”
Benson’s office this summer distributed a new “poll worker code of conduct.” The voluntary 11-point pledge includes a promise to “not harass, threaten, retaliate against or disparage” fellow election officials and to not share insider information with people who are not authorized to receive it.
A Michigan organization led by purveyors of false fraud theories issued its own pledge last month, vowing to surveil drop boxes, recruit poll workers and scrutinize employees at nursing homes who could attempt to “take advantage of elderly residents and usurp their votes.”
“If you are someone who seeks to cast a vote illegally, we are watching,” the Michigan Grassroots Alliance announced, dubbing its work “Operation Overwatch.”
Since Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election, which culminated with the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, election officials have been bombarded with threats and accusations that they cannot be trusted to impartially oversee the vote. Bannon and others say that only by mobilizing pro-Trump volunteers can they be sure that the process is not marred by cheating.
“I think what you’re setting up for is Republicans to say our people were excluded [as poll watchers], ballots were counted that shouldn’t have been counted, challenges were not acknowledged that should have been acknowledged,” Democratic election attorney Marc Elias said.
The high tempo and intensity of Republican recruitment efforts have been readily apparent — especially compared with previous election cycles. The party this year has dedicated millions of dollars to the effort.
Right-leaning election activists focused on the largest cities of Pennsylvania, for instance, in arguing — without evidence — that the 2020 vote was marred by cheating. This month, the RNC’s director of election integrity, Andrea Raffle, told trainees that the party had recruited 6,000 poll watchers in the state, up from 1,000 in 2020, according to Reuters.
In a tweet, Joseph Flynn — brother to former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn, a prominent promoter of false claims about the 2020 election — touted the increase in Pennsylvania, which has critical races this year for governor and U.S. Senate. “They won’t be able to steal this election the same way they stole 2020!” he wrote.
But a Pennsylvania state law requires poll watchers to be registered voters in the communities where they show up to observe. Lisa M. Deeley (D), the chairwoman of the city commissioners for Philadelphia — a frequent target of false allegations of fraud in the 2020 election — said the law prevents outsiders from flooding city voting sites or counting facilities.
She acknowledged “huge concern nationwide” over the issue but said, “we don’t anticipate those kinds of issues” locally.
“They’re not busing people in here to do this,” she said. “There’s nowhere for them to go. They can’t wreak that kind of havoc because they’re not allowed to fill those roles.”
Around the country, state chapters of the Republican Party and self-described patriot groups — fueled by Trump’s false claims about elections — have sought volunteers and trained them how to document what they see at the polls.
In Racine, Wis., a group of conservative activists recently held their regular meeting in the back of an Italian-themed bar festooned with small American flags to discuss the upcoming election. They talked up the need to recruit 150 poll watchers to cover 12 precincts — and to help build a case for a potential legal challenge.
“Our activities and our roles are designed to capture information that we can pass along to law enforcement, to lawyers contemporaneously so that we have some kind of chance of getting a certification challenge going timely if we need to,” Carol Vaclavicek, campaign treasurer to a state Assembly candidate, told the group.
“Everybody familiar with what Steve Bannon said about what happened on November 3rd, 2020?” she asked. “He said, ‘We won, but we failed to close the deal.’”
“It’s just like parents realizing they’ve got to go to the school boards,” Mitchell, who advised Trump as he sought to overturn the 2020 election, said in a recent podcast. “Citizens have got to go to the election offices. We need people being a presence in the election offices.”
“We just want to make sure we have more eyes out there,” said Paul Farrow, the chairman of the Wisconsin Republican Party. “When I look at 2020, the biggest challenge I think we had under a pandemic was we didn’t have enough people seeing what was happening. Now we do.”
In Maricopa County, Ariz., the RNC brought litigation this month over an alleged partisan imbalance among poll workers — to the consternation of county officials who said they had been evenhanded in offering members of both parties opportunities to serve.
Emails released under the state’s public records law show county officials routinely contacted Republicans who said they wanted to work at the polls only to find that many of them would not take shifts.
Candi Boyer had worked alongside Democrats for 15 elections in El Paso County, the state’s most populous county and home to Colorado Springs. Her tasks included methodically flattening mail-in ballots so they could be read by voting tabulators.
“I always say, it’s boring — very boring,” said Boyer, 67. “However, it’s vital to the process. And that’s why I do it.”
In September, Boyer — who has supported Republicans for office since she turned 18 and voted for Trump in 2020 — lost her position after tangling with the local GOP chairwoman and making clear she believes local elections are handled with integrity.
The chairwoman, Vickie Tonkins, has promoted the false theory that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump — including by speaking alongside a group of prominent election deniers at an “emergency meeting” in March following the arrest of a Colorado clerk who is accused of orchestrating the copying of voting machine hard drives in an effort to prove fraud. In addition to Boyer, she revoked the appointments of two other Republican poll workers.
“We haven’t jumped on her election denier bandwagon,” said Brenda Conrad, another of the Republicans who saw her position rescinded.
Tonkins cited a Colorado law that allows the local party chair to withdraw election judge appointments if she deems the appointees to not “faithfully or fairly represent the party.” In a Sept. 22 email to County Clerk Chuck Broerman, she said she believed they “no longer represent the El Paso County Republican Party and my Administration.”
In a statement to The Washington Post, Tonkins stood by her decision, saying, “I am doing my job as the El Paso County Chair. People do not always like the decisions that leaders have to make for the betterment of the whole.”
Broerman, a one-time chairman of the local GOP, said the instruction felt “not fair and not right,” but he followed state law and removed the workers. Under another provision of state law, Broerman rehired Boyer and the others to fill vacancies. The openings occurred because the Republican Party had not nominated enough workers to fill those jobs. As a result, Boyer and Conrad will serve alongside other Republicans appointed by the party.
During the 2020 election — held amid the coronavirus pandemic — many jurisdictions struggled to find poll workers, whether Republican, Democratic or independent. Difficulties finding poll workers continue in some areas, as a group of Democratic senators noted last week in a letter to the federal Election Assistance Commission.
Michael Siegrist, the clerk of Canton Township outside of Detroit, said he has seen a drop in the number of poll workers — particularly among Republicans — since 2020. He said that the shortfall had left him and other local officials scrambling to fill positions for poll workers, known as inspectors in Michigan.
“Our percentage of Republicans participating as inspectors dropped in 2022,” Siegrist said. “Inspectors are a dying breed.” | 2022-10-25T10:43:24Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Trump supporters say they're training poll watchers to spot fraud - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/25/pro-trump-republicans-court-election-volunteers-challenge-any-vote/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/25/pro-trump-republicans-court-election-volunteers-challenge-any-vote/ |
LAS VEGAS — The midday sun beats down on Elsa Roldan and Alma Lozoya as they begin another day of canvassing in a predominantly Latino neighborhood of stucco homes with tile roofs and rocks for landscaping.
Roldan, 61, is a housekeeper at the Bellagio hotel and casino, a job she’s held for 14 years. Lozoya, 33, is employed as a porter at Caesars Palace after losing her job at another casino early in the pandemic. They are on leave from their jobs, now being paid by the Culinary Workers Union, Local 226, to go door-to-door mobilizing voters ahead of the November elections.
The neighborhood is a mix of homeowners and renters, many of whom have experienced rent increases. At the first four homes they knock on, no one answers. At the fifth, a man opens the door but is not receptive to their appeals. At the sixth, a woman appears at the door. Roldan and Lozoya offer campaign fliers and ask whether the woman would also sign a statement calling for rent stabilization regulations. “Is this a Democratic issue?” the woman responds. “I’m a Republican. No, thanks.”
At the next six houses, there is no response. Then, at the seventh, a young man answers the door. “I usually vote late,” he says, meaning on Election Day, Nov. 8. Roldan and Lozoya are buoyed by the response. They turn around and keep canvassing. At yet another house, a young woman answers the door. She says she is on the phone with her boss and in a hurry. She said her rent has increased, takes their literature and reassures them she will be with them in November. “I’ll vote,” she says before closing the door.
This is the state of play in the final weeks of Election 2022 as Democrats and Republicans compete for the votes of Latinos in battleground Nevada. The scene is reminiscent of the trench warfare playing out in swing-state neighborhoods across the country. In no recent election have the votes of Latinos been so closely monitored or perhaps so fiercely fought over.
[Women powered Democrats in the 2018 midterms. Will they again in 2022?]
By the end of a typical shift, Roldan and Lozoya will have knocked on roughly 120 doors, but rarely does an interaction translate into immediate, hard-and-fast support, which keeps open the questions of just who will show up to vote and for whom.
“There’s a lot of people who are getting evicted due to high rent that they can’t afford.”
Alma Lozoya, 33
Culinary Workers Union Local 226 members Elsa Roldan and Alma Lozoya speak to a Nevada voter as they canvass tough residential neighborhoods in Las Vegas last month.
Here in Nevada, Democrats are worried about losing the Senate seat held by Catherine Cortez Masto, a Latina completing her first term. She and former state attorney general Adam Laxalt (R) are in a toss-up contest. A Laxalt victory could tip the Senate to GOP control. Democrats are also nervous about the governor’s race, which pits Democratic incumbent Steve Sisolak against Republican Joe Lombardo, the sheriff of Clark County, which encompasses Las Vegas. In addition, three House seats currently held by Democrats are seen as competitive.
The Latino electorate nationally is made up of diverse communities, shaped by different backgrounds and motivated by divergent issues in each region. Beyond Nevada, Latino turnout next month — and the margins by which these voters split their support between Democrats and Republicans — will help to decide the outcome of Senate, House and governors’ races in Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, New Mexico, Oregon, Pennsylvania and Texas.
In Nevada, Democrats have depended on the votes of Latinos in closely fought elections. In 2016, they favored Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump by 60 percent to 29 percent, helping Clinton win the state by two percentage points overall, according to exit polls. In 2020, that margin shrank to 61 percent to 35 percent, as Joe Biden also won by two points.
This year Democrats in Nevada are especially worried, both about their margins and assuring a hefty turnout among Latino voters sympathetic to their candidates. They say the current political climate is as challenging as they have seen it in years. Economic issues are paramount. Nevada has struggled to rebound fully from massive job losses in the hospitality industry triggered by pandemic shutdowns, and now high prices for gasoline, groceries and housing are being felt acutely among Latinos and others.
“We’re going to have to knock on more doors than we’ve ever knocked on ever and we’re going to have to talk to more people,” said Ted Pappageorge, 61, secretary-treasurer of Local 226. “If we’re not out there, I’m just going to say this, then we think Democrats lose — and they lose in Nevada and they’ll lose in Arizona and they’ll lose in Pennsylvania.”
Latinos are one of several groups whose votes will be pivotal this November as Democrats seek to reassemble their past winning coalition to avoid major losses. Other groups include White women, both those with college degrees (who have trended Democratic) and those without (who have trended Republican). Black voters , both men and women; and voters under age 45. They all can be called “the deciders,” the focus of a Washington Post series this fall.
Four years ago, when Democrats captured the House, about 2 in 3 Latinos supported Democratic candidates. Democrats appear to be struggling this fall to replicate both that margin and the size of Latino turnout.
“If we don’t go Democratic, we are at risk to lose our rights, things we have been fighting for, for a long, long time.”
Elsa Roldan, 61
Culinary Workers Union Local 226 members Elsa Roldan and Alma Lozoya walk through a residential neighborhood in Las Vegas.
For Democrats, knocking doors has historically been a key weapon in mobilizing Latino voters. In addition to the Culinary Workers, other pro-Democratic groups are canvassing in Nevada, from what remains of the powerful political machine built by Sen. Harry M. Reid under the name Nevada Democratic Victory to several Latino-focused political operations. The question this fall is whether the canvassing will drive high enough turnout among Democratic sympathizers to overcome worries about inflation and other concerns.
That leaves much in the hands of workers like Roldan and Lozoya. Laboring under the broiling sun, they wait in vestibules that are often the only shade they can find. The work is tiring and often frustrating.
The hardest part, Roldan said, is the heat, which reached triple digits during the height of the summer. The heat, she said, “and the dogs,” which can be a frightening presence at people’s doors. Despite the physical hardship, the women say the work is as rewarding as it is valuable. “I feel very satisfied,” Roldan said, “because I never thought this would fulfill my soul, my spirit.”
Roldan said the election is important because, “if we don’t go Democratic, we are at risk to lose our rights, things we have been fighting for, for a long, long time,” specifically noting abortion rights. “In the blink of an eye, things can turn different.”
Across the street from Culinary Workers Union Local 226, a resident feeds street cats outside her apartment a couple of blocks from the Las Vegas Strip.
Latinos are the largest minority group in the country and make up nearly a fifth of the U.S. population. That includes those who are not citizens. The Latino population is roughly triple the size of the Asian American community and about 50 percent larger than the Black population. Among those who are 18 or older and eligible to vote, Latinos now slightly outnumber Black Americans, but they vote in lower numbers and therefore account for a slightly smaller share of the electorate than Black voters.
All this makes Latinos one of the most important constituencies in American politics. But the Latino vote defies easy categorization or simple description because it is demographically and geographically diverse. What might appeal to Latinos in one part of the country does not work in another. What motivates Cuban Americans — for years it was staunch anticommunism — does not necessarily win over Mexican Americans.
In California, Texas and states across the Southwest, Mexican Americans dominate the Latino population. Florida is a mix of Cuban Americans, Puerto Ricans and, increasingly, immigrants from Central American countries like Venezuela. In the past, Mexican Americans in Texas were more receptive to Republican appeals than those in California, in part due to the age of the population and the period of time families had been in the United States.
As with many voters overall, Latinos are especially sensitive to economic conditions, and in Nevada this fall that puts an obstacle in the path of the Democrats. Economic issues are paramount due to the combination of the rising costs for essentials like food, gasoline and housing and the aftereffects of pandemic shutdowns that hit Latino families especially hard. Other issues are in the mix, including abortion, but Democrats say the battle here is being waged on an economic landscape.
Mirian Cervantes, who is part of the Culinary Workers union organizing team, underscored how critical every vote could be in November, given how tight the polls show the race for the Senate here. “You don’t want to lose any door,” she said.
Some Democrats have assumed that Latino voters can be swayed on the issue of immigration, but that is not always the case. On that issue, these voters have varying views. More than 8 in 10 back a path to citizenship for those who are in the United States without legal documentation, while 6 in 10 say they support more funding for border security, according to a recent Washington Post-Ipsos poll of Latinos. When asked which party they trust to deal with immigration, 38 percent say Democrats, 31 percent say Republicans and 30 percent say neither.
Republicans long have argued that their party is a natural home for many Latino voters, based on values of patriotism, family, community and faith. But only in a few cases were they able to win even a significant minority of those votes in presidential elections. The best performance came in 2004, when President George W. Bush won at least 40 percent of the Hispanic vote nationally, according to an analysis by the Pew Research Center.
Bush’s success was attributed to his long cultivation of Hispanic voters when he served as governor of Texas. The GOP’s 2008 and 2012 nominees, John McCain and Mitt Romney, respectively, fell short of his performance. In 2016, Democrats saw in Trump an immigrant-bashing candidate who they believed could repel some of the Latino voters who had been voting Republican. Instead, Trump did about as well with Latinos as Romney in 2012, winning just under 30 percent of the vote.
Then came 2020 and the wake-up call. Amid a surge in turnout in the Latino community, President Trump’s share of the Latino vote jumped 10 percentage points, to 38 percent, according to a Pew Research analysis of voters. Other sources put the decline in the Democratic share between three and eight percentage points, depending on the source of the data.
People watch the fountain at the Bellagio Hotel and Casino.
In Nevada, Biden won the state over Trump by about 34,000 votes. Had Latino support for the Democratic ticket remained stable from 2016, he would have won by about 55,000 votes, according to a post-election analysis by Catalist, a Democratic data firm.
In South Texas, which has a large Latino population, GOP gains were especially striking. Trump won 47 percent of the vote in relatively small Starr County, up from 19 percent in 2016. In more populous Hidalgo County, the Democrats’ margin fell from 40 points in 2016 to 19 points in 2020.
Texas could be undergoing a true realignment, said Carlos Odio, co-founder and senior vice president at Equis Research. But an Equis report in late September noted that if Republicans want to claim a broader realignment, they will need to first demonstrate consistent gains in Nevada and Arizona.
The shifts in Florida in 2020 were undoubtedly significant, but analysts warn against extrapolating what happened there to the rest of the country because of the unique makeup of the Latino population there. But the shifts there, unless Democrats can reverse them, make the state more fertile ground for the GOP.
The 2020 results brought a new focus to the debate about whether the Latino vote is becoming much more of a swing vote than one solidly Democratic. Patrick Ruffini, a Republican pollster, said he believes that over time Latino voters could follow a pattern resembling that of some European immigrants from the last century. Those groups began as more staunchly Democratic but as they became more assimilated increasingly split their votes between the two parties.
“I think this is really part of a long arc of Hispanics kind of following in the footsteps of other immigrant groups that we’ve seen in the past,” he said. “Over generations, they start blending in.”
David Leal, a professor of government at the University of Texas at Austin, said Democrats may have been lulled into assuming that the burgeoning Latino population would forever accrue to their benefit politically.
“I think that there is this idea in many Democratic circles about how demography is destiny and demographic change is going to produce this electoral dividend,” he said. “It’s becoming a little more clear that this story is much more complicated than that.”
The GOP’s appeal
Realtor Iris Ramos Jones shows an apartment for sale in Henderson, Nev., a city near Las Vegas.
For some Latinos, the Republican Party has long been a comfortable home. Conversations with two Republican-leaning Latinas in Nevada offer insights into why.
Iris Ramos Jones, 37, came to the United States from Ecuador, nine years ago. Married and the mother of a young daughter, she works as a Realtor, is registered as a Republican and fears that the Democrats are taking the country in a socialist direction.
Valeria Gurr, 39, emigrated from Chile more than a decade ago. Married with a young son, she is active in the school choice movement through Federation for Children. She was once registered as a Democrat, switched to independent and now is a registered Republican. But she has no strong tie to either party; she said she votes on issues.
Jones embodies the story of many immigrants who have come to the United States over generations. When she arrived, she found herself in rural West Virginia, with only rudimentary English. She later moved with her then-husband, the father of her daughter, to Las Vegas, then went through a divorce, at which point she had no family to fall back on. With the encouragement of the man who would become her current husband, she decided to pursue the real estate business. Her husband works as a political consultant.
“I am living the American Dream,” she said. “I want my kid to understand that she must respect this country. ... She needs to respect everybody. She doesn’t have to agree or copy other people. Just respect everybody.”
Jones’s identification with the Republicans, she said, is based on values. “There are good things about both parties, but my personal values are more aligned with them. Family. Freedom. Hard work. I don’t need and I do not appreciate the government telling my kids what they should believe or not,” she said.
“My personal values are more aligned with them. Family. Freedom. Hard work.”
Iris Ramos Jones, 37
CLOCKWISE FROM ABOVE LEFT: Jones at an apartment in Henderson. Jones reading religious passages for kids from the Book of Mormon with her daughter. Jones listens to Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo, a Republican gubernatorial candidate, in Las Vegas.
Jones said Republicans are working harder to attract support from Latinos and sees the economy as an issue that could accelerate a shift. “Every time you go to the grocery store, you feel there has been a change,” she said. “Now every time you get gas, there has been a change.”
She worries about the direction of the country if Democrats remain in charge. “My country had been destroyed [by socialism],” Jones said, referring to her native Ecuador. “I know what socialism looks like. And it is very unfortunate that this is the path we are going in this country right now,” she said. “... I didn’t come here and sacrifice so much just for my child to have to live in the same type of country that I was born in.”
Gurr, meanwhile, is mostly a single-issue voter. For her, education is the key to almost everything and she believes Democrats have not paid enough attention to the needs of those in the Latino community. “I think Hispanics come to this country because … we see so much opportunity,” she said. “If you work hard and you try hard, you’re able to make it. But the promise of the American Dream, in my opinion, is broken without access to a quality education.”
Gurr said her mother was one of nine children and struggled to build a better life in Chile. “I came to the United States of America thinking only this is the greatest country in the world when it comes to education, but I realized that the education system was not different than in Chile,” she said. “And essentially, my community was left behind.”
She has lost faith in Democrats. “They basically told me that if they are supportive [of school choice], they cannot put their face to it because it will mean that they will lose their seat,” she said. “I basically realized it was about politics and not about kids. It was like a growing-up moment. It was like, ‘Oh, I’ve been very naive to think it’s about the kids.’”
To Gurr, the Republicans are far from perfect. “But I will say the Republicans have been more open here in this particular state to reach out to me and say, ‘Hey, Valeria, what do you think? How do we fix this?’ ”
She said she has voted “for all sides of the [political] spectrum” but will vote Republican in November. Does she see Latino voters as being more up for grabs? “I can only speak about me,” she said. “I know I am, for sure.”
This fall, she will vote Republican for both the Senate and governor.
“I will say the Republicans have been more open here in this particular state to reach out to me and say, ‘Hey, Valeria, what do you think? How do we fix this?’ ”
Valeria Gurr, 39
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: Educational choice advocate Valeria Gurr, director of external affairs for American Federation for Children, puts up Halloween decorations with her son at their home in Las Vegas. Gurr and her husband play with their son. Gurr was once a Democrat but is now a registered Republican.
Peter Guzmanis president and CEO of the Latin Chamber of Commerce in Las Vegas. What he sees is a Latino community still feeling the effects of the pandemic and thinking about its political options. “They are pausing, reflecting and paying attention,” he said.
He said that many Latino parents in Las Vegas are still upset over school closures. “I call them the Latino soccer moms,” he said. “They are pissed. They’ve been going along with the status quo for a long time, and now, you know, they saw their kids get left behind and struggling to find internet and struggling to keep up.”
Guzman also pointed to the impact of inflation on many of the small businesses that are part of his organization. He cited as an example a landscaper with half a dozen trucks and crews paying more for gasoline. “When you have a grown man sitting [here] with tears in his eyes saying, ‘My business was going so well, and these gas prices are driving me out of business,’ that’s powerful, man,” he said.
Democrats know they are in a battle for the allegiance of Latino voters. Several said they have seen no real deterioration in Latino support for Democrats since 2020 but acknowledge that the environment remains unstable and could lead to more gains by the GOP. They are looking especially closely at Nevada and Arizona this fall. What also worries some strategists is whether Latino voters will turn out in the numbers needed for victory.
“I read a lot about the narrative that Latino voters are shifting,” said Melissa Morales, founder and president of Somos Votantes, a national Latino advocacy group. “I certainly heard that on the doors in 2020. We’re not hearing that on the doors as much this year. I’m more concerned that our base stays home, that they simply don’t vote.”
Are Democrats losing ground or gaining votes?
Kevin Osorio Hernandez, a student leader and sophomore at Nevada State College, canvasses for a democratic congressional candidate in Las Vegas.
The shifts among Latinos nationally and especially in places like South Texas and South Florida have touched off a debate about the trade-off between the possibility of smaller Democratic margins in future elections and the continued growth in the numbers of Latinos now voting, particularly in states where they represent a substantial share of the population.
“Nationally, Democrats lost a couple percentage points [in 2020], but they gained more votes,” said Matt Barreto, a pollster who was part of Biden’s 2020 team and, among other responsibilities, works with Building Back Together, which is trying to advance the Biden agenda. “Biden would not have won Arizona or Nevada without the huge increase in Hispanic turnout.”
Potentially offsetting the problems in South Texas, Barreto said, is the continuing gains Democrats have made with Latinos and other voters in the major cities of Austin, Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston and San Antonio, which he said have produced far more net votes than were lost in South Texas.
“The work I’ve done in my neighborhood definitely makes me feel like I want to fight for our community and give a voice to those who have no voice. Because if I’m not out in my community, then who will be?”
Kevin Osorio Hernandez, 19
CLOCKWISE FROM ABOVE LEFT: Hernandez meets with Nevada State Student Alliance President Tessa Espinosa at Nevada State College in Henderson. Hernandez speaks with a potential voter in Las Vegas. Hernandez works in the student political office at Nevada State College.
The Democrats’ gains in the Texas cities — which have been among more than just Latino voters — reduced the GOP’s statewide winning margin in presidential races from 16 percentage points in 2012 to six in 2020.
Barreto also echoed what others pointed to: the possibility that 2020 reflected more about Trump and less about appeal of the Republican brand. “Hispanics were hit extremely hard by covid, both health and economic,” he said. “And so, if there’s a … net boost [for Democrats], it seemed like it was a Trump effect and not necessarily a Republican effect.”
Simon Rosenberg, president of the New Democrat Network, has been focused on the Latino vote for two decades, particularly in the Southwest. He calls what has happened over that period a major success story for Democrats. In 2004, he said, by his calculations, Democrats netted about 700,000 Latino votes. By 2020, that had grown to between 4 million and 5 million. In 2004, Bush won Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada and Arizona. In 2020, Biden won all four.
Rosenberg also noted that, nationwide, the Pew study of the 2020 vote showed Democrats with a 21-point margin, 59-38 percent, among Latinos, while a recent Pew survey showed that Latino registered voters favor Democrats by 53 percent to 28 percent, a 25-point margin, for November. “Erosion is the wrong word to associate with what we’re talking about,” he said.
But Ruy Teixeira, who has been studying population and voting trends for years and is now at the American Enterprise Institute, said Democrats should be worried by the falloff in Latino support in 2020.
“It’s just remarkable how widespread it was and how pervasive and how geographically diffuse,” he said. “Certainly it has something to do with Trump, but I think it is broader than that. It has to do with how the Democrats themselves have evolved.” He said Democrats have moved “very noticeably” to the left, leaving them far away from the median voter in the country. “I think for the median Hispanic voter, that distance is even farther,” he said.
Odio of Equis Research turned the question of 2020 around. “Many people ask, why did people move toward Trump in 2020? And I think the better question is, why had they held back from Trump at ’16 or for Republicans before that?” he said.
His reasoning is that given various aspects of the makeup of Latinos — religious, working-class, striving — it would not be surprising to see them as open to voting for a more conservative candidate or party. He also said that economic issues could have become more important by 2020 and, with Latino incomes continuing to rise (and faster than among other groups), more of these voters decided to go with Trump rather than Biden.
The other factor was the impact of the pandemic and business closings. In Nevada, Latinos were especially hard-hit when the casinos shut down and tourism evaporated. Democrats were identified with those closures. “If an election was to be a referendum on immigration, Democrats would do better among Latinos,” Odio said. “If it were to be a referendum on the economy, they would do worse, and it was closer to a referendum on the economy.”
Nevada could prove a test case in the debate over rising participation by Latinos vs. Republican inroads. Can Democrats through their mobilization efforts turn out Latinos in numbers big enough to hold the Senate seat that could tip the balance of power in that chamber?
Trying to connect
Hernandez leads a student meeting with the staff of Rep. Susie Lee (D-Nev.) to discuss the obstacles that minority students and educators face in higher education at Nevada State College.
On a recent evening last month, about two dozen people gathered for food and phone banking on behalf of Cortez Masto at a strip mall east of downtown Las Vegas. After a training session, volunteers were given lists with dozens of names of potential voters and they began punching numbers into their cellphones.
Amie Martinez, 21, a college student, said she has been attending political rallies with her family since she was much younger but was doing this work for the first time and was there to encourage younger Latinos like herself to vote this fall.
“I consider myself a Democrat because they’ve always been there for the Latino community,” she said. “And they always fight for our rights, and they want the best for us.”
A few seats away, Carlos Velis, 75, looked down at his mostly blank sheet of paper. “I dialed and somebody answered, but they didn’t say anything and pretended they weren’t listening,” he lamented. He added with a laugh, “What can we do?”
The work that night was one part of how the individual campaigns are trying to reach Latino voters. Cortez Masto started Spanish-language advertising in March, focusing on her personal story and that of her family. Her campaign has spent more than $3 million on Spanish-language TV, radio and digital advertising and direct mail, according to communications director Josh Marcus-Blank.
Laxalt’s campaign officials say they started to assemble a coalition of Latino support even before the Republican primary. The Laxalt campaign has invested more than a million dollars in its Spanish-language TV, radio, digital and mail, according to campaign adviser John Ashbrook.
In conjunction with the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the Laxalt campaign is also contacting voters directly, focusing on independents and those identified as loosely tied to the Democratic Party. “We have a great opportunity to flip them over,” said Jesus Marquez, senior adviser and Hispanic engagement director for the campaign.
An army of canvassers
Victor Villanueva, who works for a Latinx political organization Somos Votantes, hands out pamphlets in Las Vegas.
Scholars who have specialized in studying Latino politics and voting patterns say direct contact between campaigns and voters is the most effective form of communication and the likeliest path to increasing turnout.
“When you reach out to the Latino voters, when you actually contact them, when you talk about the things that they care about … in ways that make sense to them and that actually relate to their day-to-day lives, they will turn out to vote," said Lisa García Bedolla, vice provost at the University of California at Berkeley.
That makes the coming election a new test case, given that Democrats did very little canvassing around the country two years ago because of the pandemic. For example, Sophia Jordán Wallace, a political science professor at the University of Washington, said she has been hesitant to generalize about changes in the Latino vote because 2020 was a difficult year for traditional mobilizing strategies.
“We were still operating at a time in which Democrats weren’t doing as much get-out-the-vote effort in terms of in-person [contact],” she said. “… I think we will know the answer to whether the outreach theory is correct when we see what happens in this election, when in theory Democrats have been doing their normal thing.”
That puts more pressure than ever on the organizers knocking doors daily in places like Las Vegas. But who are they? What motivates them? And what are they seeing?
“I know I had to use sunblock like three or four of five times a day. … I come out so red on my face. But it’s one of those things, like, you love to do it.”
Mirian Cervantes, 49
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: Culinary Workers Union Local 226 organizers Gisela Flores and Mirian Cervantes prepare union committee member Elazar Gonzales to lobby for union representation at the Green Valley Casino in Las Vegas. Cervantes was born in Arizona, moved to Mexico and later returned to the United States. Cervantes plans the day with fellow union organizers.
On a recent afternoon, Cervantes and a colleague who goes by the name of Rocha M are gathered around a conference table at the Culinary Workers union offices. Like Roldan and Lozoya, they are part of an army of more than 350 canvassers the union is deploying to knock doors.
Rocha, 42, was born in Mexico, immigrated to Texas when she was 23 and eventually made her way to Las Vegas. Her goal is to keep Nevada in the Democrats’ column. “We have to teach our community that our vote is really important,” she said.
She spoke about the overt racism she felt while Trump was in the White House. “It was for me more hate on the streets,” she said. “I’m not saying he’s all of the Republicans, but I’m saying at that time it was really, really bad … like we were sometimes scared of going out because, well, I do look Mexican, you know, I cannot hide it.”
She has “passion in my veins” as she goes door-to-door, calling the work she is doing the best experience she has had with the union. “I do the push because one door, it can make a difference, one-on-one conversation and it can make a difference. I never feel like, oh, this is too much.”
“I do the push because one door, it can make a difference, one-on-one conversation and it can make a difference. I never feel like, oh, this is too much.”
Rocha M, 42
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: Culinary Workers Union Local 226 member Rocha M cares for her mother before leaving for work. Rocha greets her team member, lead organizer Pat Lindsey, at the union hall in Las Vegas. Rocha smokes a cigarette at her home in Las Vegas.
Cervantes, 49, was born in Arizona, later moved to Mexico and eventually returned to the United States. She, too, felt the sting of racism during Trump’s presidency. “I felt attacked,” she said. “I’m not a drug dealer. I do housekeeping. My husband, ... he’s not, like, abusing people. He works in construction. But you know [Trump] was so racist. You can feel [it] going to any restaurant. … It was a really, really bad situation back then.”
Like Rocha, Cervantes said she is driven to work the long hours she is spending in the neighborhoods. “I know it’s hot. I know I had to use sunblock like three or four of five times a day. … I come out so red on my face. But it’s one of those things, like, you love to do it.”
Victor Villanueva, 32, is canvassing for Somos Votantes. Born in Aurora, Ill., to parents who came to the United States from Mexico, he lived there until he lost his job during the pandemic. When he heard about the work Somos was doing for the election, he signed up. “I said, ‘Hey, it sounds like I’d be a good fit for me,’ ” he said.
Villanueva studied communications in community college and said what he learned has helped him in Nevada. “Every interaction is different,” he said. “If they’re on the fence, really, it’s because they’re not really educated on, you know, who is actually running or what it is that they’re actually doing for the community. So I kind of try to take some time and at least give them some points or two that might relate to what it is that we talked about that is affecting them.”
“I would say 90 percent of the people that I talk to, [it’s] health care or, you know, child care, that also affects them. But, yeah, it’s mainly the finances, the way inflation [is hitting them].”
Victor Villanueva, 32
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: Victor Villanueva speaks about the upcoming election. Villanueva leaves a flier at a home in Las Vegas. Villanueva lived in Aurora, Ill., until he lost his job during the pandemic.
At most doors, he hears about prices and the economy. “I would say 90 percent of the people that I talk to, [it’s] health care or, you know, child care, that also affects them. But, yeah, it’s mainly the finances, the way inflation [is hitting them].”
The canvassers talked about the personal struggles they have encountered as they’ve gone from house to house. Lozoya described a woman who aspires to buy a home but is having trouble saving enough money because her rent keeps increasing. “She’s like, ‘How can I afford something when my wages are the same and my rent keeps going up?’’ Lozoya said. “And I was like, I know how you feel. Same thing happened to me.”
For Roldan, it was a man who spoke to her in quiet tones because he did not want a neighbor to hear. He told her he was being evicted and had no home to go to. She has come to see her own circumstances differently. She once thought of herself as poor, but no more. “I have knocked doors where I see little kids,” she said. “I cannot tell you exactly, but I know that is poverty.”
Villanueva mentioned an elderly woman with a son who has Down syndrome and who worried about what might happen to him if something happened to her, whether the health-care system would be able to provide for him. “They just want things to get better,” Villanueva said.
Door to door, one vote at a time
Culinary Workers Union Local 226 members Elsa Roldan and Alma Lozoya go door-to-door in a Las Vegas neighborhood.
Back on the streets, Roldan and Lozoya go door-to-door again. This time, the hour is later, the heat less oppressive. But the work is no less difficult. At a few houses, they are greeted warmly; at others, hesitantly. At one house, a father is sleeping; at the next, a husband who is the voter on their rolls is asleep. At the next, a sign says, “This house protected by the good Lord and a gun.”
At the 10th house of the afternoon, a young man with a red beard and wearing a Batman T-shirt and his mother-in-law greet them warmly. He says he doesn’t have cable TV and has “turned down the politics,” but they both say they are “blue” voters and cheerfully pose for the Culinary Workers photographer who is trailing along.
Later along their route, Roldan and Lozoya engage one man in a spirited conversation in Spanish. He favors rent stability but doesn’t want to hear about politics or candidates. Later, there is more positive reinforcement when a man tells them, “I’m a Democrat,” and pointing to the literature they hand him, he adds, “These are Democrats. I’m voting for them.” A few doors later comes a different response. “We’re not really engaged,” a man says. “Thank you very much.”
Graphics by Nick Mourtoupalas. Design and development by Aadit Tambe. Design editing by Madison Walls. Photo editing by Natalia Jimenez. Graphics editing by Kevin Uhrmacher. Story editing by Philip Rucker. Copy editing by Christopher Rickett. | 2022-10-25T10:43:31Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Why the fight for Latino votes in 2022 election is more intense than ever - Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/interactive/2022/election-2022-latino-voters/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/interactive/2022/election-2022-latino-voters/ |
Mourners carry the bodies Tuesday of Palestinians who were killed in an overnight Israeli raid in the occupied West Bank city of Nablus. (Majdi Mohammed/AP)
TEL AVIV — Israeli security forces blew up a weapons workshop and killed the leader of an alleged terrorist cell during a deadly raid in Nablus early Tuesday, military officials said.
At least five Palestinians were killed and more than 20 injured in the fighting, according to Palestinian health officials, the latest in the near-nightly clashes between Israel and militants in West Bank cities.
Videos on social media showed intense exchanges, including firefights and burning vehicles in parts of Nablus’s old city. Residents came out to protest the presence of Israeli forces, setting tires on fire and throwing rocks and pieces of concrete at Israeli armored vehicles. The Israel Defense Forces said none of its troops were injured.
Palestinian media reported that one vehicle was apparently struck by a drone or missile, which would mark an escalation in the fire power Israeli forces usually bring to bear in the West Bank. Airstrikes are common in Israeli attacks on Hamas and Islamic Jihad positions in the Gaza Strip, and Israeli media reported that commanders had recently approved drone attacks in other occupied areas. The IDF declined to comment on the drone report.
Militants keep firing rockets at Israel as strikes in Gaza kill at least 24
The military said its troops entered Nablus to target the headquarters and “explosive manufacturing site” of the Lion’s Den, a group accused of carrying out numerous attacks on Israelis in recent months and planning others that were thwarted at the last minute.
Video on social media showed more than a dozen vehicles maneuvering in the city. Many of them surrounded the home of Wadee al-Huh, a Lion’s Den leader who was killed in the attack, according to Palestinian media reports.
“Soldiers were positioned throughout the city of Nablus with various operational means, including sniper forces and shoulder-fired missiles,” the IDF said in a statement.
Al-Huh would be the second alleged Lion’s Den commander killed in two days. Tamer al-Kilani died when a motorcycle exploded on a Nablus street Sunday in what the militant group said was a targeted assassination arranged by Israel.
Israeli and Palestinian officials have not commented on the claims.
Tuesday’s battle is part of a worrisome spike in violence in West Bank cities during a months-long crackdown by Israel against suspected militants. Following a spate of terrorist attacks that killed at least 19 Israelis in the spring, soldiers have carried out near-nightly raids in Nablus, Jenin, Hebron and other West Bank cities.
More than 125 Palestinians have died in the clashes, including several in East Jerusalem. Israel says most of the fatalities have been suspected militants, but several have been teenagers. Palestinian hospitals say they are straining to keep pace with the numbers of gunshot injuries, sometimes several a night.
The Lion’s Den formed about a year ago as one of several upstart militant groups that operate outside the hierarchies of Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other established organizations. The newcomers attract disaffected, unemployed young men who are increasingly able to acquire weapons in a West Bank awash with guns.
Israel blames the group, which is active around Nablus, for numerous attacks in recent months, including the shooting of an IDF sergeant who was escorting Jewish settlers on a religious march near the town of Sebastia.
Israel has called on Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to do more to rein in the militant groups. But it claims the right to operate in West Bank cities.
“There is no refuge, and there never will be for terrorists,” Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz said. “We will continue to act against anyone who tries to harm Israeli citizens in any place at any time needed.”
The Palestinian Authority, which has deployed its own security forces against suspected militants, has objected to the campaign of Israeli incursions. A spokesman for Abbas said Tuesday that the authority had asked the Biden administration to help de-escalate the situation. | 2022-10-25T10:43:37Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Israeli raid on Nablus kills 5, destroys West Bank bomb lab - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/25/israel-palestinian-nablus-strike/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/25/israel-palestinian-nablus-strike/ |
Terri Straka explores her new home with her granddaughter Sophia Raymund in Myrtle Beach, S.C., on Sept. 19. Straka is part of a buyout program to relocate Horry County residents away from flood prone areas. (Madeline Gray for The Washington Post)
SOCASTEE, S.C. — On the day she would finally move to higher ground, Terri Straka awoke in the neighborhood where she had lived for three decades, but a place steadily becoming less recognizable.
“No Trespassing” signs adorned the lawns of other flood-prone houses whose owners had already taken government buyouts. Storage pods sat in the driveways of neighbors who would soon follow. In one yard, a sign warned would-be house hunters, “Don’t buy in the swamp.”
“It’s like a death,” Straka, 52, said as she surveyed the two packed U-Haul trucks parked out front. “I didn’t have any intentions of leaving. This place is my heritage.”
The transformation unfolding in this one corner of South Carolina embodies the quandary that a growing number of communities around the nation face — and will face in the years ahead.
In this stretch of the mid-Atlantic, waters are rising at among the fastest rates in the world — a U.S. government station in Myrtle Beach has recorded nearly 10 inches of sea level rise since the late 1950s, and the trend has accelerated in recent years. Add to that more intense hurricanes, torrential rainstorms, feverish development that alters water flow and other factors, and more and more communities like this one find themselves in the path of floodwaters.
Already, according to one seminal study that examined voluntary buyouts between 1989 and 2017, the government has paid for more than 43,000 voluntary buyouts of flood-prone properties across 49 states and more than 1,100 counties.
Those numbers are set to grow.
In places such as Socastee, where some residents flooded not only during hurricanes Joaquin in 2015, Matthew in 2016 and Florence in 2018, but also during no-name storms and heavy rains, local officials eventually sought federal funding to help those who wanted to relocate, and to return the land to green space in perpetuity.
But even that effort has proven contentious and slow. For those who have sought buyouts, the hot housing market and soaring interest rates have made it difficult to find comparable places to move.
Other homeowners nearby have received state resilience money or help from nonprofit groups to elevate their homes and stay put. Others have rejected either option. Many residents, once assured they didn’t live in a high-risk area, now struggle to afford the rising cost of flood insurance.
The situation illustrates how there are seldom easy answers when it comes to dealing with homes that face repeated flooding, even as more places face the likelihood of such catastrophes in the years ahead.
Buyouts and home elevations can alter the character of communities, impact property values and sow division among neighbors. But the prospect of chronic flooding brings its own form of upheaval, mental anguish and financial strain.
For Straka, moving day brought a rush of emotions.
Among them was relief to be escaping her neighborhood perched along the intercoastal waterway — five miles inland from Myrtle Beach’s glittering oceanfront strip — where she and others had flooded again and again in recent years.
There was also sadness at leaving behind a community where her parents still lived and a home, now destined for demolition, where she had raised her three children and befriended other families.
But with each flood, and each tumultuous rebuilding that followed, it became harder for Straka to justify staying. “We can’t withstand it, financially or emotionally,” she said on the morning of her move. “Nothing is going to change. It’s only going to get worse.”
Sitting under a clear sky, with the morning sun glinting off the serene waterway nearby, she said she understood why many of her neighbors don’t want to endure the headaches that come with a buyout.
But she also believes that over time, climate change will leave some with little choice — that the storms will return, and the waters will rise again.
“I don’t think people are ready for it,” she said. “But it’s coming, and it’s going to get worse.”
‘This is unmanaged retreat’
In many ways, the affected neighborhoods of Socastee seem utterly normal — home to working-class families and retirees, the majority of whom live in modest, low-slung houses laid out along tidy suburban streets.
But it’s also clear here that flooding — the memory of it, the aftermath of it, the anticipation of it — has become an inescapable part of life.
On a recent morning, employees from a demolition company walked one street with clipboards, surveying houses that had undergone buyouts and would soon be torn down. Nearby, a man from the Horry County government was hanging fliers on certain homes to remind their owners that there was still time for people affected by “repetitive loss” flooding to seek a buyout.
“Funding is limited, and applications will be processed in the order they are received,” it read.
On some front porches, the faint water line from Hurricane Florence remains. Some residents continue to rebuild from the last time they flooded, as recently as last year. More than a few worry what their street will look like as more people leave, about the disruption demolitions will bring, about the police and firefighters who use now-empty houses for training exercises.
Rob Young views the situation in Socastee as a microcosm of the issues facing many communities — and of the uneven ways that governments often respond.
“It’s a great case study that exhibits several of problems with how we handle human vulnerability and flooding in the United States,” said Young, a professor of geology at Western Carolina University and director of the Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines.
Historically, he said, much of the money that the federal government allocates to protecting properties threatened by floods and rising seas has gravitated toward wealthier, waterfront areas with highly valued properties. These places tend to get the most protection, and they are often first in line for aid to rebuild.
Communities such as Socastee, which often lie inland, tend to receive far less funding to make them more resilient to disasters. More often, Young said, any financial relief tends to come later in the form of buyouts — and sometimes only after residents clamor for help.
“The system is pretty broken,” he said. “We tend to help them only after they have been wounded and damaged.”
Young believes county officials are trying their best to deal with an unenviable situation and give homeowners the ability to leave. But buyouts inevitably take a long time, don’t provide a systemic solution to flooding and impact those who remain.
“Some would look at that and say, ‘This is managed retreat.’ I look at it and I say, ‘This is unmanaged retreat, not managed retreat.’ There’s no long-term plan,” said Young, who last year worked with Horry County to alter its existing flood maps.
“When you have to do it this way, you have lasting injuries, both for the people who have been waiting years for a buyout, but also for the people who are left behind,” he said.
Socastee is hardly the first community to experiment with buyouts, nor will it be the last.
In Louisiana, residents of Isle de Jean Charles are among the first communities the federal government is working to resettle en mass in the face of rising seas. New Jersey has overseen buyouts of hundreds of properties since Superstorm Sandy in 2012. Harris County in Texas has undertaken more than 800 buyouts since Hurricane Harvey in 2017, and approved 1,600 more. Many smaller communities have followed a similar path, though on a smaller scale.
As more people in more places face repeat flooding and potential displacement, the country must do more to prepare for what is coming and to treat different communities equitably, said Stephen Eisenman, co-founder of the Anthropocene Alliance, a coalition of front line communities experiencing the impacts of extreme weather and climate change.
One key change, said Harriet Festing, the group’s executive director, is for leaders to stop allowing construction in vulnerable areas, which threatens to put more people in harm’s way.
“There’s so much money going into development in flood-prone areas,” she said. “You see everywhere around you the exact opposite of what you know has to happen.”
‘Mother Nature is telling us something’
In October 2018, Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) came to Starcreek Circle in Socastee to survey the devastating flooding that Hurricane Florence had inflicted.
“Mother Nature is telling us something, and we need to listen,” he told the collection of assembled homeowners. He urged those who had flooded repeatedly to consider leaving, and said government funding could help move them to higher ground.
Four years and more flooding later, the residents of Starcreek Circle have taken different paths in the wake of those pleas.
Some, such as Keith and Tyra Moore, are in the process of applying for a buyout. The couple rebuilt largely themselves after Florence forced three feet of water in the house. They replaced drywall and insulation, painted ceilings, installed new doors and windows.
They had hoped to raise their well-kept home and spend their retirement there. But after they learned that part of their property now sits in a floodway, they decided it was time to go. “We’re always just waiting for that next storm, that next flood,” Tyra said.
Keith jokes with friends and relatives about their predicament: “We used to live on the creek, then we were in the creek, and now we are up the creek.”
Meanwhile, their neighbors on either side have no plans to leave.
“We are going to take our chances with the flooding. We will just deal with it as it comes,” said Connie Wardien, who has lived with her husband, Wayne, for three decades in a home that has flooded twice since 2016, displacing them each time.
“We don’t think the buyouts are going to be worth our while, especially the way the market is now,” she said. She pointed to the pecan and pear trees they had planted, spoke of the children they had raised who still live nearby. “We have loved this place. … Where are we going to go?”
Jim and Gina Hudson feel much the same. His father built their two-story home in the 1990s, but they had to gut the first floor after Florence and were displaced for nearly 9 months.
“This is our investment,” Jim, who is from Horry County, said one recent afternoon. “This is home.”
“We are just trusting the Lord that it won’t happen like that again,” Gina said, “and dealing with it if it does.”
Elizabeth Tranter, Horry County’s director of community development and grants, sees the buyout program as a lifeline to those who want it. “I view our job as providing an option to people who may not perceive they have many options,” she said.
Tranter said the series of bad storms in recent years left the community “just exhausted” from the constant threat of flooding. That reality, coupled with the fact that some residents held a public protest in 2020 to demand funding for buyouts, led officials to seek funding from the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development.
The county eventually was awarded money to buyout up to 61 properties, with an initial cap of $250,000 each. The buyout program opened for applications in July 2021. As of Friday, the county has acquired 29 homes, with another eight under contract. More applications are in the pipeline, Tranter said.
“Right now, I’m still seeing a great deal of interest,” she said. “I hope that some of the families who are seeking a new start are able to get that, and are able to locate to a place they feel comfortable.”
Linda and Jim Fraboni jumped at the chance for that new start. After flooding roughly a dozen times in their nearly 25 years on Starcreek Circle, the couple wanted out. But, Linda said, “We felt stuck.”
They refused to sell to an unsuspecting buyer — “You can’t do that to people,” Jim says — but disclosing the risks meant the house was virtually unsellable. When the buyout offer came, they applied and encouraged their daughter and son-in-law down the street to do the same.
The process took longer than expected, but the couple — now both retired — closed in June and left South Carolina behind. They now live on nearly 2 acres in Tennessee, surrounded by woods.
“It was a blessing for us,” Linda said on a recent fall day, as Hurricane Ian barreled toward South Carolina. If they were still in Socastee, she said, they would be frantically packing up keepsakes and bracing for another flood.
Instead, they were watching the autumn leaves change color.
“We don’t have to worry about it,” Linda said. “That burden isn’t there.”
‘We needed to move on’
By late afternoon, Terri Straka and a group of family members that included her two sons, her ex-husband and a nephew had unloaded the bulk of her possessions at her new house.
The two-story Cape Cod sat only several miles but a world away from her old neighborhood. It lay down a winding road, tucked amid towering pine trees. It had a big backyard, a front porch and a magnolia tree in front where she imagined her 5-year-old granddaughter playing.
Most importantly of all, there was little risk of flooding.
After vacuuming the baseboards, wiping down the windows and positioning her sofa in a spot by the brick fireplace, Straka headed outside for a break.
“You had no peace,” she said, recalling the angst in her old home each time a hurricane formed or a heavy rain would fall. “We needed to move on.”
Straka sat on the back of a half-empty U-Haul. The sun was sinking, and a breeze blew through the pines. Despite the work ahead, she already felt a weight lifting.
She nodded toward her sons, who were busy stacking boxes of clothes and Christmas ornaments in the garage. Nearby, her granddaughter was racing through the house, deciding which room would be hers when she visited.
“I loved my home. But home is where you feel safe and comfortable,” Straka said. “At least I know they are going to be safe here.” | 2022-10-25T10:47:46Z | www.washingtonpost.com | As flood risk rises, vulnerable communities weigh government buyouts - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/10/25/flood-zone-homes-buyouts/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/10/25/flood-zone-homes-buyouts/ |
North Atlantic right whale population drops to about 340, worrying scientists
A North Atlantic right whale entangled in fishing rope with a newborn calf near Cumberland Island, Ga., last year. (Georgia Department of Natural Resources/AP)
For more than 40 years, a group of researchers in New England have kept tabs on hundreds of critically endangered North Atlantic right whales they’ve come to know by name. They’ve taken millions of photographs of these whales by sky and sea, often tracking when they have given birth, been injured and who their mothers, siblings, cousins and grandparents are.
But, much to their dismay, the North Atlantic right whale population has slid to a low not seen since about 2001 — a steady decline that has continued for more than a decade, according to the North Atlantic Right Whale Consortium. That’s largely due to climate change and lethal, human-caused accidents, the experts say.
New numbers from the group, released Monday, suggest that only about 340 of the whales were alive as of 2021, a sharp decline from the nearly 500 recorded in 2010. (Researchers track the whales by photographing them year-round, and their estimates are often released with a small range of error.)
“These whales have been plying these waters for tens of thousands of years, and they have an inalienable right to continue to be able to do so,” said Philip Hamilton, a senior scientist at the New England Aquarium who has been tracking North Atlantic right whales for more than three decades. “A lot has happened in the last decade — increased mortality, decreased reproduction, and they’re having to change when and where they’re feeding due to climate change.”
As the story goes, right whales were given their names because they were the “right” whales to hunt hundreds of years ago, when blubber was a key good for trade. Members of the North Atlantic species weigh up to 70 tons, grow as long as 55 feet and are thought to live for up to 70 years.
The whales are “iconic” in New England, Hamilton said, and they can be found anywhere along the coast from eastern Canada to Florida. Their population rebounded from fewer than 300 in 1990 to nearly 500 in 2010, though it’s not entirely clear why; the population could have fluctuated because of natural cyclical patterns that affected the supply of zooplankton, their primary diet, he said.
“It’s a very, very complex ecosystem that changes with temperature, primarily, but also salinity,” he said. “We expect to see some of those cyclic fluctuations in food abundance in different areas.”
Nevertheless, Hamilton said this pattern has not been “bouncing back” since 2010.
Warming water temperatures caused by climate change are affecting where zooplankton multiply in abundance, which has in turn been driving North Atlantic right whales into areas with fewer regulatory protections in recent years. For example, many whales were killed by entanglements and vessel strikes in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, Hamilton said, spurring Canada to begin adopting measures to manage ship traffic during certain parts of the year. Meanwhile, it is illegal to get closer than 500 yards from right whales in U.S. waters.
About 85 percent of North Atlantic right whales have been entangled at least once, and researchers are able to tell when one has been injured by fishing ropes because of the scars. According to Hamilton, female whales in this species often stop reproducing if they’ve suffered severe entanglements, or they may produce calves once every six to seven years instead of the usual three.
Just 15 calves were born in 2022, the North Atlantic Right Whale Consortium said in the report, a substantial decline from the average of 24 per year in the early 2000s.
“We need to enhance their health and survival by slowing and rerouting vessels to minimize vessel trauma,” said Michael Moore, a senior scientist in the biology department at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. “To avoid the risk of entanglement trauma, we must remove fishing lines from the water column,” he added, referring to the vertical expanse between the ocean surface and floor.
Scientists around the world have begun developing ropeless fishing systems that would eliminate the lines that connect crab or lobster fishing gear to buoys marking their location on the ocean’s surface. In Massachusetts, researchers have begun testing “virtual buoys” that track the location of fishing traps and trigger them to rise to the surface using acoustic signals.
“There are legislative, financial and technical hurdles that have to be overcome before it can be used on a really broad scale,” Hamilton said. “But it has advanced really quickly in the last four to five years in response to the dire situation for whales.” | 2022-10-25T10:47:52Z | www.washingtonpost.com | New England's North Atlantic right whale numbers drop to about 340 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/10/25/north-atlantic-right-whale-population-climate-change/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/10/25/north-atlantic-right-whale-population-climate-change/ |
America’s archives tell an incomplete version of our story.
Perspective by Karin Wulf
Karin Wulf is executive director of the Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture, and professor of history at William & Mary. She is also a co-founder of Women Also Know History.
The National Archives Research Center at Pennsylvania Avenue NW and 7th St. NW on July 12, 2019 in Washington, D.C. (Marlena Sloss/The Washington Post)
The unprecedented crisis between former president Donald Trump and the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) highlights the Archives’ critical government and public service role. It also offers a primer on how archives have come to be both essential for the public but also key contributors to the partial nature of our histories.
Missing records — in this case because of a recalcitrant former president seemingly in defiance of both the Presidential Records Act and other laws governing government documents — are only one of the many ways that archival records are incomplete. Both public (government) and private archives have often been biased and exclusionary, collecting and sharing primarily the materials of elite people or materials created from their perspective. Just as NARA is making a very public effort to secure the records of the previous presidential administration, archivists in the United States and indeed around the world have been pressing for ever more critical scrutiny of their own and others’ institutional practices.
It wasn’t always possible to locate let alone to use federal records. Though the U.S. government was always concerned with record-keeping, before NARA was founded in 1934, government records were kept in “various basements, attics, abandoned buildings, and other storage places with little security or concern for storage conditions,” the Archives’ own history reports.
Now headquartered in Washington, in an iconic building on Pennsylvania Avenue that houses federal records and also displays the Declaration of Independence, the Federal Constitution and the Bill of Rights, NARA also manages more than 40 facilities and regional centers across the United States. Since its origin via the National Archives Act, NARA lists the Federal Records Act of 1950 and the Presidential Records Act of 1978 among the milestone legislation that makes the agency responsible for managing materials produced by the federal government.
Governments have been largely interested in preserving records of their own activities, such as property records, licenses, meetings of government bodies, legislation, court decisions and so on. There are national archives in countries around the world. There are also state libraries and archives across the United States. Cities and counties often have public records offices or archives, too. In Rhode Island, for example, the state archives are managed by the secretary of state and are “home to more than 10 million letters, photographs, and important state documents that form a permanent, tangible record of Rhode Island’s rich history.” In Providence, the city archives hold an estimated 40,000 cubic feet of records providing a detailed window into the development and operation of city government since 1636.
And these are just the publicly managed and maintained archives. The 19th century was a particularly fertile period for the creation of privately run archival organizations. Regional, local and topical historical societies, universities and more have rich archival collections documenting the history of places, people, institutions and ideas. Founded in 1822, for example, the Rhode Island Historical Society has “the largest and most important historical collections relating to Rhode Island.” County and township historical societies, tribal nation archives and libraries, and community collections all provide places for collecting and sharing the materials and memories of the past.
Many of these institutions have been key defenders of public access to the materials that are critical to our nation’s history. The Massachusetts Historical Society, for example, founded in 1791, was the nation’s first historical society. Among its most significant holdings are the papers of presidents John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. It catalogued and preserved those papers, and worked with documentary editors to research and contextualize them, including their direct support for the Adams Papers Editorial Project. It then collaborated with the National Archives and other partners to make those materials available to anyone through the online portal Founders Online, which gives specialist researchers and the general public alike extraordinary access to these materials.
But as vast as these collections are, they are highly incomplete. Most public and private institutions have a much larger body of materials documenting the lives of White and elite people and political and economic histories, than those documenting the lives of Black or Indigenous people or cultural histories. Wealthy families often kept family papers and then contributed their family archives to local historical societies, for example, and public records often overrepresent wealthier individuals, keeping marginalized people, well, marginal. Scholars have had to work creatively to pull the histories of marginalized people out of elite sources.
Historian Erica Armstrong Dunbar, for example, wrote a book about Ona Judge, a woman enslaved by George and Martha Washington who ran for freedom and was pursued by Washington and his agents. While two invaluable interviews that Judge herself gave late in her life to abolitionist newspapers provided insights into this crucial history, Washington’s aggressive pursuit of Judge can be read in his letters via Founders Online.
It is not only the relative paucity of materials that has long weighted our histories in favor of elite stories, though. This disparity has also resulted from institutional collection and preservation priorities. In a frank statement in 2020, the state archives of Alabama acknowledged its role in perpetuating partial — and racist — history. The first publicly funded and independent state archives in the country, the Alabama Department of Archives and History was founded in 1901 “to address a lack of proper management of government records.” But, its archivists write, “for well over a half-century, the agency committed extensive resources to the acquisition of Confederate records and artifacts while declining to acquire and preserve materials documenting the lives and contributions of African Americans in Alabama.”
This statement came during intense public debates about why we learn, read and remember the histories we do. The tenacity of Lost Cause mythology is a stark example of how partial histories are centuries in the making.
Leaving explicitly and purposely wrong histories to one side, the partiality of history comes from telling some aspects of the past and not others, some people’s stories and not others. They result from having voluminous historical records about some people and groups, and comparatively little about others. And they are also the result of archival and library institutions having long collected and organized material that privilege some aspects, some people, some stories.
Just as it is important to take action to make the archival record as full as possible, it’s also important to understand why and how it became so partial. Archival records are a necessary component of an accountable, democratic government. The National Archives is, by its own definition, the “nation’s record keeper.” Incomplete and selective record-keeping leads to incomplete and selective history.
Thankfully, change is underway as archives and libraries reflect on their own institutional histories and practices. Trump’s efforts to occlude the historical record by evading the National Archives should not succeed. But his blatant efforts at distorting history offer a useful opportunity to consider all the ways our histories have been partial — and must be fuller. | 2022-10-25T10:47:58Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Donald Trump’s stolen records aren’t all that’s missing from the Archives - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/made-by-history/2022/10/25/archives-history-donald-trump/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/made-by-history/2022/10/25/archives-history-donald-trump/ |
Afro-Latino politicians could bridge the African American-Latino divide
In the U.S., Dominicans are the Hispanic group with the largest Black population. Many are pressured to identify as either Black or Latino, not both.
Analysis by Michelle Bueno Vásquez
Domingo Morel
Dominican American Rep. Adriano Espaillat (D-N.Y.) speaks during a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing in Washington on Feb. 28, 2020. He says he identifies as Black and Latino. (Carolyn Kaster/AP)
As the United States marked the end of Hispanic Heritage Month, prominent Los Angeles Latinos were revealed to have made casually racist remarks about Black people. Anti-Blackness Latino sentiment is no surprise; within the Latino community, Afro-Latinos are rarely represented. Popular media tend to show primarily light-skinned Latinos. For instance, the movie “In the Heights,” meant to portray New York City’s Dominican neighborhood of Washington Heights, was criticized for whitewashing the Dominican community.
That’s not unusual. Afro-Latinos face pressures from the Latino and Black communities to pick a side: to identify as Latino or Black, not both. Many Latinos deny that Afro-Latinos are Black; some Afro-Latinos themselves deny being Black rather than denying their Latino heritage. Hollywood and TV contribute to constructing Latinos as entirely light-skinned, rarely showcasing Afro-Latinos.
Similarly, U.S. politics and political institutions have struggled to recognize the increasing number of Americans who are both. Consider the struggles of Rep. Adriano Espaillat (D-N.Y.), the nation’s first Dominican American and first formerly undocumented member of Congress. Although Espaillat identifies as “a Latino of African descent,” the Congressional Black Caucus declined to extend him membership, at least in part because he is also a member of the Latino caucus.
The CBC’s rejection could be a missed opportunity. Our findings suggest that Black Latinos — and Dominicans, in particular — could help bridge two marginalized communities that are often divided, as we’ve seen most starkly on the Los Angeles City Council recently.
In the U.S., Dominicans are the Hispanic group with the largest Black population
The Dominican Republic has the fourth-largest Black population in the global African Diaspora, with an estimated 80 percent (and upward) of its population descended from Africans. Dominicans are also the fifth-largest Hispanic group in the United States, after Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Salvadorans and Cubans, respectively. And yet they are rarely covered by Latino and U.S. media and are ignored in national politics.
While other Latino groups are distributed around the United States, 70 percent of the Dominican population resides in New York, New Jersey and Florida. In New York and New Jersey, Dominicans are the second-largest Hispanic group, second to Puerto Ricans, making up 24 percent and 18 percent of the Hispanic population for these states, respectively.
In the past decade, the Hispanic population growth in New York and New Jersey surpassed that of the general population. Although Dominicans make up 4 percent of Latinos nationally, they represent the Hispanic group with a population above 1 million with the most growth since 2010. Dominicans have the potential to be politically instrumental in these states experiencing exponential Hispanic growth, which happens to be where Dominicans abound.
With Mexican Americans making up around 62 percent of Hispanics nationally, politicians and analysts often overlook how other Hispanic subgroups can affect state and local elections.
Despite their growth, Dominicans lag in traditional measures of assimilation. Among Latinos in the United States, around a third are foreign-born, while over half of Dominicans in the United States are foreign-born. However, 43 percent of those foreign-born Dominicans have lived in the country for more than 20 years and more than half are U.S. citizens. Additionally, the median household income for Dominicans in the United States is around $10,000 less than for Hispanic households. Dominicans are also more likely to be unemployed, to say that they don’t speak English well, and have a homeownership rate nearly 20 percent less than other U.S. Hispanics.
A higher proportion of Dominicans have bachelor’s and graduate degrees than other U.S. Hispanic groups. However, Dominicans in the United States still face economic challenges, much as do African Americans. In fact, Afro-Latinos’ socioeconomic status most closely resembles that of non-Hispanic Blacks, while White Latinos’ standing is closest to non-Hispanic Whites.
Why did prominent Latino leaders say such racist things?
Dominicans are gaining political influence
That socioeconomic profile makes Espaillat’s exclusion from the Congressional Black Caucus particularly poignant.
Espaillat has championed Dominican representation in national politics, founding the annual Dominicans on the Hill, a program that spotlights Dominican Americans’ civic engagement. In fact, while Dominicans have not lived in the United States as long as Mexican Americans in general , they have recently been getting elected to public office at equal to or greater rates than Latino subgroups of similar size in the United States.
So how do Dominican American elected officials themselves identify their race and ethnicity? To find out, we conducted an original online survey using Qualtrics of all known Dominican American elected officials in the United States at the municipal, county, state and federal level. To identify the Dominican American elected officials, we relied on multiple sources, including a list provided by Espaillat’s staff. We also used machine-learning algorithms to search for Dominican officials in the United States using news articles, campaign websites and news releases.
Our search yielded a list of 49 current officials whom we asked to participate in an online survey we fielded from November 2021 through January 2022. We heard from 28 respondents with a 57 percent response rate. Our survey results showed that out of 28 respondents, 11 identified as Black, and 17 identified as Afro-Latino.
When asked whether their political future was bound to that of other Latinos and African Americans, most Dominican officials said they felt politically linked to both. This may be useful in government coalition-building, which is necessary for any underrepresented U.S. group to achieve its goals. In other words, Dominican elected officials may be in a position to close the gap between Latino and African American coalitions at local and state levels, where most Dominican elected officials serve.
Our findings suggest that Dominican elites may be able to help link Black and Latino coalitions. However, these possibilities will continue to be limited until Afro-Latino inclusion becomes a priority for Latino politics.
Michelle Bueno Vásquez (@_MichelleBuenoV) is a PhD candidate in political science and statistics master’s candidate at Northwestern University.
Yalidy Matos (@YalidyM ) is an assistant professor at Rutgers University in New Brunswick.
Domingo Morel is an associate professor at Rutgers University, Newark and author of “Takeover: Race, Education, and American Democracy” (Oxford University Press, 2018). | 2022-10-25T10:48:22Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Why should Black Latinos have to pick a side? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/25/latino-racism-dominicans-congress/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/25/latino-racism-dominicans-congress/ |
Tuesday briefing: Rishi Sunak, the U.K.’s new prime minister; St. Louis school shooting; Kanye West and Adidas; and more
The midterm elections are two weeks away.
One big storyline: How Republicans’ push to recruit people to monitor voting and watch for fraud will play out on Nov. 8.
Get prepared: Make sure you’re registered to vote, understand your ballot and more with our guide.
Britain got a new leader this morning.
The details: Rishi Sunak became prime minister — the third person to hold the job in two months — after winning the race to replace Liz Truss, who quit last week.
Who is he? A 42-year-old former finance minister who is richer than the royals. A practicing Hindu of Indian descent, he’s the first person of color to become prime minister.
Two people were killed in a school shooting in St. Louis.
The details: A 19-year-old former student opened fire yesterday at a high school, killing a woman and a teenage girl before police shot and killed him, authorities said.
What else to know: A student accused of killing four classmates in a shooting at a Michigan high school last year pleaded guilty yesterday.
Russia’s claim that Ukraine could use a “dirty bomb” is causing concern.
What’s that? An explosive weapon designed to scatter radioactive material. Russia has accused Ukraine, without evidence, of planning to detonate one on its own soil.
Why this is unsettling: Moscow could be using it as an excuse to escalate the conflict, or to lay the groundwork for a false-flag attack, U.S. officials warned yesterday.
Backlash over Ye’s antisemitic comments continues to grow.
The latest: A photo went viral this weekend of a hate group hanging a banner in Los Angeles showing support for the artist formerly known as Kanye West.
The response: Celebrities and other public figures are pressuring Adidas, one of his last remaining business partners, to cut ties.
Why this matters: Adidas is a German company, its founders had ties to Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party, and unlike other businesses, it hasn’t taken action over Ye’s comments.
Leslie Jordan, the actor and internet sensation, died yesterday.
How we’ll remember him: For his roles in “American Horror Story,” “Will & Grace” and “Call Me Kat,” and his hilarious Instagram videos in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic.
The 67-year-old died in Los Angeles, his agent said.
Eating seafood affects the land, not just the ocean.
That’s just one takeaway from a new study that looked at 99% of all food production and its impact on the environment, telling us exactly how our diets affect the planet.
What else it found: The U.S. and four other countries are responsible for over half of the global impact of food production.
And now … some lunch inspiration for this week: Five fast, easy fried rice recipes. Plus, good advice for all you perfectionists out there. | 2022-10-25T10:49:14Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The 7 things you need to know for Tuesday, October 25 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/the-seven/2022/10/25/what-to-know-for-october-25/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/the-seven/2022/10/25/what-to-know-for-october-25/ |
WASHINGTON, D.C. - APRIL 30: Kim Kardashian on the red carpet of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner at the Washington Hilton in Washington, D.C. on April 30, 2022. (Amanda Andrade-Rhoades/For The Washington Post)
“Hate speech is never OK or excusable," Kardashian tweeted Monday. "I stand together with the Jewish community and call on the terrible violence and hateful rhetoric towards them to come to an immediate end.”
Ye had in recent weeks shared a string of posts apparently aimed at the Jewish community, which were removed by Twitter and Instagram and prompted both platforms to lock his account temporarily. Screenshots shared on social media showed showed Ye saying he would go “death con 3” on “JEWISH PEOPLE,” an apparent reference to Defcon, the U.S. military defense readiness system.
Racist fliers featuring conspiracy theories about the Jewish community and LGBTQ people were also left on cars outside people’s homes, the Los Angeles Times reported.
“I can say anti-Semitic things and Adidas can’t drop me. Now what?" Ye recently boasted in an interview with podcast “Drink Champs,” which was subsequently pulled from YouTube. Adidas said it “does not tolerate antisemitism” and would end its partnership with Ye and end production of Yeezy branded products. The move is expected to cost company up to $250 million in net income this year, it said.
In the same interview, Ye propelled false claims about George Floyd, the Black man killed at the hands of Minneapolis police. As a result, the Floyd family is taking legal action against Ye, who falsely claimed that Floyd died from drug abuse and not as a result of police violently restraining him.
Kardashian filed for divorce from Ye earlier this year and the pair have four children together. Both sides have spoken publicly about the separation and Kardashian has in the past asked for “compassion and empathy” regarding her husband’s bi-polar disorder. Ye has frequently used social media to attack the Kardashian family.
Bryan Pietsch and Jaclyn Peiser contributed to this report. | 2022-10-25T11:22:24Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Kim Kardashian speaks out after Kanye West antisemitism sparks outcry - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/10/25/kim-kardashian-kanye-ye-antisemitism/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/10/25/kim-kardashian-kanye-ye-antisemitism/ |
We need more people to go to college
Students holding their graduation hats. (iStock)
It’s become somewhat unfashionable to say this, but: We actually need more people going to, and ultimately graduating from, college.
Enrollment in higher education is plummeting, and K-12 students are falling behind on key skills needed to succeed in college and later in life. The issue is broader than dismal new reading and math scores for youths. These trends threaten our future workforce and, ultimately, the U.S. economy.
New preliminary data from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center shows that college enrollment has nosedived in recent years. From fall 2019 (the last full semester pre-pandemic) through fall 2022, undergraduate enrollment declined more than 7 percent; for freshmen alone, it tanked more than 10 percent.
Graduate enrollment is up a bit over this period, about 2 percent. But when it comes to quickly moving Americans into the middle class, trends in undergraduate enrollment (especially for associate’s degrees) arguably matter more.
Worryingly, the biggest declines in enrollment the past few years have been in these programs. More detailed spring semester data show that community college enrollment dropped nearly 17 percent from 2020 to 2022.
What’s happening? Usually when the economy is bad, higher education does well, and vice versa. Enrollment last peaked in 2010, for instance, in the wake of the financial crisis. When job opportunities are scarce, people seek shelter in the higher education system, where they can upgrade their skills and hopefully make themselves more marketable. In the pandemic recession, though, people avoided college even though unemployment was sky-high — presumably because the traditional college experience became less attractive while schools were largely remote.
As the country began reopening and hiring like mad, higher education still didn’t look terribly enticing. Nominal wages rose sharply in jobs that didn’t require much formal education (retail, restaurants, hotels). For many, the calculation appears to have been: Why return to the classroom, given other options?
Some people have cheered these trends. For a long time on the right, and more recently on the left, it’s become increasingly popular to claim that college is a scam. Schools take students for suckers, critics say, and usually leave them with debt they’ll never be able to repay.
It is true that some people, particularly those who don’t complete their degrees, struggle with loans they will never pay back. Worse, some institutions knowingly recruit students into programs that don’t pay off or that have abysmally low completion rates. We can all cheer if those schools lose students. Personally, I think the government should stop subsidizing low-performing institutions with federal grants and loans, so that potential students get a clearer signal to stay away.
But for the typical student, at the typical school, college does pay off.
According to the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce, schools that primarily offer associate’s degrees provide a median return of $141,000 after a decade, and $723,000 over 40 years. Among those that primarily offer bachelor’s degrees, the return is lower in the short run, because tuition expenses are higher, but greater over the long term: $864,000 over 40 years.
Beyond the individual benefits that accrue to degree-holders, the U.S. economy needs more workers with postsecondary educations.
Not any and all educations, of course. Whatever the non-monetary benefits of attending, say, art school, degrees from such programs are not in high demand from employers. On the other hand, a lot of solid middle-class jobs — nurses, teachers, dental hygienists, paralegals, even wind-turbine service technicians — require at least some postsecondary education and training, and they have strong expected employment growth. Many higher-paying jobs in STEM fields typically require a postgraduate degree.
Given the wave of retirements in many of these occupations, and longer-term declines in birthrates, the country needs to start refilling the pipeline. Soon. Instead, enrollment in health profession programs has fallen in recent years. Same for education, engineering, and math and statistics.
Some might argue that if colleges want to attract more students they should cut their prices. Many already have. Tuition rates at public institutions have declined in the past decade, especially when adjusted for inflation and grant aid (i.e., the typical net price instead of the “sticker” price), according to data released Monday by College Board. And since 2009-2010, first-time full-time students at public two-year colleges have, on average, been receiving enough grant aid to fully cover their tuition and fees.
Net costs might still need to come down a lot more. Meanwhile, K-12 education has a lot of catching up to do so today’s children can eventually make it to college. Standardized testing data released Monday showed reading and math scores for fourth through eighth graders have plunged since the pandemic began, down to levels not seen in two decades.
This is a failure of massive proportion that political and educational leaders have not yet reckoned with. Whether we acknowledge these challenges or not, we’ll all feel the economic consequences soon enough. | 2022-10-25T11:31:07Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | The economic threat in declining college education rates - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/25/declining-college-education-rate-economic-threat/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/25/declining-college-education-rate-economic-threat/ |
Herschel Walker, Georgia Republicans' Senate nominee, prays before speaking at a campaign event. (Erik S. Lesser/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock) (Erik S Lesser/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock)
The Constitution may forbid any religious tests for public office, but where politics is actually practiced, candidates are constantly testifying about their faith, hoping we’ll see them as principled and moral — no matter our own beliefs.
Yet, despite what many voters believe, there’s very little reason to think that there’s something worthwhile about piety in politicians.
Ellis responded to a recent Post article on Democratic nominee Josh Shapiro’s Jewish faith by tweeting that “Josh Shapiro is at best a secular Jew in the same way Joe Biden is a secular Catholic.” It was utterly vulgar for a gentile like Ellis to pass judgment on whether any Jew is sufficiently Jewish. It’s also a particularly weird way to attack Shapiro, who is devoutly observant. Unfortunately, this wasn’t too surprising given the recent eruption of antisemitic remarks from high-profile conservatives including Donald Trump, who has a long history of tossing around rancid antisemitic tropes while expressing surprise that more Jews don’t abandon their values to support him.
Just as notable, however, is the implication that being more “secular” in Ellis’s eyes would make Shapiro more objectionable as governor.
Is there any evidence at all that pious and observant politicians make better governors or senators? Are they wiser, more compassionate, more competent, possessed of more integrity than those who don’t regularly attend services or look to scripture for policy guidance?
If there is, I haven’t been able to find it. In our long history of rogues and villains in public office, the highly religious are more than adequately represented. As in the rest of society, there’s no pattern in which the corrupt are more likely to be secular and the moral more likely to be religious, either personally or in their official capacity.
And plenty of less religious officeholders carry the qualities that the faithful supposedly bring. Take Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who unlike Shapiro happens to be an actual secular Jew. Despite never claiming his religion should dictate the policies everyone should adopt, Sanders embodies what advocates of pious politicians say they want. You may not agree with Sanders, but he has clear and consistent moral principles that guide his positions and decisions. They’re unwavering, and among other things, his supporters believe they immunize him from corruption: Campaign contributions won’t change his positions.
As so often happens, when people claim they’re looking for principles, what they’re after is nothing more than politicians who support their team. Nothing demonstrated this more vividly than evangelicals’ rapturous embrace of Trump, whose professions of faith are so comically phony that not even his supporters can believe them. (Asked once what God means to him, he talked about how he made a great deal to buy a golf course.)
When Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.) ran against Trump for the GOP’s 2016 presidential nomination, he said that “any president who doesn’t begin every day on his knees isn’t fit to be commander in chief.” But the GOP’s religious base turned away from Cruz and all the other more religious candidates to give their support to Trump, seemingly the living representation of every character flaw Christians are supposed to abhor.
Why? Because what really mattered to them was that Trump hates the people they hate. They don’t care that he says the Bible is his “favorite book” but can’t name a single Bible verse. He hates and infuriates liberals, and he’ll fight the culture war. That’s what matters.
And to a great degree, they’re right not to care, and the rest of us shouldn’t either.
Among the benefits of not worrying about how often a candidate sits in the pews, we might finally get some representation for the tens of millions of Americans who aren’t religious. An important recent development in American religion is the rise of the “nones,” the rapid increase in those who tell pollsters they don’t believe in God or don’t identify with any religion.
They now make up about a quarter of Americans, and the numbers are even higher among young people. (And guess what, there are even conservative atheists out there.) Yet there are almost no “nones” serving in Congress; Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) may be the only one.
A candidate’s faith may sometimes be a shortcut to know which positions they’ll take, but it won’t tell us whether they will be honest and trustworthy. There are plenty of things that go into being a good public servant, but being religious isn’t one of them. | 2022-10-25T11:31:25Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Why religious piety tells us nothing about candidates - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/25/religious-politicians-piety-honesty-waldman/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/25/religious-politicians-piety-honesty-waldman/ |
Majority of Marylanders supports expanding the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, Post-U. Md. poll finds
A 55 percent majority of Maryland residents favor building a third span at the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, a Washington Post-University of Maryland poll finds, as backups at the crossing have recently stretched up to 14 miles amid a long-term repair project.
The support is relatively widespread, with slightly more — over 6 in 10 in favor — in Howard and Anne Arundel counties combined, the latter where the bridge touches down on the western shore.
A slimmer 51 percent majority of Marylanders support Gov. Larry Hogan’s (R) plan to add express toll lanes to Interstate 270 and the state’s part of the Capital Beltway, according to the poll conducted earlier this month. Support dips to a combined 45 percent in Montgomery and Prince George’s counties, where the highways are located.
That’s a drop from 55 percent of residents in both counties who supported the toll lanes in a Post-Schar School poll in May. However, it is higher than in a 2018 Post-U. Md. poll that found a combined 41 percent of registered voters in Montgomery and Prince George’s supported express toll lanes. The 2018 poll question did not specify that the highways’ existing lanes would remain free.
The latest poll, conducted by The Washington Post and the University of Maryland’s Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement, finds support for another Chesapeake Bay crossing spans party lines. A 58 percent majority of registered Republicans favor the idea, as do 53 percent of Democrats and 57 percent of independents.
Support for adding a third span to the Bay Bridge ranges from 52 percent in Baltimore City and County combined, 55 percent in both Prince George’s and Montgomery counties, 63 percent in Anne Arundel and Howard counties together and 55 percent among residents in other parts of the state.
“It’s all about infrastructure — that’s something that seems to be neglected around the country today,” said Jeff Davis, 63, a retired mail carrier who lives in Upper Marlboro.
In addition to an expanded Bay Bridge and toll lanes, Davis said, he’d like to see better mass transit options to reduce traffic.
“It’s all about moving people and commerce,” Davis said. “We spend so much time in traffic around here. I think we need a comprehensive transportation system.”
Bridge repairs bring unprecedented traffic misery to both sides of the bay
Overall, Marylanders rank transportation as one of the state’s less pressing problems, with 10 percent citing road and transit issues as their chief concern. That is about even with those who consider taxes and affordable housing as the top issue and below those who name crime (22 percent) and public education (20 percent).
But in follow-up interviews, respondents had plenty of opinions about how the state should alleviate traffic congestion, which studies have shown is some of the worst in the country.
Some said massive delays related to the recent start of a two-year deck rehabilitation project on the Bay Bridge’s westbound span have highlighted the need for an additional crossing. A spokesman for the Maryland Transportation Authority, which operates the bridge, also said recently that the eastbound span will need lane closures for similar work within the next five to 10 years.
Deirdre Harash, 53, of Stevensville, said she’s “100 percent” for building an additional span. She said she lives near the bridge’s eastern end in Queen Anne’s County and uses it several times a week to shop and visit family. Her husband crosses it daily to commute to Bowie.
“The volume of traffic that uses the bridge on a daily basis has just grown tremendously over the last 20 years,” said Harash, a patient service coordinator for a cardiology practice in Stevensville.
Harash said the state needs to help local roads that get jammed during bridge backups, which she said have become a “nightmare” since the repairs started in late September. Her husband’s 40-minute commute can now take 1 1/2 hours, she said, and bridge-bound traffic using local roads to circumvent Route 50 has increased “20-fold.”
“Another bridge needs to be built,” Harash said. “There’s no way around it.”
Hogan, “furious” about Bay Bridge backups, orders state to speed up repairs
The state is conducting a $5 million federally required study to assess the potential environmental impacts of building a third span. It would augment the original two-lane span, built in 1952, that now carries eastbound traffic and the three-lane westbound span that opened in 1973. Both are about four miles long.
State officials haven’t said how much a new crossing would cost or how the state would pay for it. However, a top state official told the Baltimore Sun in 2018 that it could cost up to $10 billion, the paper said. The poll did not ask whether Marylanders would be willing to pay higher tolls or taxes to fund a bridge expansion, but instead whether they would support the project when “considering state government budget priorities.”
Douglas Boline, 61, a federal worker who lives in Annapolis, said there’s “not enough bridge” to meet the cross-bay traffic demand.
“I don’t care where it goes,” said Boline, who sees the backups on the western shore. “I just want more bridge.”
But some residents say an additional span shouldn’t come before other state needs.
Vinay Sharma, 28, a lawyer who lives in Columbia, said he recently got stuck in a two-hour bridge backup while heading home from a weekend wedding in Cambridge. He said he appreciates that some motorists rely on it more regularly to commute, but he believes the state should first address more pressing issues, such as improving public education and reducing crime in Baltimore.
“To me, traffic on the Bay Bridge is part of life,” said Sharma, who grew up in Montgomery County. “You plan for it, you deal with it, and then you enjoy Ocean City or wherever you’re going.”
It’s unclear why support for Hogan’s plan to add toll lanes to I-270 and the Beltway dropped compared to the May poll.
The proposal has come under criticism from environmental groups and leaders in Montgomery and Prince George’s, who say widening the Beltway east of I-270 would destroy homes and environmentally sensitive parkland while doing too little to encourage mass transit use.
Support for the toll lane plan varies according to income levels. Nearly 6 in 10 residents with a household income of $100,000 or more favor the lanes. But support falls to half for those making $50,000 to $100,000 and to about 4 in 10 for those earning less than $50,000.
Md. plan to widen I-270 first will make traffic worse, toll lane advocates say
Boline, of Annapolis, said he supports adding toll lanes to I-270 as long as they reach Frederick and eventually beyond to Hagerstown. Having lived in Damascus, he said, he knows that upper I-270 is “a mess.” He said he’s fine with the state charging tolls because motorists would have the option of not using the toll lanes.
“If that’s what you need to build the lanes, then fine,” Boline said. “They need it.”
But others said they were concerned that many motorists would be priced out, especially if the Maryland tolls reached $30 to $40 and more, as they have at peak times on express lanes in Northern Virginia.
Lisa Tompkins-Brown, who lives in Silver Spring, said she’s “very much against” toll lanes in Maryland. They might be handy for her commute to Tysons, she said, but any toll above $5 would be too expensive.
“I worry about people who have lower or more moderate incomes,” said Tompkins-Brown, 50, a health strategist. “They’d still be stuck in traffic while those who are more affluent can pay the tolls. It just increases the divide between the haves and the have-nots.”
Idette Brumbaugh, 53, a registered nurse who lives in Damascus, said she’s concerned about the economic fairness of express toll lanes, but believes motorists need an alternative to sitting in traffic.
“I like convenience,” Brumbaugh said, “and I’m willing to pay for convenience.”
The poll was conducted by phone Oct. 9-14 among a random sample of 860 Maryland residents. The overall results have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 4.5 percentage points. | 2022-10-25T11:48:29Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Majority of Marylanders supports expanding the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, Post-U. Md. poll finds - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/trafficandcommuting/majority-of-marylanders-supports-expanding-the-chesapeake-bay-bridge-post-u-md-poll-finds/2019/10/24/e2a91402-f6ad-11e9-8cf0-4cc99f74d127_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/trafficandcommuting/majority-of-marylanders-supports-expanding-the-chesapeake-bay-bridge-post-u-md-poll-finds/2019/10/24/e2a91402-f6ad-11e9-8cf0-4cc99f74d127_story.html |
Sunak’s rise to U.K. prime minister holds lessons for U.S. politics
Rishi Sunak, who will take over as U.K. prime minister, at the Conservative Party leadership election hustings in London in August. (Neil Hall/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)
The United States and the United Kingdom often move in lockstep politically. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s ascendancy signaled the rise of low-tax conservatives; then came the election of President Ronald Reagan. Brexit in 2016 presaged increasing right-wing nationalism and economic know-nothingism; Donald Trump was elected later that year. Now, the spectacular collapse of Conservative Liz Truss has made way for Rishi Sunak’s selection as prime minister — which could offer hints about the future of politics in the United States. Sunak’s success certainly provides two lessons for American voters.
First, the cult of supply-side tax theory is spectacularly dangerous. In the Truss-Sunak battle for their party’s backing last summer, Sunak warned of the folly of jumbo tax cuts amid raging inflation. “For the past six weeks,” the New York Times reported, “Sunak has been lying low as his economic predictions have played out at a dizzying speed.” Conservative ideologues in the United Kingdom and the United States had ridiculed Sunak’s call for moderation and fiscal sanity; now, he’s getting the last laugh.
As chancellor of the exchequer during the pandemic, Sunak — not unlike President Biden — spent “hundreds of billions of pounds on emergency pandemic measures,” the Times noted, “including paying people’s wages and arranging generous grant and loan programs for businesses.” As the pandemic subsided, Sunak reduced spending and recognized inflation was the primary concern. “Sunak raised taxes as a share of national income to their highest level in 70 years, a record he had to defend over the summer,” the Times reported. “He contrasted his pragmatic approach to public finances with Ms. Truss’s more carefree policy of not offsetting tax cuts with spending cuts or other plans to avoid increasing public debt.” Although he has said he eventually wants to cut taxes, he and certain sober economists understand this cannot happen until inflation abates.
Meanwhile, in the United States, Biden and the Democratic Party have been resisting entreaties from Republicans — should the GOP take one or both houses of Congress — to return to reckless tax cuts that will enlarge the deficit and drive inflation even higher. American voters should be wary of politicians promising an extravagant free lunch and hawking the notion that supercharged growth can end inflation and deliver prosperity.
The second lesson: The United Kingdom wound up in its Truss quagmire in large part by indulging in an increasingly problematic feature of American politics — partisan primaries. Truss got her job, as the Times noted, through “elections somewhat like those held in the United States for party nominations.” Truss, like the MAGA Republicans, promised the unattainable to British primary voters, who “tend to be more ideologically fervent and less inclined to moderation than are party bosses or even the median party supporter.”
In U.S. politics, there’s of course plenty of support for the conclusion that partisan primaries undermine moderation, compromise and sanity. In a report for the New America think tank, Lee Drutman finds that although partisan primaries don’t fully explain our hyper-partisan and dysfunctional politics, they do “incentivize more polarizing behavior among candidates and legislators.” He adds: “There is ample evidence that fear of a primary challenge leads candidates to reject compromise; to cultivate and stay close to their primary constituencies and the interests groups and donors who actively fund candidates in primaries; and to engage in partisan conflict to prove their bona fides to their primary constituencies.”
Together with gerrymandering and single-member districts, primaries produce what one would expect from low-turnout elections in which the most ferocious partisans participate. The Unite America Institute found that with over 80 percent of congressional districts rated “safe,” the real action happens in partisan primaries in which only about 10 percent of eligible voters take part. “Of 234.9 million eligible voters, only 23.4 million cast ballots (10%) in primaries that effectively decided the outcome of 361 congressional districts (83%),” its report found. That’s how you get the likes of Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) and the Republican nominee for Pennsylvania governor, Doug Mastriano.
Among other measures, the report recommends ranked-choice voting, which helped lead to the election of a more centrist mayor in New York City and to Mary Sattler Peltola’s victory in a special election in Alaska, which made her the first Alaska Native to serve in Congress (over MAGA favorite Sarah Palin). In Alaska, ranked-choice voting also helped secure the candidacy of perhaps the most moderate Republican in the Senate, Lisa Murkowski. By forcing primary candidates to appeal to a broader cross-section of voters (to gain second- and third-place votes), ranked-choice candidates promote less-extreme candidates.
In the midterm elections, Nevada voters will consider a ballot proposition to institute ranked-choice voting, a measure that in the future could make it harder for election deniers such as Adam Laxalt, the Republican candidate for Senate, and Jim Marchant, the Republican nominee for Nevada secretary of state, to prevail. Considering the primary results around the country, ranked-choice voting might be the single most effective defense this election cycle against the disintegration of functional democracy.
In short, midterm voters are on notice. Electing right-wing ideological firebrands willing to pander to the most extreme elements in their base is a recipe for economic disaster. And if we want to halt the slide to ever more nutty nominees and dysfunctional government, putting our political fate in the hands of super-partisan primary voters is a grave mistake. It’s time to look at a range of political reforms — from nonpolitical redistricting to multi-member districts to ranked-choice voting — if we want to maximize the chance of electing responsible, reasonable leaders. | 2022-10-25T11:52:51Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Sunak’s rise to U.K. prime minister holds lessons for U.S. politics - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/25/sunak-uk-prime-minister-us-politics-lessons/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/25/sunak-uk-prime-minister-us-politics-lessons/ |
The Porter sisters’ ‘genius’ bestsellers are back in the spotlight
Review by Wendy Smith
Although Jane and Maria Porter’s morally uplifting melodramas have little in common with Jane Austen’s wry comedies of manners or the Brontë sisters’ passionate chronicles, literary scholar Devoney Looser’s subtitle for her book “Sister Novelists” rightly claims the Porters as trailblazers who paved the way for other female writers. They published under their own names at a time when English “authoresses” were expected to hide behind gender-ambiguous pseudonyms or remain anonymous. Both were best-selling authors, and Jane was also an unabashed businesswoman, bargaining with their publishers to get better terms as their reputations — and sales — grew. Looser’s dual biography admiringly portrays two single women from modest circumstances who seized fame and tenuous economic security through talent and determination.
Jane had to be a tough negotiator; the Porters were genteelly poor. Their father, a military surgeon, died in 1779 when Jane was 3 and Maria under a year old. Their mother supplemented a scant army pension by running a boardinghouse. Jane and Maria’s education consisted of a few years at a charity school, but both were avid readers and precocious writers. Maria’s first story collection, “Artless Tales,” was published when she was 14; it did well enough to lead the sisters to hope that their literary work could support their mother while their three brothers were in apprenticeships and school. Jane, quieter and more cautious than her lively, loquacious sister, made up for a slower start by “creating the historical novel as we know it” in her 1803 tale of a Polish war hero who becomes a refugee in England. “What was new about ‘Thaddeus of Warsaw,’ ” Looser explains, “was its mingling of climactic historical events with the conventions of biographies, romantic tales, and probable domestic novels.” Contemporary critics dubbed it “a work of genius,” and it was a sensational bestseller.
Maria, who had bounced around among fictional genres, followed Jane into historical romance with “The Hungarian Brothers” in 1807, and “The Scottish Chiefs,” Jane’s epic 1810 account of William Wallace’s struggle for independence from Britain, cemented the sisters’ reputations as the premier historical novelists of their day. Despite stardom and sales, their income rarely covered their expenses. The Porter brothers racked up debts, which their sisters often covered, and offered little financial help when their fortunes improved. Jane and Maria economized and traded on their fame by making lengthy sojourns in the homes of the wealthy patrons they cultivated. Looser makes good use of the sisters’ letters to each other during these periods to paint a sharp portrait of a class-stratified society in which social inferiors availing themselves of an aristocratic household’s amenities were expected to be at their benefactors’ beck and call.
Looser also draws on their correspondence to offer minutely detailed exegeses of Jane’s and Maria’s tortuous relationships with a parade of men who entangled them in emotionally charged friendships that promised to blossom into love and marriage but never did. How much a reader enjoys these passages depends on the level of their interest in exchanges such as Maria’s with a young painter, Thomas Kearsley, she thinks may be interested in her, as summarized by Looser from Maria’s letter to Jane:
“Then you have an affection for some people?” Maria asked.
“For many,” he said. “And I can like, and endure, a great number more.”
“Can you endure us?” [Maria] asked Kearsley, pointedly.
Kearsley looked down for a few moments at this loaded, audacious question. Suddenly, he came forward and snatched Maria’s hand.
“Yes,” he said, his eyes burning with ardor. “I can endure you!”
And so on, for three pages. On the one hand, this scene is charmingly redolent of the cult of “sensibility” that spread across Europe in Romanticism’s heyday. On the other, there are a great many such scenes, and it can be maddening to watch Maria and Jane pining after men who kept them dangling, or waffling over how they really felt about men they ultimately rejected. A little agonized soul-searching goes a long way, and Looser might profitably have made more selective use of the sisters’ atmospheric correspondence.
She is more cogent on the question of why these popular and influential authors are virtually unknown today. The root cause of the sisters’ decline in literary reputation and, eventually, sales, Looser writes, was the phenomenal success of Walter Scott’s “Waverley” in 1814 and the author’s failure to acknowledge that the methods he employed in his historical novels were very similar to the Porters’: “Critics would increasingly claim that the Waverley novels had elevated the genre of fiction — and especially historical fiction — bringing to it a superior new (masculine) excellence, while correcting supposed previous (feminine) faults.”
Jane in particular resented this and in 1827 wrote a pointed short story, “Nobody’s Address,” that implicitly accused Scott of reducing his literary precursors to nobodies. By the time she died in 1850, having survived Maria by 18 years, Jane had been reduced to living with a brother and receiving charitable grants from the government. Her achievements deserved better recognition, and although Looser’s thickly detailed biography could stand to be a little less detailed, it pays overdue tribute to pioneering siblings unjustly neglected by literary history.
Wendy Smith is the author of “Real Life Drama: The Group Theatre and America, 1931-1940.”
Sister Novelists
The Trailblazing Porter Sisters, Who Paved the Way for Austen and the Brontës
By Devoney Looser
Bloomsbury. 576 pp. $30 | 2022-10-25T12:10:15Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Sister Novelists, a biography of Jane and Maria Porter, book review - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2022/10/25/porter-ister-novelists-devoney-looser-review/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2022/10/25/porter-ister-novelists-devoney-looser-review/ |
His Yeezy branded products accounted for an estimated 10 percent of the company’s annual revenue
Kanye West at Milk Studios in Hollywood, California, in 2016. (Jonathan Leibson/Getty Images)
Adidas has cut ties with Ye, the musician and fashion designer formerly known as Kanye West, marking the end of a partnership that made the company billions but was soured by the artist’s repeated brazen antisemitic and offensive remarks.
After avoiding commenting for weeks on the status of the partnership, the German-based maker of athletic gear broke its silence on Tuesday, saying in a statement: “After a thorough review, the company has taken the decision to terminate the partnership with Ye immediately, end production of Yeezy branded products and stop all payments to Ye and his companies. adidas will stop the adidas Yeezy business with immediate effect.”
The statement added that Adidas “does not tolerate antisemitism and any other sort of hate speech. Ye’s recent comments and actions have been unacceptable, hateful and dangerous, and they violate the company’s values of diversity and inclusion, mutual respect and fairness.”
The move comes weeks after Adidas executives announced the company was reviewing its business deal with Ye and his multibillion-dollar Yeezy brand following widespread outrage after he wore a “WHITE LIVES MATTER” T-shirt at his Paris Fashion Week show. In the days that followed, Ye made antisemitic comments on his Instagram and Twitter — triggering suspensions — and continued his diatribe on a podcast, where he doubled down on antisemitic tropes. In that same interview he also falsely claimed that George Floyd, a Black man who was killed at the hands of Minneapolis police, died from a fentanyl injection. Floyd’s family is considering legal action against Ye.
Ye has had a significant impact on Adidas, with Yeezy generating an estimated $2 billion a year, close to 10 percent of the company’s annual revenue, Morningstar analyst David Swartz said.
The company said in its statement that terminating the relationship was “expected to have a short-term negative impact of up to €250 million on the company’s net income in 2022 given the high seasonality of the fourth quarter.”
Ye, who has won 24 Grammy Awards and released numerous critically acclaimed platinum records, started working with Adidas in 2013. The partnership eventually made Ye a billionaire and provided Adidas with a new customer base.
Ye began airing his grievances with Adidas this summer, when he falsely accused the company of stealing his designs, calling out chief executive Kasper Rorsted by name in a tweet. He went after the company again in early October, releasing a 30-minute online video of a meeting with Adidas executives, whom he accused of doing “wrong by the company, by the business and by the partnership.” Ye also showed the executives a pornographic film.
In an appearance on the podcast Drink Champs, Ye launched into a 10-minute rant about Jewish people and called out Adidas’s delay in ending the partnership.
“The thing about it being Adidas — I can say antisemitic things and Adidas can’t drop me. Now what? Now what?”
These rants presented a particularly sensitive challenge for Adidas, given the company’s history. Its founder, Adolf Dassler, was a member of the Nazi Party and outfitted the Hitler Youth.
“At a time of rising antisemitism, when incidents in the U.S. reached an all-time high in 2021, such statements are more than damning — they are dangerous,” wrote Jonathan A. Greenblatt, the CEO and national director of the Anti-Defamation League.
Pressure on Adidas mounted on Oct. 23, after members of a hate group draped signs over a major highway in Los Angeles that said “Honk if you know Kanye is right about the Jews.” Pictures show the men doing the Nazi salute went viral, prompting celebrities to call on Adidas to cut ties with Ye.
“@ADIDAS DROP KANYE WEST,” actor and director America Ferrera posted on Instagram, “this is despicable. do not amplify that man’s influence.” | 2022-10-25T12:10:21Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Adidas ends massive deal with Kanye West after antisemitism controversy - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/10/25/adidas-kanye-west-partnership-ends/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/10/25/adidas-kanye-west-partnership-ends/ |
Mortgage rates have nearly tripled and housing affordability has plummeted, but US home prices aren’t really supposed to fall much — at least according to the prevailing narrative. As few buyers as there are, there are too few sellers to drag prices much lower, the optimists say.
Austin, Texas, seems to disagree.
One of the hottest housing markets of the pandemic-era boom, the Texas capital has suddenly experienced a flood of existing-home inventory. The number of listings has jumped to the highest since 2011, and in a metropolitan area that has become accustomed to cycling through inventory in less than a month, it now takes more than three, according to data from Texas A&M University’s Texas Real Estate Research Center.
Austin is a unique case, of course, but it shows that the “lock-in effect” may not be the ironclad defense against home-price declines that some investors and homeowners think it is. As the thinking goes, homeowners aren’t supposed to willingly part with their below-3% 30-year mortgages when they would have to turn around and replace them with new home loans that carry interest rates above 7%. That’s true of the typical young family that may have been on the cusp of upsizing, but it’s not a hard-and-fast rule that applies to the entire country.
In Austin, what appears to be happening is an effort to time the top of the market. Like stock traders, Austin homeowners and investors who bought their properties before the boom appear to be rushing to cash in their chips. “I suspect that people are nervous that home values are going to fall, so they’re trying to sell even if they have low interest rates,” Jim Gaines, a research economist at the Texas Real Estate Research Center, told me by phone. Some may have never lived in the homes; others may be taking the cash proceeds to smaller homes or cheaper suburbs; while others might just be moving into rentals while they wait out a market bottom to buy back in.
Although they’re still up on a year-over-year basis, Austin-Round Rock home prices are clearly rolling over, falling 6.9% on a sequential basis in the third quarter from the second, according to the Texas Real Estate Research Center’s home price index for single-family homes, which tracks repeat sales on the same homes. The declines are broad-based across price categories, although more expensive homes are holding up slightly better than mid-priced and lower-priced ones, the data show.
It’s possible that homeowners are also getting the itch to take profits in other recently hot markets such as Miami, Phoenix and Boise, Idaho. All of them were juggernauts that benefited from the combination of 2021’s low interest rates and pandemic-fueled migration. And now, many of their longtime residents are sitting on piles of untapped home equity, a tempting resource to tap as inflation eats away at purchasing power.
Granted, it’s not a given that this initial wave of listings will necessarily snowball in Austin or elsewhere. In fact, it’s conceivable that many of these sellers will start to pull their listings from the market once they see that they aren’t getting the offers they had hoped for, and the “lock-in effect” proponents could still be vindicated. Underwriting standards have tightened drastically since the financial crisis, and there are far fewer adjustable-rate loans, so it’s unlikely that the US will experience an imminent wave of forced selling. With few homeowners under water, the incentive is high to keep making mortgage payments rather than risk foreclosure.
So ultimately, the fate of home prices rests with the labor market. The median forecast in a Bloomberg survey of economists projects that unemployment will reach 4.5% next year. But with the Federal Reserve rapidly tightening financial conditions to tackle the worst inflation in 40 years, the range of estimates is wide — 3.3% to 6% — and the probability of a recession is rising. “If people start losing their jobs willy nilly, then yeah, these home prices will decline rapidly because there will be a surge in distressed sales,” Gaines told me. In other words, low inventories can probably buffer most housing markets for a while. But if the labor market starts to crumble, housing will probably crumble right along with it. In Austin, the low-inventory bulwark is already starting to fall apart. | 2022-10-25T12:19:18Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Think Homeowners Will Stay Put? Austin Suggests Otherwise - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/think-homeowners-will-stay-put-austin-suggests-otherwise/2022/10/25/fcf8225a-5454-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/think-homeowners-will-stay-put-austin-suggests-otherwise/2022/10/25/fcf8225a-5454-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html |
Iconic Leslie Jordan moments, from ‘Will & Grace’ to Instagram fame
Leslie Jordan performs with Cassadee Pope at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville last year. (Jason Kempin/Getty Images)
Actor and comedian Leslie Jordan, 67, known for his television appearances in “American Horror Story,” “Will & Grace” and “Call Me Kat,” died on Monday in Los Angeles, according to his agent. Jordan’s unique humor and Southern accent touched the hearts of audiences across multiple generations. After a glittering acting career on the small screen, he found a new stage on an even smaller one: Instagram.
Here are some of the moments his fans and former colleagues are remembering him fondly by:
His iconic ‘well, well, well’ drawl
Before his internet stardom, Jordan was best known for his recurring role on “Will & Grace,” which ran on NBC from 1998 to 2006 and brought the first gay lead actors on a hit U.S. sitcom in history into millions of living rooms.
His performance as sassy socialite Beverley Leslie, and frenemy to Megan Mullally’s iconic, boozy Karen Walker, won him an Emmy for outstanding guest actor in a comedy series in 2006. He often strolled onto the screen at opportune moments with the catchphrase: “Well, well, well.”
BEVERLY LESLIE FOREVER pic.twitter.com/POKDFkolD6
— jeremiah moriarty (@miahmoriarty) October 24, 2022
His comedic chemistry with Mullally
His on-screen rivalry and chemistry with Mullally created some of the show’s most memorable moments — which one fan described as “a comedy masterclass.”
In one scene widely shared on Tuesday, he greets her character with the line: “Karen Walker, I thought I smelled gin and regret.”
His co-stars from “Will & Grace” honored the actor by sharing photos of him in costume from the show. “My heart is breaking … Leslie Jordan was, hands down, one of the greats,” Mullally wrote. “How brilliant it was that millions of people were able to discover the real Leslie and his love of life and unparalleled storytelling abilities on instagram.”
Fans of the sitcom also praised Jordan for being open about his sexuality. “Leslie Jordan was one of the first gay people I ever saw on TV,” one person tweeted. “He has made me smile so many times.”
His internet rebirth
As the coronavirus pandemic swept the globe — Jordan, then 64 — returned from Hollywood to hunker down in Chattanooga, Tenn., where his 94-year-old mother lived. Armed with little more than plenty of spare time, his phone’s front-facing camera, and the occasional baton — the self-described computer-illiterate actor found internet stardom.
Jordan’s videos, in which he carefully deployed his acid-tongued, high-camp sense of humor, introduced him to a new generation of fans. His Instagram account grew from 20,000 followers in 2020 to 5.8 million by the time of his death.
Jordan was perplexed at first by his sudden rise to viral fame, he told The Washington Post in an interview published in April 2020. “Who are these people? I had no idea. It’s all of a sudden becoming popular, and how is this happening?”
With the help of internet-savvy friends, Jordan embraced his new audience with an array of energetic posts — including a recurring series of self-produced home-fitness videos deploying a back scratcher as a piece of exercise equipment.
Leslie Jordan is our feisty quarantine uncle
Instagram role model for young LGBT people
More frequently than not, Jordan was sidetracked during his pandemic videos by humorous memories, often about life in Tennessee as a young gay man.
In one much-loved clip, he recalled the reaction of his father upon returning home with army colleagues to find Jordan performing twirls with a baton in the front yard. “He loved me, he just didn’t know what to make of me,” he recalled of his father.
In another video he identified himself as a “high school cheerleader stuck in a 65-year-old male body.” He said: “I think I fell out of the womb and landed in my mother’s high heels.” | 2022-10-25T12:19:24Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Leslie Jordan’s best moments, from ‘Will & Grace’ to Instagram videos - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/10/25/leslie-jordan-will-grace-instagram-tributes/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/10/25/leslie-jordan-will-grace-instagram-tributes/ |
In prime minister transition, King Charles III plays role his mother did
The ‘kissing hands’ ceremony was important enough to Queen Elizabeth II that she participated only two days before she died
King Charles III welcomes Rishi Sunak during an audience at Buckingham Palace, where he invited the newly elected leader of the Conservative Party to become prime minister and form a new government. (Aaron Chown/Pool/Reuters)
LONDON — King Charles III ascended the throne less than two months ago and is already on his second prime minister, playing a central role in that transition of power.
On Tuesday, in a carefully choreographed sequence of events that Britons are increasingly familiar with, the British monarch invited the new leader of the Conservative Party, Rishi Sunak, to form a government. It was at that exact moment — and not before — that Sunak became prime minister of the United Kingdom.
Not that this was in any doubt. Sunak on Monday was selected as leader of the Conservative Party, heralding a number of firsts: the first person of color and first Hindu to lead Britain. At 42, Sunak is also the youngest prime minister in 200 years.
Rishi Sunak promises to earn Britain’s trust in first speech as prime minister
Tuesday was also a first for the king, who for the first time has presided over a changeover in power. His mother, the late Queen Elizabeth II, had 15 prime ministers during her long reign.
Britain is a constitutional monarchy and one of the few powers that the monarch has left is the ability to appoint the prime minister. In theory, the king could exert some personal choice; in practice, he appoints the person who can command a majority in the House of Commons.
The ceremony is effectively a formal installation of the new prime minister. But it was important enough to Elizabeth that she performed the duty just two days before her death.
Tuesday’s ceremony took place at Buckingham Palace, the official headquarters of the British royal family. It was also, for most of the queen’s life, the London residence of the British monarch. So far, Charles and Camilla, Queen Consort, have shown no sign of wanting to move into the palace and instead have kept their base at nearby Clarence House.
In a private audience in the morning, former prime minister Liz Truss arrived at the palace and tendered her resignation. Shortly after, Sunak arrived. There was likely some bowing — by him — before he was invited to form a government.
The ceremony is called “kissing hands,” though in modern politics there is no kissing.
The logistics were much less complicated than last time, seven weeks ago and a lifetime in British politics, when Boris Johnson and Truss, on separate planes, flew to Balmoral in the Scottish highlands due to the queen’s poor health.
In Britain’s constitutional monarchy, the monarch and the prime minister meet weekly, currently on Wednesdays, to discuss matters of state. There is no one else in the room, and many former prime ministers have spoken about how much they have enjoyed the weekly exchanges. Some have even said they found them therapeutic, knowing that their conversations won’t be leaked.
In her final speech as prime minister, Truss said it had been a “huge honor to be prime minister of this great country” and highlighted leading “the nation in mourning [following] the death of her late Majesty the Queen, after 70 years of service, and welcoming the accession of His Majesty King Charles III.”
It’s unclear what Charles thought of the dizzying politics of the past few weeks.
But Charles did raise eyebrows when, during his first weekly audience with Truss, he could be heard greeting the leader and muttering, “Dear, oh dear.” | 2022-10-25T12:20:38Z | www.washingtonpost.com | King Charles III invites Rishi Sunak to become prime minister - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/25/king-charles-rishi-sunak-prime-minister/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/25/king-charles-rishi-sunak-prime-minister/ |
Barack Obama had a lot to say (about the Bears) on ESPN’s ‘Manningcast’
With Barack Obama rooting them on from afar, Justin Fields and the Bears easily beat the Patriots on Monday night. (C.J. Gunther/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock) (Cj Gunther/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)
The first guest segment of ESPN’s Monday night “Manningcast” — better known as “Monday Night Football with Peyton and Eli” — featured three guys in dad-style, quarter-zip sweaters. One of them happened to be a former president of the United States.
The game between the New England Patriots and Chicago Bears offered Bears fan Barack Obama the chance to hang out with Peyton and Eli Manning for a conversation that included wisecracks about golf, coaching their kids’ teams, voting and, of course, the Bears.
Peyton and Eli have each met up with Obama during White House visits to celebrate the former quarterbacks’ Super Bowl victories, and Peyton joined Obama at least once on the golf course.
“Peyton’s game is pretty tight,” Obama said, describing “a great match” at Riviera Country Club in Los Angeles.
“I’m not going to talk about anybody’s game because I’m pretty sure I hit into the woods and trees a couple of times,” he added, noting that woods and trees aren’t exactly plentiful at Riviera.
Peyton confessed that his tee shot on the first hole was, well, a disaster that Obama “pardoned” with a mulligan. “It was the least I could do,” Obama joked. “I felt bad for you. I thought you were a high-stakes performer.”
To that, Peyton replied: “I would rather throw four interceptions on national TV than do what I did in front of you.”
Obama famously helped coach his daughter Sasha’s youth basketball team for a while, volunteering along with aide Reggie Love “after observing an adorable but chaotic first couple of games,” he wrote in his book “A Promised Land.” That’s another thing he has in common with Peyton, although Eli cracked that Peyton has designed “197 plays” for his son Marshall’s 11-and-under flag football team.
The former president remains an ardent Bears fan and admitted it was a little difficult to welcome the team’s rival Green Bay Packers to the White House after they won the Super Bowl in 2011, but he also welcomed the Bears 25 years after their lone Super Bowl title. The 1985 Bears had never visited because their trip was preempted by the Challenger shuttle disaster on Jan. 28, 1986, two days after Super Bowl XX. At the time of the 2011 ceremony, Obama admitted, “this is as much fun as I will have as president of the United States.”
He told the Mannings “it was hard having the Packers in and having to be nice to them. I moved to Chicago in ’85. You show up in this city, and you’ve got this team that captures everybody’s imagination. The fact that they never got their White House due, I figured, what’s the point of being president if you can’t make up for that?”
As for which Manning brother was the better White House guest, Obama went the diplomatic route, with a zinger aimed at Peyton’s trip with the Denver Broncos in 2016. “I have to say that both of you guys were gentlemen,” he said. “There was some silverware missing after that visit, but we couldn’t directly trace it to you, but we had a great time. One of the fun things about being president — and there are a lot of things that aren’t so fun — is having a chance to greet world-class athletes and giving them a chance to shine. It’s a lot of fun, although I will tell you when you get football teams in — I’m a skinny guy as it is, and when I’m standing next to some of these linemen or I’m shaking their hands and they’ve got paws, it does make you feel a little bit small.”
Who was the better White House guest: Peyton or @EliManning?
Former President @BarackObama joins the ManningCast on ESPN2 pic.twitter.com/pFb5wQWPZq
Obama’s appearance gave Eli the opportunity to show the former president’s impression of Peyton’s famous “Omaha!” audible at the line of scrimmage, but Obama turned the wisecrack on the former New York Giants quarterback who often protected himself when his protection collapsed. “You dropped quick when that rush was coming,” Obama cracked.
Obama used the appearance to urge people to vote, no matter their preference.
"Regardless of where you stand on the issues, you taking 15-20 minutes out to let your voice be heard makes a big difference." - President @BarackObama
Comedian Bill Burr, a Patriots fan, followed Obama and said of appearing alongside the Manning brothers, “This is like the quarterback anti-Christ for me.” Vince Vaughn was the night’s final guest, and the actor drew some criticism from fellow Bears fans on social media for referring to Chicago’s stadium as “Soldiers Field.”
I learned from the best. Vince wins. https://t.co/wRgV2AWazC
The Bears beat the Patriots, 33-14, and passed up the chance to score again on Coach Bill Belichick’s team at the end, which did not please Peyton.
“Do not take a knee,” he said with disgust. “I think if you have a chance to score 40 in Foxborough, you score 40 in Foxborough.” | 2022-10-25T13:24:16Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Barack Obama joins Peyton and Eli Manning during Bears-Patriots game - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/25/barack-obama-peyton-manning-eli-manning/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/25/barack-obama-peyton-manning-eli-manning/ |
Goya? Picasso? This obscure art museum has them and much more.
By Cathy Alter
The installation “Terrestrial Caravan,” by Baltimore-based artist Hoesy Corona, at the Academy Art Museum in Easton, Md., speaks to environmental displacement and migration. (André Chung for The Washington Post)
All of this in a town formerly known for sea merchants and farmers tucked away on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. I count myself a bit of a museum junkie, and I had never even heard of AAM before a news release recently landed in my inbox announcing a major show: “Fickle Mirror: Dialogues in Self-Portraiture.” It included a Warhol from the National Gallery of Art. I decided to make the two-hour journey from D.C. across the Chesapeake Bay Bridge to Easton, population 17,000.
She arrived at AAM in June 2021, after stints at the Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The museum already had a core audience, but Jesse and curator Mehves Lelic are hoping to draw the nontraditional museumgoer through their doors. “Of course, we need to meet people where they are,” Jesse says, “but we also want to open them up to new ways of looking at contemporary art. What is beautiful? What is art? What is interesting?”
While the museum has laid down strong roots in Easton, its director and its curator regularly visit studios and art shows in Philadelphia, New York City and elsewhere. “We are always looking at what’s been already made and what’s currently being made,” Lelic says. Adds Jesse: “The dialogue between the two” — the art of the past, the art of the present — “is what excites us.” That’s all to the benefit of their audience: art lovers on the Eastern Shore — and beyond — who are waiting to be thrilled. | 2022-10-25T13:41:53Z | www.washingtonpost.com | A tiny art museum spotlights big names like Picasso and Goya - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2022/10/25/small-art-museum-easton/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2022/10/25/small-art-museum-easton/ |
By Mileah Kromer
Mileah Kromer is director of the Sarah T. Hughes Center for Politics at Goucher College.
Rep. Anthony G. Brown (D-Md.), at the Prince George’s County Democratic Central Committee, Ploughman & Fisherman Breakfast on Oct. 15 in Greenbelt. (Robb Hill for The Washington Post)
A 2017 commercial for Gatorade asked several professional athletes to give their secret to victory. Serena Williams looked directly into the camera and said flatly, “be on the wrong side of the biggest upset in your sport.” Williams, then the No. 1-ranked tennis player in the world riding a 33-match winning streak, had lost to No. 43-ranked Roberta Vinci in the semifinals of the 2015 U.S. Open. Odds-makers gave Vinci a 1-in-300 chance of winning.
Williams’s loss to Vinci ranks among the biggest upsets in sports history.
And Anthony G. Brown can surely relate.
Eight years ago, the smart money in Maryland and election forecasters expected a win for Brown, the 2014 Democratic nominee for governor in Maryland and the holder of an Ivy League law degree, a decorated veteran and a two-term lieutenant governor.
As we all know, things didn’t go as expected.
The “little bit of a molehill” race against Republican Larry Hogan turned Brown into a cautionary tale rather than a racial-barrier-breaking governor-elect. National media outlets dubbed Brown’s loss to Hogan as one of the biggest political upsets of the cycle; some contend that it ranks among the biggest upsets of the past decade. The harshest analyses of Brown’s loss centered on his personal failings as a candidate. No one would have blamed him for walking away from public service to the moneyed pastures of a high-powered legal firm or lobbying shop.
But Brown returned to the ballot in the very next election cycle. He won a competitive Democratic congressional primary in 2016 after incumbent Donna F. Edwards decided to run for U.S. Senate, and he was elected to represent Maryland’s 4th District.
This year, after besting a formidable primary opponent in Judge Katie Curran O’Malley in the Democratic primary for attorney general, he is taking another shot at statewide office.
And what is noticeably different this time around is. It’s evident on the campaign trail. He’s more relaxed and less rigid, still on-message but with authenticity in delivery, confident rather than arrogant, and more comfortable with being put on the spot.
His valuable detour to Congress allowed him to step out from former governor Martin O’Malley’s (D) shadow and benefit from the mentorship of Rep. Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.) and the late congressman Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.). Both men encouraged Brown to lean into his experience and specialize in military issues and veterans affairs.
And as a member of the Armed Services Committee, Brown quickly became a leading voice against the Trump-era ban on transgender service members and an advocate for criminal justice reform in the military. He crafted a proposal with Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.) to remove Confederate names from military bases. This provision was part of a larger defense spending bill eventually vetoed by then-President Donald Trump and overridden in a rare moment of bipartisan cooperation among Democrats and Republicans in Congress.
In advocating for these issues, the gubernatorial candidate who once awkwardly refused to conduct what he dubbed a “drive-by interview” with WBAL-TV’s Jayne Miller in 2013 became a regular on live national cable news by the end of his first term in the House. Brown has grown from being “terrible on television” to an effective communicator.
What perhaps helped Brown the most was his frequent was his frequent participation in town halls and other community events in his district. Gone were the days of being driven by security detail to deliver prepared remarks at a scripted event. The constituent-centered work done by members of Congress is unglamorous, mostly unnoticed by the media, meaningful and humbling. There is no greater reminder of the responsibility of public service than a constituent asking directly for help. Of course, from a purely political standpoint, there is also no better political training than being peppered with questions from an elderly resident at a public meeting armed with research, time and an opinion.
Recent polling shows Brown up by a considerable margin over Republican nominee Michael Peroutka. Peroutka, a former member of the League of the South who currently and definitively espouses political positions far outside of those held by the average Maryland voter, has neither the campaign funds nor organization to mount a realistic, statewide challenge to Brown.
Still, Brown would not have gotten this far — in Congress or through the recent primary — had he not learned lessons found on the wrong side of an upset. Larry Hogan will always be his Roberta Vinci, and the 2014 gubernatorial election remains a part of his political story. And, should Brown be successful in November, the people of Maryland will be better served because of it.
Opinion|There’s a better choice for Maryland comptroller | 2022-10-25T13:46:02Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Anthony Brown was humbled in 2014. He's a better candidate for it now. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/25/anthony-brown-was-humbled-2014-he-better-candidate-it-now/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/25/anthony-brown-was-humbled-2014-he-better-candidate-it-now/ |
Michael Fanone’s battle for accountability for Jan. 6
In this Washington Post Live conversation from Oct. 18, former D.C. police officer Michael Fanone discusses his new book, “Hold the Line: The Insurrection and One Cop’s Battle for America’s Soul,” recounts his firsthand experience defending the U.S. Capitol and explains why it’s so important to hold insurrectionists accountable for the violence of Jan. 6, 2021. | 2022-10-25T13:46:04Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Michael Fanone’s battle for accountability for Jan. 6 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/podcasts/capehart/michael-fanones-battle-for-accountability-for-jan-6/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/podcasts/capehart/michael-fanones-battle-for-accountability-for-jan-6/ |
The truth is that California outperforms the US and the rest of world across many industries. That’s especially relevant with renewable energy, the fastest-growing business in California and Germany. The market capitalization of California companies in this business increased 731% the past three years, or 1.74 times more than their German counterparts, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Notable examples include Fremont-based Enphase Energy Inc., a solar and storage solutions provider, up 916%, or more than twice the 410% returned by wind-farm maker PNE AG in Cuxhaven along Germany’s North Sea coast.
(Corrects spelling of Fremont, California in sixth paragraph.) | 2022-10-25T13:50:42Z | www.washingtonpost.com | California Poised to Overtake Germany as World’s No. 4 Economy - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/california-poised-to-overtakegermany-as-worlds-no-4-economy/2022/10/25/2c03a262-5460-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/california-poised-to-overtakegermany-as-worlds-no-4-economy/2022/10/25/2c03a262-5460-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html |
What’s a Recession and How Close Are We to One?
Analysis by Reade Pickert | Bloomberg
Stock market information at the Nasdaq MarketSite in New York, U.S., on Thursday, Feb. 3, 2022. Big technology earnings have prompted some extreme share price moves this season, with Wall Street’s expectations seemingly misaligned with company realities. Photographer: Michael Nagle/Bloomberg (Bloomberg)
The debate over whether the US economy will tumble into recession in the next two years -- and if so, when -- has been the subject of heated debate among economists, policymakers, investors and business executives for much of 2022. Inflation accelerated to levels not seen since the early 1980s, leading the Federal Reserve to take aggressive action to fight it. Worries grew that the global economy would also fall into recession as central banks across the world rapidly raised interest rates.
1. What constitutes a recession?
A common rule of thumb is that it’s when the government’s hallmark measure of economic activity, gross domestic product, contracts for two straight quarters. But the National Bureau of Economic Research’s Business Cycle Dating Committee, the group of academics whose determination is regarded as official in the US, defines a recession differently: a “significant decline in economic activity that is spread across the economy and that lasts more than a few months.” The group considers factors such as employment, inflation-adjusted spending and industrial production. The decline must meet three criteria -- depth, diffusion and duration.
2. What do the figures show?
Adjusted for inflation, US GDP, or the total value of all goods and services produced in the economy, posted back-to-back declines in the first half of the year. Another measure of growth, gross domestic income -- which calculates all income generated from producing those goods and services, including compensation and company profits -- was positive in both quarters, though barely so in the April through June period. Theoretically, GDP and GDI should be roughly equal, so the divergence stimulated debate over the extent to which the economy softened in the first half of the year. The Business Cycle Dating Committee looks at the average of the two measures, which was slightly negative in both quarters.
3. How close is the US to a recession?
That wasn’t clear as the fourth quarter began. The Fed rapidly increased interest rates to temper demand and tame the worst inflation in decades, fueling concerns about a downturn. But economic data released through mid-October still suggested generally resilient consumer spending and a solid labor market. Some economists said the US could skirt a recession over the coming quarters. Others disagreed. Bloomberg Economics expected the US to enter a recession in the second half of next year. Economists at Deutsche Bank AG, one of the first major banks to forecast a recession, expected one to begin in mid-2023. Nomura Holdings Inc. expected one sooner, starting at the end of this year.
4. What about the rest of the world?
The global economy, too, faced high inflation and aggressive steps by central banks to curb it. In Europe, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the resulting energy crisis heightened fears of an imminent downturn. Russia progressively reduced flows of natural gas to Europe’s biggest economies, driving a surge in energy prices and squeezing household balance sheets. In August, Bloomberg Economics forecast that the euro area would slip into recession in the final quarter of 2022. The following month, Germany’s leading research institutes said that nation’s economy would likely contract by 0.4% in 2023. The Bank of England warned in August that a recession would likely begin in the fourth quarter of 2022. The UK picture grew more complicated when the government of Prime Minister Liz Truss proposed massive, unfunded tax cuts, then reversed itself due to ensuing market chaos, prompting Truss to step down. As for China’s economy, it has sharply slowed, strained by a property slump and ongoing measures to combat Covid-19.
5. How bad will a recession be?
For the most part, economists said any looming recession in the US would likely be mild or moderate, in part because the unemployment rate remained near a five-decade low well into 2022. In September, the unemployment rate dropped back down to 3.5%, matching the lowest level since 1969. Still, even a mild recession would likely mean hundreds of thousands of Americans losing their jobs. Forecasters expected the unemployment rate could rise to around 4% to 6.5%, though that would still be well below the 10% seen in the wake of the 2007-2009 Great Recession and the nearly 15% at the start of the pandemic.
6. Could a recession be averted?
In the US at least, there was still hope that the Fed might pull off a so-called soft landing -- slowing the economy enough to cool demand and tame inflation without tipping the economy into recession. A more painful route to averting an official recession would be a “growth recession,” which is a protracted period of meager growth and rising unemployment. | 2022-10-25T13:51:07Z | www.washingtonpost.com | What’s a Recession and How Close Are We to One? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/whats-a-recession-and-how-close-are-we-to-one/2022/10/25/1b35f8fc-5467-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/whats-a-recession-and-how-close-are-we-to-one/2022/10/25/1b35f8fc-5467-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html |
‘The Return of Tanya Tucker — Featuring Brandi Carlile’ follows the making of Tucker’s Grammy-winning album ‘While I’m Livin’ ’
The affectionate making-of music documentary “The Return of Tanya Tucker — Featuring Brandi Carlile” charts the recording of Tucker’s Grammy-winning 2019 album “While I’m Livin,’ ” via fresh interviews, studio footage and archival film clips. In the film, Tucker calls the circumstances surrounding the record a “relaunch,” not a comeback. (This, despite the fact that it was the now-64-year-old singer’s first album of original material in 17 years. Her 2009 album “My Turn” featured only covers.)
“Relaunch” may be the best way to describe Tucker’s impactful return to music, after she first rocketed to success beginning at age 13 with the 1972 album “Delta Dawn,” which earned her a Grammy for most promising female vocalist. That was followed by a regular string of nominations and wins, up until the mid-1990s. In the film, Tucker attributes the hiatus following her 2002 album “Tanya,” at least partly, to grief over her father’s death in 2006 and her mother’s in 2012.
We first meet Tucker — gray hair dyed pink, her cigarette-deepened voice a rich growl — as she’s meeting the engine behind her relaunch. That’s singer-songwriter Brandi Carlile, who with producer and musician Shooter Jennings was the impetus behind the 2019 album (hence the titular “featuring”).
Carlile is in the film almost as much as her idol, Tucker, as the two collaborate and day-drink together in the studio. Carlile co-wrote the Grammy-winning song “Bring My Flowers Now” with Tucker, but Carlile seems to have done much of the songcraft; Tucker started the tune years ago and never finished it, but it turns into a beauty.
Tucker’s 14-month romance in the early 1980s with singer Glen Campbell — 20-some years her senior — is touched on only glancingly, as is Tucker’s struggle with cocaine. Neither subject provides much grit. There are moments when Tucker’s unreliability threatens to derail her creative partnership with Carlile, as when it appears she might not show up in time to perform at a Loretta Lynn tribute concert. But the drama is fleeting.
Mostly “The Return” is about listening to great music getting made by two women representing two generations of country music — Carlile is 41 — who genuinely seem to respect each other, and who have obvious talent. Tucker’s first words in the film are, “Say a prayer. I need it.” But as Carlile assures Tucker at the end of the film, the greatness of what they were working on together was never really in doubt — not for one second.
R. At area theaters. Contains strong language and some drug references. 108 minutes. | 2022-10-25T13:51:19Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Tanya Tucker documentary charts the relaunch of a country icon - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/movies/2022/10/25/the-return-of-tanya-tucker-movie-review/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/movies/2022/10/25/the-return-of-tanya-tucker-movie-review/ |
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky speaking via video link at the opening session of the International Crimea Platform parliamentary summit, organized by Ukraine and Croatia, in Zagreb on Tuesday. (Damir Sencar/AFP/Getty Images)
KYIV, Ukraine — Members of Ukraine’s political elite rejected demands by some congressional Democrats for negotiations with Russia to end the war, saying this was “not a viable option,” after a group of liberals called on President Biden to push Kyiv for direct talks with Moscow.
The Ukrainians said that Russian President Vladimir Putin had closed off any possibility of negotiations by illegally declaring the annexation of four Ukrainian regions, and that the Russians, who are facing repeated setbacks on the battlefield, would use any cease-fire to rebuild their strength and then resume Putin’s plan to steal Ukrainian territory and destroy Ukraine as a nation.
In a letter to Biden, 30 members of the liberal wing of the Democratic party, led by Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), the chair of the congressional Progressive Caucus, called on Biden to pursue a “proactive push, doubling efforts to seek a realistic framework for a cease fire.”
Andriy Sybiha, the deputy head of the Ukrainian presidential administration and an adviser on foreign affairs, declined to comment directly about the liberal Democrats’ letter but said Kyiv’s position “was very clear” in a five-point peace plan presented by President Volodymyr Zelensky during the United Nations General Assembly in September.
During his speech, Zelensky said that the key points of his plan were “punishment for aggression, protection of life, restoration of security and territorial integrity, security guarantees, and determination to defend oneself.”
Biden and other leaders of the Group of Seven democratic economic powers endorsed Zelensky’s call for a “just peace” in a statement this month.
In the statement, the leaders of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United States, Britain Kingdom and the European Union, said such a peace “should include” assuring respect for territorial sovereignty as enshrined in the United Nations Charter, which would require a full Russian withdrawal from Ukrainian territory.
Sybiha also said that “no negotiations” were possible with Putin after “attempts at illegal annexation” and “sham referendums” that were carried out at the end of last month in the four Ukrainian regions partially occupied by Russian forces.
In response to the letter, White House officials repeated Biden’s position that it would be up to Zelensky and Ukraine to decide when, or if, to enter peace talks.
And Sybiha added that Ukraine was “completely confident in the support” of the “U.S.A. and American people,” whom he called Ukraine’s No. 1 ally.
But the letter inevitably adds to growing anxiety in Kyiv about maintaining crucial financial and military support from Washington, especially if Republicans regain control of Congress in the upcoming midterm elections. Some Republican leaders have signaled an intent to review U.S. support for Ukraine.
The liberal Democratic lawmakers are among a small but growing chorus of voices calling on the Ukrainians to engage the Russians directly to bring an end to the war, or at least introduce a cease-fire, although Putin has refused repeatedly to meet and speak directly with Zelensky.
Ukrainians are deeply wary of being caught up in Washington’s internal politics, especially after being ensnared in President Donald Trump’s first impeachment scandal, and they said they expected to hear differing views. But there was a sense of dismay over what they perceived as a lack of understanding of Putin’s views.
“We don’t get between Republicans and Democrats,” a senior Ukrainian official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive international relations. “That’s the internal politics of a foreign government. That the positions on this war will be varied, that’s expected.”
“The thing is, in this war, it’s obvious that Russia isn’t capable of negotiating in good faith,” the senior official said, noting that Zelensky’s position is a willingness to discuss Russia’s demands only when Ukraine’s territory has been restored.
“We had the experience of 2014, when we had an agreement, and how did that end,” the senior official said. “For the Russians, it would be to their advantage for there to be some kind of pause in fighting. But considering how much destruction they’ve already caused, we have nothing to lose.”
“Dialogue is for when each side takes a step back for some greater goal,” the senior official continued. “In the current situation, they’ve already done so much damage. They alone have ruined the chances for discussion. The only thing left is nuclear weapons. Other than that, they’ve done everything to us.”
A second Ukrainian official, also speaking on the condition of anonymity to preserve relations with Washington, was more blunt. “This is an encouraging signal for Putin,” the second official said of the liberal Democrats’ letter.
Orysia Lutsevych, the head of the Ukraine Forum at the London-based Chatham House think tank, said negotiations on these terms were “impossible.”
“Some people say, ‘Look, at Finland — they’ve lost part of their territory, but they preserved a nation-state,’ ” Lutsevych said by telephone from Berlin. “But you don’t want to negotiate with an enemy that wants to completely destroy you. It’s not a viable proposition.”
Lutsevych said that the “proposal to negotiate with Putin harks back to appeasement of Hitler” and that the United States “cannot negotiate about Ukraine without Ukraine.”
“Ukraine is defending its way of life, which Russia wants to destroy,” she said. “This is what it’s about. It’s not about territory.”
A European diplomat, speaking the on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, said that the letter’s language was “vague” and most likely would not affect the position of E.U. member countries.
“The Ukrainians would naturally point out that a cease-fire would serve Russia to regroup and train their newly recruited forces,” the diplomat said. | 2022-10-25T13:52:33Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Ukrainians say U.S. Democrats pressuring for peace talks don’t get Putin - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/25/ukraine-pessure-liberals-negotiation-putin/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/25/ukraine-pessure-liberals-negotiation-putin/ |
U.S. basketball player Brittney Griner appears on a screen via video link during a court hearing in Krasnogorsk, outside Moscow, on Oct. 25. (Evgenia Novozhenina/Reuters)
A Russian court rejected U.S. basketball star Brittney Griner’s appeal against her nine-year prison sentence on drug charges Tuesday.
The basketball star has been imprisoned since her Feb. 17 arrest, after she was accused of entering Russia with vape cartridges containing cannabis oil, which her lawyers said was prescribed as part of treatment for chronic pain and other conditions.
The U.S. government characterizes her arrest as a “wrongful detainment.”
Griner appeared in court via video link from detention outside Moscow on Tuesday. Her lawyers asked for a suspended sentence, while Russian prosecutors maintained that nine years is fair. Griner’s lawyers earlier said she wasn’t expecting “miracles.”
“We are very disappointed,” Maria Blagovolina and Alexander Boykov, Griner’s lawyers, said in a statement. “We still think the punishment is excessive and contradicts to the existing court practice.”
They said they would confer with their client about the possibility of further appeals, and that they intended to make use of “all the available legal tools.”
“We are aware of the news out of Russia that Brittney Griner will continue to be wrongfully detained under intolerable circumstances after having to undergo another sham judicial proceeding today,” U.S. national security adviser Jake Sullivan said in a statement. “President Biden has been very clear that Brittney should be released immediately.”
One path to resolve her situation — and that of Paul Whelan, a former U.S. Marine also imprisoned in Russia — could be an exchange of prisoners.
Tuesday’s ruling came in the wake of a Moscow court’s decision Monday to reject the appeal of Russian opposition politician Vladimir Kara-Murza, who was seeking to overturn the approval his pretrial detention. He has been charged with spreading false information, following criticism of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Annabelle Timsit and Mary Ilyushina contributed to this report. | 2022-10-25T14:12:10Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Brittney Griner’s appeal rejected by Russian court - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/25/brittney-griner-appeal-rejected-russian-court/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/25/brittney-griner-appeal-rejected-russian-court/ |
Italy’s Giorgia Meloni sets agenda, says she has no sympathy for fascism
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni reacts ahead of a confidence vote for her new government in the lower house of parliament on Tuesday. (Fabio Frustaci/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)
ROME — Delivering an opening address to parliament on Tuesday, new Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said she would stand up to Russian “blackmail” and refrain from sabotaging European integration, as she tried to make that case that her government would not be a source of anxiety in the West.
“I have never felt sympathy or closeness toward anti-democratic regimes. For no regime, including fascism,” Meloni said.
Meloni’s ascent as Italy’s top leader has attracted world attention because of her hard line Christian cultural views and her party’s ties to earlier, post-fascist movements. But in her address, Meloni made almost no mention of social issues, aside from suggesting that individual freedoms, including on abortion, wouldn’t be rolled back. She thanked her predecessor, centrist Mario Draghi, and noted — in an example that contrasts with the United States and British politics, of late — the “serene” change of power.
Giorgia Meloni sworn in as Italy's first female leader
“So it should be in great democracies,” she said.
Meloni, 45, still faces confidence votes in both houses of parliament. But those steps, later Tuesday and Wednesday, are largely perfunctory, given her coalition’s majority. That means Meloni could go five years before facing an election — unless, that is, infighting brings her down sooner, a common occurrence in Italy.
In the hour-long speech, Meloni framed herself as an “underdog.” She does not come from a blue blood political family, and she is Italy’s first female leader. She cited numerous other prominent Italian women, including politicians, who opened the way to “break the heavy glass ceiling.”
Giorgia Meloni’s astonishing rise is changing both the politics and political tone of her country.
The character Meloni presented Tuesday bore little resemblance to the firebrand from earlier speeches — occasions in previous years when she denounced the “LGBT lobby,” spoke conspiratorially about “international speculators,” or decried the total erasure of gender and a future where families had “Parent 1 and Parent 2.”
But it remains to be seen how fully Meloni, who says her party is “conservative” rather than far right, commits to a conventional line. In her speech, it was still possible to see potential battle lines with the European Union, as she said her government will “respect the rules currently in force,” while also working to change those that haven’t worked. She specifically cited the E.U.’s rules on public spending, which are currently under review. Critics say Meloni, who once questioned the value of the euro zone, prefers a Europe that is less integrated, in which nations are freer to stand up for their own interests — a philosophy they say could lead to fights in Brussels.
Meloni said her goal is to steer Europe to “greater effectiveness.”
Migration could be a particular source of tension within the bloc. Meloni said Tuesday that she wants to halt the flow of immigrants across the Mediterranean. But her ideas for doing so involve European cooperation in an area where the bloc has rarely made progress. She is pushing for the Europe-backed creation of so-called hotspots in northern Africa that could process asylum requests, while E.U. forces work to halt boat departures.
Right-wing victory in Italy expected to bring swift changes to migration
Politicians on the left and right have long talked about remote centers for vetting would-be immigrants, few countries want to host such sites. Any plan would bring with it the risk of legal challenges and rights abuses.
Italy also has some power to close ports to humanitarian rescue ships — a step it took in 2018 and 2019, under a populist government. Though such measures have been contested in courts, Meloni could resurrect that policy, and Italian media on Tuesday said the interior ministry was preparing to deny the entry into Italian waters of two NGO vessels with several hundred immigrants aboard.
All the while, Meloni has other challenges closer to home. Although she stressed the importance of backing Ukraine, leaders of the other parties in her coalition — Silvio Berlusconi and Matteo Salvini — have shown personal affection for Vladimir Putin, with Berlusconi claiming to have recently exchanging birthday gifts with the Russian president.
Separately on Tuesday, she reiterated a priority that would be controversial in Italy: reforming the nature of Italy’s presidency. For the moment, Italy’s president has a largely ceremonial role, except in times of crisis — and the position is chosen by a vote of politicians. But Meloni’s party, Fratelli d’Italia, says the country’s perpetual political instability could be improved by making the Italian president directly elected, and giving the position some of the day-to-day governing duties — in a system that mirrors that of France.
What to know about Giorgia Meloni
Meloni lost some of the leverage to attempt such a reform when her coalition failed to reach the two-thirds majority necessary for unilateral constitutional changes. But she indicated in her speech that she still wants to pursue the changes, arguing that Italy’s constant political turnover was discouraging foreign investment and weakening its negotiating capacity internationally. Such an effort would be highly contested, given that some Italians see the president, under the current system, as a backstop against any one leader concentrating political power.
“We will not give up on reforming Italy,” Meloni said.
Ezio Mauro, the former editor in chief of La Repubblica, the Italian daily, said such a move would “change the shape of our state.”
“I don’t think the presidential reform would be wrong per se,” Mauro said. “There are deeply democratic countries such as France that have a presidential system. But we need to remember that Italy’s own history led to the republic as it is today, because they wanted to prevent any risk of a strongman. The problem, the way I see it, is as follows: the Meloni government marks the end of antifascism.” | 2022-10-25T14:29:34Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s new prime minister, says no sympathy for fascism - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/25/giorgia-meloni-italy-fascism/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/25/giorgia-meloni-italy-fascism/ |
There is no compromise with election deniers. And that’s the problem.
Former president Donald Trump at a rally in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., on Sept. 3. (Ed Jones/AFP/Getty Images)
Right-wing pundits and Republican apologists are quick to blame “elites” or “the left” for a failure to respect and recognize the legitimacy of a MAGA movement based in election denial, White Christian nationalism and hostility toward robust democratic elections. It’s a demand for acceptance that is eerily reminiscent of other periods in U.S. history (e.g., the 1850s, the 1920s, the 1950s), which can illuminate the depth of our national problem.
At the outbreak of the Civil War, for example, it was as if the South “could hear nothing more — could absorb nothing more — once it was told that the rest of the nation had found its way of life morally wanting. It felt judged, and it hated it,” writes Jon Meacham in “And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle.”
Substitute “election denier” for “the South,” and you have a fair approximation of the current state of American politics. Now, one side believes its viewpoint is essential to maintaining its power and its conception of America. It insists its followers can be “seen” only if the rest of us agree with their delusions and conspiracies. Sorry, but in a democracy, there is no compromise with that mentality. Buying into the “big lie” and white nationalism means rejecting the premise of constitutional government based on the creed “All men are created equal.”
The MAGA perspective explains the constant anger of a shrinking segment of Whites who, as George Mason University political scientist Ashley Jardina told the New York Times, feel “really threatened [so] are willing to reject democratic norms because they see it as a way to protect their status.” These Americans believe they’ve been deprived their “due” of elite status by a changing country.
Aggravated by declining economic prospects, overwhelmed by the opioid epidemic and utterly divorced from mainstream news sources, they unsurprisingly glob onto conspiracies, hold up former president Donald Trump as their champion and refuse to process any information that conflicts with the victimhood they embrace.
While there are certainly persuadable voters who drift between the parties, one cannot attribute Democrats’ losses in certain areas of the country to “poor messaging” or even a specific policy failure. None of that would make any difference. It’s fantasy to think there is a segment of White male working-class voters eager to vote Democratic if only Democrats had not passed the American Rescue Plan or avoided dealing with bias in policing.
Sure, Republican politicians, big donors, right-wing pundits and GOP consultants would love us to believe that the misguided policies of Democrats have created the MAGA movement. Balderdash. There are some who see the disaffected MAGA mob as a means to their own ends of low taxes and right-wing judges, but let’s not pretend that sophisticated policy differences explain the movement.
That leaves us with an ongoing crisis in democracy in which each election puts us on the brink of chaos and democratic collapse. The solution if one wants to retain reality-based, democratic pluralism and the rule of law is threefold.
First, regardless of the MAGA camp’s irrational political beliefs, there are real problems in stretches of America. If one wants to have both widespread affluence and political sanity, it pays to draw down the venom in communities that feel left behind. Spreading chip manufacturing to the heartland and spending billions of dollars on infrastructure make both economic and political sense. The less aggrieved certain voters are, the less vulnerable to demagogues they will be.
Second, everyone else has to vote. There is no substitute for high engagement, high turnout and an educated electorate. If 90 percent of the money spent on ads that viewers literally tune out were devoted to organizing on college campuses and other low-turnout environs, the results would be quite different for the pro-democracy, pro-pluralism forces.
Third, one has to be at least in a position to win those reachable non-progressives. Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio) is running neck and neck in the Ohio Senate race because he’s an economic moderate rooted in the sensibility of the industrial Midwest. But what works for uber-progressive Democrats in Vermont or Massachusetts probably will not work in swing states such as Wisconsin. Left-leaning Democrats cannot lead with their chin where they don’t enjoy big demographic advantages.
No, we’re not heading for a real civil war (although let’s not mince words about the right’s Jim Crow election agenda as a means to boost White voting power). However, the MAGA movement’s deep-seated, irrational pugnaciousness threatens functional democracy. Smart economic policy, well-selected candidates and supercharged organizing could provide some hope of returning to the politics of reason and inclusion. But do not underestimate the difficulty of the undertaking. | 2022-10-25T14:42:38Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | The MAGA movement cannot be reasoned with - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/25/election-deniers-midterms-maga/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/25/election-deniers-midterms-maga/ |
Yeah, Ted Cruz’s book doesn’t show any voter fraud
This does not come as a surprise.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) greets Republican supporters during a rally outside the offices of Mark Alford, Republican Candidate for Missouri's 4th Congressional District on Oct. 14 in Raymore, Mo. (Kyle Rivas/Getty Images)
For a guy looking to sell a book to a right-wing audience, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) couldn’t have landed a much better spot than his interview with Fox News’s Mark Levin on Sunday. Levin, less an interviewer than town crier, gave Cruz plenty of time to explain what his new book, “Justice Corrupted,” would offer readers.
“This book is the first inside account of what happened on Jan. 6,” Cruz said in his practiced manner. “And so I take the reader through the events of the 2020 election leading up to Jan. 6. I take them through the evidence of election fraud and voter fraud in November 2020, which the Democrats and the corporate media insists doesn’t exist.”
The thrust of Cruz’s book echoes the one released by former Donald Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway earlier this year: Had but the authors been in charge, none of this would have happened. If only everyone in November 2020 had the benefit of their hindsight, a hindsight that is near-perfect!
In Conway’s case, that sentiment was focused on the 2020 election. Her assertion that Trump lost made headlines as a break from his repeated claims, but it was offered mostly as a pretext for her to claim that she could have gotten him across the finish line. In Cruz’s case, the failure that could have been avoided was the flurry of post-election lawsuits aimed at proving illegalities.
“I called President Trump, and told him that he needed to assemble a far better legal team, and he needed to do so immediately,” Cruz writes at one point, with the tone of a guy trying to impress his friends. But, sadly, no lawyers would take Trump’s case — a failure Cruz chalks up, no doubt accurately, to Trump’s reputation. When Trump asked if he, Ted Cruz, would argue Texas’s last-ditch lawsuit should it get to the Supreme Court, Cruz readily agreed. Unfortunately for Trump (Cruz would have us think), Cruz never got the chance. The suit, a pastiche of nonsense, was quickly turned away.
Then there was Cruz’s effort to leverage Trump’s claims of fraud to his own benefit. Beaten to the punch by Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) in early 2021, Cruz invented a way to object to the results of the election while maintaining plausible deniability that he was doing so. What if they simply held off on certifying electors until fraud claims had been adjudicated? Never mind that they had been, of course; this was a way for him to wink at Trump’s base while still nodding soberly at his colleagues. And when this course of action wasn’t adopted, it opened the door for him, writing a book months later, to suggest that if only it had been, everything would have turned out fine.
When Cruz does talk about fraud in the book, he does so in an amusingly lawyerly way. He’s more than willing to warm over a wide array of right-wing boogeymen from the days of yore — both ACORN and the New Black Panther Party make appearances — but he generally constrains his claims about fraud in ways that leave him an escape hatch back to reality.
All of his assertions about fraud are similarly nebulous in a very politician-y way. He says enough so that people who track this stuff closely know what he’s talking about, but not enough to be able to be pinned down as being dishonest. It’s always 2020 “might have been the most fraud-ridden election in the history of the United States” this and “no one would ever find out whether there had been serious fraud that tipped the election in one direction or the other” that. Scratching an itch by brushing a feather against it.
Some things he does say are simply false. For example, he makes this claim:
“In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, however, with the citizens of Pennsylvania mostly confined to their homes thanks to the stay-at-home orders of Governor Tom Wolf, a Democrat, the state legislature had enacted a new law providing, essentially, for universal mail-in voting.”
Nope. The law passed in 2019, before the novel coronavirus had emerged in the United States. What’s more, this argument — that this expansion was unconstitutional and therefore mail ballots were suspect — was adjudicated before the election. The then-chief justice of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court wrote that there had been “too much good-faith reliance” on the method to vote in 2020 for those votes to be discounted even if the 2019 law violated the state’s Constitution (which the court later determined it did).
In other words, Cruz isn’t arguing that this was fraud. He’s just arguing that more people shouldn’t been able to vote (presumably to Joe Biden’s benefit) because there might be fraud in mail ballots. Mail ballots are “one of the surest ways to ensure more voter fraud, according to Jimmy Carter and James Baker,” Cruz writes, citing a 2005 report that was widely misrepresented in 2020 as it is here. Misrepresented so extensively, in fact, that Carter released a statement defending mail ballots.
One of the stars of Cruz’s book is Catherine Engelbrecht, the founder of the group True the Vote. True the Vote is the organization that purports to have analyzed geolocation data showing an organized effort to collect and submit ballots in drop boxes — a claim that is at the heart of Dinesh D’Souza’s film “2000 Mules.” The organization has been called out even by Republicans for failing to back up its assertions, and the movie, infamously, offers literally no evidence in support of the claim. But Engelbrecht is a Texan, and Cruz presents her as the eternal victim of left-wing machinations — even as he mostly elevates her group’s purportedly earthshaking claims to asides like noting that there were “multiple reports of fraudulent ballots being dropped in the dark of night.” More UFOs flitting away before we can get out our cameras.
At one point, Cruz takes credit for the pardon D’Souza was granted by Trump following a guilty plea for making illegal campaign contributions in 2014. Cruz celebrates this as a wrong having been righted, a freeing of an important voice.
“Today, Dinesh D’Souza continues to fight valiantly in the arena of ideas,” Cruz writes. “ … His latest movie and book, 2000 Mules, is a powerful exposé of voter fraud in 2020, exposing ballot harvesters caught on camera stuffing drop boxes with handfuls of ballots in the middle of the night.”
Again, it doesn’t show this. It simply presents a narrative crafted by True the Vote that’s buttressed with misrepresented snippets of video.
Cruz, undeterred by such considerations, continues to enthuse: “It’s also the top-grossing political documentary since his prior film 2016: Obama’s America.”
Sure. Because D’Souza presented an indefensible allegation that Trump was the true winner of the 2020 election thanks to this alleged fraud. D’Souza recognized that there was a market for someone to make a claim along these lines that was backed with “evidence,” so he stepped up to fill the niche. D’Souza made a ton of money by telling people that this movie proved them right all along.
Imagine someone promising an audience that he would tell them exactly what they wanted to hear if they would only purchase his product — even if he ended up not doing that at all! Seems like the sort of pitch that might find a home on, say, Mark Levin’s TV show. | 2022-10-25T14:55:42Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Yeah, Ted Cruz’s book doesn’t show any voter fraud - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/25/cruz-trump-2020-election-false-claims/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/25/cruz-trump-2020-election-false-claims/ |
Freer Gallery gets an early start on celebrating its 2023 centennial
The small but dense exhibition ‘Freer’s Global Network’ showcases the sweeping interests of the museum’s namesake, Charles Lang Freer
A grouping of vessels by Pewabic Pottery in Detroit. (Freer Gallery of Art/Gift of Charles Lang Freer)
Getting a head start on the centennial celebration of its 1923 opening, the Freer Gallery of Art is offering a bit of backstory. “Freer’s Global Network: Artists, Collectors and Dealers” illustrates the role of four colleagues in shaping the collection of the museum’s namesake, Detroit industrialist Charles Lang Freer. Yet the largest portrait in the 22-object show is not of Freer or any of his aesthetic advisers, but of Theodore Roosevelt.
He’s integral to the museum’s history, since in 1906 the then-president urged an initially reluctant Smithsonian Board of Regents to accept Freer’s gift of his collection of Asian and American art. Roosevelt is also part of a larger tale briefly recounted by this small yet dense exhibition (which is supplemented by more information online).
Freer procured artworks from Japan, China and the Near East at the same time the U.S. was acquiring an overseas empire — and banning Asian immigration under the Chinese Exclusion Act. Roosevelt was a key instigator of the American expansion, during which the country took control of Hawaii, Cuba, Puerto Rico and — less permanently — Cuba and the Philippines. If art collecting is a form of soft power, Freer began amassing treasures in an era of concrete American clout.
The retired rail-car manufacturer, who died in 1919, traveled the globe to accumulate thousands of art objects in just two decades. Among his tutors were four people whose influence is chronicled in this show: ceramist Mary Chase Perry Stratton and three art dealers, Dikran Kelekian, Bunko Matsuki and Yamanaka Sadajiro. The guidance of the latter two is evident in a display of 17th- to 19th-century Japanese ceramics that include dark-glazed raku ware (recommended to Freer by Matsuki) and light-glazed Satsuma ware (suggested by Yamanaka).
Both varieties of pottery are subtle and austere, save for one touch: There’s a sake flask whose stopper is shaped like a tanuki, a raccoon dog that figures prominently in Japanese folklore.
Kelekian, an Armenian who worked for the government of Iran and eventually became an American citizen, introduced Freer to Syrian ceramics from the 11th to 13th centuries. Freer brought some and showed them to Stratton, a Detroit friend who was impressed by their metallic glazes. It inspired her to apply similar finishes to smaller jars, some of which Freer purchased.
Freer displayed his ceramic holdings in the Peacock Room, transplanted from its original home in London to the collector’s Detroit mansion. The elaborately decorated chamber has been a prominent attraction at the Freer since it opened and is just a few steps from the gallery that currently hosts “Freer’s Global Network.”
The Peacock Room combined two of Freer’s enthusiasms: his pottery collection and the work of James McNeill Whistler, the American painter who spent much of his life in London and who designed the original room. Included in this show is one of Whistler’s “nocturnes,” a near-abstract landscape in shades of blue whose flat composition shows the influence of Edo-period Japanese woodblock prints.
In addition to Whistler’s picture, three of the show’s five other American paintings are linked to Asia. (The exceptions are a somber Whistler rendering of Freer and the Roosevelt portrait, made by the now largely forgotten Gari Melchers.) Childe Hassam’s “The Chinese Merchants” impressionistically depicts a Chinatown street scene in Portland, Ore. Thomas Wilmer Dewing’s two pictures of women in flowing white gowns amid leafy landscapes are impressionist treatments of a classical subject, painted on Asian-style folding screens.
Dewing became an agent for Freer, buying pieces from Yamanaka’s New York gallery. Among the other members of the collector’s circle were C.T. Loo, a Chinese-born dealer, and Eugene and Agnes E. Meyer, friends of Freer who helped supervise the Freer Gallery’s completion after its namesake’s death. (Eugene Meyer later bought The Washington Post, which his family owned from 1933 to 2013.)
Loo was dubious about a Tang Dynasty statue of a bodhisattva, bought by the Meyers and included here. Its awkward appearance is probably the result of having being assembled from pieces of several sculptures. More graceful are a trio of Chinese bronze vessels, two bought by Freer and one by the Meyers. They’re all about 3,000 years old, making them by far the most ancient items in the show.
The Freer is usually associated with Whistler and items from Japan and China, but this exhibition gives a sense of its founder’s broader interests. “Freer’s Global Network” demonstrates that the collector’s interests, if not quite global, were remarkably sweeping.
Freer’s Global Network: Artists, Collectors and Dealers
National Museum of Asian Art’s Freer Gallery of Art, 1050 Independence Ave. SW. si.edu/museum/freer-gallery.
Dates: On indefinite view.
Oops — We inventoried Tucker Carlson’s low point one week too soon | 2022-10-25T15:08:46Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Freer Gallery gets an early start on celebrating its 2023 centennial - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/10/25/freers-global-network-art-review/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/10/25/freers-global-network-art-review/ |
Ewen Stevenson, the experienced and well-respected finance chief at HSBC Holdings Plc, is the first to admit he’s never brimming over with optimism, but it seems investors will miss his patient and cautious drawl. The UK-listed bank’s shares were down more than 9% at one point after it announced his unexpected exit with its third-quarter results on Tuesday.
Profits and revenue beat forecasts, but alongside the executive change, HSBC also delivered surprises on bad debt provisions and confusion over its revenue outlook. With bad headlines coming out of the UK and China, two of its most important markets, it might be tricky for the bank to repair investor sentiment quickly.
Stevenson will hand over the role to Georges Elhedery, currently co-head of HSBC’s investment bank, by the end of the year. Noel Quinn, chief executive officer, and Stevenson said there had been no disagreements over strategy, it was just a natural moment for change at the end of a three-year strategic overhaul. But the speed of Stevenson’s exit and the fact there had been no sign he was planning to leave still seem odd.
HSBC took hefty loan-loss provisions related to the UK and China, while it also managed to make an upgrade to its net interest income outlook sound like a downgrade.
The bank took a more than $1 billion hit for bad loans in the quarter, more than double the second-quarter total. The UK accounted for 25% of the charge, driven by Britain’s gloomy economic outlook and a rise in uncertainty. But Quinn added he was pleased to see UK bond and currency markets had settled down in recent days with the change in political leadership.
A bigger worry for investors is China and particularly commercial real estate lending in the country. A large chunk of HSBC’s property loans, about $12 billion, are done offshore via its Hong Kong bank. These are riskier than direct property lending done on the mainland because HSBC’s legal protections and access to the buildings that it lends against aren’t as straightforward. Stevenson told analysts on the earnings call that the loans were neither secured nor unsecured but somewhere in between, which isn’t the most reassuring way of putting it.
The bank has about $1.3 billion in provisions against the $12 billion offshore portfolio. To put these numbers in context, HSBC has about $1 trillion of loans on its books and $111 billion of core equity capital. A big spike in Chinese real estate losses would certainly hurt profits, but it isn’t going to damage the bank’s balance sheet dramatically.
The other big China issue is Premier Xi Jinping’s consolidation of power over the weekend and whether that leads to even more restrictions on entrepreneurship and wealth. This is a worry for all the foreign banks that look after money for China’s rich, including UBS Group AG of Switzerland, which also reported third-quarter results on Tuesday.
Chinese stocks sold off heavily in recent days, especially those of technology companies, and the country’s wealthy have been taking cash out of the markets. UBS has seen five quarters in a row of Chinese and other Asian clients slashing the amount of borrowed money behind their financial bets. The cuts have grown through the year and loans in its Asian wealth business have fallen by more than $10 billion since January, or about 24%.
The Swiss bank said that it still expects Asia and China to show the greatest growth in wealth over the longer term and that the country’s restrictions on the rich would likely be focused on the ultra-wealthy rather than ordinary millionaires. Quinn at HSBC also said he didn’t doubt the long-term opportunity in China for wealth and trade and added that foreign financial firms like HSBC were still being granted fresh licenses and allowed to do deals that were expanding their businesses in the country.
Some investors are less certain, but it will be a while before Xi’s intentions for his buttressed power will become clearer.
HSBC also managed to trip itself up slightly on Tuesday. Net interest income is one of the most important sources of revenue at any bank, and the headline from HSBC was that it was cutting its outlook for 2023 by about $1 billion — to greater than $36 billion. Behind the headline, though, was the explanation that this was driven by the fall in the British pound — which has the benefit of cutting the group’s costs as well. Without the currency effect, it was actually lifting forecasts by $1.5 billion.
Plus, the extra funding costs in its financial markets business would be replaced with higher fees for clients, the bank said. Stevenson also said he was low-balling his outlook.
The new finance chief will almost certainly have a sunnier style of presentation, but he will have big shoes to fill. Convincing investors to be more optimistic about the UK and China is a tough task right now whatever your demeanor.
• UK Political Stability Won’t Stop Winter From Biting: Marcus Ashworth
• How Markets Judged Rishi and Xi; Manila’s Dollar Migraine: John Authors | 2022-10-25T15:22:00Z | www.washingtonpost.com | HSBC’s Sudden CFO Change Piles On the Investor Gloom - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/hsbcs-sudden-cfo-change-piles-on-the-investor-gloom/2022/10/25/6da550bc-5474-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/hsbcs-sudden-cfo-change-piles-on-the-investor-gloom/2022/10/25/6da550bc-5474-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html |
No, thanks. (Photographer: Bloomberg/Bloomberg)
With rents skyrocketing across the US — and even more so in New York City — this once die-hard renter is faced with a reckoning about whether it finally makes more sense to buy.
New York is hardly the only city where renters are suffering. The median monthly rent in Los Angeles has increased $505 compared with last year, while in San Francisco it’s up $408, according to Zillow rental market trends data. Seattle has seen hikes of $218, and Atlanta’s rents are up $193 a month. Even a smaller city like Lincoln, Nebraska, has seen a $138 jump in the median monthly rent.
Still, even with crazy rental prices, typically the only way buying more than a studio apartment in Manhattan will be cheaper on a monthly basis is if you can afford to pay all cash — the reason, of course, being the exorbitant price tags for property taxes and co-op or condo fees. There is more nuance in the outer boroughs, but those too are no longer filled with affordable homes to buy in desirable locations.
Ownership and equity are the main draws of homeownership. You aren’t “throwing away your money,” because you’re building equity in your home. This equity can be used in the future to sell and leverage buying a larger home, if necessary, or help fund other financial goals, especially if you move to an area with a lower cost of living. Trouble is, that assumes a decent price appreciation and that it won’t take months — or even years — to sell when you’re ready to move. The requisite co-op approval can complicate the matter for New York homeowners who aren’t given total autonomy over choosing a buyer.
Certain life choices will also limit housing options. At the time of this writing, if I enter a $4,000 max online for a one-bedroom apartment search in my neighborhood, 256 apartments show. If I filter for pets allowed (we own a dog), it drops to 176 apartments. Should we elect to expand beyond us two and our dog, we’d probably want a two-bedroom. If I filter to two-bedroom apartments, the results drop to 23. Then you have to compete with every other person on the prowl for a two-bedroom, pet-friendly apartment in our neighborhood. | 2022-10-25T15:22:06Z | www.washingtonpost.com | I May Buy Because the Rent Is Just Too Damn High - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/i-may-buy-because-the-rent-is-just-too-damn-high/2022/10/25/53ca190e-5472-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/i-may-buy-because-the-rent-is-just-too-damn-high/2022/10/25/53ca190e-5472-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html |
Mr. Carter also helped boost Pentagon ties with Silicon Valley to upgrade defense technology, anticipating the military’s need to explore artificial intelligence and other technology
Ashton B. Carter during a news conference at the Pentagon on June 30, 2016. (Alex Brandon/AP)
Ashton B. Carter, a longtime adviser on nuclear and strategic policies who served as defense secretary in the last years of the Obama administration, overseeing the opening of more military combat roles to women and helping boost Pentagon ties with Silicon Valley to upgrade defense technology, died Oct. 24 in Boston. He was 68.
The death was confirmed by Peter Cook, the press secretary to Mr. Carter as he served as Pentagon chief from February 2015 until Barack Obama left office in January 2017. A statement from Mr. Carter’s family said he had a “sudden cardiac event.”
In 2016, Mr. Carter announced that transgender men and women could openly serve in the U.S. armed forces — a policy that was later rolled back by President Donald Trump. Mr. Carter also guided U.S. policy in the Middle East during the rise of Islamic State extremists in Syria and Iraq.
After leaving Washington, Mr. Carter became the director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard’s Kennedy School.
This is a developing story. A complete obituary will appear soon. | 2022-10-25T15:22:28Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Ashton Carter, defense chief who urged Obama tech advances, dies at 68 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/10/25/ashton-carter-defense-obama-dies/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/10/25/ashton-carter-defense-obama-dies/ |
Grand Canyon Caverns in Peach Springs, Ariz. (Google Maps)
Five people were rescued Monday night after being stranded 200 feet underground at Grand Canyon Caverns when the tourist attraction’s only elevator broke down, officials said.
The group had descended 21 stories in the elevator Sunday for a tour of the caverns in Peach Springs, Ariz., Coconino County Sheriff’s Office spokesman Jon Paxton told The Washington Post on Tuesday morning.
The one bright spot in this deep, dark story is that they didn’t have to sleep on the cavern’s floor. The visitors stayed at a suite located at the bottom of the tourist attraction while they were stuck waiting, Paxton said.
The suite, advertised as the “deepest, darkest, quietest, hotel room in the world,” sleeps up to six people and costs $1,000 per night for two people, according to the cavern’s website. It includes two queen beds, a fully functioning RV-style bathroom, a kitchenette and a living room area with a television. It also has a small restaurant that served the group of stranded tourists.
Authorities used an emergency lift to bring the tourists back to the surface one-by-one on Monday after workers advised them it would take longer to repair the elevator, according to Paxton. They were rescued around 7:30 p.m. and were all in good condition.
Grand Canyon Caverns did not immediately respond to messages from The Washington Post. | 2022-10-25T15:23:23Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Tourists rescued in Grand Canyon Caverns in Arizona after elevator fails - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2022/10/25/grand-canyon-caverns-tourists-rescued-arizona/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2022/10/25/grand-canyon-caverns-tourists-rescued-arizona/ |
Transcript: Leadership During Crisis with Poland Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki
MR. IGNATIUS: Good morning, and welcome to Washington Post Live. I’m David Ignatius, a columnist for The Post. I’m honored to be joined this morning by Poland’s prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki.
Mr. Prime Minister, welcome to Washington Post Live.
PM MORAWIECKI: Can you hear me now? Good morning, David. Thanks for having me.
MR. IGNATIUS: Yes. Good morning, Mr. Prime Minister. We can hear you, and again, thank you for joining us.
I want to begin, Mr. Prime Minister, with the war on your--next door, on your border in Ukraine. I was in Warsaw this month for the Warsaw Security Forum, and I was struck by how passionate Poles are, starting with your president and many Polish officials and citizens that I met, how passionately they feel about this war. Could you just tell our viewers briefly why Ukraine's fight against Russia is so important to the Polish people?
PM MORAWIECKI: Well, it's very important for Polish people, but it is critically important for the whole of Europe, and I believe that Poles know this all too well. And we also know the risks which are related with aggressive Russian politics and with their aggression and war crimes in Ukraine.
And this is why we are very active and we try to organize sanctions in Europe, one package after another, so that the sanctions really bite Russian economy, which started to happen.
And this also why, by and large, every Pole understands what's going on behind our‑‑beyond our eastern border, and this is also why I can be so proud with my countrymen how all the country behaved in the context of the recent refugee waves and also in the context of supporting Ukraine in their fight for freedom, sovereignty, and independence.
MR. IGNATIUS: So, Mr. Prime Minister, Russia this week continued what we would call its "nuclear saber rattling" with warnings to Western governments about what they claimed were Ukrainian plans to use a dirty bomb, apparently bogus claims, but this continued the concern that Russia may itself be preparing to use nuclear weapons. Do you believe, does your government believe that there is a significant possibility that Russia could actually use these weapons?
PM MORAWIECKI: Well, I would not exclude any option because Russia is now in a place where they had never expected themselves to be, and they probably are going to escalate the situation in Ukraine. I just hope they are not going‑‑they won't be using nuclear--tactical nuclear weapon, but it's clear to me that Putin and the Kremlin, they do not view the war in Ukraine as the only battlefield. It is one of several battlefields, like the other ones being cyberspace, cybersecurity, propaganda and information field, and economy in particular, and this is why I think that all the tools from the toolkit of the Kremlin have to be very carefully analyzed. And I wouldn't exclude anything, but I hope that they will stop from using nuclear weapon, tactical nuclear weapon, or nuclear weapon as such.
MR. IGNATIUS: So, Mr. Prime Minister, given that, as you say, you can't exclude the possibility that they could use these terrible weapons, I want to ask you what preparations your government in Poland is taking for the possibility that they could be used and how you're seeking to protect your citizens in Poland from possible consequences of the use of these weapons.
PM MORAWIECKI: Well, on the one hand, we are distributing all the necessary appeals which are‑‑which are used in the case of some pollution, like we have this experience from 1986 April when the Chernobyl disaster happened, and Poland back then, a communist country, which suffered a lot because we were not informed by the communist government immediately after the disaster would have happened. And many Poles have this trauma still, still today.
So, on the one hand, these are these normal preparations, but on the other hand, we are part of the strongest alliance in the world, NATO. And we believe that Putin and the Kremlin‑‑President Putin and the Kremlin will stop short of using disastrous and mass‑‑weapon of mass destruction, but, of course, hope for the best, prepare for the worst. So we are in the process of preparation.
MR. IGNATIUS: And just one more question, Mr. Prime Minister, about preparation. Your government, I read, ordered an inventory this month of air raid shelters in Poland. 62,000 is the number of shelters that I gather you located. Are you considering actual training of your citizens so that they have a clear idea of where these shelters are, how to get to them, preparations in other ways for the possibility that they might be necessary?
PM MORAWIECKI: Well, this is part of the process of preparing people for an incident which might happen, and yes, the counting of shelters and creating new ones‑‑or using existing infrastructure for that purpose is one part of this process.
MR. IGNATIUS: So you talked about Poland‑‑Poland‑‑NATO a moment ago, and I want to ask you. Poland has been a key transfer point for the extraordinary flow of weapons and support of Ukraine, and there's been concern that Russia might strike at these transfer points along your borer. If Russian strikes went inside Polish territory, would Poland immediately request NATO support under Article 5 of the NATO Charter?
PM MORAWIECKI: Well, I strongly believe that the words which President Biden said in Warsaw several months ago that not even an inch‑‑or square inch of the NATO soil can be attacked without very serious consequences and a counterstrike based on solidarity. So we are a very reliable ally of the U.S. and NATO for the last 25 years, and we believe that we have this shelter and support from all the NATO and the U.S. in particular.
And, yes, you are right. Much of the support, military support and humanitarian aid goes through our airport and our roads. This is why we also counter any bad scenarios. It is another element of the same chapter, which we would have discussed five minutes ago, and we are preparing for different scenarios.
Having said that, we already have good antimissile and antiaircraft systems prepared in cooperation with U.S.‑‑with the U.S. forces, with the United States Army and with our United Kingdom friends, and this is not, as we know, 100 percent guarantee. But our sky is also quite well covered with air policing by the jets and with antimissile, antiaircraft shields, which we have located and installed in several places.
MR. IGNATIUS: Sir, I think you answered this in part, but I want to pose a question from a member of our audience named Marian from Maryland who asks, what would prevent Russia from attempting to coerce an annexation of Poland if it were to succeed in Ukraine? Give us a sense of what that would mean in terms of your response, if this invasion should be successful.
PM MORAWIECKI: Well, I exclude such a scenario because this could have been‑‑could be a disaster for the whole of Europe. So this is why not only Poland but also many other countries, in particular, of Eastern flank of NATO and Eastern flank of the European Union are very active in helping Ukraine to survive and to preserve their‑‑maintain their independence and territorial integrity. This is why I have to exclude such scenario in the first place.
On the other hand, I believe that NATO and NATO's credibility is‑‑in defending lies very strongly in defending all of its 30 members, and I believe that none of the members can be attacked without other countries coming with their support on the basis of the device, "One for all, and all for one."
MR. IGNATIUS: Mr. Prime Minister, you've been forthright in speaking about this war and the potential dangers. I want to ask you, what message would you want to send today to President Putin in Russia about this war and about Poland's resolve?
PM MORAWIECKI: We are not going to surrender. We are not going to leave Ukraine without support, without help, and not only military support but also financial support, because this could be the next big game of the Kremlin to make Ukraine to go bankrupt, because Ukraine has to pay salaries for their soldiers and teachers, doctors, nurses, judges, and so on, so the state is at least half functioning.
Very likely, imagination of President Putin and his people is that once Ukraine is deprived of financial support, the public opinion in Ukraine is no longer supporting its soldiers, and the fighting spirit and very high morale of Ukrainians will go down, and President Zelensky is going to be forced to negotiate a bad deal from the Ukrainian point of view. This is a quite likely scenario on the Kremlin's working desks.
And this is why we have to organize not only weapon and humanitarian aid, but we also have to organize financial support for Ukraine to survive those winter months, but also, I'm particularly happy with the recent developments on the European Council in Brussels where, together with my Baltic friends and other Eastern European countries, we were able to‑‑we were able to work a solid financial package, work out a solid financial package for Ukraine.
MR. IGNATIUS: Mr. Prime Minister, one more question about the Ukraine war, and then I want to ask about some other issues facing Poland. President Biden has said that he believes that this war must end in a negotiated settlement that's favorable to Ukraine. Do you agree with that, or do you think that some sort of total military victory is possible for Ukraine on the battlefield?
PM MORAWIECKI: It is possible that the real problems of the Russian army on the battlefield confirm that all scenarios can happen and also this very optimistic scenario that Russians would be pushed out of the Ukrainian territory. This is also quite possible.
Having said that, it's up to Ukrainian people and President Zelensky to decide what is an acceptable position, acceptable terms and conditions for any potential future peace treaty.
MR. IGNATIUS: So let me turn now to questions about energy and about the European Union that are facing you in the months ahead. In our preliminary footage before we began our conversation, we quoted you as saying that the Kremlin was acting like a drug dealer over gas supplies. I want to ask you what your plan and Poland's current plan is to deal with the energy supply crisis that you're going to be facing along with your neighbors this winter?
PM MORAWIECKI: Well, we were quite prudent and preventive in terms of what might have happened, and we would have expected those bad scenarios to happen. This is why in 2016, we have started to build a new pipeline system to Norway and Denmark, and we have just finished all the works. And this is why for the first time in our history, Poland is independent of Russian gas.
And the other fossil fuels, we were able to very quickly revert Russian direction, the Russian imports, and replace them with other directions and other imports from all over the globe, really.
So, for the first time in our history, we are not dependent on Russian fossil fuels, but this is quite a rare situation in Europe because there was this addiction, and there was this huge, huge mistake made by the Germans in their‑‑in their policy of dependency on Russian gas. They have actually‑‑they have actually done this intentionally for last 15 years. They had built Nord Stream 1 and then Nord Stream 2, which was about to be operational, and the war broke out, and this is why, most likely, I hope, it is never going to be operational in the future.
But it is an indicator that Germany put all the eggs into the Russian basket, so to say, and it was as huge, huge mistake. And now lots of Europe suffers because of those mistakes and all the aggressive policy of President Putin.
And, in Poland, we were preparing for this for last five, six years intensively. We would have built LNG terminal, and we have long‑term contracts with the American and Qatar companies. We have built additional interconnectors to Slovakia, to Lithuania, to the Czech Republic. We are going to build‑‑or to locate another floating terminal for LNG gas. So not only we are going to be independent of Russian gas, but we can be provider of gas security, gas‑related security to the others in Central Europe.
MR. IGNATIUS: Mr. Prime Minister, let me ask you frankly. Do you think that Germany has learned its lesson after making what you describe as a terrible mistake in relying too much on Russia? Has Germany really turned course, or are you still waiting for more signs of that?
PM MORAWIECKI: I hope yes. I hope they've learned this lesson because the lesson is quite harsh for them as well. It means recession, maybe even bad recession in Germany over the next couple of quarters or into 2023. It means the highest inflation since 1951. So it's the highest inflation in Germany since the post‑war times. Incredible, isn't it? It's this indirectly contributed to the highest inflation in all the countries of the European Union, and it is a very high inflation in the United States, as I hear, as well.
So the ripple effects are already there, and the situation is getting worse and worse because we not only encounter huge energy crisis and crisis related with level of‑‑that level of inflation, but also, we see a financial crisis in the making in many countries in the world; in particular, those which have very high debt, public debt to GDP, but also private debt in emerging markets. In particular, in those countries where private debt is denominated in dollars is going to be very painful. So it's just a very quick landscape of potential problems which are ahead of us.
This is why I believe that our German partners and many other friends in Western Europe understood that the strategy of dependency on Russian‑‑not only gas, but dependency on Russian natural resources and raw materials was very, very wrong.
MR. IGNATIUS: Mr. Prime Minister, one of the other headlines coming out of last week's EU Summit concerned Poland and a judgment that Poland was not complying with the EU's charter of fundamental rights concerning certain matters in your legal system, and that the EU, therefore, would withhold some of the cohesion funds that otherwise would have been paid to Poland. What's your response to this argument that Poland is not complying with the charter, and do you think this matter is going to be resolved soon?
PM MORAWIECKI: Poland and the United Kingdom, some 15 years ago, have signed a so‑called protocol or British protocol, Protocol No. 13. It is part of the treaty. Protocols are part of the primary law in the European Union. It is not that the laws included or that the majority of the provisions included in the charter which you mentioned, sir, are not observed and are not part of our Polish system. It is that we didn't want it exactly as the United Kingdom back then, didn't want it to include yet another international document into our legal system.
The United States are doing the same quite frequently, but we have those, exactly the same rights, sometimes even in a much stronger wording of those in our constitution, and this is why it is not at all a jeopardy for our cohesion funds, as you asked, and the other funds of the European Union.
There is additional fund related to post‑covid times called "next generation EU," and here, we‑‑I hope we are in a final stage of explaining some differences between the European Commission and theirs.
MR. IGNATIUS: Mr. Prime Minister, I know you have a hard out, as we say, a departure time. I want to thank you for joining us. Having visited Poland several times recently, I'm struck by the generosity of your country towards Ukrainian refugees, the way Polish people have stepped up and taken people into their homes. Thank you for joining us this morning for a very interesting conversation. We hope you'll come back.
PM MORAWIECKI: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much, sir. Thank you, and in particular, I'd like to thank you for your kind words towards my countrymen. They really deserve it. Thank you very much.
MR. IGNATIUS: Thank you.
So we’ll be back with much more Washington Post Live programming. To see what we’ve got coming up, please go to WashingtonPostLive.com.
I'm David Ignatius. Thank you for joining us this morning for this conversation with the Polish prime minister. | 2022-10-25T15:23:29Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Transcript: Leadership During Crisis with Poland Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2022/10/25/transcript-leadership-during-crisis-with-poland-prime-minister-mateusz-morawiecki/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2022/10/25/transcript-leadership-during-crisis-with-poland-prime-minister-mateusz-morawiecki/ |
Bear attacks aren’t common, but hikers and campers should be prepared for a bear to cross their path
A grizzly bear is seen just north of the National Elk Refuge in Grand Teton National Park, Wyo. (Joe Lieb/U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service via AP)
Would you know what to do if you crossed paths with a bear?
Wildlife experts emphasize that bear attacks are rare. A woman in Washington state Saturday fended off an attack from a black bear outside her house by punching the bear in the nose. Earlier this month, Kendell Cummings, a college wrestler at Northwest College in Powell, Wyo., fought off a grizzly bear that attacked his teammate in Shoshone National Forest, and Cummings survived the encounter by playing dead. A Wyoming hunter shot himself Friday while trying to fend off a grizzly bear.
Most of us will only see a bear from a distance. But, by understanding bear behavior, you can better prepare for what to do if a bear takes an interest in you.
And if you do plan to hike in parts of the country where black and brown bears live, experts say you should bring bear spray, travel in groups and don’t run away if a bear spots you. They’ll catch up.
So what’s the real risk of getting attacked by a bear?
How do I know if I’m in bear country?
What should I do if I’m on a hike or camping trip?
What should I do if a bear visits my house?
What if I see a bear in the wild?
Okay, but what if the bear starts to approach me? | 2022-10-25T15:23:35Z | www.washingtonpost.com | What should you do if you see a bear? Tips for surviving an attack. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2022/10/25/what-to-do-bear-sighting-attack/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2022/10/25/what-to-do-bear-sighting-attack/ |
A video captures Iran's notorious Evin Prison on fire with smoke rising on the night of Oct. 15. (Video: 1500 Tasvir)
By Imogen Piper
For more than 40 years, Evin prison in Tehran has been the most visible symbol of the Islamic Republic’s authoritarian rule, a menacing complex built on fear and absolute control. Unrest rarely breaches the prison walls.
But on the night of Oct. 15, massive fires tore through Evin, killing at least eight people and injuring 61, according to state media. Families of prisoners fear the true toll is much higher.
The disaster coincided with nationwide demonstrations that have swept across Iran over the past month, and a brutal crackdown by the country’s security forces, who have killed dozens of protesters and arrested thousands more. Some of those detained have been taken to Evin, where rights groups have documented a long history of torture and other abuses.
Extraordinary videos from the night of the fire show people shouting “death to the Dictator” and “death to Khamenei,” a reference to Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and a rallying cry of demonstrators, as shots are fired and flames rise above the prison.
A video posted online on Oct. 15 shows fire and smoke in addition to audible gunfire and protests at Evin Prison in Tehran, Iran. (Video: Twitter)
To understand what happened that night, The Washington Post analyzed dozens of photos and videos, spoke to activists, lawyers, former prisoners and families of current prisoners, and consulted with experts in arson, weapons and audio forensics.
The findings are damning: At least one fire that night appears to have been started intentionally at a time when prisoners are locked in their cells. The most deadly fire erupted near the scene of the arson. As prisoners tried to flee the fire, guards and other security forces assaulted them with batons, live ammunition, metal pellets and explosives.
The fires
The unrest started around 8:45 p.m., according to a video posted by Mizan, the news site of Iran’s judiciary. The video claims that a fight broke out in Ward 7 and that prisoners then set fire to a nearby textiles workshop.
Satellite imagery analyzed by The Post does, indeed, show extensive damage to the roof of the two-story building in the center of the prison that houses the textiles workshop, as well as a religious hall called a Hussainiya on the level below.
Visible fire damage
That was not the only fire in the prison that night, however, and it was probably not the first.
Before any flames were visible from the outside of the textiles workshop, videos show at least three individuals throwing flammable liquid onto a fire atop an adjacent building in Ward 7, according to Phillip Fouts, a certified fire investigator. The fire on the roof probably failed to catch, he said, due to a lack of combustible material. Satellite imagery taken in the aftermath shows only minimal damage.
A video posted online on Oct. 16 capture three individuals on a roof at Evin Prison spreading flammable liquid. (Video: YouTube)
Yet visuals show another fire blazing high into the air inside the grounds of Ward 7, close to where the arsonists had previously fed the flames on the rooftop. This second fire appeared to originate by the entrance to Ward 7, near a guard station, according to a former inmate who spent several years inside Evin. He spoke to The Post on the condition of anonymity, fearing backlash from the government.
The Post cannot confirm how the fire inside Ward 7 started, but its proximity to the intentional fire is telling. And it is the fire inside Ward 7 — which the government later blamed on prisoners without providing evidence — that offered a pretext for the chaotic and deadly crackdown on inmates that followed.
The gates to the wards were locked at 5 p.m. each night after roll call, according to the former prisoner. Families of current prisoners say their movements have been further restricted since the protests broke out last month. This makes it unlikely that inmates could have accessed any of the three areas where the fires broke out.
Amnesty International has reported that the sounds of gunshots and screaming in Ward 7 could be heard by prisoners in neighboring wards as early as 8 p.m., well before the first flames were visible, and that “authorities sought to justify their bloody crackdown on prisoners under the guise of battling the fire.” Iranian state television later said that security forces were responding to a “premeditated” escape plan by prisoners.
“This was a strange incident that happened at a time that the prisoners should be sleeping,” said Saleh Nikbakht, a lawyer who has several clients in Evin, speaking to The Post by phone from Tehran. “This was a big event.”
Ward 7 houses thieves and financial criminals, according to the government, though the former inmate told The Post that more violent criminals were also held there. Just as importantly, it borders Ward 8, where dissidents and political prisoners are held, and where the smoke from the fire eventually spread.
Workshop fire
Prison yard
As noxious smoke poured from Ward 7 into Ward 8, labor rights activist Arash Johari began to cough and gag, he told his family.
Johari, 30, said he and the rest of the prisoners in Ward 8 faced a stark choice: smash through the gates or suffocate. As they burst through the locked doors and spilled into the prison yard they were met by enraged guards, who brutalized them with batons, bullets and tear gas, according to family members who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of repercussions from authorities.
A video posted online on Oct. 15 shows smoke and fire rising from a building at Evin Prison in Tehran while rapid gunfire is heard. (Video: Twitter)
Steven Beck, an audio forensics expert, and researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, separately analyzed videos provided by The Post and found that more than 100 distinct gunshots were fired. Both analyses identified automatic gunfire “consistent with an AK-47” as well as sounds that likely came from handguns and rifles.
Mohammad Khani, a dissident in Ward 8, was blasted in the chest with metal pellets and took a bullet in his side, according to a family member, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Beck determined there were also at least two explosions “consistent with grenades.” Amael Kotlarski, a senior analyst and weapons experts from Janes, the intelligence defense provider, examined footage and audio provided by The Post and concluded stun grenades were probably launched into the prison, “judging by the flash and audible blast” heard in the video.
A video posted online on Oct. 16 shows smoke rising and the flashbang from a stun grenade at Evin Prison in Tehran, Iran. (Video: Twitter)
“[Johari] said he had been beaten in the head with a baton and that he was dizzy and felt nauseous,” said his family member. “He also said he had blurred vision and his head was bleeding.”
The experiences of Khani and Johari that night could not be independently verified by The Post, but they were consistent with the findings of Amnesty, as well as with past investigations by The Post documenting the use of excessive force against protesters in Iran.
Reinforcements were dispatched to Evin to deal with the unrest, including “security forces, judicial forces, the Basij and special police units,” prison official Heshmatollah Hayat Al Ghaib said in the judiciary video. The Basij are a paramilitary branch of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and have taken a leading role in the violent suppression of demonstrators.
The fire at Evin had been put out and the unrest was brought under control shortly before midnight, according to the government, though sources who have family and friends living around the prison told The Post that gunfire could still be heard as late as 2 a.m. Sunday.
Three buses full of prisoners from Ward 8, including Johari, were sent from Evin to Rajai Shahr prison, about 40 miles west, according to Johari’s family member. The judiciary video shows these buses being escorted by police cars with flashing red lights.
Johari was promised an X-ray for his head injuries at Rajai Shahr but authorities did not follow through, his family said.
Khani contacted his family Sunday to tell them he had been badly wounded. His relatives fought for him to get outside medical care and prison authorities eventually relented, taking him to a nearby hospital.
The bullet in Khani’s side was approximately two fingers deep inside his body and required surgery, his family member said, alleging that the doctors did not stitch his wound up properly or give him antibiotics before sending him back to Evin. He can only walk now with the aid of other political prisoners in Ward 8, they said.
Dozens of other families flocked to Evin on Sunday morning to get news of their loved ones. They were turned away by soldiers until a large crowd had formed and began beating on the gate, demanding answers. Many mothers, thinking their children were dead, wailed with grief.
“When families went up as a group to ask questions [the guards] insisted that people come up one-by-one or else guards would be called to beat them,” said Johari’s relative, who talked to families at the prison that day. “All they kept saying is ‘Go home and we’ll contact you.’”
Farther away, other families were gripped by a similar fear. Among those held at Evin are Siamak Namazi and Emad Sharghi, two Iranian American business executives.
When the unrest broke out Saturday night, Namazi was moved from Ward 4 to Ward 2A, which is run by the IRGC, according to his brother Babak. Namazi could hear the gunfire and smell the smoke during the unrest, his brother told The Post in a telephone interview from Dubai.
“It’s important for President Biden to see how close we came. It could have been Siamak and Emad who got killed,” said Babak. “It shows the literal urgency and the life-threatening situation that they’re in.” | 2022-10-25T15:23:42Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Mysteries of Iran’s Evin prison fire: Inside a notorious prison - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/25/iran-evin-prison-fire-protests/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/25/iran-evin-prison-fire-protests/ |
New Maryland guard Abby Meyers was the Ivy League player of the year at Princeton last season. (Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post)
Olivia Meyers sat inside a Calgary coffee shop in March, recording herself trying to contain her emotions while watching her twin sister have one of the biggest moments of her life.
Olivia, better known as Livy, silently pumped her fist with the camera rolling as Abby Meyers scored a career-high 29 points to lead No. 11 seed Princeton to its second NCAA tournament win in program history, defeating the future No. 1 pick in the WNBA draft, Rhyne Howard and No. 6 Kentucky.
Livy knew the moment would be special, even if she had to watch from afar while attending graduate school in another country.
“It was kind of weird but I wanted her to see my reaction,” Livy said. “I was supposed to be doing my work, but the work was put away very quickly. And then I was watching intently the game in the coffee shop probably making a little too much noise at some point. People probably thought I was crazy, like fist-pumping in this coffee shop. And crying. But it was a good moment.”
Livy has watched Abby have these moments all of their lives and there was another in April that blew her mind again. Coming off being named Ivy League player of the year, Abby transferred to the University of Maryland — the school they grew up idolizing. The Potomac natives went to Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda, where Abby is the all-time leading scorer, and used to attend Maryland games to watch current WNBA stars Alyssa Thomas and Shatori Walker-Kimbrough. Now Abby has been voted a captain and is expected to shoulder a significant role for a program that was overhauled during the offseason.
“We looked up to those girls like they were basketball gods,” Livy said. “So the fact that Abby’s going there now startled me because we idolized the team.
“Really just shocked. Abby always surprises me. I never thought she could go to such a dominant basketball school and now she’s playing for them, and is going to be one of their top players, I think. It’s just real shock. She always does the unthinkable for our family. So it’s always a good surprise.”
Abby added, “It was kind of just like a no-brainer for me.”
The Terrapins lost five of last season’s top six scorers through graduation or the transfer portal. Coach Brenda Frese worked the portal herself and brought in Meyers, Brinae Alexander (Vanderbilt), Elisa Pinzan (South Florida) and Allie Kubek (Towson). (Lavender Briggs also transferred from Florida in January, and Kubek has been lost for this season with a torn ACL.) All-Big Ten guard Diamond Miller, sixth player of the year Shyanne Sellers, Faith Masonius and Emma Chardon are the only returners and Frese signed three four-star recruits that were ranked in the nation’s top 60 by ESPN.
The new group has plenty of proven scorers, but none have played an actual game together outside of practice. So there’s an atmosphere of unknown surrounding the 2022-23 Terrapins. Meyers is coming off a season where she scored 17.9 points and grabbed 5.8 rebounds per game. She shot 45 percent from the field and 39.3 percent from behind the arc. The success on the court extended beyond the Ivy League as she dropped that career-high 29 on Kentucky, 21 against No. 12 Texas and 18 against No. 22 Florida Gulf Coast last season.
“She’s a phenomenal guard,” Kentucky Coach Kyra Elzy said after the tournament game. “Her ability to score on all three levels, and if you give her any space, it’s going up, and she’s very efficient offensively”
Frese added, “Can’t say enough for her experience, just a special player. She’s given us so much as an ultimate leader as well as a scorer that can score in a variety of ways. We’re excited for Abby.”
Meyers spent the offseason improving her ballhandling with the anticipation of having the rock in her hands more often. She was used as a playmaker off the wing at Princeton, but the Terps will probably play faster without much size on the roster. Frese said there will be a lot of positionless basketball, and that could lead to multiple players pushing the ball upcourt instead of waiting to find the point guard.
Brenda Frese downplays high-profile transfers, restocks Maryland’s roster
It’s difficult to surmise what expectations should be for a Maryland team with so many question marks. Since joining the Big Ten in 2014, the Terps have won six regular season championships and five tournament titles. But how will all the newcomers fit in and how will the returners adapt to new skill sets and tendencies? Both the media and coaches voted Maryland to finish fourth in the preseason rankings.
Things may feel even stranger for those expected to be in the program for just one season.
“I think that you have like a devil and angel on your shoulders,” Meyers said. “And the angel’s saying, ‘Hey, day-by-day, be present. Take your time and just get better.’ And the devil’s saying, ‘Hey, you’ve got to make every moment count.’ Trying to find the balance between the two for me is going to be a good challenge that I’m ready for.” | 2022-10-25T15:43:35Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Princeton's Abby Meyers returns home to play for Maryland - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/25/abby-meyers-maryland-princeton/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/25/abby-meyers-maryland-princeton/ |
Juno Oliveira da Silva displays campaign items from his old friend, former Brazilian president Luis Inácio Lula da Silva, in São Bernardo do Campo, Brazil. (Pétala Lopes for The Washington Post)
RIO DE JANEIRO — They camped outside the prison for 580 days. Each morning, they chanted “Good morning, president” loud so he could hear them.
When former Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva emerged from the federal police headquarters in Curitiba on Nov. 8, 2019, freed after serving more than 19 months for corruption and money laundering, the hundreds of supporters waiting for him erupted in cheers — and the lion of the Latin American left resumed campaigning for the office he held from 2003 to 2010.
Now Lula, who was convicted in Brazil’s sprawling Operation Car Wash scandal but released when the Supreme Court ruled that he had been denied due process, is on the verge of completing a stunning political resurrection. He won the first round of the presidential election here this month with more than 48 percent of the vote; polls show him ahead in the second round on Sunday against President Jair Bolsonaro.
Lula, who turns 77 on Thursday, holds a singular place in Brazil’s history. His Workers’ Party, which he co-founded in 198o, when the country was ruled by a military dictatorship, has won four of the nine presidential elections since democracy was restored in 1985. In his two terms, Lula himself presided over a period of prosperity, fueled by a global commodities boom, that lifted millions of Brazilians out of poverty. President Barack Obama once called him “the most popular politician on Earth.”
“He is in every Brazilian,” said Duke University historian John French, author of “Lula and His Politics of Cunning: From Metalworker to President of Brazil.” “Everyone recognizes his deep voice, his smile, his sense of humor.”
Beloved by millions of Brazilians and despised by millions more, Lula is typically described in hyperbolic terms: He’s a champion of social justice and protector of the poor — or a corrupt, leftist radical who would lead the country to financial and moral bankruptcy.
“Lula is the people,” said Juno Rodrigues Silva, owner of the restaurant Gijo’s in São Bernardo do Campo on the outskirts of Sao Paulo, its walls covered with pictures of the former president.
“He has a love for the people and people adore him back, and throughout the years he has remained the same person.”
Silva, who met Lula in 1969 when they were both metalworkers, was the only person received at his São Bernardo apartment on the eve of the 2002 election, when he became president. He had asked Silva to bring him beef chops and wine, according to the newspaper Folha de S. Paulo.
“When he was president there was no lack of rice, no lack of beans. He wanted everyone to eat barbecue every day,” he said. “Today, people are abandoned, eating garbage, picking up leftovers from the trash, and buying just the bones. This is what Bolsonaro serves to the poor people of Brazil.”
But to Deborah Guzman, Lula represents everything she rejects: Same-sex marriage, communism and drugs. The 45-year-old homemaker from Brasilia cited false claims on social media that Lula planned to legalize drugs and persecute or ban religion. (His campaign has denied any such plans.)
Guzman also pointed to the corruption in Lula’s and other Workers’ Party administrations. “Only in Brazil can we consider reelecting a man who was in prison, and who wants to turn this place into Venezuela!” she said. She said she does not believe the annulment of his conviction means he’s not guilty.
Lula has pitched himself to voters as the man who will restore stability after nearly four chaotic and isolating years of Bolsonaro. He promises to tackle hunger and homelessness. He has vowed to raise taxes on the rich, increase the minimum wage, and expand social spending to lift millions out of poverty. He has vowed to make the environment a priority by cracking down on illegal mining and other crimes in the Amazon and reversing Bolsonaro-era policies that have weakened protections and enabled growing deforestation.
But he could not legally run for office until the Supreme Court annulled his conviction last year. The court ruled that the trial judge had been biased against him.
The Operation Car Wash investigation into bribery and corruption has ensnared scores of politicians and business executives in Brazil and across Latin America. Lula was convicted of receiving more than $1 million in bribes in the form of a beachfront apartment. He denied the property was his.
To many Brazilians, Lula is still a thief who was released on a technicality, not innocence. The revelations left him and the Workers’ Party weakened, and fueled massive protests that led to the 2016 impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff.
Still, Lula’s message of social mobility and empowerment continues to resonate with millions in a country increasingly divided by growing inequality.
He began his political career as a metalworkers union leader in the ’70s and ’80s, when he helped organize massive strikes in defiance of the dictatorship.
But it is Lula’s story — he was born to illiterate parents, left school after fifth grade and shined shoes as a child but became a skilled metalworker, a powerful union leader and eventually president — that for many Brazilians embodies the hopes and dreams of the nation: thriving against all circumstances, surmounting crisis after crisis, always growing.
As the first working-class president, Lula made the struggles of the poor central to his government; he pushed social initiatives credited with lifting millions out of poverty while enabling more low-income and Afro-Brazilian students to access higher education. He left office with an approval rating north of 85 percent.
“Not only did he put three meals a day on millions of poor people’s plates, but they were then also able to start buying cars, access a loan for a house, which invigorated the economy even more,” said the journalist Fernando Morais, author of the biography “Lula.”
Years after Lula left office, many Brazilians credit his social and economic policies with transforming their lives. Jorge Freire, born into a poor Afro-Brazilian family, said Lula’s quota programs for underserved students enabled him to attend university.
Critics say Lula did little to dismantle power structures that allowed systemic corruption to persist, and from which he benefited. They credit much of his success to good timing: His administration coincided with a regional commodities boom that fueled economic development and helped to pay for social programs.
After the first-round vote on Oct. 2, Lula was endorsed by two key politicians: Simone Tebet, who finished third in the first round with 4 percent of the votes, and former president Fernando Henrique Cardoso, an influential figure in business circles who said he would vote for Lula in the name of “a history of struggle for democracy and social inclusion.”
Gabriela Sá Pessoa in São Paulo contributed to this report. | 2022-10-25T16:01:00Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Lula leads Bolsonaro in Brazil election polls in political comeback - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/25/lula-brazil-election-bolsonaro/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/25/lula-brazil-election-bolsonaro/ |
Her radiant hats, aimed mostly at African American women for use at church, weddings and funerals, were featured on postage stamps and in museum collections
D.C. hat maker Vanilla Beane worked six days a week into her 100th year. (Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post)
Vanilla Beane, whose radiant hats topped the heads of legions of African American women at church, weddings and funerals in the District for half a century, earning her the title of “D.C.’s Hat Lady,” died Oct. 23 at a hospital in Washington. She was 103.
The cause was complications following an aortic tear, said her grandson Craig Seymour.
Ms. Beane’s hats, which she had designed and fabricated at Bené Millinery and Bridal Supplies shop on Third Street NW, were featured on postage stamps and in collections at the National Museum of African American History and Culture. Every hat was one-of-a-kind.
Poet Maya Angelou wore Ms. Beane’s hats. So did civil rights activist Dorothy I. Height, putting them on for meetings with presidents and other officials. “Hats give me a lift and make me feel real special,” Height explained — a sentiment shared by the countless others who shopped at Ms. Beane’s store.
Ms. Beane worked six days a week into her 100th year.
“Some people like real fussy hats,” Ms. Beane once said. “Others like sophisticated hats, and a lot of people like simple hats. I try to please people regardless of their race or background.” | 2022-10-25T16:18:25Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Vanilla Beane, the District’s ‘Hat Lady,’ dies at 103 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/10/25/vanilla-beane-dc-hatmaker-for-more-than-50-years-died-at-age-103/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/10/25/vanilla-beane-dc-hatmaker-for-more-than-50-years-died-at-age-103/ |
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service granted federal protections to the world’s tallest and heaviest penguin species Tuesday
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on Oct. 25, placed emperor penguins under endangered species protection due to sea-ice loss driven by climate change. (Video: British Antartic Survey, Photo: AP/British Antartic Survey)
It is the only animal that dares to breed during the Antarctic winter. It endures gale-force winds to lay and protect a single egg.
Now climate change threatens Antarctica’s emperor penguin with extinction, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service declared Tuesday, as melting sea ice upends the habitat it needs to breed, feed and protect itself from predators.
“This listing reflects the growing extinction crisis,” Martha Williams, the federal wildlife agency’s director, said in a statement, as the agency gave the iconic seabird protection under the Endangered Species Act. “Climate change is having a profound impact on species around the world.”
The Center for Biological Diversity petitioned Fish and Wildlife to protect the emperor penguin in 2011, arguing that the loss of sea ice driven by climate change will put the penguin’s long-term survival in jeopardy.
With their final decision Tuesday, federal officials agreed with that assessment, though it is unclear what specific steps the government will take to safeguard the penguin’s habitat.
While sea ice around Antarctica has proved more durable than ice near the North Pole, nearly all emperor penguin colonies in the southern continent would be pushed to the brink of extinction by the end of the century without dramatic cuts to global greenhouse gas emissions, scientists recently projected.
“That body of science really helped to make this decision really clear,” said Shaye Wolf, the Center for Biological Diversity’s climate science director. “That the penguin is endangered by climate change and needs all the protection it can get.”
How climate change has made it harder for penguins to find a mate
The seabirds are used to enduring tough times. Males spend two months incubating their egg on their feet while females feed on krill and squid in the sea. After the egg hatches, the parents take turns waddling dozens of miles to and from the ocean to feed their hungry chick.
That journey — documented in the 2005 film “March of the Penguins” as well as in the 2006 animated movie “Happy Feet” — turned the hardy, flightless seabird into an animal icon of resilience.
Right now, the penguin’s population appears stable, with between 625,000 and 650,000 birds shuffling and sliding around Antarctica.
But there are already signs of what the future may hold for the bird. The breakup of sea ice before chicks were ready to swim at Halley Bay and Cape Crozier led to breeding failures in recent years. | 2022-10-25T16:53:20Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Climate change threatens emperor penguins with extinction, officials say - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/10/25/emperor-penguins-threatened-extinction-climate/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/10/25/emperor-penguins-threatened-extinction-climate/ |
A new bromance? Sunak prompts hopes for improved France-U.K. ties.
New Prime Minister Rishi Sunak arrives at Number 10 Downing Street on Tuesday. (Hannah Mckay/Reuters)
PARIS — Only two months ago, Franco-British relations appeared to have hit a new low when Liz Truss — at the time the front-runner to succeed Boris Johnson as prime minister — said “the jury is out” on whether French President Emmanuel Macron was Britain’s friend or foe.
Eight weeks and one tumultuous British premiership later, some in Paris and London hope the question is finally settled and that new Prime Minister Rishi Sunak will help improve the antagonistic relationship between Britain and France, despite concerns that Brexit — and particularly the status of Northern Ireland — could still derail any progress.
“The differences in policy and program are still quite deep,” said Peter Ricketts, Britain’s ambassador to France between 2012 and 2016. But he added that Sunak “doesn’t have Johnson’s habit of mocking and denigrating international leaders.”
“He’s a much more respectful, serious politician, and I think probably he and Macron will get on pretty well,” he said.
It would be welcome news in the Élysée presidential palace, where Macron has left little doubt in recent weeks that Europe needs “to have the U.K. back on its horse,” said Elvire Fabry, a senior research fellow at the Parisian Jacques Delors Institute.
Johnson and Truss appeared to have little in common with Macron. But the French president, 44, and Sunak, 42, share a number of similarities that range from their investment banking backgrounds, to their steep political ascents and occasional appearances in hoodies. (They’re roughly the same height, too.)
“Are Macron and Sunak heading for a beautiful bromance?” Britain’s conservative Spectator magazine asked in a story headline on Tuesday.
At least in some ways, “both of them appear to be practical politicians and less ideological,” said Nicholas Dungan, an analyst of French politics and founder of the CogitoPraxis advisory group.
A British-French rapprochement would mark a major shift in European politics, after years in which the two countries fought bitter diplomatic battles over refugees, submarine contracts and fishing rights. Tensions ran so high that at one point last year, France and Britain literally found themselves sending gunboats to sea in a spat over shellfish. “We’re ready for war,” Britain’s Daily Mail tabloid blared in all caps at the time.
U.K. sends in the Royal Navy, France threatens to cut off power to Jersey, in post-Brexit spat over shellfish
Months later, as Russia was preparing a real war, Western Europe’s two biggest military powers were still busy ridiculing each other. When France discovered that the United States, Australia and Britain had secretly negotiated a submarine technology deal, effectively derailing a separate Franco-Australian agreement, French officials mocked Britain as a “fifth wheel on the carriage.” Unlike President Biden, who all but apologized for the deal and sought to repair the damage, Johnson appeared to feel no need to calm the French.
The situation was “worse than I can remember during 40 years of dealing with UK-French relations,” recalled former ambassador Ricketts.
But the Russian invasion of Ukraine changed the calculus and has gradually paved the way for a revival in relations, because “there is much more that unites than divides them,” said Georgina Wright, director of the Paris-based Montaigne Institute’s Europe Program.
The fierce disputes had already somewhat eased in the final weeks of Johnson’s term in office, and relations improved further when Truss attended a Macron-backed summit for the “European Political Community” earlier this month.
Sunak’s rise to the premiership now offers the chance for a clean break. It could, for example, provide momentum for a deal to prevent more asylum seekers from crossing the English Channel to Britain, which has long been a point of contention. But it also comes as Franco-German relations — traditionally the driving force behind much of European politics — are increasingly strained, which may open up room for limited ad hoc alliances between Macron and Sunak.
“They probably will be well aligned on defense issues, particularly vis-a-vis Ukraine,” Dungan said.
Britain and France are also similarly facing challenging economic situations and soaring energy bills.
Sunak has vowed to “fix our economy.” As one of Britain’s richest people, his policies will be scrutinized for any signs that he is favoring wealthy people over those most in need. That’s criticism Macron is familiar with. His political opponents long ago labeled him “president of the rich.”
“Sunak will obviously face something that Macron has been facing: that he’s been criticized for not being rooted enough in people’s everyday lives and problems,” Fabry said.
Macron, who regularly enrages leftist and far-right voters for appearing aloof, faced violent protests in his first term after proposed increases in fuel taxes ignited broader concerns over social inequality in France. To prevent a repeat of those protests, Macron has spent far more money on capping energy prices and limiting inflation than many other European governments allocated this year.
Sunak’s economic policy, in contrast, is expected to include painful cuts in government spending that in some ways are the opposite of Macron’s current approach.
“Whether Sunak is in the mood to look to France for lessons, I doubt,” Ricketts said. “But I think it would be good for him if he did.”
Even though Sunak has vowed to pursue a pragmatic leadership style, some in Paris and other European capitals worry that his policies may remain influenced by the factions within Britain’s Conservative Party that backed Truss’s policies.
In the past, Sunak was among those who sold voters the prospect of a post-Brexit “Global Britain,” and as finance minister, he moved to introduce low-tax zones, “free ports,” despite concerns over money laundering.
“Sunak has no choice than to try to make a success of Brexit,” Dungan said.
One of the most heated issues remains the status of Northern Ireland, which effectively stayed in the European Union’s single market when Britain withdrew from the 28-member bloc.
Under Johnson and Truss, Britain sought changes to the protocol that governed much of Northern Ireland’s post-Brexit status. While initially tense, E.U.-U.K. talks appeared to yield more promising results toward the end of Truss’s short tenure.
Now, Brussels is watching for signs as to how Sunak will navigate the issue. He previously said he supported overruling the Brexit deal, in a move that would inevitably heighten tensions between the E.U. and U.K. and could prompt a trade war.
Why Britain’s plan to scrap part of the Brexit deal is so controversial
True improvement in relations, Ricketts said, “is all contingent, in my mind, on the government stepping back from this Northern Ireland protocol bill, which gives them powers to rip up parts of the Northern Ireland protocol.”
If, however, the bill is passed under Sunak, “that immediately puts a big shadow over how far U.K.-French relations can improve,” he said.
Mujtaba Rahman, a Europe-focused managing director at Eurasia Group, said he is “cautiously optimistic.”
“Economic confidence is going to be key for the U.K.'s recovery,” he said, “which ultimately means working constructively with European allies.” | 2022-10-25T16:55:02Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Will Rishi Sunak and Emmanuel Macron, with similar bios, start a bromance? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/25/sunak-macron-uk-france-relations/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/25/sunak-macron-uk-france-relations/ |
Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) chair of the House Progressive Caucus. (J. Scott Applewhite/AP)
The Congressional Progressive Caucus has withdrawn a letter, signed by 30 House liberals and sent to the White House Monday, that urged President Biden to negotiate directly with Russia to bring an end to the war in Ukraine.
“Timing in diplomacy is everything,” Rep. Sara Jacobs (D-Calif.), one of the letter’s signatories, tweeted Tuesday. “I signed this letter on June 30, but a lot has changed since then. I wouldn’t sign it today.”
In the original letter to the White House, dated Oct. 24 and first reported by The Washington Post, the lawmakers called on Biden to pursue a “proactive diplomatic push, redoubling efforts to seek a realistic framework for a cease fire.”
Take a look: What more than 1,000 political ads are arguing right before the midterms | 2022-10-25T17:23:44Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Democrats withdraw letter urging Biden to rethink Ukraine war strategy - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/25/democrats-ukraine-letter/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/25/democrats-ukraine-letter/ |
Stickers for patients who receive doses of the new bivalent coronavirus booster. (Hannah Beier/Reuters)
Get ready: Another covid wave is on the horizon because of a new immunity-evading subvariant, BQ.1, and its offshoots. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says, based in part on models, that BQ.1 and BQ.1.1 now account for nearly 17 percent of infections in the United States, up from zero a few weeks ago. The prevalent BA.5 variant is starting to fade. Especially at risk are the unvaccinated and those who have not gotten a shot of the new boosters.
Right now, the pandemic in the United States is in a lull, and overall levels remain relatively low. There are 260,808 new reported cases a week and 2,566 weekly deaths, the CDC said, partially based on modeling. Covid-19 has been one of the leading causes of death in the United States, but the numbers are far smaller than during the omicron surge last winter.
What is not yet known is whether or how well an immunity wall, built both by natural infection and vaccines, might protect against a new wave. One reason to worry is that BQ.1.1 evades immune systems on a greater scale than other variants and subvariants. Already, the new variant has the potential to make obsolete Evusheld, a key antibody used to protect immunocompromised individuals. Cases appear to be taking off in New York and could spread across the country in the months ahead. Another subvariant, known as XBB, can also easily evade immune systems.. So far, it has spread far in Singapore but little in the United States.
BQ.1.1 evolved from BA.5, so there is hope the new bivalent boosters, offered by Pfizer and Moderna, will protect against it, too. The United States has ordered 171 million doses, which became available in early September, but uptake so far is a mere 19.4 million doses. “The U.S. is woefully under-vaccinated and under-boosted,” says Dr. Eric Topol, professor of molecular medicine at Scripps Research. A preliminary study of the bivalent boosters, not yet peer-reviewed, showed that they provided protection roughly similar to the previous monovalent boosters but are not as effective against BA.5 as some had predicted; more research will be needed.
Another factor is that people are desperate to return to normal, relaxing precautions as they move indoors and gather in close contact for the coming holidays. A surge in Europe is probably the result of this shift, and there are signs everywhere of an earlier influenza season as well as a wave of RSV among children, leading to overwhelmed pediatric wards.
No one will welcome a new surge, but everyone should prepare for one. The most important step is for all eligible individuals to get vaccinated and boosted. It will be necessary to return to wearing masks in some places, particularly crowded areas with close contact. Everyone should test themselves often and, if positive, stay home — for their sake and for that of others. Good ventilation — with fresh air — and air filtration are indispensable in minimizing transmission in workplaces and other areas people gather.
The virus has not stopped, and the pandemic is not over. But there are ways to keep it at bay. | 2022-10-25T17:32:26Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | How to fight covid-19 variant BQ.1.1 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/25/covid-variant-bq11-vaccine-booster/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/25/covid-variant-bq11-vaccine-booster/ |
Passengers wait for a train in Berlin on Oct. 8 after a major disruption on the German railway network. (John MacDougall/AFP)
“We are at war with Putin,” declared German health minister Karl Lauterbach this month. His remark caused consternation among his colleagues in government. But he’s right. Spies, hackers and mysterious saboteurs are attacking critical infrastructure around the country — and the most likely culprits are the Russians. For the first time in decades, Germans are confronting a major challenge to their national security. How will they adapt?
This month, an act of sabotage forced state-owned rail giant Deutsche Bahn to suspend all train traffic for nearly three hours across the country’s north, leaving passengers stranded. The sophistication of the attack, in which assailants simultaneously cut two sets of fiber-optic cables about 340 miles apart from each other, prompted some officials to speculate that a foreign government might be involved. It should come as little surprise that many suspect Moscow is responsible. The breakdown also revealed that there is a surprising amount of sensitive information about the rail network freely available online, heightening concerns about poor security.
Cyberattacks on the state and businesses have also been intensifying. In recent months, hospitals, fuel distribution networks and government websites have reported incidents. IT expert Benjamin Mejri has warned that many of the attacks are focusing on critical infrastructure, such as power, water and gas distribution; the war in Ukraine, he says, is suddenly laying bare long-standing failures in cybersecurity. Things have gotten so bad that last week the government fired its cybersecurity chief over concerns that he has close ties to Russia.
The Bundeswehr, the German army, has spotted unauthorized drones surveilling bases where Ukrainian soldiers are reportedly being trained in the use of armored vehicles that Germany is sending to Ukraine. Again, links to Russia are hard to substantiate. Yet there’s a striking parallel to similar cases in Norway, where the authorities have just arrested seven Russians for flying drones or taking pictures near sensitive areas.
Meanwhile, European officials are still trying to get to the bottom of last month’s mysterious attacks on the Nord Stream natural gas pipelines that run from Russia to Germany. Danish and Swedish experts who have investigated the sites suggest that they were caused by “powerful explosions,” and the case is now being investigated as an act of gross sabotage. Of course, Russia was quick to point fingers at the West, claiming that the leaks were caused by an “act of international terrorism” that set a “dangerous precedent.” Moscow’s propagandists have been busily generating reams of disinformation blaming the United States for the blasts.
Yet it’s Russia that clearly benefits from the blasts. Russian President Vladimir Putin has been trying to pressure the Europeans into reducing their support for Ukraine, and he hopes that the doubts sown by the explosions will add to the mounting political tensions in the West. Russia had already disrupted, and then systematically scaled down, the gas flow through Nord Stream 1 for months until shutting it down completely in August. The undersea attacks have now succeeded in indefinitely suspending the start of operations for Nord Stream 2. The loss of supply has sent European gas prices shooting up just as the market had calmed somewhat because of reports of above-average storage levels for the winter.Even though gas prices have recently dipped due to a sudden surge in supply, that is likely to have little effect on prices for electricity, only 15 percent of which is produced from gas.
Germany is particularly vulnerable to such attacks. Its electricity costs have long ranked among the highest in the world but have reached new records in recent months; consumers are already paying 30 to 60 percent more than before the war, and prices are projected to rise by another 60 percent next year. Talk of nationwide blackouts has heightened the sense of crisis. According to a recent survey, more than two-thirds of Germans are concerned about the rising cost of living, and nearly 60 percent worry that they might not be able to pay their rent and mortgages anymore. More than two-thirds of Germans are dissatisfied with the work of the government.
Russia has both means and motive to ratchet up the pain. A comprehensive report by Spiegel magazine revealed that Germany has been a major target for Russian spies in recent years. Moscow’s methods have included state-sanctioned assassinations on German soil, such as the murder of Zelimkhan Khangoshvili in a Berlin park in 2019.
Bundeswehr general Carsten Breuer warns that “every substation, every power plant, every pipeline can be attacked.” Russian influence reaches deep into the German economy. Over the years, the Russians have bought major shares in Germany’s state-owned energy infrastructure, such as a critical oil refinery in the city of Schwedt.
Berlin has shrugged off security concerns for far too long. The general sense of relief at the end of the Cold War led to a downscaling of both internal and external security, says Green politician and secret service expert Konstantin von Notz: “We were complacent and didn’t care about the details.”
Germany now needs to act quickly. While parliament has launched a welcome debate about security for critical infrastructure, results are slow in coming. With Russia smarting from its defeats in Ukraine and Europe heading into a difficult winter, Putin has little to lose and much to gain from attacks on critical targets in Western countries.
Putin is fighting his war against Ukraine on German soil, too. The sooner Berlin wakes up to this fact, the better. | 2022-10-25T17:32:32Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Germans are under attack. Can they adapt? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/25/russia-sabotage-germany-railroads-hacking-drones/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/25/russia-sabotage-germany-railroads-hacking-drones/ |
House liberals make a mess out of Ukraine letter
Reps. Mark Pocan (Wis.) and Pramila Jayapal (Wash.), co-chairs of the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC), speak to reporters on Capitol Hill on Jan. 29, 2019, in Washington, D.C. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)
For the second time in a week, members of Congress have signaled a potential shift in America’s policy toward Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
First, it was House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) saying that a GOP-controlled Congress next year might withhold funding from Ukraine. Then, on Monday, 30 liberal House Democrats called on President Biden to engage in direct diplomacy with Russia.
One of these approaches has engendered significant pushback inside the party, some walkbacks from the signatories and now, ultimately, a retraction. But it’s not the more drastic one.
Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) announced Tuesday that she had retracted the letter which she had spearheaded, just 24 hours after it went out. She said that the letter was drafted “several months ago” and that it was not vetted before it was released Monday.
The move comes after multiple signatories had distanced themselves from the thrust of Monday’s letter and Jayapal herself had sought to clarify it.
Rep. Mark Takano (D-Calif.) said in a statement that, “Only Ukrainians have a right to determine the terms by which this war ends.”
Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.) said that the letter wasn’t meant to criticize Biden’s approach and defended it in a series of tweets. But he also suggested that it was poorly handled. “First, this was written in July & I have no idea why it went out now. Bad timing,” he said. “Second, it was trying to get to a cease-fire & diplomacy as others were banging war drums, not criticizing Biden.”
Rep. Sara Jacobs (D-Calif.) echoed Pocan, saying she actually signed the letter in late June. But unlike Pocan, she offered perhaps the biggest break from its contents, saying that “a lot has changed since then. I wouldn’t sign it today.”
A Jayapal spokesperson initially declined to comment Tuesday on the claims that the letter was months old. But Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), the Progressive Caucus whip, seemed to confirm that it was and that signatories weren’t notified that it would go out Monday.
(The letter, for what it’s worth, cites Russia’s attempt to annex Ukrainian territory “last month,” which hadn’t happened in June or July.)
But setting that aside, these members were only pushing for diplomacy — something that under most circumstances would seem like an admirable goal to avoid bloodshed. So why the course correction?
The first thing to note is that, Jacobs aside, the signatories were engaged in more of a tonal walkback than a full-on reversal. The members said they do believe in the usefulness of diplomacy, but de-emphasized how much they’d been actually pushing for it.
The biggest problem with the letter was that it was seen as breaking with Biden’s strategy by calling for diplomacy at a moment in which the administration has argued that Russia hasn’t taken the necessary steps to engage.
The administration hasn’t exactly shied away from the prospect of diplomacy, but it has argued that it shouldn’t be so freely entered into — and that Russia shouldn’t be rewarded for its escalation.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Friday that the United States has “reaffirmed our commitment to meaningful diplomacy that can bring an end to the war, even as Moscow continues to demonstrate through its escalatory actions that its claim to be open to diplomacy is as hollow as it’s been since President Putin launched his invasion in February.”
State Department spokesman Ned Price added last week that Ukraine will lead any such process: “We have not heard any reciprocal statement or refrain from Moscow that they are ready in good faith to engage in that diplomacy and dialogue.”
The letter’s rhetoric was discordant, to say the least. The administration has emphasized that, before you enter into diplomacy, you want to be sure the other side is serious about it and has demonstrated good faith; otherwise your attempt to reach out is not only pointless but risks demonstrating weakness or even playing into your adversary’s hands. Diplomacy is a commendable goal, but has its pitfalls. (Think: Donald Trump giving Kim Jong Un a historic photo op.)
Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), who often finds himself in common cause with lawmakers like the letter’s signatories, responded: “There is moral and strategic peril in sitting down with Putin too early. It risks legitimizing his crimes and handing over parts of Ukraine to Russia in an agreement that Putin won’t even honor.”
Rep. Jake Auchincloss (D-Mass.) was more direct. “This letter is an olive branch to a war criminal who’s losing his war,” he said, speaking about Putin.
Jacobs added, of her reasons for no longer supporting the letter she signed: “Timing in diplomacy is everything.”
The same could be said of politics. Part of the reason for the pushback is that Democrats have sought to highlight McCarthy’s comments as demonstrating the GOP’s insufficient support of Ukraine. And it’s not just that Democrats see potential electoral benefit of differentiating themselves from Republicans; it’s that they worry the letter will be seen as demonstrating a bipartisan lack of resolve.
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) said that the letter “led to the conflation of growing Republican opposition to support for Ukraine, as exemplified by recent statements of Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, with the polar-opposite position of dozens of Democrats like me …”
As noted above, the call for diplomacy isn’t really on the same level as McCarthy suggesting that the money could soon dry up. But in pushing for their preferred path, the letter’s signatories did invoke their support for funding the war.
Indeed, the letter sought to carefully strike a balance between pushing for diplomacy and seeming to break with Biden or suggest the United States should take any steps that Ukraine doesn’t approve of. But it went over like a lead balloon with much of the party, and the fact that even signatories felt the need to back away shows how this delicate matter wasn’t handled nearly delicately enough.
What seems evident is that there will be a significant accounting of just how this transpired. For now, though, the big takeaway is that a political party has successfully pulled one of its factions back from straying too far from the party line.
So far, only one party has. | 2022-10-25T17:36:47Z | www.washingtonpost.com | House liberals make a mess out of Ukraine letter - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/25/house-liberals-ukraine-letter/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/25/house-liberals-ukraine-letter/ |
Chris LaCivita is widely known for running the Swift Vets and POWs for Truth campaign against 2004 Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry
Former president Donald Trump speaks at a rally at Legacy Sports Park on Oct. 9 in Mesa, Ariz. (Joshua Lott/The Washington Post)
Former president Donald Trump and his team are eyeing a longtime Virginia operative to take on a senior role in his next presidential campaign, which could be announced shortly after the midterms, according to four people familiar with the matter.
No decisions have been made on the exact role that Chris LaCivita would take in Trump’s campaign, though discussions have included a possible role as campaign manager or senior adviser. LaCivita is a longtime Republican political consultant who helped lead the Swift Vets and POWs for Truth campaign against Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kerry in 2004 and who is now directing a super PAC tied to Trump.
“Thank you for the opportunity but I don’t comment on rumors!!” LaCivita said in a text message to The Washington Post.
A Trump spokesman did not directly address LaCivita when asked for comment.
“As President Trump continues to fuel the Republican Party’s march towards a historic Midterm Election, aiming to propel more than 300 endorsed-candidates into office and providing the energy that will turn out a record number of voters, America is rightfully hungry and excited to know what’s next,” spokesman Taylor Budowich said in a statement. “President Trump is focused on what’s important: Making America Great Again.”
The four people familiar with the matter spoke on the condition of anonymity to disclose internal deliberations.
LaCivita is currently working as a consultant for both the reelection campaign of Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) and as the senior strategist for Make America Great Again Inc., the latest incarnation of an outside group backed by Trump that can raise unlimited amounts of money.
A partner at the Republican firm FP1, LaCivita has been doing the work for MAGA Inc. though his personal consulting company. MAGA Inc., which has not yet disclosed its donors, has spent about $8.5 million on ads this month to support Republican Senate candidates in Ohio, Arizona, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Georgia, according to federal records.
Should he be tapped, LaCivita would give some entree into the traditional Republican world for Trump, who has seen his orbit shrink in recent months amid a range of federal investigations.
During the 2020 campaign, LaCivita helmed Preserve America PAC, a group that was almost entirely funded by entities connected to Las Vegas casino magnet Sheldon Adelson and which spent about $100 million over the final months of the campaign to help elect Trump.
LaCivita started working in politics after being wounded as a Marine in an artillery unit during the 1990 Gulf War. He has previously worked for former senators George Allen of Virginia and Bob Corker of Tennessee, as well as on the Senate campaign of former Trump Small Business Administration administrator Linda McMahon. He has also worked in senior roles for the National Republican Senatorial Committee and as a consultant for the Congressional Leadership Fund, the outside group that supports Republican House candidates.
During the 2016 presidential campaign, LaCivita worked as a senior adviser to the presidential campaign of Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.). After Paul suspended his campaign, LaCivita went to work for the Republican National Committee, where he helped organize the pushback against an attempt on the floor of the Republican convention to deny Trump the nomination.
Susie Wiles, one of Trump’s top operatives, is also reaching out to other Republicans in a bid to hire a team for Trump, who is telling allies he plans to run for president again. Many of his longtime advisers do not want a role in the 2024 bid after a slate of federal investigations have ensnared many of them — and they fear a bruising battle he could lose.
So far, Trump’s team has been able to convince him not to announce a bid before the midterm elections, where other Republicans fear he could damage their campaigns.
Some Trump allies increasingly say he is losing altitude amid a range of federal investigations, and he has slipped considerably among Republican voters in polls conducted by people close to him. Trump allies note he leads in most GOP primary polls by a wide margin. His team also increasingly sees a large 2024 field, which they hope to splinter and use for his benefit, according to four people close to him.
But some in his orbit fear he will be charged as part of an FBI investigation over classified documents recovered from his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida after he left office, according to people familiar with the matter. Given the political and legal headaches from the investigations into him, some of his allies suspect he may change his mind about running.
In both of his previous presidential campaigns, Trump replaced his initial campaign manager in the summer before the general election. His son-in-law Jared Kushner, who played the role of a senior adviser in both campaigns, has separated himself from Trump’s political operation since the 2020 election defeat. Many of his other advisers, lawyers and consultants say they talk to him less often than they once did.
“For me right now, I’m enjoying my life in the private sector and loving the time with my kids,” Kushner said in an August interview with Fox News. | 2022-10-25T17:49:51Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Trump eyes longtime Virginia operative for senior 2024 campaign role - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/10/25/trump-campaign-lacivita/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/10/25/trump-campaign-lacivita/ |
It’s barely Halloween. The ball won’t drop in Times Square for another two full months, and more good books will surely appear before the year ends. But I already know: My favorite novel of 2022 is Barbara Kingsolver’s “Demon Copperhead.”
Equal parts hilarious and heartbreaking, this is the story of an irrepressible boy nobody wants, but readers will love. Damon is the only child of a teenage alcoholic — “an expert at rehab” — in southwest Virginia. He becomes aware of his status early, around the same time he gets the nickname Demon. “I was a lowlife,” he says, “born in the mobile home, so that’s like the Eagle Scout of trailer trash.” The more he grasps the connotations of words like “hick” and “redneck,” the more discouraged he becomes. “This is what I would say if I could, to all the smart people of the world with their dumb hillbilly jokes. …We can actually hear you.”
Now, we can hear him.
“You get to a point of not giving a damn over people thinking you’re worthless,” he says. “Mainly by getting there first yourself.”
Demon is right about America’s condescending derision, but he’s wrong about his own worth. In a feat of literary alchemy, Kingsolver uses the fire of that boy’s spirit to illuminate — and singe — the darkest recesses of our country.
The essential Americanness of “Demon Copperhead” feels particularly ironic given that Kingsolver has drawn her inspiration directly from one of England’s most celebrated classics: “David Copperfield,” by Charles Dickens. In a brief afterword, Kingsolver expresses her gratitude to Dickens and acknowledges living for years “with his outrage, inventiveness, and empathy.”
Indeed, anyone familiar with Dickens’s most autobiographical novel will hear its characters and incidents echoing through these chapters. And in one particularly meta-moment, Kingsolver winks at her readers when Demon praises an author he discovered in school. Charles Dickens, he says, is “one seriously old guy, dead and a foreigner, but Christ Jesus did he get the picture on kids and orphans getting screwed over and nobody giving a rat’s ass. You’d think he was from around here.”
There’s no denying the pleasure of seeing Dickens’s Peggottys transformed into the kindly Peggots, or his oily villain Uriah Heep recast as a sniveling assistant football coach named U-Haul Pyles. But too much can be made of these echoes. Kingsolver hasn’t merely reclothed Dickens’s characters in modern dress and resettled them in southern Appalachia, the way some desperate Shakespeare director might reimagine “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” taking place in an Ikea. No, Kingsolver has reconceived the story in the fabric of contemporary life. “Demon Copperhead” is entirely her own thrilling story, a fierce examination of contemporary poverty and drug addiction tucked away in the richest country on Earth.
From the moment Demon starts talking to us, his story is already a boulder rolling down the Appalachian Mountains, faster and faster, stopping for nothing. “We’re one damn thing after another,” he says. “Sometimes a good day lasts all of about ten seconds.” Even before he’s born, his father, a man named Copperhead, has died under mysterious circumstances. Demon knows his mother, bubbling with optimism and other spirits, is not to be counted on, but it’s still a shock when he loses her, too, and gets dropped into the gears of the foster care system.
“I thought my life couldn’t get any worse,” he says. “Here’s some advice: Don’t ever think that.” He’s 10 years old.
Kingsolver has effectively reignited the moral indignation of the great Victorian novelist to dramatize the horrors of child poverty in the late-20th century. Demon’s descriptions of his life under the neglectful eye of Child Protective Services reveals one ordeal after another. Woefully overwhelmed, the state relies on placement companies, “rotating and merchandising foster boys at more than fifty customer accounts.” It’s a ghastly racket, akin to modern-day slavery, with shady foster parents signing on for the free labor and the state’s monthly checks. “Being big for your age is a trap,” Demon notes. “They send you to wherever they need a grown-up body that can’t fight back.” At its best, foster care is “like a cross between prison and dodgeball.”
And there’s the saving grace. This would be a grim melodrama if it weren’t for Demon’s endearing humor, an alloy formed by his unaffected innocence and weary cynicism. Assigned to a tobacco farm, for instance, Demon meets his new foster “dad,” Crickson, “a big, meaty guy with a red face and a greasy comb-over like fingers palming a basketball.” The derelict kitchen is covered with scum. “This man’s wife had passed away,” Demon says. “I wondered if her body was still lying somewhere back in that house, because I’d say there’d been zero tidying up around here since she kicked off.”
In such moments — and they’re everywhere in this novel — you may be reminded of another orphaned boy slipping through the country’s underbrush, just trying to stay out of trouble: Huck Finn. With Demon, Kingsolver has created an outcast equally reminiscent of Twain’s masterpiece, speaking in the natural poetry of the American vernacular.
Kingsolver’s attraction to the great 19th-century novels is not surprising. Since publishing her first novel, “The Bean Trees,” in 1988, she’s grown increasingly interested in stories that explore exigent social themes. In 2000, she established the Bellwether Prize, a $25,000 award designed to celebrate “socially engaged fiction” that addresses “issues of social justice and the impact of culture and politics on human relationships.”
That’s a tall order, fraught with the deadening risks of polemical art, and none of the prize winners I’ve read has reached anything close to Kingsolver’s combination of subtlety and power. Now, with “Demon Copperhead,” she’s raised the bar even higher, providing her best demonstration yet of a novel’s ability to simultaneously entertain and move and plead for reform.
Much of that success stems from how cleverly Demon’s experience is woven through the tragedy of opioid addiction in the United States. This boy grows up in the early days of that miracle pill, OxyContin, and Kingsolver illustrates how a conspiracy of capitalism and criminality preyed on the pain of poor Americans to create a shockingly profitable and deadly industry.
“I don’t know a single person my age that’s not taking pills,” Demon says at one point. “If you’ve not known the dragon we were chasing, words may not help.” But these words, laid out in the achingly candid voice of a young man who barely survives, create a visceral picture of that dragon.
For the Sackler family, a dynasty built on medicine, marketing and pain
“Where does the road to ruin start?” Demon asks. “That’s the point of getting all this down, I’m told. To get the handle on some choice you made.” But part of his struggle involves realizing how much of this road has been laid by forces entirely outside his control. At one point, a kind woman tells Demon that he mustn’t think he has to be responsible for everything. His job, she insists, is “just to be a little boy.”
“Weird,” Demon thinks. “I’d not had that job before.”
In such tender moments, this story feels almost too much to bear.
Demon survives. On some level, we always know that; he’s the narrator, after all. But the harrowing story Kingsolver tells — including a particularly frightening climax — makes his life seem continually in peril. His resilience, in the face of so many personal tragedies and governmental failures, makes him a name to remember.
“I was starting to get known as Demon Copperhead,” he says in a rare moment of pride. “You can’t deny, it’s got a power to it.” | 2022-10-25T18:24:41Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver book review - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2022/10/25/barbara-kingsolver-demon-copperhead-review/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2022/10/25/barbara-kingsolver-demon-copperhead-review/ |
Hurricane season isn’t over yet. Here are three new systems to watch.
A trio of systems are being monitored in the Atlantic for possible tropical development
The National Hurricane Center highlights three systems to watch. (NOAA/NHC)
Atlantic hurricane season historically peaks in September, but October can be a sneakily perilous month. Despite a quiet few weeks since the demise of Ian in late September, the season’s far from over — and meteorologists are tracking three more disturbances with varying potential for development.
One is currently located near Bermuda, and flirted with the idea of becoming a brief tropical depression. Another is centered well to its south, while a third — perhaps the most intriguing at this point — could enter the eastern Caribbean this weekend.
The season to date has featured 11 named storms, including five hurricanes. Despite the flurry of storminess, the season has technically been below average for activity. That’s according to a metric called ACE, or Accumulated Cyclone Energy, which attempts to quantify how much cumulative energy storms expend on their strong winds.
At present, the season has racked up 84.1 ACE units, meaning we’re still about 25 percent below the benchmark for what’s average. Roughly half of this season’s ACE was churned through by just two storms — Ian and Fiona — which both spent time as Category 4 storms roaming the ocean basin.
Officially, hurricane season doesn’t end until Nov. 30, and the trio of systems discussed below exemplify why it’s too soon to stop monitoring the tropical Atlantic.
System No. 1: Swirl near Bermuda
The first area to watch is a small swirl of clouds just north-northwest of Bermuda. Initially it had sprouted a couple of showers and thunderstorms, but most disintegrated since. It was once believed that any showers and thunderstorms that formed near its center would vertically stretch the axis of near-surface spin and allow a tropical depression to brew. Now, however, disruptive wind shear, or a change of wind speed and/or direction with height, is working against it.
With a mature hurricane, wind shear can play a game of atmospheric tug-of-war that knocks a storm off kilter. For a storm still working to develop, it’s like aiming a leaf blower at a spinning top.
As such, it’s unlikely the Bermuda swirl will become better organized. The island may see an isolated shower or some breezy winds on Tuesday, but otherwise the system is working north-northwest and will likely become shredded by strengthening upper-level winds in the next day or two.
System No. 2: Southwestern Atlantic
A low pressure system is expected to form midway between Hispaniola and Bermuda sometime Thursday or Friday. It will initially be just a broad, open wave of low pressure with a scattering of thunderstorms embedded within it, but there’s a chance that it could consolidate. If that does happen, it would do so likely near or west of Bermuda before swinging east after getting caught up in the path of an approaching cold front. The key time frame to watch would be Saturday through Monday.
The National Hurricane Center estimates a 30 percent chance of eventual development.
System No. 3: Eastern Caribbean
This system — a disorganized group of showers and thunderstorms about 700 miles east of the Windward Islands — is potentially of greatest concern, but it’s unclear whether it will materialize.
Some weather models hint that some of the showers and storms will skim along the northeastern coast of South America before emerging in the extreme southeastern Caribbean. If they do so, they would encounter an environment favorable for intensification, with gentle upper-level winds and exceptionally warm ocean temperatures. However, other models suggest the thunderstorms are more likely to move over land in northern South America — where they wouldn’t be able to organize.
The National Hurricane Center estimates a 20 percent chance of development in the next five days, but those odds could grow. The system won’t even move into the southeastern Caribbean until the late Thursday or Friday time frame. | 2022-10-25T18:25:07Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Hurricane season isn’t over yet. Here are three new systems to watch. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/10/25/tropical-atlantic-hurricane-season-disturbances/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/10/25/tropical-atlantic-hurricane-season-disturbances/ |
Israel’s far-right proposes judicial ‘reform.’ It would be disastrous.
By Gershom Gorenberg
A roadside campaign banner for Bezalel Smotrich, leader of the Religious Zionism party near Nablus, West Bank, on Monday. (Kobi Wolf/Bloomberg News)
The leader of Israel’s surging far-right party has a plan for what he calls judicial reform. More accurately, it’s a plan to bulldoze judicial oversight, the rule of law and protection of human rights.
Here’s the context: Next Tuesday, we here in Israel will be going to the polls yet again. This is the fifth time since spring 2019, so you might think that repetition alone would lessen the anxiety, the sense that everything — not just who will be elected, but the very future of democratic government — depends on the final count.
Instead, speaking for myself — and possibly about half the nation — the sense of election dread is greater than ever. Because this time around, the question is not only whether the scandal-ridden Benjamin Netanyahu will return to power. This time, the polls consistently forecast that the far-right Religious Zionism party is likely to become the third-largest party in parliament, with more than 10 percent of the vote, making it probably the most influential partner of Netanyahu’s Likud, if he forms the next government.
The Religious Zionism party — the name is a calumny toward both religion and Zionism — is itself an alliance of smaller hard-right factions. Most media attention thus far has gone to the party’s No. 2, Itamar Ben-Gvir, leader of the Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power) faction. Ben-Gvir began his career as an acolyte of radical rightist Meir Kahane, who served one term in parliament before being banned from seeking another under an anti-racism law. Kahane was assassinated in New York in 1990; his picture reportedly still hangs in Ben-Gvir’s living room.
A photo of terrorist Baruch Goldstein, the Kahane disciple who killed 29 Palestinians in Hebron in 1994, once hung in that living room as well. Removing Goldstein’s picture is emblematic of Ben-Gvir’s effort to soften his image ever so slightly, as far-right politicians elsewhere have done. He says he no longer advocates expelling Arabs from Israel and the West Bank. But he does call for deporting left-wing Arab and Jewish politicians who he claims “support terrorism,” for dismantling the Palestinian Authority and for Israeli police in East Jerusalem to use live fire rather than riot-control measures against Palestinian disturbances.
But last week, Religious Zionism leader Bezalel Smotrich regained the limelight by rolling out his “reform” proposals. The headline item: erasing the crime of “fraud and breach of trust” by a public servant from the criminal code. That offense covers misuse of public funds, using state power for personal purposes, conflicts of interest and other forms of official misconduct.
And just incidentally, Netanyahu faces that charge in the three cases for which he is on trial. In only one case is the ex-prime minister also charged with bribery. Smotrich’s plan would therefore erase most of the indictment. So, was he trying to show right-wing voters how pro-Netanyahu he is, or to embarrass Netanyahu by calling attention to the corruption cases?
Neither. He was accusing prosecutors of being a cabal that will foil a right-wing government by “cobbling together fake cases and opening criminal proceedings.” In Smotrich’s view, apparently, a corruption charge against any politician of the right, not just Netanyahu, is ipso facto evidence of subversion by the left. In a preemptive strike, he seeks to eliminate a main tool available to prosecutors.
That’s not all. Currently, the Israeli attorney general is a civil servant whose role includes acting as the government’s legal counsel — and her opinions are binding unless overruled by a court. Smotrich proposes separating off the role of legal counsel and making it a political appointment — that is, a yes man, rather than a check on executive power.
Smotrich also regards the courts as hostile to right-wing policies and laws. To solve that problem, he would change the makeup of the committee that appoints judges. Representatives of the governing coalition would have an absolute majority. The Supreme Court could overturn a law that violates constitutional principles, including human rights, only by an 11-0 vote. And if it did so, parliament could easily vote to overrule the court and reinstate the law.
The unsubtle subtext of Smotrich’s deforming reform is that he regards democracy as a dictatorship of the most recent majority. Once elected, his favored government would be free to take draconian measures against asylum seekers, or discriminate against same-sex couples, or for that matter deport pesky political opponents, without judicial interference.
Smotrich’s judicial plan, in short, is the enabling legislation for Ben-Gvir’s program.
For weeks, polls have shown the pro-Netanyahu bloc of parties, including Religious Zionism, getting 60 out of 120 seats in parliament — one short of the majority needed to rule. But polls are not precisely predictive; those numbers show only that the race is very close. Given margins of error, voters’ last-minute choices and the uncertainty of turnout, the race could easily go either way, and either side could win a narrow majority.
Hence the dread — and also a desperate measure of hope. In theory, as in any very close election, a single vote could tip the balance. When the count is complete, we may yet discover that democracy in Israel has survived.
Opinion|Israel’s far-right proposes judicial ‘reform.’ It would be disastrous. | 2022-10-25T18:25:26Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Israel's far right is proposing bogus judicial 'reform' - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/25/israel-elections-religious-zionism-judicial-reform/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/25/israel-elections-religious-zionism-judicial-reform/ |
A ‘right to sex’ is not the cure for what ails so many men
By Christine Emba
Alexandra Hunt, a former candidate for Pennsylvania’s 3rd Congressional District, recently argued that "we should be moving toward a right to sex." (Rachel Wisniewski for the Washington Post)
Last year, a bestselling essay collection titled “The Right to Sex” argued thoroughly and effectively that — as appealing as such an unconventional idea might sound to frustrated, sex-deprived men — there is in fact no such thing. And with that you might have thought that the idea had been put to bed.
But think again. “Young men aren’t having sex!” tweeted activist and former Pennsylvania Democratic congressional candidate Alexandra Hunt last week, setting off an internet firestorm.
Hunt cited a graph clipped from a 2019 Post article. “Nearly a third of men under 30 have not had sex,” she continued. “And a higher percent do not have as much sex as they’d like — not exactly surprising, but this kind of statistic is a sign of much deeper problems.” (The graph, it’s worth noting, was being mischaracterized: The statistic refers to men who had not had sex over the past year, not their entire lives. Hunt also did not mention that 18 percent of women said the same.)
She went on to note that men who don’t have sex are less likely to have jobs and more likely to feel nihilistic and to suffer from depression and other mental health issues. This raises obvious cause and effect questions, but it was Hunt’s proposed solution that unleashed her audience’s ire.
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“We should be moving toward a right to sex,” Hunt declared. “People should be able to have sex when they feel they want to, and we need to develop services that meet people’s needs without attaching the baggage of shame or criminalization.”
The phenomenon Hunt saw in the graph does indicate a negative, and significant, social trend. But recasting sex as a “right” isn’t the solution — in fact, it obscures the deeper issues at stake.
For one thing, a “right” to sex suggests that there must then be someone else duty-bound to provide it — a lot that has historically fallen to women, who responded to Hunt’s thread with scorn and alarm.
Plus, given the context of the dysfunction that supposedly results from men’s falling rates of sexual activity, the implication is that violent or antisocial behavior in response to being denied sex is predictable, understandable and perhaps even justified.
Hunt suggested that decriminalizing or perhaps even state-sponsoring sex work might prevent that outcome — an assumption that many sex workers understandably did not appreciate. As one tweeted in reply: “it *seems* like you’re saying that we should decriminalize sex work so that violent incels can have more access to sexworkers and no, that’s not our plan. We’re not sexual bullet-catchers.”
But not only is Hunt’s solution not the right prescription, it’s not even the right diagnosis.
Modern society tends to conflate intimacy and sex, to suggest that that they are interchangeable or that the latter, perhaps, is even a bit superior. Proposing that a “right to sex” will cure mens’ ills wrongly assumes that the depression, nihilism and economic dislocation that Hunt correctly identifies as serious problems will be eliminated by a higher number of sexual encounters.
In interviews for my own book on what ails our sexual culture, one psychotherapist described to me how many of her young male patients pursued sex compulsively (and often succeeded in getting it), but still found themselves unsatisfied. In many cases, their underlying desire wasn’t for the act itself, but for the chance to be with someone — to feel intimacy and closeness, to wake up next to someone else.
They weren’t struggling from a lack of sexual entitlement, the therapist explained, they were lonely and atomized.
A record share of American young adults is living without a spouse or partner, according to the Pew Research Center, and men are less likely to be partnered than women, a fairly recent shift. About 61 percent of Americans are measurably lonely, according to a 2019 survey using the UCLA Loneliness Scale, but the share of men outstrips that of women. According to the 2021 American Perspectives Survey, including information gathered since the pandemic hit, 1 in 7 men in the United States don’t have any friends.
Connection is a universal human need. But there are avenues for intimacy other than sex — and that might be even more valuable to pursue. We could elevate friendship, family, community, even sex paired with real relationships, rather than dispensed in one-off “services,” or gamified through the Tinder and Grindr dating slot machines. Of course, no one has a “right” to those relationships either, any more than they have a right to sex — some things must be given rather than demanded. But attacking the crisis of loneliness and isolation at its roots would go much further to restore well-being than theorizing a new justification for sex-on-demand.
“A guy needs somebody— to be near him,” explains a character in John Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men.” “A guy goes nuts if he ain’t got nobody . . . I tell ya a guy gets too lonely an’ he gets sick.”
It’s a line truer than fiction. But sexual entitlement isn’t the cure. | 2022-10-25T18:25:32Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | No, a ‘right to sex’ is not the cure for what ails so many men - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/25/right-to-sex-alexandra-hunt-ailing-men/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/25/right-to-sex-alexandra-hunt-ailing-men/ |
The unsurprising reasons Democrats want a ‘new generation’ of leaders
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer on the South Lawn of the White House on Sept. 13, 2022. (Elizabeth Frantz/The Washington Post)
In recent weeks, Democratic candidates in battleground states have offered a similar critique: their party is ready for a new generation of leaders.
There was Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio), seeking election to the Senate who, in a radio interview in September noted President Biden’s past pledge to serve as a bridge to the next generation of Democratic leadership. “I think it’s time for a generational move,” Ryan said.
More recently, it was Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) who, on “Meet the Press” earlier this month, said, “we need new blood, period, across the Democratic Party, in the House, the Senate and the White House.”
In response to Slotkin, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) offered muted agreement, then adding that “there’s no substitute for experience.” At 82, Pelosi certainly has plenty of that.
To a significant extent, what Slotkin and Ryan are doing is calling for the ouster of Democratic officials — Pelosi, 79-year-old President Biden — who probably aren’t terribly popular in the districts where they’re seeking election. But the comments also reflect a broader rift in the country between a large older and a large younger generation.
It is unquestionably true both that the leadership of the House and Senate on the Democratic side are particularly old, as is Biden. It’s also true that Congress itself has trended older over the past three decades. You can see that below; darker colors reflect more senators and representatives in a Congress within the identified age range. See how the dark region shifts to the right as you move down the graph? That’s Congress getting older over time.
(The data here build on public data from FiveThirtyEight.)
The ages of presidents bounce around a bit over time, but the two most recent have been among the three oldest presidents in U.S. history.
The average age of members of the House and Senate was in the low 50s, dropping to about 50 in the early 1990s. Since then it has climbed to nearly 60.
But wait. Now we do some math. 1990 minus 50 is 1940. The median age fell to 50 in the early 1990s because baby boomers (born 1946 to 1964) were reaching that age! And because they were reaching an age when they were more likely to vote.
If we break the entire population by age group, you can see how it mirrors the graph above. It’s a bit smoother, but you see the same range of darker values as the population itself grows older. And the baby boom obviously stands out.
Congress is generally older than the population, certainly. But it is moving up in age because the population is moving up in age.
It’s always risky to assume that people vote solely along demographic lines, but it is also the case that more of the electorate is made up of older Americans. Michael McDonald of the University of Florida provides a breakdown of the composition of the electorate in each federal election cycle since 1986. See how it keeps getting darker further to the right? Older Americans making up more of the voter pool — in part because they make up more of the population.
But there’s a subtle aspect to that population graph. Notice at the very bottom left, there’s the beginning of a new darker section? Just to the right of 2020? Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the millennials.
Here we get into why it is Democrats in particular that are talking about generational change. National data on registered voters from the firm L2 shows that much more of the Republican Party is aged 50 and up than is the case with Democrats. In other words, Democrats skew younger than Republicans — and therefore would be more likely to notice a generational discrepancy with their party’s leadership.
Again, it’s useful for Ryan and Slotkin to say let’s dump Biden and Pelosi through the lens of so we can give someone else a shot. But it’s not as though they are not capturing an actual pattern in American politics. Leaders are older because the country is older, but that also means that younger Americans — heavily Democratic — are less likely to see themselves in leadership and therefore to seek change.
This is also why both Pelosi and Biden have agreed with that motivation … at least once their own terms of office are complete. | 2022-10-25T18:25:38Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The unsurprising reasons Democrats want a ‘new generation’ of leaders - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/25/biden-pelosi-generation-democrats/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/25/biden-pelosi-generation-democrats/ |
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