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Holy Cross outside hitter is enjoying a big junior season after playing with USA Volleyball’s under-19 training team last summer
Outside hitter Emerson Sellman has led Holy Cross to a dominant season. (Craig Hudson for The Washington Post)
Continually refreshing her inbox, she finally saw an email. She hesitantly clicked on the vague subject line and scrolled down to the body of the message, which revealed her invite and a welcome video from U.S. women’s national team coach Karch Kiraly.
An invitation to the national training team is widely regarded as the initial step toward the pipeline for the Olympics, a goal Sellman has long had her sights on — though initially in gymnastics. She competed as a Level 5 gymnast at the now-defunct Top Flight Gymnastics in Howard County for five years, until she turned 12. “I stuck with it for a pretty long time until I grew out of it, like physically,” said Sellman, who stands 6-foot-4.
While there is no set height limit, gymnasts who compete at the highest level typically do not stand taller than 5-4. The tallest gymnast to make a U.S. Olympic team was Kyla Ross, who at 5-7 contributed to Team USA’s gold medal in the all-around competition in London in 2012.
Participation in club volleyball in the offseason has become a crucial part of improving players’ skills and preparing for the collegiate level. Metro Volleyball Club is considered the premier club in the D.C. area and has produced five Power Five recruits and several first-team all-Americans.
Sellman worked hard in the gym to get to that level of consistency. The year before she made the U16 travel team, Danai invited the girls on the U15 team to his practices so they could get a feel for what to expect the following year. While most of the girls initially jump at the opportunity, they tend to stop coming eventually. Sellman never stopped attending.
“As a gymnast, you have to have a really high work ethic,” Sellman said. “If you don’t put in the work yourself, you’re not really going to get anywhere in gymnastics, so I think that transitioned over to volleyball and it has made me understand from a young age that I really have to work hard.” | 2022-10-25T18:25:51Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Too tall for gymnastics, Emerson Sellman dominates volleyball instead - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/25/emerson-sellman-volleyball-ohio-state/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/25/emerson-sellman-volleyball-ohio-state/ |
Washington re-signed Marcus Johansson to a one-year deal in the offseason. (Jonathan Newton/The Washington Post)
“I’m comfortable anywhere on this team I think,” Johansson said. “Of course you want to have responsibility and all that, but whatever it takes to help the team win. It is just fun to be out there and I think everyone wants to play as many minutes as possible. It has been a good start so far, but got to win a few more games.”
“When I came I felt like I wanted to be here and this is where I enjoyed myself and enjoyed playing hockey,” Johansson said. “I definitely wanted to come back. I think there were other teams involved and stuff but this is where I want to be, and my family, so that was never a doubt in my mind.”
After the Capitals’ power play was 0 for 9 to start the year, Washington added Johansson to the first unit and dropped Evgeny Kuznetsov to the second unit. The change has worked.
“I feel like [he’s good at] getting the puck in the zone and really understanding what the forecheck is going to do, where the areas are to find and get open and once we get in the zone, [he can] get us to where we want to be,” Capitals assistant coach Blaine Forsythe said. “The more clean entries that we get, the more time we spend in the zone so it’s important.”
“It is a lot of fun and that is why I’m here,” Johansson said. “It’s to play hockey. I’m enjoying it. I love playing hockey with this team and in Washington. I enjoy every day of it.” | 2022-10-25T18:25:57Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Marcus Johansson off to a good start for Capitals this season - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/25/marcus-johansson-capitals/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/25/marcus-johansson-capitals/ |
This artists rendering provided by MANICA shows a potential new stadium for the Tennessee Titans NFL football team. The Titans released the renderings of a proposed domed stadium with a capacity of approximately 60,000 Tuesday, Oct. 25, 2022. (MANICA via AP) (Uncredited/MANICA)
NASHVILLE, Tenn. — The Tennessee Titans’ proposed domed stadium would seat approximately 60,000 people and cover 1.7 million square feet under renderings released Tuesday. | 2022-10-25T18:26:21Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Titans release renderings of proposed new domed stadium - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/nfl/titans-release-renderings-of-proposed-new-domed-stadium/2022/10/25/b0c3520e-548d-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/nfl/titans-release-renderings-of-proposed-new-domed-stadium/2022/10/25/b0c3520e-548d-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html |
Twenty years after death, Wellstone’s beloved Iron Range has shifted to the right
For some, the anniversary serves as a bittersweet memory, losing a natural leader but reminding them of a political era that is disappearing fast
Sen. Paul Wellstone (D-Minn.) speaks at the Senate office building in D.C. on May 12, 1998. (Ray Lustig/The Washington Post)
Aaron J. Brown still remembers his last conversation with Paul Wellstone, the fiery liberal senator from Minnesota who stopped in to visit Brown’s newspaper office during the final push of his 2002 reelection campaign.
“He didn’t know if he was gonna win, but he liked where he was,” Brown recalled of Wellstone’s thinking.
Figuratively, Wellstone was in one of the toughest Senate races in the nation. Literally he also liked where he was, the Iron Range, almost 200 miles north of the populous Twin Cities, a region whose identity — political, financial and cultural — was forged in the iron mines by European immigrants.
Just a few days after visiting Brown, Wellstone was returning to the area for the funeral for a legendary Iron Range labor leader when the plane he was in crashed and he was killed. He was 58.
The death rocked Democratic politics less than two weeks before midterm elections that flipped the Senate to Republicans and crushed liberals across the nation. They viewed Wellstone as an icon who connected their coalition from the liberal academics and students he used to teach at Carleton College, to the grunts hauling iron ore from the Range who counted their United Steelworkers membership cards as a lease on life.
For years after his death, Democrats running for high office would appropriate Wellstone’s line about representing the “Democratic wing of the Democratic Party,” often without attribution.
To mark Tuesday’s 20-year anniversary, his family arranged a virtual tour of the memorial at the place where Wellstone, his wife, daughter and three aides were killed.
For local activists, the anniversary serves as a bittersweet memory, losing a natural leader but also serving to remind them of a political era that is disappearing fast. The Iron Range has shifted to the right in a Trumpian era of grievance that left many members of Minnesota’s Democrat-Farmer-Labor Party wary of what used to be considered its base. Frankly, there just aren’t many Democratic politicians left who can fuse real support anymore from the F and L portions of the party acronym, and certainly not in the way Wellstone could while remaining beloved by urbanite liberals focused on cultural issues.
Some, like Brown, 42 now, have their doubts that even Wellstone could still thread that needle if he were alive and still running statewide campaigns.
“Were Wellstone still here, he’d struggle with it. Everybody wants to know what side are you on,” Brown said in a recent telephone interview.
The Iron Range runs about 125 miles across seven counties in northeastern Minnesota, where immigrants in the late 19th century and early 20th century flocked for grueling, but well-paying, jobs inside the iron mines, working for the likes of U.S. Steel and the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company.
Robert Zimmerman grew up in there, in Hibbing, before leaving to become Bob Dylan and recording albums about Highway 61, which ran through the heart of the Range. Labor battles with the corporations were legendary, resulting in a very well-organized workforce that had deep unity, inside the mines and inside the voting booth.
In the 14 elections from 1960 through 2012, the seven Range counties gave the Democratic presidential nominee a margin of victory of at least 25 percentage points 10 times, with the 14-point margin in 1972 the smallest Democratic victory there.
The voters around the mines tilted even more toward the DFL-backed candidates.
But Republicans remained competitive in governors races, and in the 1970s and 1980s they won both Senate seats, largely through big margins in the suburbs around the Twin Cities.
Enter Wellstone, who in 1990 left his political science post to launch a long-shot bid against then-Sen. Rudy Boschwitz (R). With one failed race under his belt, Wellstone drew little interest from Washington. The leaders of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee declined to meet with him, leaving him to meet with their communications director, Anita Dunn, who is now a senior aide in the Biden White House.
But Wellstone campaigned everywhere, riding around in a green bus, and his gregarious approach united the DFL coalition to win in an upset.
Those miners never doubted Wellstone, despite a background that began with his childhood in Northern Virginia and then a wrestling scholarship to the University of North Carolina, before settling outside the Twin Cities as a college professor.
“He knew and could speak their language,” said Brown, who is now an author and local college professor.
The Range remained friendly to DFL candidates and national Democrats — until 2016 and the arrival of Donald Trump in politics.
Hillary Clinton received 48 percent support in the seven counties, a 13-point drop from Barack Obama’s performance in 2012. President Biden won those counties by six percentage points in 2020, a slightly bigger margin, but, like Clinton four years earlier, that’s only because of the still strong Democratic lean of Duluth, a port city of almost 90,000 that sits outside the Iron Range.
Trump won those old union mining towns that had been so loyal to the Democrats, Brown said. “That’s when the DFL collapsed on the Iron Range.”
Two years later Rep. Pete Stauber (R-Minn.) won this congressional district that had been in Democratic hands for 70 of the past 72 years. He won reelection by more than 19 percentage points in 2020 and is cruising to a third term this fall.
Stauber frequently uses “our way of life” as his motto when discussing gun rights, environmental regulations and even local community funding requests.
What does “our way of life” mean?
“A lot of memories, a lot of nostalgia, a lot of resentment,” Brown suggested.
The mines used to provide more than 40,000 jobs in the 1950s, which shrank to about to 16,000 in 1980, largely due to automation and, over the past few decades, offshoring of jobs.
Today’s Range provides technical, high-end jobs, helping produce about as much iron ore as the steelworkers did decades ago. Just three weeks ago U.S. Steel announced a $150 million upgrade to an Iron Range mine, what some considered the biggest investment in 40 years — yet it comes as other mines this year have had shutdowns and layoffs.
There are now fewer than 4,000 people holding mine jobs, according to Brown, leaving towns and schools that feel basically half full.
While other rural areas made earlier shifts to the right politically, the Iron Range really changed over the last decade as its residents relied increasingly on national cable news and social media sites for their news.
“Older white people here started behaving like older white people elsewhere,” he said.
Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) is the rare DFL’er who retains her popularity there. Part of that is her own good politics, some due to her Slovenian heritage. Her father was raised on the Iron Range and went on to become a popular sports columnist.
Among Senate Democrats, Sherrod Brown (Ohio) is the closest thing to Wellstone today, running as a proud union man in a swing state. Others adopting this style are in deep blue states.
In 2002, the old rules still applied: Wellstone hit the trail all across the Iron Range, needing to run up his tally there to deflect against the expected margins former St. Paul Mayor Norm Coleman would get in the suburbs.
Coleman ended up winning by two percentage points, as former vice president Walter Mondale took Wellstone’s place on the ballot.
Brown, the editor at the Hibbing Daily Tribune 20 years ago, gave Wellstone a ride to the small local airport after their meeting, watching as the senator knocked on the door trying to get inside and get back on the trail.
Had he not died, and went on to win his reelection campaigns, Wellstone would have been on the ballot in 2020, with Trump. Could he have still won the Iron Range, after all that economic and cultural change, or would Wellstone have instead focused on the cities and suburbs to win?
“I kind of doubt Trump-Wellstone voters would be easy to find,” Brown said. | 2022-10-25T19:38:43Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Twenty years after death, Wellstone’s beloved Iron Range has shifted to the right - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/25/twenty-years-after-death-wellstones-beloved-iron-range-has-shifted-right/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/25/twenty-years-after-death-wellstones-beloved-iron-range-has-shifted-right/ |
Neema Roshania Patel, Post editor who cultivated younger audiences, dies at 35
Neema Roshania Patel in 2018. (Jesse Dittmar for The Washington Post)
Neema Roshania Patel, a founding editor of The Washington Post news site for millennial women, The Lily, and most recently an editor with the Next Generation audience development team working to cultivate a younger and more diverse readership, died Oct. 24 at a hospital in Washington. She was 35.
The cause was gastric cancer, said her husband, Akshar Patel.
On the podcast “Motherly,” Ms. Roshania Patel called The Lily “a stopping place on the internet where we could bring together the best stories on women and gender.”
Amy King, The Lily’s founding editor in chief, who is now creative director and deputy managing editor at the Los Angeles Times, called Ms. Roshania Patel a “vibrant” colleague who “found our greatest stories and gave visibility to people and ideas who had long been ignored.”
Among the projects Ms. Roshania Patel shepherded, King said, were the “Anxiety Chronicles” mental health series and a book club that featured literature by female authors, often women of color.
King said Ms. Roshania Patel spent months working on a project called “The Jessicas,” which looked at the most popular name for girls born in 1989 and examined their lives and evolving identities as they turned 30. She found 10 diverse subjects, worked with freelancers to tell the stories and oversaw a documentary short that was included in film festivals.
Ms. Roshania Patel spent a year and a half as the top editor of The Lily before moving to Next Generation, a new initiative, in October 2021.
Phoebe Connelly, senior editor of Next Generation, wrote of Ms. Roshania Patel in an email: “What stood out immediately was her desire to collaborate — to take what she had learned running The Lily and infuse it into every department, every article and every project.” She also partnered with the Style section to introduce new advice columnists to The Post.
In April, Ms. Roshania Patel wrote an op-ed for the Poynter media training center about the importance of diverse sourcing — by age, gender and ethnicity, among other categories — to attract and keep a younger demographic of potential subscribers.
“Younger audiences want to see their experiences and the experiences of their peers reflected in the journalism they consume,” she wrote. “They want to see how policy affects the lives of everyday people. And they want to feel personally connected to what they read. Diverse sourcing makes us more trustworthy arbiters of the news.”
“If we don’t include a diverse range of voices we are narrowing those lanes and not reflecting the world we should be covering,” she added.
Neema Prabhu Roshania was born in Maplewood, N.J., on Sept. 28, 1987, to immigrants from India. Her father was an electrical engineer for Metallix, a precious metals recycling company, and her mother also worked for the firm as an accounts manager.
After working for her high school newspaper, she received a bachelor’s degree in economics and journalism from Rutgers University in 2009.
In addition to internships at the business journal NJBIZ and the financial news network CNBC, she spent a few years as a researcher and writer in Washington with Kiplinger’s business newsletters and, from 2013 to 2016, she was a community news editor with WHYY, the public radio station in Philadelphia.
She married in 2014. In addition to her husband, survivors include a son, Abhiraj Patel, both of Kensington, Md.; her parents, Prabhu Roshania and Mira Roshania, of Winterville, N.C.; and a sister. She attended BAPS Shri Swaminarayan Mandir, a Hindu temple in Beltsville, Md.
Ms. Roshania Patel told Motherly that journalism appealed to her mostly as an excuse to satisfy her curiosity about the world and was a career that gave her permission and confidence to ask questions of strangers and get answers. “I felt like it was something I would never get bored of,” she said. | 2022-10-25T19:43:04Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Neema Roshania Patel, Post editor who cultivated younger audiences, dies at 35 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/10/25/neema-roshania-patel-washington-post-lily-dead/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/10/25/neema-roshania-patel-washington-post-lily-dead/ |
As a dominant cultural figure of the 21st century, West has been through cycle after cycle of controversy and redemption. His repeated antisemitic statements might prove too much to overcome.
(Katty Huertas/The Washington Post; based on Jean-Baptiste Lacroix/AFP/Getty Images)
Last week, Balenciaga announced it was severing ties with Ye, who opened the opulent fashion house’s 2023 show. The brand’s creative director, Denma, had become one of Ye’s biggest allies in the fashion world, partnering with Ye on his Gap clothing line and the massive rollout of Ye’s Grammy-nominated album “Donda.” In September, Ye abruptly terminated his deal with the Gap. This week, his longtime talent agency, CAA, announced it was no longer working with Ye after his latest remarks.
Kim Kardashian rebuked her ex and the father of her four children on Monday, tweeting, “Hate speech is never OK or excusable. I stand together with the Jewish community and call on the terrible violence and hateful rhetoric towards them to come to an immediate end.”
“I’m exhausted to the point where I’m like maybe it’s just time to move on. He’s unpredictable in a way that I can’t gauge, so it’s not worth it,” said Panama Jackson, columnist for TheGrio, who now counts himself as a former Ye fan. “It’s hard for me to say I’m not fan, but I think the person I’m a fan of doesn’t exists anymore.”
Taylor & Kanye: How two superstars, four words and 15 seconds of TV influenced a decade of pop culture
“I’m just ashamed that my hurt caused someone else’s hurt,” he tearfully said on NBC’s “The Jay Leno Show,” after Leno asked how his late mother, Donda, would feel about his antics. Donda West, a professor who championed his career, was particularly close to Ye, and the depth of their relationship is shown in charming scenes from the recent Netflix documentary “Jeen-yuhs”; Ye debuted the song “Hey Mama” (“I wanna scream so loud for you/ ’Cause I’m so proud of you”) on Oprah’s daytime talk show with Donda present in 2005. Her 2007 death after a cosmetic surgery operation is often cited as the moment Ye became unmoored.
The quick return to prominence didn’t surprise people who knew him growing up, like Terry Parker, who raps under the name Juice and knew Ye as he became an emerging force in the Chicago hip-hop scene. Ye was always bright, intensely competitive, and brilliant — people would “overlook the annoying things he’d say because they wanted his beats,” Parker said.
So goes the thinking: He’s a musical genius who repeatedly changed the course of modern pop music, and all geniuses are all a little crazy, right? Boykin doesn’t buy it. “The phrase is used to exonerate people of other social responsibility. It’s a way of excusing their inappropriate behavior,” he said, adding that fans of R. Kelly use the same honorific. “But that’s not enough. You can’t be inspiring people on one day and then the next day talking about how much you love Trump and preaching anti-Blackness.”
Over the rest of the decade, Ye collaborated with established labels and launched one-off capsules, but his collections tended to be coolly received by fashion critics. As The Post’s Robin Givhan wrote recently, his 2012 debut in Paris was “calamitous.”
Ye also became tabloid fodder when he started dating his longtime friend, reality show phenom Kim Kardashian, in 2012. Their relationship seemed almost predestined, two celebrities for whom attention often seemed like the only goal.
Another turning point in Ye’s drift toward increasingly dangerous rhetoric came when he showed up at TMZ’s headquarters in May 2018, where he infamously suggested that slavery was a choice — on the part of the slaves. He was quickly rebuked by then-TMZ staffer Van Lathan. A former fan of the rapper’s music, Lathan told Ye on camera that he was done with him. That he could no longer separate the man from his music. But that wasn’t quite true. The two men communicated over email later that summer. Lathan reached out because he felt that Ye’s tendency to speak unfiltered was being exploited.
“I’m done. It’s just like you’re hurting yourself at this point. In two years when he makes ‘F--- MLK’ shirts I’m not going to bat an eye,” said Lathan. But he admitted that it’s still hard to ignore Ye.
“The Sunday Service helped to rebrand him, helped to make people like him again,” said Joshua Wright, who teaches history at Trinity Washington University and wrote the recent book “‘Wake Up, Mr. West’: Kanye West and the Double Consciousness of Black Celebrity.”
“The thing about me and Adidas is like, I can literally say antisemitic s---, and they can’t drop me,” he said on the Drink Champs podcast on Oct. 16. “I can say antisemitic things, and Adidas can’t drop me. Now what? Now what?”
Helena Andrews-Dyer, Kim Bellware, Ashley Fetters Maloy, Chris Richards and Emily Yahr contributed to this report. | 2022-10-25T19:56:08Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Kanye West's antisemitic remarks may be the controversy he never recovers from - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/10/25/kanye-west-career-future/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/10/25/kanye-west-career-future/ |
High prices, low speeds and fraud plague U.S. aid to keep people online
A pandemic-era initiative has helped millions of low-income families stay connected. But it has suffered persistent abuses, a Post investigation has found, as telecom giants have introduced price hikes, speed cuts and fraud risks.
Illustration by Anson Chan for The Washington Post
The complaints began pouring into Washington this summer, the criticism directed at Assurance Wireless, a little-known company owned by the telecom giant T-Mobile.
In Sun Valley, Calif., a local resident in June claimed that Assurance Wireless sent an agent to their mother’s door — and pushed her to sign up for mobile internet funded by the federal government even though she didn’t need it.
Another in Phoenixville, Pa., alleged a month later that they received a “deceptive” offer in a text message — which ultimately resulted in federal aid being sent to Assurance Wireless for service that the customer said they didn’t seek.
And time and again, a social worker in South Boston claimed Assurance Wireless and other providers had enrolled seniors in the government program under dubious terms. Sounding off to the Federal Communications Commission, the nation’s chief telecom regulator, the unnamed writer coupled their criticism with a plea for help: “This is not an isolated incident for me.”
At the height of the coronavirus pandemic, Congress chartered a first-of-its-kind federal effort to help struggling Americans who could not afford to lose access to the internet. The generous aid proved to be a godsend for millions of low-income families, but it also sent the nation’s telecom giants scrambling for the new federal money — unleashing price hikes, service cuts and fraud risks that hurt customers and taxpayers alike.
The story of the government’s roughly $17 billion efforts to close the country’s persistent digital divide is one of great promise and costly peril. Under the program, Washington offered to pay stipends directly to internet providers that lowered Americans monthly broadband bills — potentially to zero. But this simple premise at times brought complicated, undesirable results.
In the earliest days of the program, telecom giants including AT&T, Charter Communications and Verizon forced customers to accept price increases or slower connection speeds if they wanted to apply federally funded discounts to their bills, according to complaints filed with the FCC and later obtained by The Washington Post under federal open-records laws.
The companies’ practices — on top of the government’s flawed application system — also left the program at risk of fraud, according to the FCC’s internal watchdog. Last year, for example, a wide array of internet providers including Dish Network, the owner of Boost Mobile, administered aid for roughly 200,000 people who claimed to have children attending schools in high-poverty areas. But tens of thousands of these beneficiaries listed schools on their applications that were thousands of miles away from their home addresses, The Post found, while others never named a child at all. A subsequent crackdown ultimately saw the government cancel benefits for nearly all these school-based subscribers, including those with likely legitimate claims.
The Biden administration worked with Congress to improve the program beginning in November 2021, but new trouble soon emerged: Assurance Wireless along with other, lesser-known internet providers started showing up at Americans’ doors unannounced, pushing subpar service on unsuspecting families and potentially signing up others without their knowledge or permission. Others who received aid through another low-cost T-Mobile brand, Metro by T-Mobile, reported additional incidents — including months-long delays that left them on the hook for bills they could not afford.
Tara Darrow, a spokeswoman for T-Mobile and its other brands, Assurance Wireless and Metro, said they took “took extraordinary measures, closely following FCC guidelines and using recommended systems” to stand up benefits in record time. She said delays are uncommon, while there is “no instance where a customer could be enrolled in these programs without their permission.”
To date, more than 14 million households have enrolled in the federal broadband benefit system, the government reports. But the figure represents about a quarter of the estimated 49 million American households that are eligible for help, according to a Washington Post analysis. Telecom experts attribute at least some of the gap to the multibillion-dollar industry that administers the aid.
“What you’re seeing is not an issue with the [federal] program, it’s an issue with the broadband economy ecosystem overall,” said Brandon Forester, a national organizer at MediaJustice, an activist group that promotes online access particularly for marginalized groups.
“Their interest is not in serving community members,” Forester said of the internet providers. “Their legal requirement is to return profits to shareholders and investors.”
This story is based on interviews with nearly three dozen government officials, public-interest advocates, nonprofit leaders and internet subscribers, most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to reveal private deliberations. The Post also obtained data under the Freedom of Information Act about nearly 200,000 subscribers, along with thousands of consumer complaints, including those concerning Assurance Wireless and other firms.
In written responses, spokespeople for AT&T, Charter, Comcast, Dish and Verizon each called the broadband benefits essential in keeping Americans online. They said they had been diligent stewards of federal money and noted many of the discrepancies stemmed from the government’s own actions.
Paloma Perez, a spokeswoman for the FCC, said that “investigations” are underway — and that the commission is aggressively keeping watch over federal aid. On Capitol Hill, lawmakers pledged to press the telecom industry over its tactics as well.
“Congress put strong consumer protections into the laws to prevent these types of egregious actions from occurring in the first place, and these companies have a lot to answer for,” said Rep. Frank Pallone Jr. (D-N.J.), the leader of the telecom-focused House Energy and Commerce Committee. “I intend to hold them accountable.”
‘Bait and switch’
For Cristina Pastrana, the prospect of cheap broadband last year came as a welcome surprise. The 43-year-old in Brooklyn had just subscribed to Verizon fiber internet that August, and she soon looked to apply a government discount toward her roughly $90 monthly bill.
Called the Emergency Broadband Benefit, the aid program offered Americans up to $50 each month toward internet services if they received certain other government aid, including health benefits under Medicaid or food stamps, or if they were unemployed. Congress approved the initiative in December 2020, adding it to the roughly $5 trillion in federal relief funds that helped rescue the economy even while it unleashed a wide array of waste, fraud and abuse, as The Post has found in its year-long investigation, the Covid Money Trail.
But Pastrana quickly discovered the help came with a catch. In a recent interview, she said Verizon called her after she enrolled in the federal program with an ultimatum: She could keep the subsidy only if she agreed to switch to a different plan with lower speeds. Out of work and facing financial hardship, Pastrana fought to keep her service and prevailed, though she later described the situation as a “bait and switch.”
“People are working from home, they have their kids at home, they can’t afford this — and you’re literally threatening to remove the service or support,” she said.
Many customers — with Verizon and other carriers — complained to the FCC about similar threats and demands. Their frustrations reflected the program’s signature challenge in its early days, as telecom giants accepted government subsidies only on the condition that customers accepted price hikes or service cuts.
“There’s a lot of mistrust [that] there’s going to be a catch,” said Evan Marwell, the executive director of EducationSuperHighway, a nonprofit that has advocated for the program and helped people enroll.
In creating the federal broadband benefits, Congress faced an urgent task. Roughly one quarter of Americans do not subscribe to high-speed home internet, according to the Pew Research Center, a digital divide made worse by a pandemic that forced people to work, learn and communicate online. Lawmakers could have put in place tough, strict rules, requiring telecom providers to maintain a minimum level of service in exchange for federal payments. But Democrats and Republicans faced an onslaught of industry lobbying, so they instead chose to apply a light touch in the waning days of the Trump administration — and made companies’ participation in the program voluntary.
“Internet service providers should not be allowed to ruin this program,” a frustrated AT&T subscriber from Orange, Calif., told the agency in June 2021. The comment, one of thousands obtained from the FCC under the Freedom of Information Act, redacted filers’ names and other details.
Some subscribers with Charter and its internet offering, Spectrum, were stunned to read the company’s fine print last year. To receive federally funded discounts, customers had to opt into higher-priced service once the government aid, totaling $3.2 billion, ran out — threatening them with potential price spikes in the future.
More recently, Charter has paired federal broadband benefits with its own promotional discounts. The move has opened the door for sizable price increases on low-income Americans once the company’s time-limited assistance expires.
“I am trying to get help to lower my bill temporarily because of the hardship COVID has caused and why would I increase my price plan to get a discount and then end up paying the same or more,” a customer from Fairfield, Maine, told the FCC last May.
Asked about the complaints, AT&T spokesman Jim Greer said the rush in Washington “presented unique technical challenges,” so the company could only apply the benefit to select plans at first because of its computer systems. Cameron Blanchard, a spokeswoman for Charter, said the company had been clear with its customers — securing “significant participation” in the program while helping “millions of families gain access” to affordable internet.
Only after a public outcry did Verizon reverse course last May. Rich Young, a spokesman, acknowledged in a statement that “some customers experienced administrative issues during the program’s initial rollout.” But he added that “most if not all of those problems have been rectified.”
An ‘entry point for fraud’
It did not seem particularly unusual when 75 families in and around Jamaica, Queens, each signed up for federally funded internet last fall. Like many cash-starved Americans, the residents of this New York City neighborhood were eager to lower their broadband bills — and they soon put their up-to $50 government discounts toward service offered by Boost Mobile, the low-cost provider owned by Dish Network.
But the help proved short-lived. Not even three months after enrolling, nearly all of the families had been removed from the government program. Each had claimed on their application to have a child attending a high-poverty school, and each had said that school was roughly 4,000 miles away — in Anchorage and other parts of Alaska — raising the suspicions of federal watchdogs.
The details are laid bare in a trove of new data obtained by The Post under the Freedom of Information Act. The records illustrate how mishaps and missteps at the start of the broadband program — from aggressive telecom sales agents to faulty government technologies — may have put taxpayer dollars and innocent Americans at risk.
In setting up the benefits, the government sought to ease the burden on low-income families, particularly those with students studying at schools in high-poverty areas. To qualify, parents had to indicate the school they attended on the federal application.
Nearly 200,000 people ultimately obtained subsidies this way by the end of 2021, according to the data obtained by the Post. But a significant portion managed to enroll despite submitting incomplete or irregular applications, the records show.
More than 143,000 of those beneficiaries signed up for monthly stipends on behalf of a student whose name they never supplied, the records show. Nearly 20,000 applicants — some including children’s names, some not — also named a school 50 miles or more away from their home address, a distance that federal investigators would later identify as suspicious.
An AT&T subscriber in Clifton, N.J., for example, qualified for a federally funded discount by claiming last October they had a child who was receiving free or reduced-price lunch — at a school in Nampa, Idaho, more than 2,300 miles away. That same month, in Philadelphia, a customer of a smaller provider, Excess Telecom, obtained federal benefits on behalf of a student about 2,300 miles away in San Diego.
But the most frequent issues involved Dish and its low-cost brand, Boost Mobile, which received federal money on behalf of more than 11,000 applicants who claimed to have students attending far-flung schools. That included more than 400 students who were 1,000 miles away or more.
In many cases, employees at Boost Mobile stores — and agents at other internet providers — helped people obtain the discounts. Across the industry, company workers assisted at least 73,000 school-related subscribers in enrolling for federal benefits, the data show, meaning telecom giants may have played some role in overseeing the submission of problematic applications.
Ted Wietecha, a spokesman for Dish, said Boost Mobile services are offered through “independent third-party retail outlets.” He added that the company has “worked to be a reliable partner” with the FCC, and its efforts had resulted in “multiple process improvements” in the benefit program.
Jo Maney, a spokeswoman for Excess Wireless, said the company is “working diligently with government officials and other stakeholders to root out improper activities.” Greer, a spokesman for AT&T, said the problem stemmed from the federal government’s application system, since the wireless giant “relied” on that technology “to determine whether a household is eligible.”
The suspected fraud underscored a conundrum for the Biden administration as it sought to thwart criminals while helping low-income Americans access aid. Too many regulatory restrictions would have deterred families from signing up, while too few threatened to invite abuse.
The same dynamic long plagued a precursor program, known as Lifeline, which launched under President Ronald Reagan to reduce needy Americans’ home phone bills. As that program expanded, the FCC increasingly issued fines, particularly in cases where agents signed up people who didn’t qualify — and still collected commissions.
But some of the FCC’s recent attempts under President Donald Trump to fight Lifeline fraud instead left the program in disrepair. The Trump-era FCC, overseen at the time by Chairman Ajit Pai, never finished what was supposed to be a national online application for Lifeline benefits. By the time Pai left office, the system remained incomplete; it hadn’t been integrated with many state and federal benefit systems. The deficiencies made it hard and slow to use, and sometimes, inaccurate in rendering decisions on who should qualify for help.
The U.S. government still turned to the same beleaguered system, known as the National Verifier, to administer the new broadband program anyway. It soon brought predictably troubling results, as millions of Americans reported hours-long delays and technical glitches. And the system failed to catch obvious signs of fraud, including families that lived implausibly far from schools where they claimed to have students. Even into this year, the verifier missed thousands of instances new subscribers enrolled in the benefit system all using the name of the same 4-year-old.
The threat of theft first grabbed the attention of the FCC’s inspector general last November. The watchdog warned that high-poverty schools had become an “entry point for fraud.” And it rebuked telecom giants — without naming any — for paying commissions to agents that might have incentivized problematic enrollments. The inspector general said the “abuses” resembled those that “once plagued the FCC’s Lifeline program.”
In response, the FCC immediately tightened eligibility, then required the roughly 200,000 school-related beneficiaries to submit to another review. Yet few enrollees completed the process: About 9,500 people, or less than 5 percent, requalified last year, according to data obtained by The Post. FCC aides believe the low response rate reflects the reality that low-income families are hard to reach, meaning thousands of innocent Americans may have lost benefits amid the crackdown.
“What we don’t want to see is consumers be prevented from ever enrolling in a program again when it was the provider that was being misleading,” said Jenna Leventoff, a senior policy counsel for Public Knowledge, a public-interest group.
The FCC’s inspector general, however, said in a May 2022 report that it was “confident” it had “saved the program millions of dollars each month in wasteful disbursements.”
‘Deceptive enrollment practices’
The man set up shop at an unmarked gray table, the stacks of WiFi enabled tablets in blue boxes piled high. It had become a common scene in Waukegan, Ill., an industrial suburb about 40 miles outside of Chicago — and Anne Durot was not pleased.
A volunteer with ConnectWaukegan, a local nonprofit, Durot and her peers had spent months trying to help low-income residents obtain quality internet — high-speed connections, funded by federal benefits, that might satisfy families’ needs. At times, though, the aid workers found themselves struggling to break through a wide array of telecom providers that seemingly hoped to make a buck.
So on a sunny day in September, Durot and her colleagues strolled over to the table not far from Harry Poe Manor, a low-income housing community. They confronted the man, whose tablets had stickers identifying the company providing them as Maxsip, an obscure telecom firm. Online, the company promised prospective customers they could obtain “free mobile internet service,” along with a free tablet or other device with 4G speeds, less than the state-of-the-art 5G service millions of Americans receive through major providers.
“They’re sitting here in a public park taking advantage of residents who want free phones,” she said.
Israel Max, the chief executive of the company, said they are focused on helping “the people who need it” and noted he would investigate the matter. But the situation in Waukegan still highlighted a broader challenge facing the federal government, as it labors to keep close watch over an aid program that has become a business opportunity.
The latest trouble surfaced this year, months after regulators at the FCC and lawmakers on Capitol Hill set their sights on recalibrating the federal internet subsidy. In November, President Biden signed into law a sprawling $1.2 trillion infrastructure package that replaced the Emergency Broadband Benefit with a new $14 billion initiative, called the Affordable Connectivity Program. Democrats and Republicans maintained the spirit of the original discount — though Congress cut it to $30 per month from $50 — and they added new rules to clamp down on some of the worst abuses.
“In creating the Affordable Connectivity Program, the Administration worked with Democrats and Republicans in Congress to strengthen consumer protections and crack down on bad conduct by internet service providers,” said Robyn Patterson, a spokeswoman for the White House.
The revisions provided a sustained reprieve in places like Jefferson County, Wash., near Olympic National Park, where internet options are limited and bills can be “substantial,” said Jamie Pena, who oversees digital equity at the local library.
“I think it’s helping people get connected since the pandemic, even though we’ve reopened to some extent,” he said.
But the tweaks also opened the door for new challenges, particularly involving low-cost carriers that saw the revised federal program as a fresh source of new customers. Some firms dispatched a raft of sales agents in Allentown, Pa., Austin, Cleveland and other cities, troubling local officials, who said they saw suspicious marketing tactics on display.
Outside Chicago, Max said his company, Maxsip, sought to provide the best tablets and service it could given the meager size of the federal benefit paid to providers. “Our goal is to find solutions that can help people use the program,” he said.
But Max added the operation relies on a network of marketing firms, which hire their own agents to set up tents and help sign up low-income Americans. They are supposed to register with the government, identify themselves clearly and provide reliable information, but the chief executive acknowledged not everyone in the industry follows the rules.
“I’m shocked to hear it, but I’m not at the same time,” he said, pledging he would look into the matter.
The problem has been especially evident in the case of companies that participate in the Lifeline program. For these firms, which are supposed to serve the neediest Americans, the new broadband subsidy has proven lucrative: They could continue offering cheap, government-subsidized telephone service — and then tack on federal payments covering high-speed internet.
In other words, Lifeline providers can collect from Washington more than $40 every month for each customer they enroll in both programs. That could come at the detriment of low-income families, however, who may be better served if they put their benefits not toward a single mobile phone but rather home internet that provides access for an entire family.
“They’re not breaking any rules, but people don’t have all the information,” said Angela Siefer, the executive director of the National Digital Inclusion Alliance, a network of organizations that aim to close the digital divide.
In person, and through texts and online advertisements, companies including Assurance Wireless allegedly pitched new and existing customers on the premise of free, unlimited phone data — a massive upgrade from the meager plans they previously had received under the government’s Lifeline program. Atop its website, in smaller font, the company informs people that the service is covered under the Affordable Connectivity Program.
Some customers did not appear to notice the disclosure at all, and later complained about the T-Mobile owned provider to the FCC. The marketing tactics also sparked more than just confusion: Some low-income subscribers told the FCC that they had already put their monthly broadband discounts to use on another provider. Once they were signed up with Assurance Wireless, their benefits were transferred — and suddenly they were on the hook for another bill that previously had been free.
Darrow, the T-Mobile spokeswoman, said customers could not have been enrolled against their will in part because the company “requires that they go through a series of steps and certifications in the application process.”
Even those who obtained the service they wanted soon experienced complications. Metro, another T-Mobile subsidiary, took months before it applied federal benefits to some customers’ accounts. In Gainesville, Ga., Wilmington, Del., Knoxville, Tenn., South Richmond Hill, N.Y., Ochelata, Okla., Lake Mary, Fla. and elsewhere, residents repeatedly said that Metro left their bills at full price for multiple billing periods — cutting into their already cash-strapped bank accounts.
“I am very poor and can’t afford to pay them every month,” a resident of Medford, Ore., told the FCC this August, two months after applying for federal aid that never arrived.
In response, Darrow said T-Mobile is not aware of any large-scale benefit delays. But she said delays are possible in the event of application lapses, like discrepancies in names and addresses, as the company looks to protect the program against fraud.
Across the telecom industry, the incidents prompted the FCC’s inspector general this March to warn Lifeline providers against engaging in “deceptive enrollment practices.” The agency said it had heard reports that “several” companies were “misleading Lifeline consumers into enrolling for undesired service” through the broadband benefit program.
In one example, the watchdog highlighted an unnamed firm that had “forced” consumers to obtain or transfer their monthly internet subsidies away from their existing provider in order to enroll in Lifeline. The firm referenced in the report was Q Link Wireless, according to documents The Post later obtained under FOIA from the inspector general.
John Nakahata, a lawyer for Q Link, described the issue in a statement as a “web script error.” He added that “no consumer was enrolled in ACP as a result,” as consent was collected later in the application process. Nakahata said the inspector general had not contacted the company before publishing its report in March.
Paloma, the spokeswoman for the FCC, said the agency’s enforcement bureau as a general rule “follows up with consumer complaints related to ACP providers, including Q Link, to address whatever issue a consumer faces.”
“The Enforcement Bureau has been in touch with the OIG, and is conducting its own investigations and assessing whether there were any rule violations,” she said broadly.
In the face of these and other mounting concerns, the White House has sought to make it easier for low-income Americans to find and choose quality broadband plans. In May, Biden announced a partnership with 20 of the country’s largest providers to improve their low-cost offerings. Between the announcement and October, more than 2.5 million people enrolled in the federal benefit program, according to administration officials.
Vice President Harris, meanwhile, personally hit the road, touting the benefits of internet access — and the importance of affordable connectivity that some Americans still have not been able to obtain.
“We created this program because we know when we connect folks with high-speed internet,” she said, “it is also a connection to opportunity — the opportunity to live a healthier, happier, and more prosperous life and, importantly, more affordable lives.” | 2022-10-25T19:56:10Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Telecom giants imperil federal program to keep needy Americans online - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/10/25/broadband-subsidies-coronavirus-aid/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/10/25/broadband-subsidies-coronavirus-aid/ |
After its three driest years on record, concern is high over what another year of drought could mean
By Diana Leonard
A dried weed lies in a fallowed field in Los Banos, Calif., in 2021. (John Brecher for The Washington Post)
California is about to enter its wet season, when hopes are high for replenishing lowland rains and mountain snows after its three driest years on record. But, for the fourth year in a row, the state could languish in a drought that is having dire effects on its water resources.
Last week, the National Weather Service projected another warm and dry winter for large parts of the state — with drought persisting or getting worse. Now, experts are sounding the alarm about what a fourth consecutive drought year could mean.
U.S. announces more water cuts as Colorado River hits dire lows
There is some hope that, even if significant precipitation eludes the southern and central portions of California, the northern part could fare better. Here, the Weather Service is calling for equal chances for above- and below-normal precipitation. However, there is plenty of uncertainty in long-range forecasts, and the season will largely be determined by moisture-rich atmospheric river storms: how strong they are, where they land — and where they don’t.
“We’re playing Russian roulette with the weather, and that’s always a bad idea,” said Felicia Marcus, a fellow at Stanford’s Water in the West program and the former chair of the State Water Resources Control Board. ““When the Sierras have been dry, Southern California has been bailed out by the Colorado. We have been lucky, and our system has been based on that luck.”
Bracing for another dry year
The past three years mark California’s third significant drought period of the 21st century — part of the larger climate change-fueled “megadrought” in the West that is now in its 23rd year, 19 of which have been dry.
October 2019 through September 2022 — the past three water years combined — was California’s driest such period on record. In that time, much of northern California missed more than a year’s worth of precipitation.
The long, hot summer of 2021 was marked by shrinking reservoirs and rapidly intensifying drought, as the state recorded its warmest June through September since 1895.
“2021 was about as bad as it gets — the atmosphere was at an all-time record dryness,” said Jeffrey Mount, a senior fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California’s Water Policy Center.
The 2022 dry season also brought below-normal precipitation in most parts of the state.
Adding another parched year on top of the past three could put the state in uncharted territory.
“If we get another 2021, we will be plowing new ground,” he said. “I don’t want to say we are ready, but we are certainly preparing for it.”
With each passing year, rising temperatures are playing an increasingly significant role in the water supply picture. Over the next 20 years, California could lose 10 percent of its water supply as the atmosphere, soils and plants become ever more thirsty, according to a report from the office of Gov. Gavin Newsom (D).
Mount and Marcus said large metropolitan areas can probably weather another drought year, having invested billions in becoming more drought resilient in recent years.
But farmers, rural towns and ecosystems “will continue to get hammered in heartbreaking ways,” Marcus said.
Hundreds of thousands of acres of California farmland were fallowed this year. Some fish species, like delta smelt, have become functionally extinct, Mount said, meaning they are only found in hatcheries.
“Freshwater ecosystems are really in bad shape because of essentially 10 years of drought,” he said. 2017 and 2019 were the only wet years of the past decade.
Marcus said conservation efforts, like replacing lawns and fixing leaks, are the fastest, cheapest way to save water and should be expanded without delay, regardless of what the coming year brings. Longer-term solutions involve paying farmers to convert land to other uses, and recharging depleted groundwater reserves after intense storms.
“If you just hold back more in the normal times, you’ll have enough to keep fish alive during dry years and still deliver water to farms and cities,” Marcus said.
Rising flood risk, even during droughts
While scientists and planners are most worried about drought, there is also growing concern about extreme precipitation and flooding amid this dry spell. The past decade has seen wet extremes arrive both during and between drought years, and the California Department of Water Resources is also gearing up for potential flooding.
In 2017, the state swung from depleted reservoirs to what UCLA climate scientist Daniel Swain called “essentially the wettest winter in modern history in parts of northern California” at a recent symposium hosted by the Department of Water Resources. A January 2021 atmospheric river produced post-wildfire flooding and mudslides, an event that became one of the nation’s billion-dollar weather disasters. Water year 2022 — Oct. 1, 2021, through Sept. 30 — also saw wild swings between record wet and record dry conditions. And over the broader region, the West has seen recent impactful flooding in Yellowstone National Park, Las Vegas and Death Valley.
“We expect to see a significant increase in both drought and flood severity in a warming climate,” Swain said during his talk at the symposium. “This is in fact exactly what climate models suggest should be emerging right around now and continuing to amplify through the century.” | 2022-10-25T19:56:19Z | www.washingtonpost.com | California forecast: More drought after driest three years on record - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/10/25/california-drought-forecast-record-dry/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/10/25/california-drought-forecast-record-dry/ |
FILE - Oscar Tshiebwe of Kentucky speaks as he is introduced as The Associated Press men’s basketball player of the year, in New Orleans, Friday, April 1, 2022. Tshiebwe was a unanimous selection to The Associated Press preseason All-America team, Monday, Oct. 24, 2022. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert, File)
LEXINGTON, Ky. — Kentucky forward and consensus national player of the year Oscar Tshiebwe said Tuesday he “absolutely” anticipates being ready for the No. 4 Wildcats’ season opener after having a procedure on his right knee earlier this month. | 2022-10-25T19:57:49Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Kentucky's Tshiebwe anticipates returning for season opener - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/colleges/kentuckys-tshiebwe-anticipates-returning-for-season-opener/2022/10/25/ed49cc6e-549a-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/colleges/kentuckys-tshiebwe-anticipates-returning-for-season-opener/2022/10/25/ed49cc6e-549a-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html |
‘Modern Warfare II’ does ripped-from-the-headlines in the worst way
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II (Campaign mode)
Available on: PC, PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X and Series S, Xbox One
Developer: Infinity Ward | Publisher: Activision
This review contains spoilers for the campaign of “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II.”
The online discourse fired up almost as soon as “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II′s” campaign mode came online last week. The first mission — literally seconds into the game — features a soldier providing visual confirmation of a terrorist leader’s presence at a meeting with the Iranian military. Following the confirmation of identity, the player pilots a rocket to destroy everyone attending the meeting.
The scene drew comparisons on Twitter to the Pentagon-ordered drone strike that killed Iranian Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani in January of 2020 outside of the airport in Baghdad. The comparison was made easier by the fact the game’s character looks like Soleimani.
A few missions later, the player is whisked to the U.S.'s border with Mexico as a terrorist leader sneaks over the fence and disappears into a border town, a fear often cited by proponents of building “the wall” and enforcing tighter border control.
Regardless of where you fall on the political spectrum, border security and the killing of a military leader of a country with which the U.S. is not at war are heady, multifaceted topics. And yet these are the sorts of subjects Call of Duty games typically home in on, seeking to offer up the kinds of gritty, ripped-from-the-headlines plots that animate films like “Zero Dark Thirty” and “Sicario.” But in contrast with those films, Call of Duty offers these up as setpieces — just empty calorie spectacle. It’s no surprise then that these games often attract criticism for, at the least, appearing distasteful, or worse, villainizing entire nations.
It’s a shame, because aside from the handful of questionable storytelling decisions, “Modern Warfare II” provides a welcome, hard 180 from the substance-less veneer of “Vanguard’s” campaign. What’s more, the varied and gripping gameplay far outshines its story.
The questionable narrative beats aren’t new to Call of Duty, or even to the Modern Warfare branch of the franchise; the first installment of the “Modern Warfare” reboot from 2019 provides a clear example. In that game, a scene depicted the infamous “highway of death” — in which Iraqi soldiers fleeing in a column of vehicles were killed by U.S. warplanes — and relayed it as a tale of Russians killing civilians in the game. In another early-game scene, Russian soldiers tear through a city killing civilians and chasing after children. The plot points so soured a popular Russian streamer who had been contracted to promote the game, he refused Activision’s money.
It is not that terrible things don’t happen in this world, particularly in wars, nor that they cannot be retold in art. But there is a way to engage with them sincerely, and then there is the way they surface in the Call of Duty universe. They don’t really feel like considered meditations. They feel like shock value.
There is absolutely a good in raising awareness of past atrocities so they do not recur. But it hits quite differently when you parachute into a video game, are told an entire nation of people — who actually exist — are the bad guys and exist almost entirely for players’ target practice and then chopper off into the sunset. That is not thoughtful exploration of a topic, that’s sensationalism. A franchise that spends millions upon millions developing games can probably afford to exert a little more creativity and nuance in this department.
The way these controversial scenes or moments are sprinkled throughout the franchise, it starts to feel like Call of Duty is trying to court this kind of attention as a way of being edgy. I’m not sure that’s the best approach for either the game makers or the audience. For me at least, it notably dimmed my enjoyment.
In comparison to past installments of the franchise, the major plot points of the rebooted “Modern Warfare II” are not particularly controversial. When the original “Modern Warfare II” released in 2009, the game opened with players in the role of an American agent embedded in a Russian terrorist cell who proceeds to shoot up an airport filled with unarmed civilians. The event triggers a war between the U.S. and Russia, which serves as the backdrop for the game as it whips the player into various roles around the globe in an epic, summer blockbuster-type story.
The 2022 version of “Modern Warfare II” is narrower in scope and tries to ground itself more in recent geopolitics, albeit not particularly well. Following the missile strike, the leadership void in the terrorist cell is filled by a lieutenant who has acquired long-range American missiles for use against targets in the U.S. A task force led by British SAS Capt. John Price hops from Amsterdam to Mexico to Chicago chasing terrorists and the missiles and uncovering a coverup by a rogue American general and a group of military contractors that makes the minimal amount of sense required to stitch together a variety of playable missions.
But as the game’s storyline hews closer to a real world in which Russia has invaded Ukraine and border control is a hotly contested topic ahead of a major midterm election in the U.S., some of the game’s scenes may not come across as the game’s designers intended. (And if they did land as intended, that would raise a number of other questions.)
Then again, the game doesn’t really give the player much time to sit and reflect on any of these points it raises. They surface and disappear quickly. The bullets start flying, and you’re more concerned about finding cover than thinking about the inscrutable plot. Which may be for the best: the simulation looks and feels great. It’s just a shame some of the story’s missteps distract from that.
Interactive: How 'Call of Duty: Modern Warfare' was made to look so real
“Modern Warfare 2” looks stunning, with locations crafted with an astounding amount of detail. The characters’ faces look real, as though captured by a 4K camera on a Hollywood set. It is also applause-worthy for how the latest Call of Duty expands beyond the franchise’s traditional on-the-rails, first-person shooter experience.
The memorable missions of past “Modern Warfares” are all present and accounted for, with the firefights interspersed with stealth and the seemingly mandatory stint providing air support from an AC-130. But there’s also a ghillie suit mission that feels almost like the map is totally open, allowing players to range far and wide as they approach, snipe down on, and then infiltrate a fishery and its adjacent lighthouse. Another ups the difficulty as players battle bad guys on the deck of a cargo ship in a storm, massive containers crashing from one side to the other, creating a kind of first-person “Frogger” level. Later in the game, the stealth mission gets a MacGuyver twist, as players must scavenge household items to craft makeshift traps to help them evade enemies. In several instances, players also get access to a backpack, which further extends their inventory beyond the typical loadout of two guns and one type of lethal and tactical grenades.
When the full game rolls out on Oct. 28 and when Warzone 2.0 is introduced in November, it seems certain the backpack and crafting elements will carry over to some multiplayer modes. That would be a welcome development, as both bolster the ability of smart, thoughtful play instead of just sprinting through the map with guns blazing. This version of “Modern Warfare II” builds upon the 2019 release’s emphasis on tactical planning and methodical map clearing. If you spend the campaign sprinting around corners, you will frequently find a foe with a shotgun aimed at your face, followed by a red screen. Players also must take care where they aim, if they are careless with their shots and clip a civilian or (when in the AC-130) damage a structure with civilians inside, the game fails you.
But then there’s a part of the game where one mechanic snapped me directly back to the “What the heck are you thinking?” type of questions that tend to define critical discussion around Call of Duty games. In one mission, playing as Mexican cops who chased the aforementioned terrorist across the U.S. border, players are instructed to “calm” civilians as the cops run through their homes in the border town. The way you calm said civilians is by aiming your gun at them. This does not need to be in the game. It boggles the mind that it is.
‘Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War’ review: Isn’t there some merit to “It’s just a game?”
The defense of these decisions usually resolves to “it’s just a video game,” but that line is often delivered by the same people who are quick to note that video games are more profitable than the film and music industry. Call of Duty’s ad campaigns — which have showcased the game’s resonance by highlighting the excitement of a host of popular celebrities for the game — illustrate how big a deal it is when a new Call of Duty drops. The game will be bought and played by millions. What the game shows to that audience matters.
As enjoyable as “Modern Warfare II” is — and it is certainly enjoyable on the whole — the moments when the story prompts uncomfortable real-world questions about the game’s intentions shatter its illusion of immersive entertainment. In those moments, I forget about whatever it is that Capt. Price and Co. are tasked with doing and just wonder what people were thinking when they made the decision to include whatever cringeworthy moment I just witnessed. As Infinity Ward plunges ahead with this story — teasing an upcoming Russian attack during a mid-credits cutscene that includes a nod to the airport massacre from the original “Modern Warfare 2” — they’d do well to devote a little more scrutiny to such decisions. | 2022-10-25T19:58:40Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II's campaign, reviewed - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/reviews/modern-warfare-2-campaign-review/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/reviews/modern-warfare-2-campaign-review/ |
By Ian Livingston | Oct 25, 2022
A partial solar eclipse wowed sky watchers from Europe to Asia on Tuesday.
Remko De Waal/AFP/Getty Images
A person wearing protective eyewear watches the partial solar eclipse in Sana’a, Yemen.
Yahya Arhab/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock
Asif Hassan/AFP/Getty Images
As the moon passed between the sun and Earth, the partial eclipse peaked at 11 UTC (1 p.m. in France, 7 a.m. across the U.S. East Coast). More than 82 percent of the sun was obscured by the moon at peak, according to space.com.
Bucharest, Romania.
It was the second and final solar eclipse of 2022.
Cairo.
The first — visible primarily in the southern hemisphere — was also a partial solar eclipse and it occurred in late April. Partial eclipses occur when the sun, moon and Earth are not perfectly aligned. Partial eclipses are thus considerably more common than their sibling the total solar eclipse, when the sun, moon and Earth are perfectly lined up and the moon casts the darkest part of its shadow on Earth.
Lahore, Pakistan.
Northern latitudes witnessed the most complete eclipse, leaving the sun appearing as if it dressed up as a slim crescent moon for Halloween. In Naples, and Karachi, Pakistan, the eclipse appeared more like a bite out of the upper right corner of the sun.
A plane passes in front of the partial solar eclipse outside Tbilisi, Georgia.
People wearing protective glasses take a glimpse of a partial solar eclipse in Kuwait City.
Parents in Karachi, Pakistan, pray next to their son in the sand. They hope exposure to the solar eclipse will help heal his illness.
South Asian countries like India and Pakistan witnessed the eclipse as the sun was setting, making for particularly dramatic scenes as the sun bathed the sky in reddish light.
Young people jump on a trampoline in the outskirts of Lahore, Pakistan.
Hindu devotees perform rituals in the Sangam, the confluence of the Rivers Ganges, in Uttar Pradesh, India.
Women watch a partial solar eclipse through an X-ray film in Jammu, India.
Channi Anand/AP
Eclipses always come in twos, according to TimeandDate.com. They are often “balanced,” meaning if one is partial the other tends to be total.
A total lunar eclipse — when the Earth blocks the moon — will follow on the heels of this partial solar eclipse on Nov. 7-8. It will be visible from East Asia through the United States, where spectators will see the moon turn “blood red” while in the Earth’s shadow.
In 2023, a total solar eclipse, which will mainly be visible in the southern hemisphere, is on tap for April 20. North America will next see a total solar eclipse on April 8, 2024.
An annular solar eclipse, in which the moon covers the sun’s center — leaving a “ring of fire” around the periphery, is on the calendar for next October in North America and some surrounding areas.
A partial solar eclipse over a Christian church in Kazakhstan.
Smoke rises from the chimney of a gas boiler house during a partial solar eclipse in Moscow.
Maxim Shipenkov/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock
Here are the top astronomical sights for the rest of 2022
Photo editing by Amanda Voisard. | 2022-10-25T19:58:46Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The last solar eclipse of 2022, in photos - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/interactive/2022/photos-solar-eclipse-2022/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/interactive/2022/photos-solar-eclipse-2022/ |
There is little arguing that Group A produced the softest draw of the 2022 World Cup, with Ecuador and host Qatar representing two of the four lowest-ranked teams in the 32-nation field. Even the Netherlands, a traditional contender, is coming off a slew of disappointments on the international stage, while African champion Senegal makes for an enticing but unproven dark horse option.
Here’s a closer look at Group A, which kicks off Nov. 20 when Qatar meets Ecuador in Al Khor for the tournament’s opening match.
There may be no bigger enigma in this tournament than Qatar, which has never played its way into the World Cup — or come particularly close — but will make its debut in soccer’s showcase event after automatically qualifying as the host.
Qatar has never qualified for a World Cup before. This time it qualified as hosts.
Qatar’s most recent World Cup qualifying campaign, for the 2018 tournament in Russia, ended with a thud as the Maroons went 2-7-1 in the final round. But the newfound investment in the men’s national team has started to pay dividends in recent years, as it won the 2019 Asian Cup — having previously never made it past the quarterfinals — and advanced to the semifinals as a guest as the 2021 Concacaf Gold Cup.
In lieu of playing qualifiers for this World Cup, Qatar joined one of UEFA’s qualifying groups — featuring Serbia, Portugal, Ireland, Luxembourg and Azerbaijan — and scheduled a pair of friendlies against each opponent. That exercise emphasized how far Qatar still has to go, as it went 2-5-3 with a minus-14 goal differential.
H. Ahmed
A. Hatem
A. Hassan
A. Ali
B. Khoukhi
K. Boudiaf
S. Al Sheeb
A. Afif
B. Al Rawi
H. Al-Haydos
P. Miguel
Coach Félix Sánchez’s squad is entirely composed of players who ply their trade in the Qatari Stars League, with defending champion Al Sadd and runner-up Al-Duhail dominating the roster. Among Qatar’s most influential players: goalkeeper Saad Al Sheeb, left back Abdelkarim Hassan, defensive midfielder Karim Boudiaf and winger Hassan Al-Haydos, the squad’s captain.
26 years old, Khartoum, Sudan
Al-Duhail SC
The player to watch, though, is 26-year-old Almoez Ali. The Sudan-born striker, who plays for Doha’s Al-Duhail, could soon surpass Mansour Muftah’s record of 44 goals to become Qatar’s all-time leading scorer. His nine goals at the 2019 Asian Cup were more than twice as many as any other player, and he also was the top scorer at the 2021 Gold Cup with four tallies.
The Oranje has returned to the global stage after an unthinkable absence four years ago in Russia, having advanced to the 2010 final and 2014 semifinals. And it wasn’t the Netherlands’s only recent embarrassment: It also failed to qualify for the 2016 European Championship, even though that was the first edition played with an expanded 24-team field.
The Netherlands has never won a World Cup, despite reaching three finals.
Those shortcomings were stunning for a nation that, despite having a population of just 17 million people, has long endured as a global power with outsize influence on footballing culture. Although the Netherlands has never won the World Cup, it has finished as the runner-up three times — in 1974, 1978 and 2010. The Dutch won the 1988 European Championship and have finished third on five occasions. Their “Total Football” philosophy has become synonymous with free-flowing, attractive soccer, and Johan Cruyff — a three-time Ballon d’Or winner in the early 1970s — is considered one of the greatest to play the game.
The Netherlands returned to major tournament play at Euro 2020, winning all three group stage games before crashing out with a stunning loss to the Czech Republic in the round of 16. The Oranje booked its ticket to Qatar with an impressive qualifying campaign, going 7-1-2 and edging Turkey for first place in UEFA’s Group G.
T. Koopmeiners
M. Depay
Louis van Gaal is back for a third stint in charge of the Netherlands, having previously managed his native nation from 200o to 2001 and 2012 to 2014 — including the run to the World Cup semifinals. The former Ajax, Barcelona and Bayern Munich manager left the national team to take over Manchester United in 2014, retired following his 2016 firing, then returned to the program last summer.
Van Gaal will boast a talent-laden squad. Matthijs de Ligt, a 23-year-old who signed with Bayern Munich this past summer, is one of the world’s most polished young center backs. Barcelona’s Frenkie de Jong is as complete as box-to-box midfielders come. PSV midfielder Cody Gakpo will be all the more integral after Roma’s Georginio Wijnaldum suffered a broken leg. And Barcelona forward Memphis Depay tied with England’s Harry Kane to lead UEFA’s World Cup qualifying campaign with 12 goals.
31 years old, Breda, Netherlands
If the Netherlands is going to make another run deep in the World Cup, it will lean on Liverpool center back Virgil van Dijk. Arguably the world’s top defender, with a hulking 6-foot-4 frame and the ability to ping a 70-yard ball on a dime, van Dijk will be eager to leave his mark on the international stage after sitting out Euro 2020 with a torn ACL.
At No. 18, Senegal enters the tournament as Africa’s highest-ranked nation. With the Africa Cup of Nations trophy in tow and Bayern Munich star Sadio Mané leading the front line, the Lions of Teranga have emerged as a trendy pick to make a deep run in Qatar.
This will be Senegal’s second consecutive World Cup, and third overall.
It wouldn’t be the first time: In Senegal’s World Cup debut, it upset defending champion France in the opening game of the 2002 tournament and made a run to the quarterfinals. After missing out on the next three tournaments, Senegal returned to the World Cup four years ago but failed to get out of the group stage in Russia.
Senegal has recently established itself as the class of Africa, beating Egypt for the Cup of Nations crown earlier this year and going 5-0-1 in the World Cup qualifying group stage. But the region’s punishing format saw Senegal drawn against Egypt in a two-game clash for a spot in the World Cup. Senegal emerged with that ticket to Qatar, as Mané converted the clinching shot in a tense shootout victory this past March — just as he did in the Cup of Nations final the month before.
F. Ballo-Touré
I. Sarr
Y. Sabaly
Aliou Cissé, Senegal’s former captain who has coached the team since 2015, has the most decorated collection of players in program history at his disposal. Goalkeeper Édouard Mendy was between the posts for Chelsea’s 2020-21 Champions League title. He was joined at Chelsea this past summer by center back Kalidou Koulibaly, Senegal’s captain. Defensive midfielder Idrissa Gueye was a steady contributor for Paris Saint-Germain the past three seasons before recently returning to Everton. Ismaïla Sarr, a 24-year-old winger for Watford, is a rising star.
30 years old, Bambali, Senegal
But the headliner is Mané. A slippery winger with a knack for finding the net, the 30-year-old is already Senegal’s all-time top scorer. He made a $32 million move to Bayern Munich this past summer after a prolific six-year stint with Liverpool in which he racked up 120 goals for a squad that won the 2019-20 Premier League title and advanced to three Champions League finals, winning the 2018-19 edition.
If home-field advantage gives Qatar a shot at making it out of the group (South Africa in 2010 was the only host to not advance), then Ecuador represents Group A’s long shot.
Ecuador qualifies for its fourth World Cup, all coming since 2002.
La Tri is making its fourth World Cup appearance and first since 2014, with its only knockout round appearance coming at the 2006 tournament in Germany. When it comes to regional competition, the Ecuadorans have a history of struggling at the Copa América, having advanced out of the group stage just four times in the 18 tournaments played since 1975. But they surprised with a fourth-place finish in South America’s grueling World Cup qualifying campaign, going 7-6-5 to beat out Peru, Colombia and Chile for the region’s final ticket to Qatar.
S. Méndez
M. Estrada
A. Domínguez
C. Gruezo
Á. Preciado
Bayer Leverkusen center back Piero Hincapié holds down the defense for Argentine coach Gustavo Alfaro, who also leans on Villarreal left back Pervis Estupiñán and Augsburg defensive midfielder Carlos Gruezo. The attack is sparked by 21-year-old Valladolid winger Gonzalo Plata and striker Michael Estrada, the team’s leading scorer in qualifying who is coming off the early termination of an underwhelming loan with D.C. United.
32 years old, Esmeraldas, Ecuador
For Ecuador to find its way out of the group, however, it may need a turn-back-the-clock performance from 32-year-old striker Enner Valencia. The program’s all-time top scorer, Valencia has scored 19 goals in his first two seasons for Turkish power Fenerbahçe and is off to a hot start this year. Previously, he played for Premier League clubs West Ham and Everton and Mexico’s Pachuca and Tigres. | 2022-10-25T20:44:02Z | www.washingtonpost.com | World Cup Group A: Qatar, Netherlands, Senegal and Ecuador - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/25/group-a-world-cup/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/25/group-a-world-cup/ |
If the U.S. men’s national team is going to mark its return to the World Cup with a prolonged run in Qatar, it will need to navigate a manageable but tricky group. After finishing fourth at the 2018 World Cup and second at Euro 2020, England is one of this tournament’s teams to beat. Wales is a sentimental favorite after its aging golden generation secured the country’s first World Cup appearance since 1958. And Iran is a rising power from the Asian confederation coming off a dominant qualifying campaign.
Here’s a closer look at Group B, which kicks off Nov. 21 when the United States meets Wales and England faces Iran.
England has long been branded as soccer’s underachieving giant — a country that invented the game and hosts the world’s most lucrative league, but whose national teams were known for premature tournament exits. The past five years, however, have flipped that script: The men’s team advanced to the 2018 World Cup semifinals and Euro 2020 final and the women’s squad won the European Championship this past summer.
England won the World Cup it hosted in 1966.
England 4,
England’s fourth-place finish in Russia four years ago marked just the third time the Three Lions had advanced to the semifinals, following another fourth-place run in 1990 and the nation’s lone title in 1966 — a controversial win over West Germany on its home soil, with the help of an extra-time goal that, famously, may or may not have actually crossed the line.
After a heartbreaking shootout loss to Italy in the Euro 2020 final in London — with young stars Marcus Rashford, Jadon Sancho and Bukayo Saka missing three straight attempts to doom England to defeat — the Three Lions rallied to win their World Cup qualifying group with an 8-0-2 record and a UEFA best plus-36 goal differential. This fall, however, did bring a worrying setback: relegation from England’s UEFA Nations League group with an 0-3-3 record.
Manager Gareth Southgate, the 52-year-old former England international who has overseen England’s recent resurgence, boasts a player pool packed with young talent but also tested by deep tournament runs. Among the rising stars angling for playing time in England’s attack: Manchester City’s Phil Foden (22), Chelsea’s Mason Mount (23) and Arsenal’s Saka (21).
uWhile it’s still early in those players’ international careers, this tournament represents the best chance for England’s in-their-prime core to leave a mark. Everton goalkeeper Jordan Pickford is coming off a European Championship in which he allowed just two goals in seven games. Harry Maguire, the much-maligned Manchester United center back who tends to fare better for country than club, anchors the defense. Chelsea’s Raheem Sterling practically willed England to the Euro 2020 final with his pace and unpredictability.
29 years old, London, England
But no player can seal his legacy quite like Harry Kane, the 29-year-old Tottenham striker who could very well surpass Wayne Rooney as England’s all-time leading scorer by tournament’s end. Having scored at least 17 goals each of the past eight Premier League campaigns — leading the league three times — and claimed the 2018 World Cup Golden Boot with six goals in Russia, Kane leads from the front with his aerial prowess, link-up play and finishing touch.
Four years removed from missing out on the World Cup in Russia, the U.S. national team returns to the global stage with an unprecedented glut of young stars playing in Europe’s top leagues. With the United States co-hosting the 2026 tournament, the trip to Qatar represents a crucial inflection point for the program.
The U.S. men's national team
The USMNT made it to the semifinals in the first World Cup, played almost a century ago in Uruguay.
Since then, the best result was 20 years ago at the 2002 World Cup.
The USMNT made it to the semifinals in the first World Cup,
played almost a century ago in Uruguay. Since then, the best result was 20 years ago at the 2002 World Cup.
played almost a century ago in Uruguay.
That 2018 qualifying failure snapped a streak of seven straight trips to the World Cup, with the Americans advancing out of the group stage in three of their past four tournaments. That included a run to the 2002 quarterfinals, which represents the best U.S. performance at a World Cup aside from a semifinal finish in the inaugural 1930 event that featured just 13 teams.
The U.S. squad bounced back with a string of successes under Gregg Berhalter — a key defender on the 2002 team and former coach of the MLS’s Columbus Crew — while still enduring significant growing pains. In the summer of 2021, the Americans staked their claim to regional dominance by notching extra-time defeats over rival Mexico in back-to-back finals to win the Concacaf Nations League and Gold Cup. But World Cup qualifying made for a bumpy road, with the U.S. squad going 7-3-4 and only edging Costa Rica on goal differential to claim the region’s third and final automatic berth to Qatar. And the Americans underwhelmed in their September tuneups, failing to score in a loss to Japan and a draw with Saudi Arabia.
A. Robinson
W. Zimmerman
Gone are the days when Americans were nowhere to be found in the UEFA Champions League, with AC Milan right back Sergiño Dest (on loan from Barcelona), Juventus midfielder Weston McKennie and Borussia Dortmund attacker Gio Reyna among the U.S. players seeing minutes in soccer’s most prestigious club competition. There’s plenty of American representation in the illustrious Premier League as well, with Fulham left back Antonee Robinson and the Leeds United duo of midfielder Tyler Adams and attacker Brenden Aaronson locked in as starters for their clubs.
Berhalter will have some tough lineup choices to make going into Qatar, though. Zack Steffen, a Manchester City backup now on loan to Middlesbrough, and Matt Turner, the former New England Revolution standout who joined Arsenal as its No. 2 this past summer, split time between the posts in qualifying. Walker Zimmerman’s center back partner is up in the air after Miles Robinson suffered an Achilles’ injury this past spring. Although FC Dallas’s Jesus Ferreira has the inside track on the starting striker role, that position has been a revolving door during Berhalter’s tenure.
24 years old, Hershey, Pa
This U.S. team could live and die on the form of Christian Pulisic, the fleet-footed 24-year-old winger who became the most expensive American player in history when he made a $73 million move to Chelsea in 2019 and helped the Premier League power win the 2020-21 Champions League title. After putting the U.S. team on his back and nearly carrying it to Russia as a teenager, the Hershey, Pa., native has been champing at the bit for the past five years to make his World Cup debut.
More than six decades after making their first and only World Cup appearance, the Dragons booked their return visit in time to give their aging golden generation — led by 30-something stars Gareth Bale and Aaron Ramsey — a chance to secure a spot in Welsh footballing lore.
This will be Wales’ first World Cup appearance in 64 years.
After advancing to the 1958 World Cup quarterfinals, Wales failed to qualify for 15 straight tournaments before ending the drought this cycle. The road was a long one: After finishing second to Belgium in UEFA’s Group E with a 4-1-3 record, Wales secured its spot by defeating Austria and then Ukraine — in a match delayed three months because of Russia’s invasion — in the qualifying playoffs. That success came after Wales qualified for its first European Championship in 2016 and made a stunning run to the semifinals, then advanced to the round of 16 at Euro 2020.
After leading Wales at Euro 2020 and through World Cup qualifying on an interim basis, Rob Page officially took the reins this past summer when Ryan Giggs stepped down as coach amid accusations he assaulted his ex-girlfriend. Page will turn to a veteran-heavy roster in Qatar, including Nottingham Forest goalkeeper Wayne Hennessey, versatile Tottenham defender Ben Davies, Swansea City midfielder Joe Allen and Ramsey, a Nice midfielder who enjoyed a productive run at Arsenal from 2008 to 2019.
33 years old, Cardiff, Wales
Although Bale was banished to the bench toward the end of his eight seasons with Real Madrid, the 33-year-old winger — known for his blistering runs down the flank and highlight-reel strikes — still racked up more than 100 goals for the club after signing from Tottenham on a then-record $130 million transfer in 2013. Bale, who joined MLS side Los Angeles FC this past summer, is already Wales’s all-time leading scorer.
Can Iran finally find its way out of the group stage? The nation has qualified for six World Cups — including five of the past seven and three in a row — but never made it past the first round. After a third-place finish at the 2019 Asian Cup and a stellar World Cup qualifying campaign, Iran may be on the cusp of breaking through — even if coaching uncertainty looms over the squad.
Iran in
Iran played its first World Cup in 1974, withdrew in 1982 and was disqualified in 1986.
The Iranians have notched just two wins in their World Cup history: A 2-1 victory over the United States in 1998 and a 1-0 result against Morocco four years ago. Iran also had a respectable 1-0 loss to Spain and played Portugal to a 1-1 draw, leaving it just short of a place in the knockout round. Iran secured its 2022 World Cup spot by going 8-1-1 in the final round of Asia’s World Cup qualifying, edging South Korea for first place in Group A.
Skocic
E. Hajsafi
M. Sarlak
M. Hosseini
S. Ezatolahi
A. Beiranvand
H. Kanaanizadegan
A. Nourollahi
Despite Iran’s recent progress, Dragan Skocic was dismissed as coach in June — then hastily reinstated six days later. Thus, the Croatian remains at the helm of an experienced squad, which includes AEK Athens defender-midfielder Ehsan Hajsafi, Feyenoord midfielder Alireza Jahanbakhsh and Porto forward Mehdi Taremi.
Gonbad-e Kavus, Iran
27 years old, Gonbad-e Kavus, Iran
The player to watch, if healthy, is Sardar Azmoun. A 27-year-old forward who moved from Zenit St. Petersburg to German stalwart Bayer Leverkusen earlier this year, Azmoun has scored at a prolific clip since debuting for Iran as a teenager in 2014. Although Azmoun retired from international play after Iran’s first-round exit in Russia four years ago, saying the insults he received for his performances there ruined his mother’s health, he returned to the national team less than four months later. But Azmoun is expected to miss six to eight weeks with a calf injury suffered in early October — a time frame that puts his World Cup participation in question. | 2022-10-25T20:44:08Z | www.washingtonpost.com | World Cup Group B: USA, England, Wales and Iran - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/25/group-b-world-cup/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/25/group-b-world-cup/ |
Lionel Messi and Argentina will be the runaway favorites to win Group C at the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, with the second ticket to the knockout round seemingly up for grabs. Will Mexico keep its streak of surviving the group stage alive — and perhaps go one step further? Can Robert Lewandowski lift Poland into the round of 16? Is Saudi Arabia positioned to spring an upset or two?
Here’s a closer look at Group C, which kicks off Nov. 22 when Argentina faces Saudi Arabia and Mexico takes on Poland.
Saudi A.
The narrative here is nothing new: Messi’s case as the greatest to ever play the game may well hinge on his ability to fill the glaring gap in his resume and win a World Cup title. With Argentina coming off the 2021 Copa America title — its first trophy in 28 years — and an unbeaten World Cup qualifying campaign, this could very well represent the 35-year-old’s best and last chance at securing his legacy.
Argentina won its first World Cup in 1978, the year it served as host. It won its second in 1986.
Argentina 3,
Few nations have a richer soccer history than Argentina, which won the 1978 and 1986 World Cup titles and advanced to the final in 1930, 1990 and 2014. But its more recent reputation has been one of disappointment, that 2014 run aside, with stacked Albiceleste squads crashing out in the 2002 group stage, 2006 and 2010 quarterfinals and 2018 round of 16.
After a string of Copa America heartbreaks — finishing as runner-up four times in five tournaments from 2004 to 2016, including consecutive shootout losses to Chile in the final — Messi and Argentina got over the hump with a 1-0 win over Brazil in the 2021 title game. And Argentina went 11-0-6 to finish second in CONMEBOL’s 2022 World Cup qualifying table.
G. Lo Celso
Messi’s supporting cast in Qatar will be a blend of familiar cohorts and fresh faces. Benfica’s Nicolás Otamendi continues to hold down the back line, and fellow 34-year-old Ángel Di María — a Juventus winger who has starred for Real Madrid, Manchester United and Paris Saint-Germain — remains a source of attacking inspiration. Roma forward Paulo Dybala is a remarkable attacking talent whose place on the field is only in question because he and Messi tend to occupy the same spaces.
This will mark the World Cup debut for Inter Milan striker Lautaro Martínez, a 25-year-old who already has hit the 20-goal mark for Argentina. The same goes for Rodrigo De Paul, a box-to-box midfielder for Atletico Madrid with impressive range and passing precision.
35 years old, Rosario, Argentina
Paris Saint-
All eyes, however, will be on Messi, the seven-time Ballon d’Or winner playing his second season with Paris Saint-Germain after his decorated, 17-year Barcelona tenure came to an unexpected end because of the club’s financial struggles. A fleet-footed attacker with transcendent control and finishing prowess, Messi is off to a strong start with PSG this season after his 11-goal haul in Year 1 snapped a streak of 13 straight club campaigns in which he scored 30-plus goals.
Messi hasn’t lost a step on the international stage, scoring six times in three appearances this year. With 90 goals in 164 appearances, he is both Argentina’s all-time leading scorer and most-capped player. Still, much of the Albiceleste’s fan base will forever say he pales in comparison to Diego Maradona — the magnetic playmaker who led Argentina to the 1986 World Cup crown — unless Messi can match that feat with a title of his own.
You have to give it to Mexico: It’s nothing if not consistent, advancing from the group stage in seven straight World Cups before crashing out in the round of 16 each time. Despite recent struggles, El Tri will head to Qatar with its sights set not just on surviving the group but notching that elusive knockout-round victory.
Mexico has hosted two World Cups, in 1970 and 1986. It will also host the next World Cup, in 2026, alongside the U.S. and Canada.
Mexico’s two best World Cup finishes — quarterfinal runs in 1970 and 1986 — both came on home soil. El Tri seemed well positioned to win its group and earn a manageable knockout round path four years ago in Russia, after upsetting defending champion Germany and then topping South Korea. But the Mexicans slumped to a 3-0 loss to Sweden in the group stage finale, dropped to second in the group and fell, 2-0, to Brazil in the round of 16.
What makes the U.S.-Mexico rivalry special? Love and hate and passion and respect.
More recently, Mexico has lost its grasp on the Concacaf crown. In the summer of 2021, Mexico fell to the United States in extra time in both the Concacaf Nations League final and the Gold Cup title game. Although an 8-2-4 record in World Cup qualifying was enough for the Mexicans to punch their ticket to Qatar as the region’s second-place team, El Tri went 0-2-2 against the United States and Canada — further irking a fan base used to ruling over the region.
G. Arteaga
E. Gutiérrez
N. Araujo
Goalkeeper Guillermo Ochoa, now 37 and playing for Club America, is poised to go to his fifth World Cup — third as Mexico’s starter between the posts. Fellow veterans Héctor Moreno and Andrés Guardado have seemingly slipped into secondary roles, but 32-year-old midfielder Héctor Herrera — who joined the Houston Dynamo from Atlético Madrid this past summer — has remained a sturdy presence in central midfield alongside Ajax’s Edson Álvarez.
Up front, Napoli winger Hirving Lozano makes for a dynamic threat while cutting in from the left flank to his lethal right foot. And Rogelio Funes Mori, a former Argentina international who made a one-time switch to Mexico in 2021 after making a name for himself with Monterrey, gives Martino the option of playing a true poacher up top.
31 years old, Tepeji, Mexico
With Sevilla winger Jesus “Tecatito” Corona probably out for the World Cup with a fractured fibula, even more of the attacking onus will land on Raúl Jiménez — though he’s dealing with a lingering groin injury himself. A 6-foot-3 target forward who scored 54 goals over his first four seasons with Premier League side Wolverhampton, Jiménez also routinely finds the net for his country. And Mexico fans would be thrilled to see him on the field in Qatar after he suffered a fractured skull in November 2020 that threatened his career and kept him on the sidelines for the better part of a year.
How far can one transcendent talent carry an otherwise pedestrian squad? That will be the question facing prolific striker Robert Lewandowski — winner of the past two FIFA men’s player of the year prizes — and his Polish teammates in Qatar.
Poland has not gone past the round of 16 in 40 years, despite two third-place finishes in 1974 and 1982.
After finishing third at the 1974 and 1982 World Cups and making it to the round of 16 in 1986, Poland has qualified for just three of the past nine tournaments and never advanced out of the group stage. After going 6-2-2 in Group I of UEFA’s World Cup qualifying campaign, finishing second to England, Poland got a free pass through the playoff semifinals (when Russia was disqualified because of the nation’s invasion of Ukraine), then earned a 2-0 win over Sweden to punch its ticket to Qatar.
G. Krychowiak
K. Linetty
K. Świderski
Juventus goalkeeper Wojciech Szczęsny gives Poland an accomplished presence between the posts, while Kamil Glik — a 34-year-old center back for Italian Serie B club Benevento — anchors the defense. First-year coach Czesław Michniewicz’s midfield includes Napoli playmaker Piotr Zieliński, with Marseille’s Arkadiusz Milik and Charlotte FC’s Karol Świderski among the options to complement Lewandowski up top.
34 years old, Warsaw, Poland
But Poland will live and die with Lewandowski, a 6-foot-1 striker with the awareness to expose the slimmest pockets of space in the opposing box and the technique to put the ball in the net with his head or either foot. Lewandowski finished as the Bundesliga’s top scorer in seven of his eight seasons with Bayern Munich, netting more than a goal per game in his final three campaigns before joining Barcelona on a $51 million transfer this past summer. He also is far and away Poland’s all-time leading scorer, with 76 goals in 134 caps.
The third-lowest-ranked team in this World Cup — besting just Ghana and Qatar — Saudi Arabia is a long shot but, after a strong qualifying campaign, not necessarily a matchup that opponents can count on for an automatic three points.
With its neighbor as host, this will be Saudi Arabia’s sixth World Cup appearance.
This marks Saudi Arabia’s sixth trip to the World Cup in the past eight tournaments, though the Green Falcons have only made it out of the group stage once: at the 1994 World Cup in the United States that marked their debut. The 2019 Asian Cup was a disappointment for Saudi Arabia, which finished second to Qatar in its group and then lost to Japan in the round of 16. But Coach Hervé Renard’s team bounced back by going 7-1-2 in World Cup qualifying, edging Japan for first place in Asia’s Group B.
Y. Al-Shahrani
S. Al-Dawsari
S. Al-Najei
A. Al-Bulaihi
S. Al-Faraj
F. Al-Buraikan
M. Al-Owais
A. Al-Amri
N. Aldawsari
F. Al-Muwallad
S. Abdulhamid
Saudi Arabia’s entire squad is composed of players in the Saudi Professional League, with Riyadh clubs Al-Hilal and Al-Nassr particularly well represented. Renard will lean on goalkeeper Mohammed Al-Owais, fullback Yasser Al-Shahrani, central midfielder Salman Al-Faraj and winger Fahad Al-Muwallad as sturdy veterans, while young striker Firas Al-Buraikan could spark Saudi Arabia’s attack.
31 years old, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia
Al Hilal SFC
The top player to watch is Salem Al-Dawsari, a 31-year-old winger who carves out scoring chances from the left flank. After scoring the late winner in Saudi Arabia’s lone victory in Russia four years ago — a 2-1 result against Egypt — Al-Dawsari netted seven goals in 2022 World Cup qualifying to tie with Saleh Al-Shehri for the team lead. And he’s coming off a career-high 18 goals in all competitions for Al-Hilal last season. | 2022-10-25T20:44:14Z | www.washingtonpost.com | World Cup Group C: Argentina, Mexico, Poland and Saudi Arabia - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/25/group-c-world-cup/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/25/group-c-world-cup/ |
When it comes to Group D at the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, the line dividing the haves and the have-nots is clear. Defending champion France and Denmark are ranked in FIFA’s top 10, and both nations boast rich soccer pedigrees that include major international titles. Tunisia and Australia, meanwhile, won’t be found anywhere in FIFA’s top 10 — or 20. All time, the countries have combined to play one World Cup knockout game.
Here’s a closer look at Group D, which kicks off Nov. 22 when France meets Australia and Denmark faces Tunisia.
No nation has repeated as World Cup champion since the Pelé-led Brazil teams of 1958 and 1962. Can Les Bleus snap that streak, 20 years after their only other title defense ended with a first-round exit? With Kylian Mbappé matured into a full-on superstar and Karim Benzema back in the fold, Didier Deschamps’s squad certainly has the talent to win it all — even if N’Golo Kante is set to miss the World Cup with a hamstring injury and fellow midfielder Paul Pogba is recovering from knee surgery.
The defending World Cup champion will be seeking its third trophy in its 16th appearance.
France 4,
Since failing to qualify for the 1990 and 1994 tournaments, France has been alternatively dominant and disappointing on the World Cup stage. After Zinedine Zidane steered France to the 1998 title on home soil, Les Bleus went home winless four years later. A run to the 2006 final — which France lost to Italy after Zidane infamously was tossed for head-butting an opponent — was followed by another winless, first-round exit in 2010. But after advancing to the 2014 quarterfinals, France was the class of the tournament four years ago in Russia, rattling off a 6-0-1 record that included a comfortable 4-2 win over Croatia in the final.
The European Championship has proved elusive since France won in 2000 on the back of its World Cup crown. After surprisingly falling to Portugal at home in the Euro 2016 final, France suffered a stunning shootout loss to Switzerland in the Euro 2020 round of 16. There were no hiccups in 2022 World Cup qualifying, however, as the French went 5-0-3 to comfortably secure their ticket to Qatar. And France topped Spain in the final to win the 2020-21 UEFA Nations League.
J. Kounde
The core that guided France to its second World Cup title remains intact, starting with captain Hugo Lloris, now 35 and still a rock between the posts for Tottenham. Raphaël Varane, fresh off a $40 million move from Real Madrid to Manchester United, is a towering presence in the back. At his best, Pogba — back with Juventus after a tumultuous six-year stint with United — is as electrifying as box-to-box midfielders come, though September knee surgery will leave him racing against the clock to be fit. Antoine Griezmann, now 31 and back at Atlético Madrid (on loan from Barcelona), is past his prime but still led Les Bleus with six goals in qualifying.
Plus Deschamps can count on one world-class talent he didn’t have four years ago: Real Madrid striker Benzema. Ostracized because of his alleged role in a sex tape and blackmail scandal involving a former France teammate, Benzema was exiled from the French squad for more than five years before returning for last year’s European Championship. Although Benzema will turn 35 during the World Cup, the reigning UEFA player of the year has never been more productive, scoring a career-high 44 goals in all competitions during the 2021-22 campaign as Madrid won La Liga and the Champions League.
23 years old, Paris, France
Despite all of that talent, France will probably need another standout World Cup from Mbappé if it wants to defend its crown. Four years ago, a 19-year-old Mbappé took home the best young player award after notching four goals — including a tally in the final made him the only teenager other than Pelé accomplish that feat. In the intervening years, the now-23-year-old has posted four straight 30-goal campaigns for PSG. Electrifying on the ball and clinical in the opposing box, Mbappé has the makings of a future Ballon d’Or winner.
A year after Denmark emerged as the sentimental favorite of Euro 2020 — enduring the trauma of playmaker Christian Eriksen’s cardiac arrest in the group stage opener, then making an unlikely run to the semifinals — a recovered Eriksen and his Danish teammates head to Qatar knowing a lengthy stay isn’t out of the question.
While Denmark won a Euro in 1992, its appearances in the World Cup have been modest.
The Danes didn’t qualify for a World Cup until 1986 but have since become regulars in soccer’s showcase event, punching a ticket to five of the past seven tournaments. They’ve only made it to the quarterfinals once, in 1998, and crashed out in the round of 16 four years with a shootout loss to eventual finalist Croatia.
The Euro 92 champions made a valiant run at their second European Championship title last year, topping Wales and the Czech Republic in the knockout round before falling to England in the semifinal. And they were downright dominant in World Cup qualifying, going 9-1-0 to win Group F and book a trip to Qatar.
J. Maehle
P. Hojbjerg
M. Damsgaard
M. Braithwaite
Denmark Coach Kasper Hjulmand — a former defender who played college soccer at North Florida — has a veteran-heavy squad at his disposal. That starts with Kasper Schmeichel, the 35-year-old goalkeeper who moved from Leicester City to Nice this summer after an 11-year run with the Foxes that included the 5,000-to-1 run to the 2015-16 Premier League title.
Crystal Palace’s Joachim Andersen and Barcelona’s Andreas Christensen hold down the back line, while Sevilla’s Thomas Delaney and Tottenham’s Pierre-Emile Hojbjerg pull the strings in central midfield. Espanyol attacker Martin Braithwaite, who recently joined the club after three seasons with Barca, provides firepower up top.
30 years old, Middelfart, Denmark
But it’s hard to think of a player with a more compelling story in Qatar than the 30-year-old Eriksen. Denmark’s team doctor said the playmaker was “gone” after going into cardiac arrest at the European Championship in June 2021 before being resuscitated on the field. Eriksen, who was subsequently fitted with a pacemaker, marked his return with Premier League club Brentford six months later, scored two minutes into his first match back for Denmark in March, then signed with Manchester United this summer. A healthy Eriksen — with his crafty footwork, immaculate set-piece service and vision to unlock defenses — elevates Denmark from undermanned underdog to dark-horse contender.
Four years after winning its first game at the World Cup since 1978, Tunisia will look to beat the odds and advance finally beyond the group stage.
Tunisia was part of France until 1956, and it didn’t qualify for a World Cup until Argentina 1978.
After qualifying for three straight World Cups from 1998 to 2006, then missing out on back-to-back tournaments, the Tunisians marked their return four years ago in Russia with losses to England and Belgium and a 2-1 win over Panama. That experience on the World Cup stage, however, hasn’t translated to much success regionally: Since winning the Africa Cup of Nations in 2004, Tunisia has made it past the quarterfinals just once in nine appearances (a fourth-place finish in 2019). The Eagles of Carthage punched their ticket to Qatar by topping Mali, 1-0 on aggregate, in the final round of Africa’s World Cup qualifying campaign.
A. Maaloul
E. Skhiri
A. Dahmen
F. Sassi
S. Jaziri
A. Laidouni
Y. Msakni
M. Dräger
Jalel Kadri
Coach Jalel Kadri can count on Lorient defender Montassar Talbi to anchor a back line that allowed just two goals in eight qualifiers. That unit also includes left back Ali Maâloul, who plies his trade for Egypt’s Al Ahly. Ferjani Sassi, a midfielder for Qatar’s Al-Duhail, sets the tempo, while captain Youssef Msakni — who also plays in Qatar, for Al-Arabi — is a threat up front.
31 years old, Ajaccio, France
To spring an upset or two, Tunisia will probably need an influential World Cup from Wahbi Khazri. The 31-year-old signed with Montpellier this summer after netting 24 goals in four Ligue 1 seasons with Saint-Étienne — including a goal of the year candidate when he struck from past midfield against Metz last October. And Khazri was Tunisia’s top scorer with three tallies in World Cup qualifying.
No team worked harder to clinch its spot at the World Cup: Australia will arrive in Qatar after navigating a grueling 20-game qualifying slate that featured two group stages, a regional playoff and an intercontinental playoff.
This will be a fifth consecutive World Cup appearance for Australia, having only once made it out of the group stage.
Not a FIFA member
After qualifying for its first World Cup in 1974, Australia went more than three decades before returning for the 2006 tournament, which marked the only time the Socceroos have advanced beyond the group stage. This year’s event represents the nation’s fifth straight trip to the World Cup, though that streak was very nearly snapped. Australia slumped to third place in Asia’s Group B with a 4-3-3 record, then topped the United Arab Emirates to earn Asia’s spot in the intercontinental playoff. There, Australia played Peru to a scoreless draw before triumphing on penalties.
A. Behich
K. Rowles
M. Duke
B. Wright
A. Hrustic
N. Atkinson
Graham Arnold, a former Australia assistant and interim coach who has held the full-time job since 2018, continues to lean on a number of 30-something stalwarts. Among them: Sunderland center back Bailey Wright, Celtic defensive midfielder Aaron Mooy and Melbourne City attacker Mathew Leckie. Also keep an eye on Ajdin Hrustic, a 26-year-old playmaker who moved from Eintracht Frankfurt to Hellas Verona this summer.
30 years old, Plumpton, Australia
If Australia has any chance of advancing to the round of 16, it will need a sterling World Cup from captain and goalkeeper Matthew Ryan. The 30-year-old Copenhagen shot-stopper — whose résumé also includes stints with Valencia, Brighton, Arsenal and Real Sociedad, among others — seized the starting role vacated by Australian legend Mark Schwarzer nearly a decade ago and has shown no signs of loosening that grip. | 2022-10-25T20:44:21Z | www.washingtonpost.com | World Cup Group D: France, Denmark, Tunisia and Australia - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/25/group-d-world-cup/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/25/group-d-world-cup/ |
Any time previous World Cup winners are drawn in the same group, things are sure to get interesting. Add in the fact that those former champions — in this year’s case, Spain and Germany — have won their most recent titles in the past 12 years and there’s another layer of intrigue. The European rivals, both now ranked in FIFA’s top 11, will certainly be vying for the top spot. Japan (No. 24) and Costa Rica (No. 31) have both played the spoiler in the group stage in previous tournaments and will be ready to jump on any missteps.
Here’s a closer look at Group E, which kicks off Nov. 23 when Germany meets Japan and Spain faces Costa Rica.
For a four-year stretch last decade, there was no better team in the world than Spain, and it had the trophies to prove it. La Roja won three major titles from 2008 to 2012 — two European Championships and the 2010 World Cup — and with its distinctive tactics changed the general understanding of what national teams could do. Now 10 years since its last trophy, Spain is still searching for the next iteration of its identity as a squad. Luis Enrique hopes he can discover it in time for Qatar.
Spain hosted the World Cup in 1982 and won it in 2010.
Netherlands 0,
Spain 1
Netherlands 0, Spain 1
In the decade since the Euro 2012 final, Spain has mostly disappointed at major tournaments. It failed to advance out of the group stage at the 2014 World Cup, the fifth defending champion to do so, and then exited in the round of 16 in Russia four years later. Spain thrived during those glory years perfecting its “tiki-taka” style, a tactical system in which players seek to dominate the ball through pressing, possession and short passes, but after 2012, the rest of the world began to catch up and learn how to counter.
Spain made a breakthrough last summer at Euro 2020, reaching the semifinals of a major tournament for the first time since 2012. It followed that performance with a trip to the UEFA Nations League final three months later. The Spaniards lost on both occasions and struggled to find the net in their final two World Cup qualifiers in UEFA’s Group B last fall, but still managed to avoid a playoff and automatically qualified with a win over Sweden in November 2021.
J. Alba
P. Sarabia
U. Simon
A. Morata
La Roja has no trouble dominating the ball and controlling possession, but the absence of a quality high-scoring striker since David Villa’s retirement was on display during the qualifying campaign. Barcelona’s Ferran Torres led with four goals, but Spain as a team managed only 15 across the eight matches. Atlético Madrid’s Álvaro Morata had a string of high-profile scoring struggles leading up to Euro 2020, but has six goals since last July. Players like Real Sociedad winger Mikel Oyarzabal (if healthy) and Manchester City midfielder Rodri will help the cause, and it can fall back on an experienced back line, led by Barcelona’s Jordi Alba and Real Madrid’s Dani Carvajal.
If he makes the squad, Ansu Fati could help fill the void at striker — the 19-year-old became the youngest scorer in Spanish national team history in 2020 and inherited the iconic No. 10 shirt at Barcelona after Lionel Messi’s departure. That scoring record was shattered two years later by his Barcelona teammate, Gavi, who in June scored his first senior goal in a Nations League match.
19 years old, Tegueste, Spain
Pedri will still be a teenager when he arrives in Qatar — he’ll turn 20 on Nov. 25 — but he already boasts a stacked résumé. The Barcelona midfielder was named to the team of the tournament at Euro 2020 after playing more than 600 minutes across six starts for Spain. (After the tournament, Enrique said he hadn’t seen a showing like that at a European Championship from any 18-year-old, not even legendary Spanish midfielder Andrés Iniesta.) Less than two weeks later, Pedri flew to Japan and helped Spain’s squad earn an Olympic silver medal at the Tokyo Games. He’s sure to make an impact at his first World Cup.
Los Ticos hold the distinction of being the final team to qualify for this year’s World Cup — they defeated New Zealand in a June playoff to secure their third consecutive trip to the tournament. This was their toughest qualification cycle of the past 20 years, and it will be even trickier to escape this World Cup group.
This will be Costa Rica’s sixth appearance in the World Cup. Its best result was reaching the quarterfinals in Brazil 2014.
The third-smallest country in Central America has an impressive history of reaching the World Cup. Of its six previous successful qualifying campaigns, it finished in the top two of the Concacaf table in four of them. Costa Rica was a darling of Brazil 2014, finishing first in a group that featured three other World Cup winners in Uruguay, Italy and England. It lost on penalties to the Netherlands in the quarterfinals, and followed up that run with a group-stage exit in 2018.
In their first eight games of this qualifying cycle, the Costa Ricans won only two and loitered near the bottom of the table as the second part of the campaign approached. When the new year arrived, though, Los Ticos went unbeaten in six. Despite Costa Rica’s win over the United States in its final game, goal differential determined it would head to an inter-confederation playoff for a spot in the World Cup. Playing at Al-Rayyan Stadium (set to host seven games), it went ahead early on a third-minute goal from Joel Campbell and held New Zealand scoreless for the remainder of the match to earn a return visit to Qatar.
B. Oviedo
Y. Tejeda
Ó. Duarte
C. Borges
K. Fuller
The majority of Costa Rica’s players spend their club season in the country’s own league — mostly at Alajuelense and Herediano, Liga FPD’s top two clubs — but there are a few notable exceptions. Left back Bryan Oviedo moved to MLS’s Real Salt Lake this summer after more than 10 years in Europe. Campbell had three goals during qualifying and is off to a good start to the Mexican club season with León. Winger Jewison Bennette is only 18, but he could be the country’s next big star: Days after scoring his first goal for English side Sunderland in September, he found the net twice for Costa Rica in a friendly.
35 years old, San Isidro de El General, Costa Rica
Keylor Navas has twice been named the Concacaf player of the year to go along with three best goalkeeper awards. On the club level, he won three consecutive Champions League titles as the starter for Real Madrid and has claimed two league crowns since moving to Paris Saint-Germain in 2019. At Brazil 2014, he kept three clean sheets in five matches — most memorably in the round of 16, holding Greece scoreless through normal time and a penalty shootout when his team was down to 10 men. Navas is no longer a regular starter in Europe, but he still had eight clean sheets in World Cup qualifying.
For Germany, the past two major tournaments brought only disappointment. The four-time World Cup winner didn’t advance out of the group stage in 2018 and barely reached the knockout round at Euro 2020 before bouncing out to England in the round of 16. With a new coach in charge and a refreshed team identity, Germany hopes this tournament has a much different result.
Germany hosted the World Cup in 1974 and 2006, and won it in 1954, 1974, 1990 and 2014.
West Germany 3,
Suspended from FIFA
West Germany 1, Argentina 0
Germany 1,
from FIFA
Those early tournament exits both happened under the watch of Joachim Löw, who led the Germans to a third-place World Cup finish in 2010 and the title in 2014. In March 2021 — the same month in which Germany lost a World Cup qualifier for just the third time in its history — Löw announced he would step down after the summer’s European Championship. Now more than a year removed from the defeat to England, the Germans have seen a resurgence at the hands of new manager Hansi Flick (an assistant under Löw in 2014) and with a core of players from perennial Bundesliga champion Bayern Munich.
The remainder of the World Cup qualifying campaign offered the first real opportunity for Flick to impose a new identity on this German side, and his plans worked. Germany was the first team, outside of the host, to officially qualify for Qatar, beating North Macedonia in October 2021 to finish at the top of UEFA’s Group J.
S.Gnabry
L. Klostermann
In two seasons from 2019 to 2021, Flick managed powerhouse Bayern Munich to two league titles, a FIFA Club World Cup and a Champions League crown. It’s no surprise that much of his Germany team now comes from Bayern. Captain Manuel Neuer still occupies his place in goal; Joshua Kimmich and Leon Goretzka patrol the midfield; and Leroy Sané and Serge Gnabry pace the wings. Flick also has a talented crop of younger players to work with: Bayern’s Jamal Musiala (19 years old), Bayer Leverkusen’s Florian Wirtz (19) and Chelsea’s Kai Havertz (23) have all shown promise with the national team.
33 years old, Weilheim in Oberbayern, Germany
Thomas Müller was a commanding presence during Germany’s previous successful World Cup runs: The Bayern attacker won the Golden Boot with five goals in 2010 and earned the Silver Ball as the tournament’s second-best player in 2014. The country’s most decorated player spent two years out of contention during the rockiest points of the Löw era, but he returned for Euro 2020 and helped the Germans qualify for Qatar. At 33, he may be past his peak years, but Müller has been impressive in Bayern’s past two league-winning campaigns (19 goals and 37 assists) and is sure to remain a significant part of Germany’s plans.
This year’s World Cup appearance will be Japan’s seventh in a row. While the Samurai Blue has reached the knockout stage on three of those occasions, Qatar is likely to present a trickier test for Asia’s second-highest-ranked team.
Starting in 1998, Japan has qualified for every World Cup, reaching the round of 16 three times.
Japan’s run at the 2018 World Cup ended in the round of 16, equaling its previous best result in 2002 and 2010. In that knockout game, the Japanese took an early 2-0 lead against Belgium but conceded three goals in succession to lose. The four-game stretch in Russia still had its positives, though: Japan’s opening 2-1 win over Colombia marked the first time an Asian country had beaten a South American country at a World Cup, and it earned a draw against a solid Senegal squad in its subsequent match.
The Japanese secured Asia’s final automatic qualifying berth with a 2-0 win over Australia in March, good enough to finish second in their group and avoid a playoff. They’ll arrive in Qatar on the heels of some confidence-boosting results the past few months: In June, it lost by a narrow 1-0 margin to tournament favorite Brazil and beat the United States, 2-0, in September.
Hajime
Moriyasu
Y. Nagatomo
S. Gonda
Y. Osako
G. Haraguchi
H. Sakai
Most of Japan’s squad in 2018 was spread between two leagues (the national J1 League and Germany’s Bundesliga), but the team for this year’s tournament should have a greater reach across the world’s top leagues. Wingers Takumi Minamino (Monaco) and Junya Ito (Reims) are both now in France, while other attacking talents like Genki Haraguchi (Union Berlin) and Ao Tanaka (Fortuna Düsseldorf) play in Germany. Takehiro Tomiyasu, who usually pairs at center back with longtime captain Maya Yoshida (Schalke), plays for Arsenal in the Premier League.
27 years old, Izumisano, Japan
After missing out on a place in Japan’s squads at the 2014 and 2018 tournaments, Minamino will make his World Cup debut in Qatar. The 27-year-old moved to England in a high-profile transfer in 2019, becoming the first Japanese player to sign for Liverpool after a successful six-year stint with Red Bull Salzburg in Austria. He was part of the squad that won the Premier League in 2020 but never saw significant playing time. The joint leading scorer for Japan during World Cup qualifying with 10 goals, Minamino should have more quality minutes under his belt after this summer’s move to Monaco. | 2022-10-25T20:44:27Z | www.washingtonpost.com | World Cup Group E: Spain, Germany, Japan and Costa Rica - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/25/group-e-world-cup/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/25/group-e-world-cup/ |
At first glance — or a glance based purely on FIFA’s rankings — this group doesn’t seem to be too much of a test for a team such as Belgium, now the No. 2 squad in the world after a long run atop the list. None of the other three members of the group is ranked higher than No. 12. There’s more than meets the eye in Group F, though. Canada, in its first World Cup in more than 30 years, is ready to make some noise. Morocco made a run at the latest Africa Cup of Nations. And despite Belgium’s high ranking, there’s only one team here with recent experience in a World Cup final: Croatia, the 2018 runner-up.
Here’s a closer look at Group F, which kicks off Nov. 23 when Morocco faces Croatia and Canada takes on Belgium.
In Roberto Martínez’s six years in charge, the Red Devils earned a best-ever third-place finish at the 2018 World Cup and held the No. 1 spot in FIFA’s rankings for more than three years, all while regularly featuring several of the world’s best players. But a trophy has proved elusive. In what’s likely its final run at a major tournament, is this the year for Belgium’s “Golden Generation” to finally claim, well, its gold?
Belgium’s best showing in World Cup history was in 2018, when it finished third.
Belgium has long hovered around the top tier of the world’s biggest sport — an impressive feat for a country roughly the size of Maryland. Its latest crop of talent has reached new highs, defeating England in the third-place match in Russia four years ago. Belgium is the only nation to sit atop FIFA’s rankings without winning the World Cup or a continental title — it owned the top spot from September 2018 until March 2022, when Brazil took over.
After exiting the European Championship last summer in the quarterfinals, the Belgians qualified for Qatar by winning UEFA’s Group E, seeing five goals from star striker Romelu Lukaku and at least two goals from six other players. Since that occasion in November 2021, though, they’ve had a bit of a rocky stretch, with a pair of defeats to the Netherlands in the past two UEFA Nations League windows.
J. Vertonghen
T. Alderweireld
J. Denayer
The group that led Belgium to the semifinals in Russia has stayed mostly intact for this year’s tournament. Kevin De Bruyne, the 31-year-old midfielder who has won four Premier League titles starring for Manchester City, wasn’t in peak form at Euro 2020 because of injuries but is still one of the best players in the world. Captain Eden Hazard, who earned the Silver Ball as the World Cup’s second-best player in 2018, has struggled to find his footing at Real Madrid since a move there in 2019 yet remains a key figure on the national team. Questions remain about an aging back line, but goalkeeper Thibaut Courtois — the Golden Glove winner at the 2018 World Cup — proved in Real Madrid’s Champions League run last year that he’s still a force.
29 years old, Antwerp, Belgium
At 29, Lukaku has already established himself as one of the top Belgian players in history. (To be fair, he’d done that well before now, setting the country’s all-time scoring record in 2017. His tally is now 68 goals over 13 years.) After an unsuccessful stint in the Premier League at Chelsea last year, Lukaku returned on loan this summer to Inter Milan, which he led to a Serie A crown in 2021. His health could be a question heading into Qatar: He scored two minutes into his return to Inter in August, but injury issues have limited his minutes for the season’s first few months.
If Belgium’s “Golden Generation” is nearing the end of its run, it seems as if Canada’s is just beginning. The northern nation’s young stars have brought their country back onto the international stage, qualifying for the World Cup for only the second time in history and first since 1986.
Qatar will be Canada’s second World Cup.
Three years ago this fall, Canada recorded a historic 2-0 win over the United States — its first victory over its American rival since 1985. Since then, the upward progress has continued: John Herdman has led Canada from 72nd in the FIFA rankings to as high as 33rd this February. (Les Rouges currently hold the No. 41 spot on FIFA’s list, trailing the three other Concacaf sides in the World Cup after a bumpy June window that included a loss to Honduras and two canceled games.)
The Canadians finished atop the Concacaf qualifying table, recording eight wins in the 14-game final round and defeating the United States again Jan. 30. A pair of friendlies in September against Qatar (a 2-0 win) and Uruguay (a 2-0 loss) were their first against non-Concacaf opponents since a January 2020 match against Iceland. Canada hasn’t beaten a European opponent since Belarus in 2011, and its last win over a South American squad was against Colombia in 2000.
Herdman
M. Kaye
R. Laryea
Two of the top three scorers during the final round of Concacaf qualifying came from Canada: winger Cyle Larin (six goals) and forward Jonathan David (five). Larin, who spent three seasons in MLS before moving overseas, is the national team’s all-time leading scorer. David, 22, is widely regarded as one of the top young attacking talents in Europe after two standout campaigns with Lille in France. Tajon Buchanan, a 23-year-old winger who plays with Larin at Club Brugge, was an all-star talent across three seasons in MLS and earned best young player honors at last year’s Gold Cup.
21 years old, Buduburam, Ghana
Les Rouges’ qualifying campaign was already impressive, and that’s before you remember they finished the job without their star player. Alphonso Davies, the 21-year-old Bayern Munich left back who became the first male Canadian to win the Champions League in 2020, missed Canada’s final four qualifying games with a case of mild myocarditis. (That didn’t stop him from celebrating when his team sealed its World Cup spot.)
The reigning Concacaf player of the year returned to the national team squad with a bang in June, scoring two goals in a Nations League game — with Canada, he’s usually deployed in more attacking positions on the wing or in the midfield — and should be near full form to create plenty more highlight-reel moments in Qatar.
At No. 22, the Atlas Lions are the second-highest-ranked African team in the FIFA rankings, behind only AFCON winner Senegal. They exited this year’s continental tournament in the quarterfinals but still managed to qualify for their second consecutive World Cup — although the manager who helped earn that place won’t make the journey to Qatar with them.
Morocco was part of France for the first five World Cups. Qatar will be the sixth appearance since its independence.
In the 2018 edition, the country’s first after a 20-year absence, Morocco finished last in a tough group that also featured Spain and Portugal. Three of its other four World Cup appearances also ended in the group stage.
The Moroccans qualified for the World Cup in March but fired manager Vahid Halilhodzic in August after a months-long highly publicized spat involving the country’s star, Chelsea winger Hakim Ziyech. Halilhodzic helped two other countries (Ivory Coast in 2010 and Japan in 2018) qualify for those tournaments, but in both instances was also sacked before the World Cup even began. The 29-year-old Ziyech quit international soccer after he was left off this year’s AFCON squad and refused a call-up for the March qualifiers, but the coach’s exit opened the door for Ziyech’s return in September.
Regragui
R. Saiss
Much of Morocco’s team — including most of the group that faced the United States in a loss in a June friendly — is based in Europe. On the back line, captain Romain Saiss plays for Besiktas in Turkey after spending six years with England’s Wolverhampton Wanderers, and right back Achraf Hakimi is an established starter for Paris Saint-Germain. Noussair Mazraoui, a talented defender who joined Bayern Munich this summer from Ajax, also missed out on AFCON and the final qualifiers this year because of a falling out with Halilhodzic but was called back up in September.
29 years old, Dronten, Netherlands
Ziyech was recalled to the national team squad for its September friendlies against Chile and Paraguay, giving Morocco an attacking boost. Like Mazraoui, Zieych broke onto the European stage after winning a number of titles and individual honors at Ajax. Since moving to Chelsea in 2020, the winger has struggled to replicate that success. Should things get smoother on the club level and on the national team — former Moroccan international Walid Regragui took over in late August — Ziyech could see a return to stronger form in time for Qatar.
The relatively surprise runner-up at the World Cup in 2018, Zlatko Dalic’s squad has seen its ups and downs in the four years since that summer in Russia. A strong record so far this year could be a promising sign for the No. 12 Croatians ahead of Qatar.
Croatia was part of Yugoslavia until 1991. It reached the final at the last World Cup, losing to France.
For a country with a population of only 4 million that has played only 30 years as an independent nation, Croatia has always punched above its weight on soccer’s biggest stage. It finished third at its first World Cup in 1998, and 20 years later reached the tournament final against France. The Croatians lost, 4-2, in Moscow, but reaching the final marked a new historic achievement for a nation — and a squad of players — just decades removed from a destructive war.
The past two years have not been all smooth sailing. In 2020, Croatia won only two of its eight games; a year later, Dalic and several veteran players faced calls to step down after a round-of-16 exit at the European Championship. They turned it around, though, finishing the remainder of their qualifying cycle in UEFA’s Group H unbeaten and earning an impressive 1-0 win over France in a World Cup rematch in June, plus two Nations League victories over Denmark and Austria in September.
B. Sosa
M. Brozovic
M. Erlic
M. Pasalic
Some thought the 2018 World Cup could be the final major tournament for Croatia’s “Golden Generation” — this is the Group of “Golden Generations,” if you haven’t noticed already — but a number of those veterans look likely to still remain as anchors for the Vatreni in Qatar. Winger Ivan Perisic moved to Tottenham Hotspur after six seasons in Italy, but was Croatia’s most productive player at Euro 2020 before the coronavirus ruled him out for the knockout rounds. Inter Milan’s Marcelo Brozovic and Chelsea’s Mateo Kovacic are still mainstays in the midfield, and on an older squad, Luka Sucic, a 20-year-old midfielder at Red Bull Salzburg, is a young name to watch off the bench.
Mario Mandzukic, the country’s second-all-time leading scorer who scored both an own goal and a regular goal in the 2018 final, will be on the sidelines as one of Dalic’s assistants in Qatar.
37 years old, Zadar, Croatia
Now 37, Luka Modric is the most capped player in his nation’s history and has led Croatia in every major tournament it has qualified for since the 2006 World Cup. In 2018, he won the Golden Ball as the best player in Russia and the Ballon d’Or as the top male player in the world. If his play of late is any indication — he helped power Real Madrid’s comeback to win the Champions League this spring — time has yet to slow him down ahead of what is likely his final World Cup. | 2022-10-25T20:44:33Z | www.washingtonpost.com | World Cup Group F: Canada, Belgium, Morocco and Croatia - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/25/group-f-world-cup/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/25/group-f-world-cup/ |
There’s a clear favorite in Group G, and it’s the nation that has spent the better part of this year atop FIFA’s rankings. Brazil is on the hunt for its sixth World Cup and has a deep, experienced squad ready to compete for it. Who will challenge the Brazilians for the group’s other spot in the knockout stages? Switzerland is fresh off a memorable run at Euro 2020 and has risen all the way to No. 15 in the world. Serbia was a surprise qualifier from a crowded pot of European teams, and Cameroon has a history of making runs on the sport’s biggest stage.
Here’s a closer look at Group G, which kicks off Nov. 24 as Switzerland faces Cameroon and Brazil takes on Serbia.
This year marks exactly two decades since Brazil last lifted the Jules Rimet Trophy. The country known for spearheading the “Jogo Bonito” — the “Beautiful Game,” a phrase popularized by Brazilian great Pelé — won its fifth World Cup in 2002 but hasn’t reached the tournament’s final in the past four editions. With perhaps the deepest squad in the entire field and an experienced manager at the helm, top-ranked Brazil is expected to arrive in Qatar as one of the favorites to win it all.
Brazil is the winner of the most World Cups with five titles out of seven total trips to the final.
Brazil 5, Sweden 2
Brazil 3, Czechoslovakia 1
Brazil 4, Italy 1
Brazil 0 (3), Italy 0 (2)
Brazil 2, Germany 0
Czechoslovakia 1
Brazil 0 (3),
Italy 0 (2)
Sweden 2
It’d be hard for any of the other 31 sides in the World Cup to match Brazil’s current run of form: “A Seleção” has won or drawn 28 of its past 29 matches, dating back to 2019. The lone loss came in last summer’s Copa América final to rival Argentina, a 1-0 defeat at the famous Maracanã in Rio de Janeiro.
Since that defeat in July 2021, Tite’s Brazil squad swept through CONMEBOL’s World Cup qualifying campaign, earning the most points by any South American team since 2002. It won 14 of its 17 matches — its first game against Argentina was called off after Brazilian health officials took the field and attempted to arrest four Argentine players — and kept a near airtight defense, conceding only one goal at home.
There are so many Brazilian players getting quality minutes in the world’s top leagues that it’s hard to pick out just a few names to spotlight. A number of veterans return from previous World Cup squads, from Chelsea’s Thiago Silva and Paris Saint-Germain’s Marquinhos on the back line to Liverpool’s Fabinho and Manchester United’s Casemiro in the midfield. Vinícius Júnior, a 22-year-old winger, was the star of last year’s Champions League final for Real Madrid. Brazil also owns the enviable position of having two world-class goalkeepers on its side: Liverpool’s Alisson is the likely starter, but Manchester City’s Ederson is also available for selection.
30 years old, São Paulo, Brazil
In a sport known for its stars, Neymar remains one of its biggest. Since his debut as a teenager, he has grown into one of the world’s most popular athletes and is still the most expensive player in soccer history after his $263 million move to Paris Saint-Germain from Barcelona in 2017. It hasn’t all been smooth sailing — he helped lead Brazil to its first Olympic gold at Rio 2016 but also has a predilection for over-the-top reactions and the occasional dramatic dive.
That said, he’s still a captivating attacker with the ability to transform games: He was Brazil’s leading scorer in qualifying with eight goals and is already the nation’s second-leading all-time scorer, trailing only the great Pelé.
Serbia has reached three of the past four World Cups — in 2006, 2010 and 2018 — but has yet to advance out of the group stage in that stretch. It has played the giant-beater before (defeating Germany, 1-0, in South Africa) and has a squad full of players plying their trades in Europe’s top five leagues, but it is still looking to make its big breakthrough at a major tournament.
Qatar will be its third appearance in a World Cup as Serbia.
Serbia and
In the 14 years it has played under a fully independent flag, Serbia has reached the World Cup twice but has yet to win more than one game in the group stage. Its failed European Championship qualifying campaign in 2020 marked a moment for change — the Serbs lost to Scotland in a playoff penalty shootout, making them the continent’s only squad at this World Cup that wasn’t at Euro 2020. Ljubisa Tumbakovic was sacked and replaced by national team hero Dragan Stojkovic, a star for Yugoslavia at the 1990 and 1998 World Cups.
Serbia’s hopes of qualifying directly for Qatar came down to a final UEFA Group A match in November 2021 against superstar Cristiano Ronaldo and Portugal in Lisbon. It ended in thrilling fashion for the Serbs: After conceding in the second minute, they rallied to score in the 33rd minute and kept Portugal away from goal for the rest of regular time. Aleksandar Mitrovic, the country’s all-time leading scorer, found the emotional winner in the 90th minute to seal Serbia’s place at the World Cup.
S. Pavlovic
S. Milinkovic-
Milinkovic-
S. Lukic
N. Milenkovic
A. Zivkovic
The Serbians are likely to feature a mix of experienced and young talent in Qatar. Captain Dusan Tadic (Ajax) and Sergej Milinkovic-Savic (Lazio) are fixtures in the national team’s midfield. Fiorentina center back Nikola Milenkovic is one of more than 10 players in the projected squad who play in Italy’s Serie A. Also in that category is 22-year-old striker Dusan Vlahovic, who has yet to play in a major international tournament but had four goals in Serbia’s qualifying campaign and was one of the most sought-after young players in Europe before signing with Juventus in January.
28 years old, Smederevo, Serbia
Between Vlahovic and Mitrovic, Serbia has no shortage of exciting scoring talent. Mitrovic is back in the Premier League with Fulham after a fantastic 2021-22 season — he finished the campaign with 43 goals, the most by any player in England’s modern era. That high-scoring form tends to carry over to Mitrovic’s role with the national team: His eight goals in qualifying tied for the third-most of any player across UEFA’s 10 groups, and he scored four times in Serbia’s Nations League games in September.
Switzerland was the surprise of last summer’s European Championship. The country that hadn’t won a knockout game in a major tournament since 1938 finally did so in exciting fashion: rallying from a two-goal deficit to beat defending World Cup champion France on penalties, then taking Spain to a shootout in the quarterfinals. It’ll try to replicate some of that magic in Qatar.
Qatar will be Switzerland’s 12th appearance of in a World Cup; it qualified for each of the past five tournaments.
The Swiss were tournament mainstays in the World Cup’s early editions but have mostly taken a back seat on the global stage in recent decades. In the past five years, though, they had strong results in major tournaments under Vladimir Petkovic: the knockout stage of the 2018 World Cup, the semifinal of the 2019 UEFA Nations League, a first-ever Euro quarterfinal in 2021. Petkovic left the national team in July 2021 and was replaced by Murat Yakin.
This year, Switzerland was the victor of one of the most entertaining qualifying groups in Europe. It finished atop Group C, drawing twice with Alpine rival Italy and conceding only twice in eight games. Its World Cup hopes rested on a result between Northern Ireland and Italy in November 2021, and when the former earned a goalless draw — thus forcing the defending European champion to an ill-fated playoff — Yakin sent 20 pounds of Swiss chocolate to Northern Ireland’s federation as a gesture of thanks.
R. Vargas
Arsenal’s Granit Xhaka was a key scorer for Switzerland at both the 2014 and 2018 World Cups, while Breel Embolo (Monaco) led the way with three goals during this qualifying campaign. Striker Haris Seferovic, currently at Galatasaray in Turkey, had three goals for the Swiss at Euro 2020. Yann Sommer had a summer to remember at that tournament, saving a penalty by France’s Kylian Mbappé in the round of 16 and then recording eight saves in extra time alone against Spain in the quarterfinal. In August, he set a Bundesliga record with a remarkable 19 stops in one match for Borussia Monchengladbach.
31 years old, Gjilan, Kosovo
Xherdan Shaqiri was responsible for one of the most talked-about goals of the 2018 World Cup: His 90th-minute winner gave the Swiss an exciting 2-1 win over Serbia in the group stage. (Shaqiri, an ethnic Albanian, made as many headlines for his celebration as the goal itself, and it’s worth noting that he’ll face Serbia in the group stage again this year.) Since then, Shaqiri has won a Champions League title with Liverpool and moved to the Chicago Fire in MLS as one of the league’s highest-paid stars. He was a key figure in Switzerland’s attack in World Cup qualifying and figures to be again in Qatar.
The Indomitable Lions have an impressive history when it comes to reaching soccer’s biggest stage: They’ve qualified for the World Cup eight times, the most of any African nation, and took England to extra time in a famous quarterfinal at Italy 1990. There’s no easy road out of the group into the knockout stage this year, but there can’t really be any counting out a team that reached Qatar in the most spectacular of fashions.
Cameroon was part of France until the 1962 World Cup. Since then, its best result was reaching the quarterfinals at Italy 1990.
Cameroon’s winding road to qualifying for the World Cup started in February. Hosting the Africa Cup of Nations for the first time since 1972, the country lost to Egypt on penalties in the semifinal but won a shootout against Burkina Faso in the ensuing third-place match. That proved to be the final game in charge for Toni Conceição, who had managed Cameroon for nearly three years but reportedly had conflicts with some of the team’s top players.
Rigobert Song, a former national team captain, took over and in March helped the squad clinch its place in Qatar with a dramatic finish in the final round of qualifying. After Algeria won the first leg, 1-0, in Cameroon, the Indomitable Lions went on the road and quickly found an away goal of their own. (In World Cup qualifying, FIFA’s rule on away goals still applies.) With the aggregate score line even, Algeria scored in the 118th minute and seemed bound for Qatar — until Karl Toko Ekambi found the back of the net in the final minute of stoppage time.
M. Ngadeu-
Ngadjui
E. Choupo-
Moting
A.-F. Zambo
S. Gouet
V. Aboubakar
J.-C. Castelletto
M. Ngamaleu
C. Fai
Cameroon doesn’t have a long list of European stars, but it has a solid mix of players in some of the continent’s top leagues. Bayern Munich forward Eric Maxim Choupo-Moting lined up for Cameroon at the 2010 and 2014 World Cups. Captain Vincent Aboubakar moved to the Saudi Premier League after a six-year stint in Europe but is still in strong form for his national team: His eight goals were the most of any African player at this year’s Cup of Nations. Toko Ekambi, who plays for Lyon in France’s Ligue 1, had a standout tournament on his home soil as well, scoring five goals across three matches.
26 years old, Nkol Ngok, Cameroon
Goalkeeper André Onana made his international debut as a 20-year-old and has steadily become one of Cameroon’s top players. At 26, he already has three Dutch league titles and starts in a number of important European matches — including a Europa League final and the Champions League semifinals — under his belt after five full seasons at Ajax. He missed the majority of the last season after being banned nine months by UEFA for taking an illegal substance, but he moved to Inter Milan (the Italian club at which Cameroonian legend and current federation president Samuel Eto’o once starred) this past summer. | 2022-10-25T20:44:39Z | www.washingtonpost.com | World Cup Group G: Brazil, Serbia, Switzerland and Cameroon - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/25/group-g-world-cup/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/25/group-g-world-cup/ |
This group is one of the harder to predict ahead of this World Cup. Portugal is No. 9 in FIFA’s rankings, but also needed two wins in the playoffs to even secure its spot in Qatar. It remains to be seen if Uruguay can finally put all the pieces together and advance deep into the knockout stages of a major tournament. South Korea, as in years past, will hope that its supporting cast can do enough to help its star, while Ghana holds the No. 61 ranking, the lowest of any team in the World Cup field.
Here’s a closer look at Group H, which kicks off Nov. 24 when Uruguay faces South Korea and Portugal takes on Ghana.
For a team that counts one of the biggest stars in all of sports as its captain, Portugal came dangerously close to missing out on the world’s biggest event. The Portuguese needed two dramatic wins in the playoffs this spring to secure their place in the World Cup. In a manageable group with global superstar Cristiano Ronaldo at the helm — playing in what could be his final major tournament — they’ll hope their road in Qatar is smoother than the road they took to it.
Portugal has been in the last five World Cups. Its best finish was third in 1966.
Portugal has no shortage of talent, but its squad has struggled to live up to its full potential since winning the European Championship in 2016. Its trip to Russia in 2018 ended with a disappointing loss to Uruguay — a group-mate this year — in the round of 16. It counts a UEFA Nations League in 2019 among the trophies won under Fernando Santos, but its 13th-place finish at Euro 2020 was the lowest in the country’s history.
After last summer, Portugal took the long route through qualifying. A dispiriting draw with Ireland and a loss to group-leader Serbia in the final two matches of UEFA’s Group A meant that the Navegadores could not qualify for Qatar directly, and they were forced to enter the European qualifying playoffs. Portugal needed a 3-1 win over Turkey and then a 2-0 win against North Macedonia to secure its place.
R. Dias
B.Fernandes
The Premier League is well-represented here: Ten players on Portugal’s roster in September came from three English teams (Manchester United, Manchester City and Wolverhampton Wanderers). Midfielder Bruno Fernandes, a United teammate of Ronaldo’s who is known for his goal-scoring and creativity, came off the bench in Russia but will have a much more significant role this time around. Center back Rúben Dias, right back João Cancelo and midfielder Bernardo Silva all star for City.
37 years old, Funchal, Portugal
Nineteen years after his national team debut, the 37-year-old Ronaldo is still Portugal’s undoubted star, well-established as his nation’s all-time leader in appearances and goals. He’s slowed down on the club level since his days as the winger leading Real Madrid to Champions League titles, but still possesses the game-changing scoring ability that made him one of the world’s most famous athletes.
All eyes will be watching to see if Ronaldo can set up a meeting with Lionel Messi, the former Barcelona star and longtime rival who is also likely playing at his final World Cup, in the knockout rounds. The two last faced each other on the club stage in the Champions League in 2020, but they’ve only played representing their national teams twice: a 2-1 Argentina win in 2011 and a 1-0 Portugal victory in 2014.
The Black Stars arrive at their fourth World Cup on the heels of a turbulent year. After a disappointing Africa Cup of Nations performance and a managerial change, they’ll try to turn the corner in Qatar.
Ghana reached the quarterfinals in 2010, losing on penalties to Uruguay.
The Ghananians’ World Cup history is short but noteworthy. They’ve played high-profile matches against the United States at each of their three tournaments, winning in 2006 and 2010 but losing in 2014. The Dec. 2 group-stage match against Uruguay in this edition is sure to be circled on their calendars. It’ll be a rematch of an infamous 2010 quarterfinal in South Africa, when a controversial handball save by Luis Suárez denied Ghana a trip to the semifinals.
In the hopes of reviving the national team at this year’s AFCON, the Black Stars brought back Milovan Rajevac, the Serbian manager who’d led them on that run to the quarterfinals in 2010. It was a short-lived stint: Ghana hit a new low, losing to No. 132 Comoros — a country playing in its first continental tournament — and failing to advance out of the group stage. Rajevac was sacked and replaced by former national team winger Otto Addo just before the final round of qualifying. Facing off against Nigeria, Ghana earned a 0-0 draw on home soil on March 25 and then its place with a 1-1 tie on the road — thanks to an early score by Thomas Partey, the Black Stars advanced on FIFA’s away goals rule.
J. Wollacott
Ghana has a solid number of players plying their trade in England: Partey is in Arsenal’s midfield, Jordan Ayew patrols the front line for Crystal Palace and Daniel Amartey is a defender at Leicester City. André Ayew (older brother of Jordan) now plays in Qatar’s top league and is past his peak days, but is still the squad’s captain. There’s also a promising array of young talents likely to make their World Cup debuts: Ajax midfielder Mohammed Kudus (age 22), Rennes winger Kalmadeen Sulemana (20) and striker Felix Afena-Gyan, a 19-year-old who broke out at Roma last season.
In July, Iñaki Williams, a Spain-born forward for Athletic Bilbao, and Tariq Lamptey, a wing back at Brighton in England, reclassified their nationalities and became eligible to represent Ghana. They made their first appearances for the Black Stars in September against Brazil and Nicaragua.
29 years old, Odumase Krobo, Ghana
Partey became the most expensive Ghanaian player of all time when he moved to Arsenal in 2020 after five full seasons with Atlético Madrid. He’s had mixed results in London, missing much of last season’s finish and the start of this year’s Premier League campaign with a thigh injury, but when healthy is still the biggest star on his national team. The 29-year-old had three goals during World Cup qualifying and has been named the country’s top player in two of the last four years.
A two-time World Cup winner, the nation of 3.5 million — sequestered between two giants in Argentina and Brazil — has always had an outsize influence on the world’s game. Yet it’s also spent the last decade searching for another taste of a trophy. After a bumpy stretch, Uruguay has gotten back on track this year under the guidance of Diego Alonso.
Uruguay hosted and won the first ever World Cup in 1930 and won its second in 1950.
Uruguay 4,
Brazil 1
The Uruguayans finished fourth at the 2010 World Cup, their best result since Mexico 1970. They followed that run with a Copa América title in 2011, the country’s first in 16 years. At the past two World Cups, they haven’t advanced further than the quarterfinals: The 2014 round-of-16 exit was marred by Luis Suárez’s ban for a biting incident and in 2o18, it lost to France.
Uruguay had a rocky road to Qatar. Last fall, it lost four qualifiers in a row — by a combined score of 11-1, no less — and sacked beloved manager Óscar Tabárez after 15 years in charge. Alonso’s arrival helped steer the ship, though, and the Uruguayans won his first four games, conceding only once, to qualify. In June, it faced the United States in a friendly and left Kansas City, Kan., with a 0-0 draw.
M. Vecino
L. Torreira
S. Rochet
Suárez and Edinson Cavani have been faces of the Uruguayan attack at the World Cup since 2010, when they both debuted on the major stage as 23-year-olds. The former remains Uruguay’s all-time leading scorer and this summer moved back to his boyhood club, Nacional, in Montevideo after a long and successful (albeit, often controversial) run in Europe. He and Cavani, now at Valencia in Spain, are both 35 but figure to still play significant roles.
Federico Valverde (Real Madrid) and Rodrigo Bentancur (Tottenham) are both younger talents, while Flamengo’s Giorgian de Arrascaeta was the country’s second-leading scorer with five goals in qualifying. The back line has seen a string of injuries in the past year, but defenders like José Giménez, Ronald Araújo and Diego Godín are impressive when healthy.
23 years old, Artigas, Uruguay
In South Africa, Suárez was the young striker playing alongside an established star. He finished that tournament with three goals behind Diego Forlán’s five and was named to FIFA’s all-star team. In Qatar, the roles could be reversed, with Suárez the experienced veteran and Darwin Núñez the emerging star.
The 23-year-old striker was one of the most sought-after players on the transfer market this summer after a 26-goal campaign with Benfica, eventually becoming Liverpool’s record signing in June. Núñez scored in his debut for La Celeste in 2019 and in a friendly vs. Canada last month, but has yet to represent his country in a major tournament after missing the 2021 Copa América with a knee injury.
This year will mark exactly two decades since South Korea’s most memorable moment on soccer’s biggest stage: The Taegeuk Warriors had never won a World Cup game in their history before 2002, but went on a run all the way to the semifinals and finished in fourth place. The competition in this year’s group won’t make their path forward any easier this year, but they do have one of the tournament’s — and the sport’s — biggest stars and will be worth watching.
South Korea’s best result was at the World Cup it hosted in 2002, where it reached the semifinals.
South Korea hasn’t missed a World Cup since 1982, but in the past four tournaments, it has only advanced past the group stage once. The 2018 edition in Russia wasn’t without its highlights, though: It knocked out defending champion Germany in a dramatic 2-0 group-stage win dubbed “The Miracle of Kazan.”
The South Koreans sealed their 10th consecutive World Cup appearance with a win over Syria in February. They played that qualifier without talismanic star Son Heung-min, but still managed to earn the automatic berth. In a crowded Group H, South Korea does hold the recent head-to-head advantage over both Portugal (a 1-0 group-stage win in 2002) and Uruguay (a 2-1 victory in a 2018 friendly in Seoul).
K. Jin-su
N. Sang-ho
S. Heung-
K. Young-gwon
L. Jae-sung
K. Seung-gyu
K. Min-jae
H. In-beom
H. Hee-
K. Moon-hwan
L. Kang-in
S. Heung-min
H. Hee-chan
The biggest question for the Taegeuk Warriors is the same as it was in 2018: Can they find enough supporting cast members to fill in the pieces behind a star as big and bright as Son? The majority of South Korea’s players come from the domestic K League, but a few play around Europe. Hwang Hee-chan, a 26-year-old forward nicknamed “The Bull,” is in his second season at Wolverhampton Wanderers in the Premier League. Center back Kim Min-jae is having a career-best season at Napoli in Serie A, while 26-year-old Hwang In-beom and experienced scorer Hwang Ui-jo are both at Olympiacos in Greece.
30 years old, Chuncheon-si, South Korea
South Korea may not advance past the group stage, but Son is still sure to be one of the stars in Qatar this fall. (He’s one of the most-followed Asian athletes on Instagram, and his level of fame on the continent rivals — or surpasses — that of some of the country’s biggest K-pop groups.)
He’s not bad on the field, either: The Tottenham winger won the Premier League’s Golden Boot with 23 goals last season and is fourth on his country’s all-time scoring list. He had also seven goals for South Korea during the qualifying campaign. After a slow start this season with Tottenham, Son opened his goal account just before the international break with a second-half hat trick in September. | 2022-10-25T20:44:46Z | www.washingtonpost.com | World Cup Group H: Portugal, Ghana, Uruguay and South Korea - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/25/group-h-world-cup/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/25/group-h-world-cup/ |
Vulgar anti-Biden signs over Capital Beltway draw complaints
A Maryland protester says he plans to continue displaying the crude banners from a highway overpass ahead of the midterms.
A protester has been hanging vulgar anti-Democratic Party signs off a Capital Beltway overpass bridge in Montgomery County, but there’s little authorities can do about the crass language being displayed to thousands of passing motorists below.
Maryland State Police officials say they have been monitoring the situation, which has drawn complaints from drivers, but have not intervened.
“At this time no enforcement action has been taken,” said Maryland State Police spokeswoman Elena Russo.
The Maryland State Highway Administration did not respond to requests for comment.
Shaun Porter, 43, who lives in the Hagerstown area, posted a video to his YouTube channel Monday that appears to show him and another man confronting a state crew that initially sought to remove the banners. After appearing to consult with their office by phone, the crew eventually left and the signs remained.
A trucker convoy took its protests to the Beltway and into Washington this spring
Porter said in an interview he’s trying to have fun while sharing his views, saying the crude language on the signs is intended to be eye-catching: “It’s the sizzle that sells the steak. It’s marketing.” He said he would continue to hang the banners — which attack President Biden and Democrats — through the midterm elections next month.
The First Amendment generally protects the right to protest on public property, and overpass protests are common in the Washington region, although typically with less-coarse language.
Evan Glass, vice president of the Montgomery County Council, said he shared a video of Porter’s protest with state and local transportation officials last week, who determined that Porter had a right to display the signs.
Glass said that while he respects the First Amendment, he hoped Porter and his supporters would “recognize there are families driving around the Beltway and they should want to protect kids from their obscene language.” | 2022-10-25T20:57:12Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Vulgar anti-Biden signs over Capital Beltway in Maryland draw complaints - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2022/10/25/beltway-banners-biden-maryland/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2022/10/25/beltway-banners-biden-maryland/ |
A delivery van departs an Amazon warehouse in Dedham, Mass., in 2020. (Steven Senne/AP)
Deputies found the man’s body outside the home, with what looked like bite marks “all over his body,” said Ray County Sheriff Scott Childers.
The delivery driver was about 50, Childers said. Authorities are waiting to identify the man until the medical examiner has determined the cause of death and notified the man’s family.
“We’re deeply saddened by [Monday’s] tragic incident involving a member of our Amazon family and will be providing support to the team and the driver’s loved ones,” Amazon spokesperson Lisa Levandowski said in a statement.
Woman charged with manslaughter after dogs kill state worker
Bites sent an Ohio driver to the hospital in August, led a driver this summer to post a video on TikTok about the company’s alleged response to his bite, and once caused Amazon to suspend deliveries to a Florida neighborhood where a worker was attacked, according to news reports.
The Postal Service recommends having dogs inside the house, behind a fence or on a leash when a mail carrier comes to the house, and tells residents to track packages or mail so they know when it’s being delivered.
Meet Chris Smalls, the man who organized Amazon workers in New York
The house had a fence with a latched gate and “Beware of Dog” signs. It also had a doggy door that allowed the dogs to freely enter the fenced yard, the sheriff said. Neighbors’ homes sit on either side and across the street.
When deputies arrived about a half an hour later, they found the driver’s body lying in the grass in the middle of the yard, according to Childers.
“It’s tragic all the way around,” Childers, who had spoken with the man’s family, said in an interview with The Washington Post. “The loss of a human life is obviously the number one most important thing. It’s horrible to see that. … It’s heartbreaking.”
The deputies found the dogs behind the home’s fence, which had a latched gate. The dogs behaved aggressively, the mastiff appearing ready to attack a deputy, Childers said; the deputy shot the dog and both dogs ran into the house.
“I had to make a quick decision because I had people coming in on the scene very quickly,” Childers said. “But also, I can tell you due to the nature of the case, the dogs would’ve been put down anyhow. It was inevitable.”
“There’s things in this job we have to do that we don’t always like, but it’s part of what we have to do,” he said. “You try and make all the right decisions.”
“There’s a lot of investigating left to be done, and I think this case is really going to open up a lot of questions,” Childers said. “Obviously, homeowners have the right to have animals that can protect themselves and their property … [but] this was just a man trying to do his job who lost his life.” | 2022-10-25T21:05:47Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Amazon driver found dead may have been killed by dogs, police say - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/10/25/amazon-delivery-driver-dead-dogs/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/10/25/amazon-delivery-driver-dead-dogs/ |
Bowie parents oppose Prince George’s school closure proposal
Parents rally outside Prince George's County Public Schools' main office Monday to advocate keeping open Pointer Ridge Elementary School. (Nicole Asbury/The Washington Post)
A group of parents in Prince George’s County is pushing back against plans to close their local elementary school next year as part of the school system’s proposed boundary changes.
Pointer Ridge Elementary School in Bowie, which is at about half of its enrollment capacity, is one of four schools in the county that could be consolidated under the new boundary plan by next school year.
But Pointer Ridge parents say that enrollment is expected to increase in the coming years due to major housing developments underway in Bowie and the school space is needed. They worry that other Bowie elementary schools where their students would be sent will likely become overcrowded. They also say the shift will cause a burden on transportation plans because their students will need buses to get to the combined schools, especially as the school system has struggled with bus driver shortages.
“No one is in favor of it, and it doesn’t make sense,” said Darius Hyman, who has a fourth- grader at the elementary school. Hyman, who is also president of the school’s parent teacher association, has been rallying parents to protest the proposal.
During a rally outside the school system’s offices this week, parents waved signs and chanted, “Keep the kids safe. No overcrowding.” They have also launched a letter-writing campaign, which has accumulated over 1,100 participants since it was started this week. A petition started by Pointer Ridge parent and alumna Sarah Creel has over 2,900 signatures to preserve the school.
The school system began reviewing its boundaries because some schools — especially in the north part of the county — were struggling with overcrowding. School officials say the proposal would balance enrollment at schools as the county’s population grows, and move students out of older buildings into more updated facilities.
Prince George’s school leaders consider boundary changes
Pointer Ridge — located in south Bowie — is a little over 50 percent utilized, with about 300 students enrolled according to the latest data. Its parent community boasts its rating on the Maryland Report Card, which shows it has 4 out of 5 stars.
Creel, who started the petition to keep the school open, said Pointer Ridge is community-driven and the teachers have always cared about the children. She trusts the teachers with her second grade son, who has Tourette syndrome and whose tics, or involuntary movements and vocal outbursts, worsen when he’s anxious.
“I’m really concerned because he’s finally settled into a routine after the pandemic at school,” she said. “I’m really thinking we can have a good turnaround year, because he’s falling a little bit behind from last year and the pandemic … but that will be derailed by a new school.”
Other elementary school parents hope school system CEO Monica Goldson will make changes to the proposal before it’s presented to the board.
Sammy Pulliam, a parent of a third-grader at Whitehall Elementary School in Bowie, recommended that no schools in the area be consolidated as chair of the District 5 Boundary Task Force. The group — which was started by community members with former school board member Raaheela Ahmed — suggested Goldson look at other solutions, like voluntary transfers and enforcing regular residency checks to ensure students are attending their zoned schools to even out enrollment.
Meghan Gebreselassie, a spokeswoman for the school district, said that the current proposal that includes closing Pointer Ridge, were recommendations from the district’s consultant and advisory committee. Goldson will review the feedback and offer a final recommendation to the board, which will vote on a finalized plan Nov. 10. | 2022-10-25T21:10:13Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Bowie elementary school parents push back against Prince George's boundary proposal - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/10/25/prince-georges-pointer-ridge-boundaries/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/10/25/prince-georges-pointer-ridge-boundaries/ |
The amazing capacities of dogs and other animals
We are always learning about the amazing capacities of dogs and other animals, and the Oct. 18 Health & Science article “Yes, your dog really can sense that you’re upset” is further testimony to their ability to be a barometer — in this case, to detect anxiety in humans. That is a very good thing, perhaps giving humans that extra push to seek care or change our ways.
However, let’s also recognize that because dogs (and other animals) are generally so sensitive and tuned in to us, they also take it on the chin. In other words, animals have an unerring capacity to mimic and absorb our physical and emotional conditions. Stress, buried emotions, yelling and family fights impact our domestic animals. So, in addition to being grateful for having their extraordinary ability to help us, let’s remember it’s a two-way street. We want to take care of ourselves, not just to resolve our own issues but also to reduce the stress and impact of our lifestyle and conditions on our beloved animals, who might suffer anxiety, depression, heart issues, cancer and other conditions right alongside us — something that is untenable for most animal lovers.
Barbara Elisse Najar, Potomac | 2022-10-25T21:18:51Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | The amazing capacities of dogs and other animals - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/25/amazing-capacities-dogs-other-animals/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/25/amazing-capacities-dogs-other-animals/ |
D.C. Council member Charles Allen (D-Ward 6) speaks during a council meeting on March 1. (Craig Hudson/For the Washington Post)
Much of D.C.’s criminal code dates back to the original version Congress passed in 1901. That it is badly in need of an overhaul is apparent from its references to “common scolds,” prohibitions against the playing of ballgames in the city’s streets and alleys, and mandates for the care and feeding of livestock. A rewrite of the code set for a vote this week by a D.C. Council committee goes far beyond cleaning up outdated language. It touches every aspect of the criminal justice system in substantial, and some say troubling, ways.
The committee plans to vote Wednesday on the 450-page bill redefining and clarifying crimes and penalties. Among the significant proposed changes: elimination of most mandatory minimum sentences, expansion of the Second Look Amendment Act to allow more people serving long sentences to petition for release, and broadening the right to a jury trial in almost all misdemeanor cases. (Most are now determined by bench trials).
Some concerns have been raised. D.C. police are worried that changes to the code could impede their ability to ensure public safety and address quality-of-life issues. Federal prosecutors question the wisdom of significantly reducing the maximum sentences for certain serious violent offenses, including burglary, robbery and carjacking, and the elimination of mandatory minimums for violent offenses when a firearm is used. In a letter last week to the council highlighting his office’s concerns, U.S. Attorney for D.C. Matthew M. Graves warned of “unintended adverse consequences.” There is also consternation about whether D.C. Superior Court, already overstressed with a backlog of cases and numerous judicial vacancies, will be able to handle an expansion of jury trials.
The sweeping rewrite began in 2006 with council legislation and continued in 2016 with the formation of the D.C. Criminal Code Reform commission, an independent body charged with designing a system that would be clearer, fairer and more proportionate. The District’s current justice system has been criticized as too reliant on case precedent and inconsistent charging and sentencing decisions by mostly federal prosecutors and judges instead of on laws passed by the city’s elected officials. One example of the system’s irrationality: D.C.’s current criminal code punishes arson of one’s own property more severely than other arson.
“To put it bluntly, D.C.’s criminal laws are a mess and literally decades and decades overdue for reform,” said Council member Charles Allen (D-Ward 6), chair of the judiciary committee who has helped shepherd the bill to this week’s planned markup. Mr. Allen has done admirable work over the past year in listening to the major stakeholders, including the U.S. Attorney’s Office, public defenders and police, and coming up with compromises on some of the more controversial recommendations of the commission. Included here: keeping carjacking and assault on a police officer as stand-alone offenses, maintaining mandatory minimum sentences for first-degree murder and providing for longer periods of implementation.
This long-overdue initiative is one of the most consequential pieces of legislation to ever come before the council. Council members must give it careful consideration and allow thorough debate. Going forward, they should also continue to solicit public feedback and revise it as needed along the way to its 2025 effective date. | 2022-10-25T21:18:57Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | The D.C. Council is rewriting the city's criminal code. Finally. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/25/dc-criminal-code-reform-rewrite-crime/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/25/dc-criminal-code-reform-rewrite-crime/ |
Let the Bannon sentence be a lesson
Stephen K. Bannon speaks to reporters outside the federal courthouse in D.C. on Oct. 21. (Jose Luis Magana/AP)
It is gratifying to note that a four-month prison term has been imposed on Trump confidant and adviser Stephen K. Bannon for thumbing his nose at a congressional subpoena [“Bannon gets 4-month prison sentence for contempt of Congress,” news, Oct. 22].
Congress is in existence, in part, to perform an investigatory function. For it to fulfill that mission, it must be able to back its legitimate demands with punitive action for those who would have us believe that a congressional subpoena is simply a request that its target might choose to ignore with impunity.
May this sentence, light though it is, be a lesson to the many who have chosen to act as though they are above the law. | 2022-10-25T21:19:09Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Let the Bannon sentence be a lesson - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/25/let-bannon-sentence-be-lesson/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/25/let-bannon-sentence-be-lesson/ |
Rehabilitation must be weighed against public safety
The D.C. Central Detention Facility. (Jonathan Newton/The Washington Post)
Nazgol Ghandnoosh’s Oct. 23 Local Opinions essay, “D.C.’s much-needed criminal justice revamp,” made the argument for reducing sentences by suggesting that science should guide policy decisions. Ms. Ghandnoosh claimed that lengthy punishments “do little to help public safety — and can even exacerbate crime.” Yet an exhaustive, decade-long study released in June by the U.S. Sentencing Commission, tracking more than 32,000 federal offenders released from prison in 2010, found that offenders released after serving more than 10 years were 29 percent less likely to be arrested for a new crime than those who served shorter sentences. Offenders who served more than five years were 18 percent less likely to be arrested for new crimes compared to a matched group serving shorter sentences.
Ms. Ghandnoosh’s alarm over racial disparities in sentencing is equally flawed. In 2018, according to Justice Department data, African Americans made up 55 percent of 2019′s known homicide offenders in the United States and committed about 60 percent of robberies, though they are 13 percent of the population. The much higher African American population in D.C. explains the disparity in incarceration. While rehabilitation should always be a goal, it should not be pursued at the expense of public safety.
Michael Rushford, Sacramento
The writer is president of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation.
Criminals released from prison are usually arrested again. Yet Nazgol Ghandnoosh, in her Oct. 23 Local Opinions essay “D.C.’s much-needed criminal justice revamp,” claimed criminals “generally age out of crime,” even those guilty of “the most serious crimes.”
That claim is called into question by a report issued in February by the U.S. Sentencing Commission. It found that over an eight-year period, violent offenders returned to crime at a rate of 63.8 percent. The median time to rearrest was 16 months. Most violent offenders released from prison committed more crimes. Even among those offenders over age 60, 25.1 percent of violent offenders were rearrested.
Murderers sometimes kill again after being released, even at an advanced age.
Hans Bader, Arlington | 2022-10-25T21:19:22Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Rehabilitation must be weighed against public safety - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/25/rehabilitation-must-be-weighed-against-public-safety/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/25/rehabilitation-must-be-weighed-against-public-safety/ |
Displaced Tigrayans queue to receive food donated by local residents at a reception center for the internally displaced in Mekele, in the Tigray region of northern Ethiopia on May 9, 2021. (Ben Curtis/AP)
The federal offensive has been supported by troops from neighboring Eritrea, a longtime enemy of Ethiopia that made peace with Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s government in 2018 — an act for which Mr. Abiy was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Now, those who sang Mr. Abiy’s praises four years ago are sounding the alarm. U.N. Secretary General António Guterres recently warned that “the situation in Ethiopia is spiraling out of control.” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director general of the World Health Organization and a Tigrayan, went even further, arguing that “there is a very narrow window now to prevent genocide” in Tigray.
So far, diplomatic efforts have been inconsistent and uncoordinated. As the war enters a critical period, the international community should ramp up engagement. For a start, world leaders should push both sides to negotiate in good-faith during the ongoing African Union-led peace talks. They should urge an immediate end to fighting, protection for aid workers and opening access for desperately needed humanitarian assistance. The United States and its allies have some leverage: They could threaten to impose new targeted sanctions on actors who have committed abuses and continue to withhold non-humanitarian assistance until there is progress. With Ethiopia’s economy floundering due to the conflict, global powers can also make clear that debt relief is available — but only if the situation improves.
As fears of atrocities mount and the death toll increases by the day, there is no excuse for the world to look away. | 2022-10-25T21:19:28Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | The conflict in Tigray is reaching a tipping point - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/25/tigray-ethiopia-conflict-peace-talks/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/25/tigray-ethiopia-conflict-peace-talks/ |
GE Is Likely to Keep Getting Windburned on Renewables
NEW SHOREHAM, RI - SEPTEMBER 22: The GE-Alstom Block Island Wind Farm stands 3 miles off of Block Island, Rhode Island on September 22, 2016. The five 6-megawatt wind turbines are the first marine-based wind farm in U.S. and are expected to produce more eletricity than Block Island needs. (Photo by Scott Eisen/Getty Images) (Photographer: Scott Eisen/Getty Images North America)
General Electric Co. plans to spend $600 million to try to right the ship at its wind-energy business, which is clearly the biggest drag on profits. Don’t expect this to be the last time this business will need fixing.The overhaul, disclosed when the company announced its third-quarter results on Tuesday, is aimed mostly at the production of onshore wind turbines and is expected to result in $500 million of annualized savings. The onshore wind business has sales of about $9 billion a year and accounts for most of the losses at the renewables segment, which were $934 million in the third quarter. Unreliable wind turbines that result in warranty payments to customers are the root cause of most of the red ink. This is Chief Executive Officer Larry Culp’s main focus with the new spending.
The plan makes sense. Culp wants to produce a few standard wind models — what he calls workhorse products — that will eliminate the complexities of making too many variations for different customers. This will streamline manufacturing for GE and suppliers and provide higher quality while reducing costs. With a simplified, more reliable wind turbine, the warranty costs will drop. For those already in operation, GE is considering corrective measures to reduce the percentage of downtime into the low single digits.This is all good on paper, but GE has been talking about blade-failure problems and addressing them with AI-enhanced inspections and preventive maintenance for almost two years. Losses since then have only deepened. Through the first nine months of this year, the renewable energy unit bled $1.8 billion. In the third quarter, the renewables unit had $500 million of higher warranty and other reserves because of wind-turbine performance.Culp has drawn a line in the sand, saying the onshore wind business will become profitable in 2024. This leaves little margin for error because GE plans to spin out Vernova, an energy company that consists of GE’s renewables and the traditional gas-power business, that same year as part of a plan to split into three companies (the other two are aerospace and health care). The goal for profitability at renewables has already been pushed back by a year. The task of simplifying manufacturing is difficult because the technology continues to change rapidly.
Where GE is likely to incur more restructuring costs is at the offshore wind unit, which also loses money. That business is expected to become profitable in the mid-2020s, Culp said. He intentionally left that date a bit vague because of the problems plaguing offshore wind. One of those problems, which Culp didn’t address, is a lawsuit by a unit of Siemens AG.A Massachusetts jury in June decided that GE’s design for its Haliade-X offshore turbine infringes a Siemens patent. GE is now trying to reduce a royalty rate that would put $30,000 per megawatt in Siemens’s pocket and is also pushing for a design change that would work around the patent, according to Bloomberg Law.
The wind business is also highly dependent on government subsidies. When the production tax credit was phased out completely for wind projects at the end of last year, orders plummeted. They were down 41% to $3.7 billion in the third quarter, but GE attributed part of that drop to a large order from the period a year earlier.
This year’s Inflation Reduction Act, which reinstates those tax credits, will boost wind power. Overall, the bill will provide $370 billion of tax credits over the next decade, but it will start impacting orders at the end of 2023. Culp said he’s not counting on those tax credits to return the onshore wind power business back to black ink. As part of the plan to save $500 million a year at onshore wind, Culp will reduce the workforce by a fifth. He’ll also focus on fewer, more profitable markets and seek more equipment-only projects, he said.
Renewables is clearly sucking the most wind at GE. Sales dropped 43% in the quarter from a year earlier. Aerospace is riding a rebound of commercial airline travel, and organic sales jumped 25% with profit margins climbing 3.4 percentage points to 19.1%. The health-care business is ready for its spinoff, boasting segment profit margins of 15.4% and organic sales growth of 4% in the quarter. Power, which will be the other piece tucked into Vernova, isn’t a stellar performer. Sales dropped 12% in the quarter to $3.5 billion, and segment profit margin was 4%, down from 5.1% last year.
Even with a turnaround at wind power, Vernova will still be the laggard among the three pieces into which GE is being broken up. Expect more pain and even more delays before this combination of renewable energy and gas power will be launched as a separate company. It’s better to be surprised if Culp can pull it off by 2024 than to be disappointed — again.
• We Need a War Effort on Wind Turbines: Chris Bryant
• Texas May Get to Carbon-Free Power Before New York: Justin Fox | 2022-10-25T21:27:33Z | www.washingtonpost.com | GE Is Likely to Keep Getting Windburned on Renewables - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/ge-is-likely-to-keep-getting-windburned-on-renewables/2022/10/25/6ee2a3cc-54a0-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/ge-is-likely-to-keep-getting-windburned-on-renewables/2022/10/25/6ee2a3cc-54a0-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html |
A kindergarten teacher works with a student at a school in Central Falls, R.I., in February. (David Goldman/AP)
This week the National Assessment of Educational Progress, also known as the “nation’s report card,” was released for the first time since 2019. Widely considered to be the most comprehensive look at how students are progressing academically, it showed that during the pandemic students across the country fell behind dramatically in math and reading. Education reporter Laura Meckler reports on what the data means and what educators and parents can do to counteract the learning loss. | 2022-10-25T21:29:13Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The pandemic wake-up call for schools - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/podcasts/post-reports/the-pandemic-wakeup-call-for-schools/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/podcasts/post-reports/the-pandemic-wakeup-call-for-schools/ |
The early electorate in Georgia looks more like 2018 than 2020
Signs showing the way for voters in Georgia's Cobb County this month. (Mike Stewart/AP)
There are two periods in which votes have been cast in an election but we have only incomplete information about what they indicate. The better-known is the period between the close of polls and when a race is called, a stretch of several hours (or longer) during which television pundits breathlessly speculate about where things might be headed.
In recent years, the other period has gained more attention. That’s the period we’re in now, where people in various states have already begun voting but information about the voting is limited. But because it is not nothing, people like to pore over who has voted, digging into the numbers like strip-mall psychics handed a drained teacup.
In many states, what’s provided publicly is the party registration of those casting ballots, giving a potentially misleading sense of where things are headed: just because Democrats are voting more before Election Day, for example, doesn’t mean that lead will hold — or that they’re voting for Democrats. In Georgia, however, the data are more interesting, including breakdowns by race, age and gender that allow us to compare with slightly more insight where we are in this critical election cycle in that state relative to previous years.
For this analysis, we decided to compare 2022 turnout with the previous two federal elections in the state (those in 2018 and 2020) — but only considering those still registered to vote. In other words, we’re not just looking at who voted in 2018 compared with 2022, but we’re looking at those who are currently registered and voted by this point that year.
The first thing that stands out is that the number of early votes cast so far this year is far higher than in 2018 but lower than 2020. Also noteworthy: far fewer mail ballots. In 2018, 15 percent of the early votes cast from this pool of voters were cast by mail. In 2020, thanks to the pandemic, 43 percent were. This year, it’s down to 9 percent.
There are also sharp differences demographically. The percentage of early votes cast by this point in 2020, for example, included a higher percentage of women. This year, the gender distribution looks more like 2018.
In 2018, though, the pool of voters up to this point was more heavily White than it is this year. Again, this is an evaluation of voters registered in 2022 who also voted in 2018. So we can say the increase in votes cast among Black voters relative to 2018 is larger than the increase in votes cast among White voters.
The current pool of votes also came from a much older group of voters. This metric is interesting since all of these voters necessarily got older since 2018. Some of those who were “50 to 64” in 2018 are now “65 and older.” But the big increase in the percentage of older voters (from 36 percent of the total at this point in 2020 to 45 percent now) is noteworthy.
What does this tell us? Well, it tells us that those who’ve cast votes so far look more like 2018 than 2020 in important ways. Importantly, given the political discussion this year, the percentage of those who’ve voted now is not more heavily made up of women than in 2020 or 2018. The percentage of votes from younger voters is down from this point two years ago.
Again, though, we’re evaluating the election with about as much clarity as discussing a race on television when only 2 percent of precincts are reporting. As with those strip-mall tea-leaves, it will be easier to come up with a compelling explanation for them once we actually know what happened.
Lenny Bronner contributed to this report. | 2022-10-25T21:29:19Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The early electorate in Georgia looks more like 2018 than 2020 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/25/georgia-election-early-voting/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/25/georgia-election-early-voting/ |
With Jessica Pegula, Coco Gauff in top five, U.S. tennis is having a moment
Coco Gauff (left) and Jessica Pegula will both play in the season-ending WTA Finals in the singles competition as well as partnering up for doubles. (Gregory Bull/AP)
Sports fans tend to turn away from tennis after the U.S. Open champions are crowned, bringing an end to the season’s four majors.
But professional tennis has played on since Carlos Alcaraz and Iga Swiatek raised their trophies in September. And amid far less fanfare, this week marked a historic moment for Jessica Pegula, Coca Gauff and women’s tennis in general.
Following her triumph Sunday in the Guadalajara Open, Pegula, 28, vaulted to No. 3 in the world rankings, achieving a career high after 13 years on the pro tour,
Fellow American Coco Gauff, 18, made a parallel leap alongside her good friend and frequent doubles partner, reaching a career-high No. 4 when this week’s Women’s Tennis Association rankings were computed.
It’s the first time since 2010 that two American women have been ranked among the world’s top five, snapping the 12-year drought since Serena and Venus Williams were No. 2 and 4, respectively.
It was just eight weeks ago that the tennis world bid farewell to Serena Williams in a prime-time gala on Arthur Ashe Stadium that followed her first-round victory at the U.S. Open, which she had indicated would be the last of her career in telling Vogue that she was “evolving away from tennis.”
More recently, Williams, 41, has left the door ajar for a return to competition. But the narrative of a changing-of-the-guard atop women’s tennis is underway, much as it is in men’s tennis.
For Pegula, the Guadalajara victory was profound, her first title in a Masters 1000 event, which is one rung below a Grand Slam event in terms of ranking points, caliber of field and prestige. Winning a 1000 event, she explained afterward, had been one of her goals for the season.
Gauff celebrated her career-high ranking with a social media post Monday, tweeting: “special feeling waking up Top 5 in the world in singles and doubles. #grateful”
Both have one more tournament remaining: The WTA Finals, which starts Monday in Fort Worth, Texas, after being relocated from China in response to ongoing concerns about the safety and independence of Peng Shuai.
Only the world’s top eight players are invited to compete, so simply qualifying for the event is a significant achievement. Pegula and Gauff will not only be making their WTA Final debut in singles; they’ll also partner for the doubles event.
For nearly 20 years, men’s tennis has been dominated by the triumvirate of Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic, whose 63 collective Grand Slam singles titles have scarcely allowed anyone else to make a mark of consequence.
With Nadal the lone among them to compete at this year’s U.S. Open, the 128-player men’s field was deemed wide open. It was won by a teenager — the 19-year-old Alcaraz, whose grit conjured memories of a young Nadal. Alcaraz has since risen to No. 1 in the world.
With Roger Federer’s retirement, tennis loses another golden star
But it was an American, 24-year-old Frances Tiafoe, who injected electricity into a Grand Slam event that had dawned as a requiem. Tiafoe became the first American man to reach the U.S. Open semifinals since 2006, ousting Nadal in the Round of 16. By sheer force of his passion, and his forehand, Tiafoe also became must-watch TV.
Like Pegula and Gauff, Tiafoe is on pace to end 2022 with a career-high ranking. He’s currently No. 17. Taylor Fritz, at age 24, paces American men, at No. 10.
“To be brutally honest, my ranking is cool and everything, but I just want to win the biggest titles in the world,” Tiafoe told reporters after clinching the No. 17 ranking at the Japan Open earlier this month.
Every sport produces beloved champions who seem irreplaceable in their era. But sport renews itself.
Behind the achievements of Pegula, Gauff, Fritz and Tiafoe, American tennis appears to be doing just that. | 2022-10-25T21:29:56Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Jessica Pegula, Coco Gauff move into top five in rankings - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/25/jessica-pegula-coco-gauff-rankings/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/25/jessica-pegula-coco-gauff-rankings/ |
Public officials on the call to serve and attracting a new generation to government service
A recent survey shows rising discontent among federal workers who are leaving government service at record levels. On Wednesday, Nov. 2 at 9:00 a.m. ET, join Washington Post Live for conversations with former congressman Will Hurd and other public servants who have served at the highest levels about the rewards and challenges of being part of the federal workforce, strengthening trust in government and attracting a new generation to public service.
Former Congressman (R-Texas)
Jennifer Gerbi
Acting Director & Deputy Director for Technology, Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy
Content from WAEPA
The Importance of Federal Leadership
In a segment sponsored by WAEPA, Shane Canfield, CEO will discuss the future of the Federal workforce, the challenges that workforce will face, and the skills necessary to meet those challenges head on. As the country heads into another election season, the importance of Federal service and Federal leadership have never been more important. But how do we inspire the next generation of civilian Federal employees to answer the call to action?
Shane Canfield
Chief Executive Officer, WAEPA | 2022-10-25T21:31:35Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Public officials on the call to serve and attracting a new generation to government service - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2022/11/02/public-officials-call-serve-attracting-new-generation-government-service/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2022/11/02/public-officials-call-serve-attracting-new-generation-government-service/ |
Lenny Bronner
A voter casts their ballot as early voting begins on Oct. 17 in Atlanta. (Megan Varner/Getty Images)
STONE MOUNTAIN, Ga. — For weeks, Georgia’s Democratic and Republican parties had urged voters to cast their ballots as soon as possible instead of waiting until Election Day. Voters apparently listened.
More than 1 million Georgians have voted early, a dramatic increase from the last midterm election in 2018 and nearly on pace with the 2020 presidential election, according to the Georgia secretary of state’s office.
Early-voting centers opened across Georgia last week, and the vast majority of voters cast their ballots in person. Mail-in-ballot requests have fallen significantly from past election cycles.
While every demographic and region of the state has seen elevated turnout relative to 2018, there has been a surge of participation from women, Black voters and voters over age 50, according to an analysis by The Washington Post. The increases have been largest in the Atlanta region, while many counties in the state’s southwest and along the southeast coast are far outpacing their early vote counts from 2018. Cobb County, a fast-growing suburb of Atlanta, crosses both trends, having counted more than three times the number of ballots collected at the same point in 2018.
Analysis: The early electorate in Georgia looks more like 2018 than 2020
Early voting is underway in several other states, although most of them don’t release as much data as Georgia.
In Virginia, more than 411,000 people have voted so far, surpassing the total number of people who voted early in 2018, according to the Virginia Public Access Project. In North Carolina, more than 530,000 voters had cast ballots in some way as of Monday, down from 590,000 at this time in 2018, although early voting was offered for more days during that election.
In Texas, about 550,000 people have voted, according to the state elections office. At this point in 2018, more than 695,000 people had voted in Texas, showing a stark drop-off in engagement between midterm elections.
In Georgia, about 17 percent of the voters who cast their ballots early had previously waited to vote on Election Day in 2018, while another 17 percent of this year’s early voters didn’t vote in the last midterm election, according to the website GeorgiaVotes, suggesting high enthusiasm and early engagement. The numbers also underscore how voting patterns have changed in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic and new voting laws in the state.
“It’s only been four years, but the demographic transformation of the state has been quite rapid,” said Bernard L. Fraga, a professor of political science at Emory University who studies election law and voter turnout patterns. As Georgia’s population, political environment and laws have shifted, voter behavior has followed suit, Fraga said.
Georgia lawmakers enacted a sweeping voting law last year that added requirements and restrictions for casting a provisional or mail-in-ballot, leading many voting rights groups to worry that those voting methods were too cumbersome for many voters and vulnerable to legal challenges.
Expand access? A historic restriction? What the Georgia voting law really does.
“Communities of color may think they have to turn out and mobilize for fear that something could happen to their vote,” Fraga said, while “some White, more Republican-leaning voters who would have turned out early may be waiting to vote on Election Day because of these voter-fraud narratives” espoused by former president Donald Trump and his allies.
But most Republican campaigns in the state also want their supporters to vote early. Georgia Republican leaders warded off Trump from rallying in their state for fear that his false claims of voter fraud would cause loyal GOP voters to lose trust in the election process and not cast a ballot.
The early engagement has excited many Democrats, who see it as a sign of a successful mobilization.
“This was always our intention — to create a big Week One — and then to continue to build that,” said Lauren Groh-Wargo, the campaign manager for Democratic gubernatorial nominee Stacey Abrams.
Groh-Wargo said the campaign had expected voters who participate in every election to do so in the first week, allowing groups to focus on reaching voters who traditionally vote on Election Day or skip voting altogether.
Republicans also say they believe the high voting numbers will benefit them. They have touted the turnout as a sign that accusations of voter suppression in Georgia by Democrats are unfounded.
“While Stacey Abrams continues to spread the myth of voter suppression in Georgia, the 2022 general election has seen another record turnout so far,” said Tate Mitchell, the press secretary for Republican Gov. Brian Kemp, who is running for reelection.
Abrams has pushed back against such criticism. On Monday, she praised the “extraordinary turnout” while arguing that “suppression is about barriers. If those barriers are not completely successful, the credit does not go to those who erected the barriers. The credit goes to those voters who found a way to navigate, overwhelm and overcome those barriers.”
In interviews with more than four dozen Georgians who voted early at six polling locations in the greater Atlanta area last week, nearly all said they usually vote early but were especially eager this year to cast their ballots as soon as possible.
Tonya Stevens said she had a “refreshing” experience voting early in Clarkston, Ga. While she said she had encountered long lines and mismanagement from poll workers in the past, she had a smooth experience casting her ballot. Stevens said she was excited to vote for Abrams “because she’s a hard worker and believes in rights for all citizens.”
Georgia’s biggest county can’t find a top elections official
Joseph Dickinson said it was “extremely easy” to cast his ballot in Forsyth County, north of Atlanta, during the first week of early voting. Dickinson, 33, said he found it more difficult to vote in neighboring Dawson County during the 2020 presidential election because of the coronavirus pandemic. While normally a libertarian voter, he said, he voted for Republicans this year “because Georgia’s done pretty well. I feel good about it.”
Many counties in the Atlanta region had little to no wait times at most polling locations, according to county elections and registration offices’ tracking sites and statements to The Post, in sharp contrast to recent cycles, when many voters waited multiple hours to cast their ballots. Some elections and registration centers, however, showed waits of up to an hour on some days this past week. Georgians can vote early at any polling place in their county, but they must vote at their respective precinct on Election Day.
“In Georgia, a lot of people think that the vote is being suppressed. And I think personally, it’s just the opposite,” said Nora Culver, a conservative and a dental office manager from Stone Mountain, Ga., who voted early on Friday. Culver, who supports the new voting law, said: “One of the controversies has been that you couldn’t accept food or drink in line. Well, who does that anyway? Nobody wants food. I mean, just stupid things.”
Kayla Smith, a graduate student from Atlanta, said that while she voted by mail in past elections because of her studies, this year she returned to her home county to ensure her vote was counted properly. “I wanted to physically see my ballot get cast,” she said.
Smith, a recent Spelman College graduate, said that with multiple competitive races on the ballot, she was excited to support Democrats, especially Abrams, also a Spelman graduate, and Sen. Raphael G. Warnock (D), who attended neighboring Morehouse College.
“I do see the power of voting,” Smith said. “We know what the stakes are this time. And I think that’s been a common theme in voting since 2020.”
Bronner reported from Washington. | 2022-10-25T21:44:58Z | www.washingtonpost.com | One million vote early in Georgia, a dramatic increase from 2018 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/25/georgia-early-vote-election-2022/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/25/georgia-early-vote-election-2022/ |
Where things stand in the midterms, with two weeks to go
Stickers on the ballot box at a polling place during early voting on Oct. 25 in Milwaukee. (Scott Olson/Getty Images) (Getty Images)
Two weeks from Tuesday, the 2022 midterm elections will come to an end. There’s an enormous amount at stake — true in every federal election cycle but seemingly far more the case in a year defined by blistering fights over abortion, the economy and the state of democracy itself.
A cycle that was presumed to be an uphill climb for Democrats for more than a year remains remarkably close. Republicans have a narrow advantage in FiveThirtyEight’s average of generic-ballot polling, suggesting a far better cycle for Democrats than does President Biden’s still-low approval rating. But control of the House, Senate and gubernatorial seats is not measured in the national party preference of American voters. It’s measured state by state, district by district — and with two weeks to go, the Republican advantage is often obvious.
Consider the House. There isn’t good polling from each House race, much less polling over time that would give a better sense of what’s happening on the ground. So we rely on independent analyses like those from Cook Political Report. Its data suggest that there are 31 House seats in “toss-up” territory, meaning that either party has a chance of winning the seat. Unfortunately for Democrats, 23 of those seats are ones they hold or most recently held.
The distribution here is interesting. A lot of the seats that are Democratic toss-ups are in blue states: California, Oregon, New York, Maine, Illinois. There’s very little up for grabs in most red states.
Democrats have an eight-seat majority in the House, with three seats vacant. If Republicans net six more seats next month, they’ll control the House.
Cook also assesses Senate races. Here, the map is less weighted against the Democrats. Each party has two states Cook considers toss-ups: Nevada and Georgia for the Democrats and Pennsylvania and Wisconsin for the Republicans. There are another five states that are considered “leaning” to one party or the other. In a wave election, those might be expected to flip toward the dominating party.
For a more specific assessment of the Senate races, we can turn to FiveThirtyEight. It models the contest in each Senate seat, tracking likely vote margins over time. This allows us not only to see which Senate races are reasonably close — here meaning within 10 points in FiveThirtyEight’s model — but also how they’ve shifted over the preceding two weeks.
As it stands, there are 11 states within 10 points, six of which are held by Democrats. The Republican leads (narrowly) in one Democrat-held state, Nevada. The Democrat leads (slightly less narrowly) in one Republican-held state, Pennsylvania.
But notice those arrows we’ve superimposed. They show the shift in the FiveThirtyEight margin over the past two weeks. In every case except Georgia, the advantage has shifted to the Republican candidates. That doesn’t mean the Republicans are or will win all of these; the big shift in Washington, for example, still leaves incumbent Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) with the advantage. But it’s a reflection of how the momentum has shifted in recent days.
The gubernatorial picture is worse for Democrats. There are 11 races within 10 points here, too — nine of which are held by Democrats. In each case, the shift in the FiveThirtyEight margin has been to the Republicans over the past two weeks. Republicans now have the lead in two states led by Democrats.
Those shifts over the past two weeks could reverse, of course. It may be the case that turnout defies expectations for one party or the other. We may see the polling land precisely where these numbers would suggest.
Those caveats aside, it is the Republicans who are in the advantaged position. That’s in keeping with historic patterns for the first midterms of a new president’s tenure, particularly one with a relatively low approval rating. But — given the stakes — it is a scenario that Democrats have been desperate to avoid.
Insight: Fetterman, Oz get one chance to make their case while sharing a stage | 2022-10-25T21:44:59Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Where things stand in the midterms, with two weeks to go - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/25/where-things-stand-midterms-with-two-weeks-go/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/25/where-things-stand-midterms-with-two-weeks-go/ |
Woman hospitalized, dog killed after being struck by driver, Fairfax police say
A 53-year-old woman was injured and her dog was killed after they were struck by a driver Monday afternoon while walking on a sidewalk, police said.
Officers arrived at Wheatstone and Gainsborough drives around 5:40 p.m. to investigate the crash, Fairfax County police said. The driver, 27-year-old Travis Hicks, of Fairfax County, was traveling west on Wheatstone Drive in a 2017 Honda Accord and ignored the stop sign at Gainsborough Drive, police said.
Police said Hicks struck the woman as she walked with her two dogs on the adjacent sidewalk. Hicks continued into the community pool area and caused extensive property damage, according to police.
Hicks exited the community pool area in his vehicle, passing the woman he had struck, and was located in a nearby parking lot with the help of residents, police said. Hicks was arrested and charged with felony hit-and-run and later released, according to police and online court records. The online records did not list an attorney for Hicks, and efforts to reach him were not immediately successful.
Police said the woman is hospitalized in critical condition. One of her dogs died at the scene, while the condition of the second dog remains unknown.
Officials have not released the name of the woman. | 2022-10-25T22:28:34Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Woman hospitalized, dog killed after being struck by car, police say - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/25/fairfax-va-crash-dog-killed/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/25/fairfax-va-crash-dog-killed/ |
George E.C. Hayes, left, Thurgood Marshall, center, and James M. Nabrit join hands outside the U.S. Supreme Court on May 17, 1954, after justices declared the Brown v. Board of Education decision. (AP)
What would Thurgood Marshall say?
On the eve of oral argument in a pair of cases that could end the use of affirmative action in higher education, the greatest legacy of the first Black justice — Brown v. Board of Education, which he argued as a civil rights lawyer before joining the court — is now being invoked as a basis for invalidating any consideration of race.
The legality of affirmative action has bedeviled the court for decades, and for good reason: It’s a difficult issue both as a matter of social policy and of constitutional law. In its splintered 1978 ruling in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, the court invalidated a program at the University of California at Davis medical school that set aside 16 slots out of 100 for minority applicants.
“Preferring members of any one group for no reason other than race or ethnic origin is discrimination for its own sake,” wrote Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. “This the Constitution forbids.”
In 2016, with O’Connor retired but Justice Anthony M. Kennedy siding with the liberals, the court upheld a University of Texas program that took race into account as part of a “holistic review.”
Now, with the court transformed, comes a group called Students for Fair Admissions arguing that Grutter must be overruled. “Because Brown is our law, Grutter cannot be,” its brief asserts, citing Plessy v. Ferguson, the disgraced 1896 case that upheld separate but equal railway cars. “Just as Brown overruled Plessy’s deviation from our ‘colorblind’ Constitution, this Court should overrule Grutter’s.”
This is a twist on the Brown rationale that defies logic and ignores history. In Brown, Chief Justice Earl Warren, wrote“to separate [schoolchildren] from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.” Brown dealt with state-imposed segregation that excluded and subordinated children on the basis of their race — not with action aimed at bringing the races together.
As the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, put it in a friend of the court brief, “The Court in Brownsought to restore the Equal Protection Clause’s original history and purpose — to provide Black people meaningful, equal participation in education and society. Indeed, Brown proclaimed that the Fourteenth Amendment’s ‘great purpose’ is to ‘raise the colored race from [a] condition of inferiority … into perfect equality of civil rights with all other persons.’ ”
To now insist that the Constitution compels unthinking color blindness is to ignore that it was anything but color blindness that produced the current circumstances. Consider the ugly history of the University of North Carolina. The country’s oldest public university, UNC did not admit its first Black student until 1951 — under court order. It took until 1955 for it to eliminate its segregation policy and admit Black undergraduates.
After that, the university told the court, “freshmen enrollees from underrepresented minority groups dropped precipitously at UC, and dropped by 50% or more at UC’s most selective campuses” (Berkeley and UCLA). Alternative measures — including outreach to low-income students and those who would be the first in their families to attend college — have helped, but not nearly enough.
And yet, there’s every reason to believe that the perverse reading of Brown will fall on receptive ears. In a 2007 case involving whether public schools making voluntary efforts to achieve integrated student bodies could take race into account in making school assignments, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. was having none of it.
“Before Brown, schoolchildren were told where they could and could not go to school based on the color of their skin,” he wrote for a four-justice plurality. “The school districts in these cases have not carried the heavy burden of demonstrating that we should allow this once again — even for very different reasons.”
Which brings me back to Justice Marshall. “Unless our children begin to learn together, there is little hope that our people will ever learn to live together,” he wrote in a 1974 dissent.
What hope, you have to wonder, would that great man see now? | 2022-10-25T22:33:02Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | The Supreme Court could end affirmative action. What would Thurgood Marshall say? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/25/thurgood-marshall-supreme-court-affirmative-action/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/25/thurgood-marshall-supreme-court-affirmative-action/ |
Trial begins for two D.C. police officers charged in fatal moped chase
Karon Hylton-Brown on Kennedy Street in Northwest Washington. (Courtesy of Khali Brown)
Two years ago, after a young Black man on a moped was fatally injured in a traffic collision during a D.C. police chase, scores of irate protesters converged on a police station in Northwest Washington, clashing with officers in riot gear. At a time of raw racial tensions and mass demonstrations nationwide following the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, the crowd outside the station that night was incensed by the death of Karon Hylton-Brown.
Now a federal jury in the District will decide whether two officers involved in the Oct. 23, 2020, pursuit should be held criminally culpable for their actions during and after a chase that authorities say was illegally reckless. It began about 10 p.m. and ended minutes later in a crash involving the rented moped Hylton-Brown was riding and an SUV.
Hylton-Brown, 20, suffered head injuries and died in a hospital two days later.
“That man right there — great guy, Metropolitan Police Department Officer Terence Sutton — we’re here today because … he murdered Karon Hylton-Brown,” prosecutor Ahmed Muktadir Baset told jurors Tuesday in his opening statement in the trial of Sutton and Lt. Andrew Zabavsky.
“He did it with his police car,” by chasing the moped on narrow residential streets “with conscious disregard of the extreme danger of death or serious bodily injury” to Hylton-Brown, the prosecutor said.
After a Black man’s death, a D.C. street agonizes over the future of policing
Sutton, 37, and Zabavsky, 54, who have been suspended from the force without pay, are accused of conducting the chase in violation of police department policy and lying about it afterward to their shift commander. The two officers, both White, are charged with obstructing justice and engaging in a coverup conspiracy. Sutton is charged with second-degree murder.
“Mr. Hylton-Brown’s crime that night? Driving a moped on the sidewalk without a helmet,” Baset said in U.S. District Court in Washington, adding, “This was a murder and a coverup by two D.C. police officers who betrayed their badges and betrayed their oaths.”
Sutton’s attorney, J. Michael Hannon, disputed Baset’s version of events, saying in his opening statement that the officers had good cause to believe that Hylton-Brown intended to commit a crime that night in the city’s Brightwood Park area. Because of their suspicions, he said, Sutton and Zabavsky were obligated by department policy to take “investigative action,” meaning stopping and questioning Hylton-Brown.
Although Hannon did not directly accuse Hylton-Brown of throwing away a gun or drugs during the pursuit, he noted that criminals sometimes do so during police chases.
Hylton-Brown would “be alive today” if he had immediately halted the moped when Sutton, driving an unmarked car, tried to stop him with emergency lights and siren activated, Hannon told the jury.
“He chose not to,” the defense attorney said. “He might have been arrested with a weapon. He might have been arrested with drugs. But he’d be alive.” As for the alleged coverup attempt, Hannon said prosecutors would not be able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Sutton committed a federal crime.
Zabavsky’s lawyer, Christopher A. Zampogna, is scheduled to make his opening statement Wednesday.
Baset, an assistant U.S. attorney, said that after Sutton and Zabavsky, in separate vehicles, saw Hylton-Brown riding the moped on a sidewalk without a helmet, Sutton chased him from behind while Zabavsky drove on parallel streets, trying to get ahead of Hylton-Brown to cut him off. Video evidence shows Hylton-Brown riding erratically on sidewalks and cutting in front of oncoming traffic. Sutton lost sight of him at least once before catching up to him in an alley.
When Hylton-Brown darted out of the alley and onto Kennedy Street NW, he was struck by the SUV and suffered a “catastrophic brain injury,” Baset said.
Department policy prohibits officers from chasing a motorist merely because of a traffic violation, such as operating a moped unsafely. “The general order could not be more clear,” Baset said. Hannon said the officers were pursuing Hylton-Brown because he had been involved in a dispute in Brightwood Park earlier in the day and was possibly in the neighborhood that night to retaliate against someone.
As Hylton-Brown lay unconscious on the street with a pool of blood spreading around his head, Baset said, Sutton and Zabavsky conspired to “control the narrative” and “bury all this under a rock.”
After the officers turned off their body cameras and conferred with each other, Sutton gave the driver of the SUV clearance to leave, Baset said. He said they did not notify the department’s major crash unit, as was required. After Hylton-Brown was taken to a hospital, Baset said, the officers did not interview any witnesses to the collision or secure the crash site for evidence collection.
Baset told the jury that at the department’s 4th District station, on Georgia Avenue NW, the officers misled their shift commander, a captain, by describing the crash as relatively insignificant, downplaying Hylton-Brown’s injuries and omitting any mention of a chase. He said Sutton also wrote a false account of the incident in a police report. “All this left [the captain] with the impression that this was a minor fender bender,” Baset said.
Later that evening, however, after the captain saw body-camera video of the pursuit, he notified the major crash unit as well as internal-affairs investigators.
Four nights later, on Oct. 27, scores of people massed outside the 4th District station in a demonstration that turned unruly. Protesters broke windows of the building, smashed police cars and shouted epithets at officers, who countered by firing pepper pellets and stun grenades. Police said four officers were injured and one arrest was made.
Sutton and Zabavsky were indicted by a federal grand jury last year. Hylton-Brown’s family has since filed a wrongful-death lawsuit against the city and five officers who were involved in the pursuit, including Sutton and Zabavsky. The civil complaint alleges that D.C. police have a pattern and practice of chasing and harassing young Black men on motorbikes, sometimes fatally.
The D.C. attorney general’s office and lawyers for the two officers have declined to comment on the lawsuit. The criminal trial is expected to last about three weeks. | 2022-10-25T22:54:42Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Trial begins for two D.C. officers charged in fatal moped chase - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/25/trial-police-fatal-reckless-chase/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/25/trial-police-fatal-reckless-chase/ |
NEW YORK — Adidas has ended its partnership with the rapper formerly known as Kanye West over his offensive and antisemitic remarks. The German sportswear company said Tuesday in a statement that it “does not tolerate antisemitism and any other sort of hate speech” and called Ye’s recent comments and actions “unacceptable, hateful and dangerous.” It comes after Adidas faced pressure to cut ties with Ye, with celebrities and others on social media urging the company to act. It said at the beginning of the month that it was placing its lucrative sneaker deal with the rapper under review. Adidas is just the latest company to end connections with Ye, who also has been suspended from Twitter and Instagram.
PORTLAND, Ore. — Americans who live in apartments without private garages are stringing extension cords across sidewalks and waiting in line at public charging stations to power up their electric vehicles. EVs are soaring in popularity amid tax incentives and high gas prices, but how and where to charge up remains a dilemma that’s a barrier for most renters. Cities from Portland to Los Angeles to New York are scrambling for solutions, from installing hundreds of public charging stations on street lights and power poles to updating building codes to require electrified parking spaces in future apartment complexes and mixed-use development.
SAN FRANCISCO — Summertime revenue growth at Google’s corporate parent slipped to its slowest pace since the pandemic jarred the economy more than two years ago. The quarterly results from Alphabet on Tuesday indicate advertisers continued to clamp down on spending and brace for a potential recession. Alphabet posted revenue of $69.1 billion for the July-September quarter, a 6% increase from the same time last year. It marked the first time Alphabet’s year-over-year quarterly revenue has risen by less than 10% since the April-June period of 2020. The revenue slowdown created a drag on Alphabet’s quarterly profit, which plunged 27% from last year. The company’s stock fell nearly 6%.
REDMOND, Wash. — Microsoft on Tuesday reported a 14% drop in profit for the July-September quarter compared to the same time last year, reflecting a weak market for personal computers affecting its Windows business. The company reported quarterly net income of $17.6 billion, or $2.35 per share, which still slightly beat Wall Street expectations despite undershooting last year’s results. The Redmond, Washington-based software maker posted revenue of $50.1 billion, up 11% from last year, also beating expectations. Analysts were expecting Microsoft to earn $2.31 per share on revenue of $49.7 billion for the quarter.
NEW YORK — The number of Americans who do not have a bank account fell to a record low last year, as the proliferation of online-only banks and an improving economy is bringing more Americans into the traditional financial system. A new report from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. issued Tuesday found that 4.5% of Americans — representing approximately 5.9 million households — were without a bank account in 2021. That’s the lowest level since the FDIC started tracking the data in 2009 and down from 5.4% of Americans in the 2019 survey data.
WASHINGTON — U.S. consumers were less confident this month as concerns about inflation took hold again after receding in recent months. The Conference Board reported Tuesday that its consumer confidence index fell to 102.5 in October, from 107.8 in September. Consumers had grown more confident in the two previous months as rising gas prices moderated slightly even as prices for other essential items remained elevated. The business research group’s present situation index — which measures consumers’ assessment of current business and labor market conditions — fell sharply to 138.9 from 150.2 in September. Consumers’ outlook for the near-term also declined. | 2022-10-25T22:59:03Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Business Highlights: Adidas split with Ye, Google ad slump - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/business-highlights-adidas-split-with-ye-google-ad-slump/2022/10/25/631cd984-54b6-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/business-highlights-adidas-split-with-ye-google-ad-slump/2022/10/25/631cd984-54b6-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html |
Rishi Sunak outside 10 Downing Street after delivering his first speech as prime minister. (Chris J. Ratcliffe/Bloomberg News)
And for Americans, where folks still tend to see diversity as a matter of Black and White, Sunak is a reminder that it’s more complex than that.
His rise isn’t a thunder clap out of nowhere. There have been other high-ranking men and women of color in Britain, including the returning home secretary and the current foreign secretary. Still, Sunak resonates. President Biden even acknowledged the moment during his remarks at Monday’s White House celebration of Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights.
Sunak’s success seems more complex than the diversity milestones that are memorialized in the United States. His background is not that of the bootstrapping underachiever who overcame debilitating poverty; his parents are both professionals. He isn’t the outsider who has promised to speak for the disenfranchised or the overlooked. He is not an activist-turned-politician aiming to dynamite a stubborn bureaucracy. Sunak is the Establishment and in some of his first remarks since becoming prime minister, he isn’t preaching hope as much as he is warning that the economy is a mess so the populace better brace itself.
Sunak delivered his first remarks as prime minister from behind a little wooden lectern placed in front of 10 Downing Street. He faced a forest of media. He did not look particularly happy. As he addressed the cameras, Sunak was steadfastly sober. His predecessor Liz Truss had set a record for being a short-timer in office at only 45 days, her demise so brisk and brutal that even Larry the Cat — a longtime Downing Street pet — was pictured shunning her affection.
After a lifetime of vivid symbolism, Queen Elizabeth II faded to gray | 2022-10-25T23:59:59Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Class and race and the new British prime minister - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/10/25/class-race-new-british-prime-minister/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/10/25/class-race-new-british-prime-minister/ |
Frederick County rejects compromise on Sugarloaf Mountain’s future
A view of Sugarloaf Mountain in the Montgomery County town of Barnesville, Md., in July 2018. (Justin T. Gellerson for The Washington Post)
Frederick County leaders have rejected a last-minute compromise over environmental protections for Sugarloaf Mountain.
The county council’s 4-3 decision Tuesday night further complicates the public debate over the future of the popular hiking and birdwatching area north of the District. The vote will probably tee up more conflict between county officials and the property’s owner, who had threatened to close the park to the public in recent weeks.
At issue is who would be the best steward for the environmental protection of the area that includes Sugarloaf, which is privately owned but open for public access. The county says regulation would best keep the region protected from future development. The owner wants to manage the property without government regulation.
The proposed compromise would have taken the Sugarloaf property out of a larger overlay zoning district restricting the use of the land.
The vote came after a twisty legislative process that began more than two years ago as nearby property owners, county planners, elected leaders and concerned citizens began crafting a plan for the region. The result was an ecological blueprint for the use of nearly 20,000 acres surrounding the mountain.
Attorneys representing the owner threatened to cut off public access to the park. In response, a compromise amendment was introduced late last week that removed the Stronghold property from the larger new zoning overlay created by the conservation plan.
But as Tuesday’s county council meeting began, County Executive Jan Gardner addressed the council to express her disapproval of the compromise.
“I have to go on record to say I am disappointed in it,” Gardner said. “It puts a big hole, a multi-thousand-acre hole, in the very area that we want to protect. I really can’t understand how environmental advocates and people living near the mountain could support it.”
At-large council member Kai Hagen, who proposed the compromise, defended the amendment. “This is an effort to advance the strongest plan we can get,” Hagen said.
An attorney for Stronghold did not immediately respond to a request for comment after the vote. | 2022-10-26T00:30:36Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Frederick County rejects compromise on Sugarloaf Mountain - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/25/sugarloaf-mountain-vote/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/25/sugarloaf-mountain-vote/ |
Justice Alito says leak of abortion opinion made majority ‘targets for assassination’
Associate Justice Samuel Alito, in remarks during an event at the Heritage Foundation in Washington on Tuesday, took issue with those who have questioned the legitimacy of the court. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite/file)
Alito’s remarks during an event at the Heritage Foundation touched on criticism of the court, relations between the justices and proposals to expand the size of the Supreme Court. His comments come as polls show public approval of the court has dropped to record lows after the conservative majority allowed greater restrictions on abortion, expanded gun rights and limited the government’s power to address climate change.
The justice did not refer to any colleague by name nor did the interviewer, John G. Malcolm of the Heritage Foundation, but both were clearly referring to comments from Justice Elena Kagan, who dissented when the court overturned the landmark Roe decision. Kagan said during a legal conference in July that the court’s legitimacy is threatened when long-standing precedent is discarded and the court’s actions are seen as motivated by personnel changes among the justices.
Even as he took some of the blame for pointed, passionate language in the court’s opinions and dissents, Alito emphasized that the justices “have always gotten along well on a personal level” and are eager to return to normal after coronavirus restrictions and the “changed” atmosphere at the court after the unprecedented leak last spring.
“We have not in recent years been all that restrained about the terms in which we express our disagreement. I’m as guilty as others on that score,” Alito said, but “none of that is personal.”
In response to a question about proposals to expand the size of the Supreme Court, Alito said the number of justices is for Congress to decide. President Biden convened a bipartisan commission of legal scholars to examine possible changes to the high court in response to calls from Democrats to restore ideological “balance” on the court, now with three liberals and six conservatives, including three justices picked by President Donald Trump. The commission’s report described disagreement about proposals to add justices.
Without tipping his hand, Alito said Tuesday that a court should not be so large that its work becomes unwieldy and cautioned about making changes for political reasons.
Insight: Republicans already hitting Fetterman for stumbles during debate | 2022-10-26T01:53:11Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Justice Alito says leak of abortion opinion made majority ‘targets for assassination’ - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/25/justice-alito-says-leaked-abortion-opinion-made-majority-targets-assassination/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/25/justice-alito-says-leaked-abortion-opinion-made-majority-targets-assassination/ |
Fire breaks out at Blues Alley jazz club
No injuries were reported in the blaze, which affected the roof and attic area.
Trio Da Paz, one of many musical groups that have performed at Blues Alley in Georgetown. (L-R: Romero Lubambo on guitar, Nilson Matta on bass) (Josh Sisk/For The Washington Post)
Fire broke out Tuesday evening at the historic Blues Alley jazz club in Georgetown, according to authorities. Club management described the blaze as a “setback” that would be overcome.
No injuries were reported in the 6:30 p.m. blaze at the club in an alley behind the 1000 block of Wisconsin Avenue NW. The fire department said it affected the roof and attic area. The club is housed in a brick structure.
The extent of damage to the structure from the fire and smoke, and from efforts to extinguish the blaze, were not immediately clear.
However, the club expressed its intention to overcome problems caused by the blaze.
“Blues Alley will not be defeated,” the club said in a Twitter message. It said the club survived problems created by the coronavirus pandemic, and “will survive this set back.” | 2022-10-26T04:21:09Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Blaze breaks out at historic D,C, Blues Alley jazz club - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/25/fire-blues-alley-jazz-club/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/25/fire-blues-alley-jazz-club/ |
Motorcyclist is killed in Fairfax County crash, police say
Three vehicles were involved in Fair Oaks area collision, according to police
A motorcyclist was killed Tuesday night in a three-vehicle crash in Fairfax County, the county police said.
The crash was reported at West Ox Road and Penderbrook Drive, in the Fair Oaks area of western Fairfax County, according to police.
The motorcyclist apparently died at the scene. The circumstances of the crash, which occurred about 6:20 p.m., could not be learned immediately. | 2022-10-26T04:21:15Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Motorcyclist is killed in Fairfax County crash - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/25/motorcyclist-killed-crash-fairfax-county/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/25/motorcyclist-killed-crash-fairfax-county/ |
Dear Carolyn: I ended a long-distance relationship in a terrible way: by falling in love with someone else while my girlfriend was on the other side of the world; having an affair; and lying to both my partner and the new flame. I went to see my partner and ended it, then came clean to the mistress, who quite understandably wanted nothing to do with me.
I went through a period of intense self-reflection, got my life back into some semblance of order and eventually was taken back by the mistress. Although our reunion was intense and love was professed, she told me we still had serious trust issues to work through.
Then I had to go overseas for a month for work. We stayed in almost constant touch, and hopes were running high. The week before I came home, she told me she still didn’t trust me, could never trust me and didn’t want to see me again.
I’ll add that infidelity has plagued her family in the past and the above occurred as she was going through a difficult period with her job and finances.
I am a bit shattered. I know I deserve to suffer for lying, but I have also made a real effort at transforming. Since she took me back, I have been honest, and although this isn’t noteworthy in and of itself, does it conversely merit being completely shut out? Whereas I felt as if I didn’t deserve to speak to her after lying to her, things feel different now, given my current honesty. Or are they?
— Hurt and Confused
Hurt and Confused: They’re different — for you. You’re comfortable with your new, honest self, because, hello, you know exactly when you’re lying. She doesn’t.
You did apparently do all the right things to clean up the mess you made — but that gets you only halfway. The other half is up to her.
It’s possible that, for her, nothing has changed. How is she to know whether you underwent “intense self-reflection” or just a shrewd campaign to win her back? She’ll never be sure-sure either way.
All she has — all any of us has — is the sum of general experience (with people) and specific experience (with you). In her general experience, people cheat and lie. In her specific experience, you cheat and lie. Some people can add new information and extrapolate a different outcome, and some people, emotionally, just can't.
When people are able to trust again in the wake of betrayal, it’s usually a product of time.
It’s not just time for you to demonstrate, to her satisfaction, that your honesty isn’t just an act, although that is important. She would also need to spend time sorting through her own emotions and frailties, enough for her to be as rational as you’re asking her to be. And that often adds up to more hard work than people are able or willing to take on. They want the sure-sure that doesn’t exist.
Of course, this is all rhetorical; she doesn’t want to see you again. Choosing not to respect her wishes is no way to regain her trust. All you can do is better yourself for your own sake. And, perhaps, thank her — for doing you the painful favor of knowing her own limits so well. | 2022-10-26T05:00:25Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Carolyn Hax: Only one of them knew their romance was an affair - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/10/26/carolyn-hax-romance-affair-trust/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/10/26/carolyn-hax-romance-affair-trust/ |
China’s annual Communist Party congress was a highly choreographed affair, designed to cement Xi Jinping’s status as the unquestioned leader of China. But it was an apparently unscripted moment that really got people talking: The unexplained public ouster of former leader Hu Jintao.
The incident, which saw Hu escorted away from the stage as the party congress wound down on Saturday, has led to fervent speculation among both seasoned China watchers and moonlighters.
A new video released Monday by the Singaporean news agency CNA with a better view of the episode provided new clues, but no real answers, only adding to the confusion about what is going on at the upper levels of China’s leadership.
Whatever did happen, the incident offers further infuriating evidence of how opaque China’s leadership is. Before Xi assumed power as China’s leader in 2012, many assumed that he would be a quiet pragmatist like Hu, his predecessor as General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party in the decade before.
But Xi instead ruthlessly cemented his own power in Beijing, abolishing presidential term limits and refusing to designate a successor. He led a crackdown in Xinjiang that the United Nations said could constitute crimes against humanity and stamped out dissent in Hong Kong.
Some fear his ultimate ambition is to bring Taiwan under Beijing’s control — an act of imperial hubris that could spark a global war.
In an unusual moment, former Chinese president Hu Jintao was unexpectedly escorted out of the closing ceremony of China's Communist Party meeting on Oct. 22. (Video: Reuters, Photo: Lintao Zhang/Getty/Reuters)
To many, Hu’s exit from the party conference was a sign of Xi’s callousness. Geopolitical analyst Ian Bremmer said Hu had been publicly humiliated because of “power politics,” while former Swedish prime minister Carl Bildt suggested Xi had shown no sympathy as his predecessor was forced out.
This was remarkable. If there had been an urgent health issue with Hu Jintao one would have expected Xi Jinping to show some empathy with him. Nothing of the sort - rather ignorance. He was just taken away. That’s life in the 🇨🇳 communist party. pic.twitter.com/GC8PFrK2Nf
But there were others who reasoned that Hu, grey-haired at 79, had appeared frail — and that some kind of health episode could have sparked his exit, as claimed by Chinese state media. Bill Bishop of the China-watching newsletter Sinocism noted Hu’s son, a senior party official himself, was in the audience. Purging one without the other seems unlikely, Bishop suggested.
Speaking to the South China Morning Post, one unnamed Hong Kong-based China expert openly dismissed any talk of a “Stalinist purge” from Western voices and said it would make no sense for Hu or anyone else to challenge Xi on the final day of the party congress.
What binds all theories is a lack of firm information. Experts are basing their impressions on a handful of short clips from outside news outlets who were at the party. As my colleague Christian Shepherd wrote this weekend, Hu had been present at the opening ceremony and was expected to stay for the entire event. Instead, he was forced out mid-ceremony.
“Shortly after foreign journalists entered the hall, two suited men helped him to his feet and guided him off the stage, leaving an empty chair to the left of Xi,” Shepherd wrote, adding that video showed “a possibly hesitant or confused Hu first exchanging words with the men and Xi. After standing, he hovered in place, took a few slow steps, then stopped and turned to say something to Xi, who briefly nodded but remained looking ahead at the assembled delegates.”
Chinese state media has offered no clues as to what happened. It was only after widespread coverage of the incident that the Twitter account of Xinhua News Agency tweeted that Hu “was not feeling well during the session.”
The new footage from CNA adds one particularly notable detail: Hu had been looking at some documents on the table in front of him, before the current chairman of China’s legislature, Premier Li Zhanshu, took them from his hand. It’s at this point that Xi calls over the other men, who take Hu away.
But that document could be a vital clue or a red herring, depending on how you look at it. As one former Chinese insider told the BBC, why would the party put a document in front of Hu if he was not allowed to look at it? “No one can explain it until there is more evidence of what was inside the file, or what was being said at the scene,” said Deng Yuwen, a former editor of party newspaper the Study Times.
Even if the speculation is off, the symbolism is powerful. In the past, it was widely expected that former leaders would continue to hold sway even after they had left office. The Post’s William Wan reported from Beijing in 2012 that many expected Hu to exert influence over Xi through patronage and networks.
“Hu is trying to do with his successor what [former leader Jiang Zemin] did to Hu and what even earlier Deng Xiaoping did to Jiang,” an editor of a party publication told The Post. “Each generation tries to hold sway over the next.”
Now, it looks clear that tradition has been broken. Hu’s ouster on Saturday came as Xi’s vision for the future was rubber-stamped by the 2,300 delegates at the 20th National Congress, with himself as leader for at least another five years. The era of two-term leaders appears to be over in China.
Meanwhile, China’s once-powerful faction linked to the Communist Youth League — which includes both Hu and Li — was effectively cut out of power. Li, once considered a potential leader and a protege of Hu’s, was ousted from not only the premiership but the powerful seven-person Politburo Standing Committee.
Reading the tea leaves is perhaps harder than ever in China. Xi has increased the pressure on Chinese civilians to fall in line, crushing not just dissent but reasoned debate. Outsiders have few resources to understand the country. Western journalists are severely limited in what they can do in the country, while public data is delayed.
Even mighty Western spy agencies have a hard time understanding what is going on in the country, as the inconclusive U.S.-led push to understand the origins of covid-19 has shown. Ironically, the massive crackdown on CIA informants that crippled U.S. operations in the country began in 2010 — the last days of Hu’s China.
In many ways, it’s similar to the problems faced by Russia-watchers during the Soviet Union. With little outside information, Kremlinology were forced to create “absolute certainties on the basis of cloudy figures swirling in [their] crystal balls,” in the words of late historian Robert Conquest. And yet most missed the coming collapse of Russian Communism during the 1980s.
Pekingologists risk a similar miscalculation when looking at Hu’s fate. “In the end, how you interpret that moment depends partly on how you interpret China’s political system,” Rory Truex, an expert on Chinese politics at Princeton, wrote for the Atlantic this week. | 2022-10-26T05:05:23Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Hu Jintao mystery tests the limits of China-watching - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/26/hu-jintao-mystery-china/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/26/hu-jintao-mystery-china/ |
Fans of Kiwoom Heroes cheer on their team at their hometown stadium, Gocheok Sky Dome, in Seoul on Oct. 22. The team beat the KT Wiz to advance in the playoffs. (Video: Michelle Lee/The Washington Post)
SEOUL — Before she heads to the ballpark to root for her favorite team, the Kiwoom Heroes, Serim Cha always checks the day’s roster and searches YouTube so she can practice each player’s personalized and choreographed cheer.
“I know the regular players’ songs, but sometimes there’s a player whose cheer is not as well-known,” the 28-year-old office worker explained. “Dancing and singing together for the players is so fun. It feels like, as fans, we’re all united as one. We know the players can hear us and get our energy.”
Baseball games in South Korea are much more than hits, runs and outs. They’re akin to raucous rock concerts where what’s happening on the field can feel secondary to the manic energy in the stands. Fans are so immersed in their collective performance that only when a whistle signals a foul ball do many look up from doing air guitars — and duck if needed.
Lotte Giants fans, known for their passionate cheering, sing a team song at the Sajik Baseball Stadium in Busan. (Video: Michelle Lee/The Washington Post)
Cheerleaders and mascots shimmy, wave and clap alongside “cheer masters,” who guide the crowd through a player’s signature song and remind fans of the accompanying moves. The tunes typically are Korean and American hits — “Happy Together” and “Let’s Twist Again” are two of the vintage favorites — and they’re so core to the game that when cheering was banned during the coronavirus pandemic, some players complained that they struggled to focus without the noise.
Most fans don’t need any guidance, though; they already know songs and steps by heart. And they’re on their feet every inning — without any need for American baseball’s seventh-inning stretch.
“It’s obviously what jumps out, all of the passion of the fans,” said Mark Lippert, a former U.S. ambassador to South Korea whose enthusiasm for Korean baseball is so well known that people ask for selfies with him at the ballpark. He preps for his favorite Doosan Bears’ cheers by watching videos. “You’ve got this really fascinating game going on, and at the same time, you have this huge concert where the players’ cheer songs are known by the fans by heart.”
The fervor at these games has deep roots.
The Korean Baseball Organization was established in 1982 by dictator Chun Doo-hwan, a military general who had seized power three years early. A bloody democratization uprising in 1980 kicked off protests challenging the new government. Chun introduced cultural reforms in an effort to turn public attention away from politics — sports was one of his diversions — and in 1982 he created the country’s pro baseball league.
The league tapped into the intense fan base at the country’s high school baseball games, where group cheering had grown popular during the 1970s as the country continued to industrialize in the wake of the Korean War. The cheers were a way for Koreans who had moved to cities for jobs and other opportunities to express their nostalgia for home, said Yongbae Jeon, a professor at the department of sports management at Dankook University in Yongin, South Korea.
Cho Ji-hoon, the cheer master for the Lotte Giants, leads the team’s fans at the Sajik Baseball Stadium. He has held his position for 17 years. (Video: Michelle Lee/The Washington Post)
Actual cheerleaders emerged in the 1980s with the introduction of sports leagues, Jeon said, and in 1990, teams started developing marketing strategies around all of it. In the early 2000s, the personalized cheers for each player began.
“Korean professional baseball is collective, passionate and dynamic. It’s also empathetic,” Jeon said. “The Korean people have a culture of ‘heung,’ which is about singing and cheering together passionately. … The cheering culture in Korea has the power to make even people who don’t like baseball enjoy baseball at the stadium.”
Kiwoom Heroes fan Yong-bin Jo said he sometimes attends their games as a stress reliever, with victory or defeat less important than being with other fans sweating it out together in the stands. But at this past Saturday’s semifinal elimination game between the Heroes and the KT Wiz, Jo wanted just one thing.
“I will do my best, give all of my power, to cheer for the players so they can win,” he said, as he and his wife helped each other put on their team jerseys outside the stadium.
At the top of the ninth inning, the Heroes were up 4-3. From the Wiz fans’ side of the stadium, a song-cheer rang out: “Hit, hit, hit, hit. Please hit the ball, please hit the ball. A home run would be good, too!”
From the other side, the Heroes cheer master urged its crowd to go louder and stronger. “Strike out, strike out,” everyone chanted.
The stands may have battled to a draw, but the Heroes ultimately won on the field. The final championship series will take place next month.
Fans sing a cheer for Lee Dae-ho, a South Korean baseball legend who spent his entire Korean baseball career with his hometown team, the Lotte Giants. (Video: Michelle Lee/The Washington Post) | 2022-10-26T05:26:26Z | www.washingtonpost.com | South Korean baseball gives fans 9 innings of cheers, songs and dances - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/26/south-korea-baseball-fans-cheers/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/26/south-korea-baseball-fans-cheers/ |
NYC judge reinstates city workers fired for refusing vaccination
A health care worker directs a man who was just vaccinated to an observation area at a mobile vaccine clinic in Midtown Manhattan in December 2021. (Mary Altaffer/AP)
A group of sanitation workers who were fired for refusing to comply with New York City’s coronavirus vaccine mandate for government employees should be given back their jobs, as well as retroactive pay, a New York state judge ruled.
The city’s requirement for government workers to be vaccinated was “arbitrary and capricious,” state Supreme Court Justice Ralph Porzio, a Republican whose jurisdiction includes the conservative stronghold of Staten Island, wrote in an order filed Tuesday. The city has appealed the decision; New York’s Supreme Court is a trial-level court and its decisions are subject to review by higher appellate courts.
City employees were required to show proof of at least one dose of a coronavirus vaccine before November 2021, amid worries that winter would hasten the spread of the virus. The sanitation workers were terminated in February this year. A mandate for public-facing employees of private companies also went into effect in December 2021, but was amended to include carveouts for performers and athletes after sharp criticism.
New York City alters vaccine mandate, clearing way for Kyrie Irving to play at home
Porzio highlighted the exceptions, writing that if the mandates were “about safety and public health, no one would be exempt.” He said that while the health commissioner had the authority to issue public health mandates, the commissioner “cannot create a new condition of employment for City employees,” nor can the public health authority “prohibit an employee from reporting to work” or terminate an employee.
Mayor Eric Adams (D) announced last month that the city was dropping the mandate for private employees as of Nov. 1. He said at the time that ending the mandate for government workers was “not on the radar for us.” (Porzio wrote in his ruling that the mayor “cannot exempt certain employees from these orders.”)
A spokesman for the New York City Law Department said in a statement that the city “strongly disagrees with this ruling as the mandate is firmly grounded in law and is critical to New Yorkers’ public health.”
He added that the mandate, which was put in place by then-Mayor Bill de Blasio (D), would stay in place “as this ruling pertains solely to the individual petitioners in this case.” In announcing the mandate, de Blasio said that the “privilege” of serving New Yorkers as a public employee “comes with a responsibility to keep yourself and your community safe.”
Adams’ office told the local news publication City & State New York last month that 1,761 city employees had been fired due to noncompliance with the mandate. More than 1,400 of those were terminated in February, when Adams said that the workers were “quitting” and not being terminated, because it was a “decision” not to get vaccinated.
New York City drops vaccine mandate for private employers
Porzio said his order was “not a commentary on the efficacy of vaccination, but about how we are treating our first responders.”
“Though vaccination should be encouraged, public employees should not have been terminated for their noncompliance,” Porzio wrote.
Lee Zeldin, the Republican nominee for governor of New York, said at a debate on Tuesday evening that anyone terminated due to a state requirement for health care workers to be vaccinated should be “offered their jobs back, with back pay.” He also criticized “special celebrity exemptions,” in a reference to the athlete carveouts, although those exemptions were from the city’s mandate. | 2022-10-26T06:18:41Z | www.washingtonpost.com | New York judge reinstates workers fired over covid vaccine mandate - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/10/26/nyc-employees-covid-vaccine-mandate-supreme-court/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/10/26/nyc-employees-covid-vaccine-mandate-supreme-court/ |
Analysis by Narayana Kocherlakota | Bloomberg
Truss won the leadership of the Conservative Party, which the UK electorate had voted into power, by promising a range of deep tax cuts and government spending increases. Whatever one might think of her policies, they were her mandate. I agree with the many observers who expected them to lead to higher inflation, higher interest rates and quite possibly higher unemployment. But such adverse outcomes take months and years to play out. Her government fell in a matter of weeks. How could this happen?(1)
The big change came in the price of 30-year UK government bonds, also known as gilts, which experienced a shocking 23% drop. Most of this decline had nothing to do with rational investors revising their beliefs about the UK’s long-run prospects. Rather, it stemmed from financial regulators’ failure to limit leverage in UK pension funds. These funds had bought long-term gilts with borrowed money and entered derivative contracts to the same effect — positions that generated huge collateral demands when prices fell and yields rose. To raise the necessary cash, they had to sell more gilts, creating a doom loop in which declining prices and forced selling compounded one another.
• BOE Is Central Banking’s Crash Test Dummy: Marcus Ashworth
(1) I thank, without implicating, my University of Rochester colleague Christopher Sleet for helpful conversation.
Narayana Kocherlakota is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He is a professor of economics at the University of Rochester and was president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis from 2009 to 2015. | 2022-10-26T06:36:12Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Markets Didn’t Oust Truss. The Bank of England Did. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/markets-didnt-oust-truss-the-bank-of-england-did/2022/10/26/dd92c4d2-54eb-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/markets-didnt-oust-truss-the-bank-of-england-did/2022/10/26/dd92c4d2-54eb-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html |
Pearson Plc is the wayward pupil with a tendency to over-promise, who shows brief spurts of improvement only to bring home a disappointing report card bearing the words “must try harder.” The education provider and textbook publisher is in the midst of another periodic upswing, and markets appear willing to trust that the better grades are here to stay. It may deserve the benefit of the doubt this time.
One way or the other, Pearson looks destined to occupy a place in the annals of corporate reinvention after former Chief Executive Officer John Fallon bet the ranch on turning the media conglomerate into a focused supplier of digital education. He offloaded storied assets such as the Financial Times (which his predecessor, Marjorie Scardino, had vowed would be sold “over my dead body”), a half share in The Economist Group, and Penguin Books. It was a torturous transition from the start, marked by successive restructurings and job cuts, waves of M&A, a series of profit warnings and a shareholder revolt over the CEO’s pay.
Fallon’s successor, former Walt Disney Co. executive Andy Bird, took over two years ago and has broadly followed the same strategy, accelerating the push into online learning with Pearson+, a direct-to-consumer subscription service aimed at college students whose name echoes the Disney+ streaming service. On Monday, the London-based company posted nine-month sales growth of 7% (led by a 28% advance at its English-language learning unit), forecast operating profit that exceeded consensus estimates and raised its dividend by 5%. The stock rose 8.7% to its highest in more than three years (though gave up some of those gains in Tuesday trading).
Pearson is entitled to feel some measure of vindication. In March, the company said it rejected two offers from private equity firm Apollo Global Management Inc. at 800 pence and 854.2 pence per share, arguing they “significantly undervalued” the company. The shares slumped in response (having run up in anticipation of a possible takeover), but at 976 pence as of Monday’s close, are well above either of those bids. At a market cap of more than $7.5 billion, Pearson no longer presents such a tempting target for an acquirer. A yawning valuation gap to Relx Plc, the academic publisher to which the company is often compared, has been halved. Pearson is trading at a multiple of 12.3 times enterprise value to estimated earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization, versus 16.8 for Relx. At the start of March, those numbers were 8.5 and 16.1.
To some extent, Pearson has owed its troubles to factors that were beyond its control, such as falling rates of college enrollment in the US, a market that makes up a quarter of sales. Where the company can be criticized is in failing to move quickly enough to capitalize on trends such online delivery of college textbooks and second-hand renting, which undermined a once hugely profitable print business. That’s a failure of execution rather than vision, though. Education still represents a vast opportunity: a $5 trillion market that’s estimated to grow to $7 trillion by 2030, according to Pearson’s last annual report.
If some of Pearson’s struggles have come down to bad luck, time and chance can also work the other way. The pandemic has accelerated the move toward online learning. The company also, fortuitously, has some desirable Brexit-proof attributes, being a services exporter that gets most of its revenue from overseas and therefore benefits from the pound’s weakness. Every 1 cent movement in the dollar-sterling exchange rate equates to 3 million pounds of adjusted operating profit, Chief Financial Officer Sally Johnson told Monday’s earnings call.
It’s not all blue sky. Sales in Pearson’s higher-education segment, its second-biggest accounting for a quarter of revenue last year, are still falling: down 4% in the first nine months. The exchange rate could change direction, now that the markets have seen the back of Liz Truss. The company deserves a solid B for the moment, though. “Keep it up” are the watchwords now.
• Bored Being an M&A Banker? Become a Literary Agent: Chris Hughes
• College Students Catch a Break on One Cost at Least: Justin Fox
• Back-to-School Doubts Crush Textbook Publishers: Brian Chappatta
--With assistance from John Davies. | 2022-10-26T06:36:19Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Pearson May Have Learned Its Hardest Lessons - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/pearson-may-have-learned-its-hardest-lessons/2022/10/26/dd3f0efa-54eb-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/pearson-may-have-learned-its-hardest-lessons/2022/10/26/dd3f0efa-54eb-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html |
‘If America starts to blink, other nations might as well,’ said one British member of Parliament
Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal, left, shaking hands with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, asked the West for an immediate economic relief package of $17 billion at a conference in Berlin on Oct. 25. (Omer Messinger/Getty Images)
LONDON — U.S. allies in Europe are growing increasingly concerned that the united front presented by the West in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine could quickly unravel if Republicans are victorious in next week’s midterm elections, ceding an advantage to President Vladimir Putin just when Ukraine is making progress on the battlefield.
President Biden’s effort to aid Ukraine has so far enjoyed broad bipartisan support, and public opinion polls show strong backing for continued U.S. assistance, with 72 percent of respondents telling a Chicago Council on Global Affairs poll last week that they support sending additional weapons and military aid to Ukraine — including 68 percent of Republicans.
“A very important push to the Europeans is that the United States has been so prominent militarily and also financially — really nudging the Europeans into supporting Ukraine. If that were to fall through in the United States, then inevitably in Europe, where the energy and economic crisis is felt more strongly, you could imagine that having a big impact,” Tocci said.
Even if European allies were to seek to compensate for a reduction in U.S. assistance, it’s unclear whether they would be able to, analysts say. As a percentage of GDP, the United States lags behind many European countries in terms of the size of its contributions — Latvia leads, with assistance worth 0.9 percent of its GDP, according to the Kiel Institute’s Ukraine support tracker. The United States has given aid worth 0.2 percent of GDP. But that nonetheless eclipses by a huge margin the total amount given by any other nation.
The size of America’s military commitments in particular dwarfs the capacity of any of its Western allies to fill the gap — the United States has promised $27 billion, more than seven times the $3.74 billion pledged by the second-largest military donor, the United Kingdom. | 2022-10-26T06:37:32Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Europe concerned about U.S. resolve in Ukraine after midterms - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/26/midterms-ukraine-us-support-europe-concern/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/26/midterms-ukraine-us-support-europe-concern/ |
Catherine Engelbrecht, founder of True the Vote, and her partner Gregg Phillips. (Bridget Bennett/Reuters)
Catherine Engelbrecht, founder of True the Vote, and her partner Gregg Phillips alleged that the company, Konnech Inc., had allowed the Chinese government to have access to a server in China that held the personal information nearly 2 million U.S. election workers — an allegation the company has vigorously disputed.
Then, just days after the New York Times published an account of the company being a “conspiracy theory target,” the Los Angeles district attorney announced that its chief executive, Eugene Yu, had been arrested on charges that appeared to mirror the claims of the election deniers. True the Vote even issued a new release taking credit for inspiring the DA’s investigation — and Phillips said in a legal filing he had testified before a grand jury to assist the DA.
It seemed a rare case of an alleged election-conspiracy theory potentially having a factual basis. Yet, in a parallel track in another courtroom, a federal judge in Texas has blasted Phillips, Engelbrecht and True the Vote for their allegations about Konnech. The judge, Kenneth M. Hoyt, nominated to the bench by Ronald Reagan, even warned the group’s lawyer that “I’m thinking you may be played” by his clients. Hoyt indicated in an order last week that he would hold the election deniers in contempt for failing to comply with a temporary restraining order he had issued in September.
The outcome of this complex case may not be clear for some time. But it indicates how election deniers have begun to gain a foothold within the legal system to advance their claims.
Phillips first gained attention when he claimed without providing evidence just days after the 2016 election that he had “verified” that more than 3 million votes had been cast by noncitizens — just enough to wipe out Hillary Clinton’s margin in the popular vote tally. President-elect Donald Trump avidly repeated the claim.
Phillips never explained how he made this calculation. He and Engelbrecht announced a fundraising effort to conduct an audit to verify the statement. But the audit never materialized. Engelbrecht, in a 2017 video posted on YouTube, said not enough donations were received to finish the job.
More recently, Phillips and Engelbrecht were executive producers of a widely debunked documentary embraced by Trump, “2000 Mules,” that claims Democrats engaged in voter fraud to steal the 2020 election from Trump. Phillips said he had assembled geolocation data to identify people who allegedly traveled to multiple ballot drop boxes as part of the conspiracy.
Again, evidence to support such claims was lacking. In fact, the Georgia State Elections Board investigated the allegations and concluded the ballots belonged to legal voters and were deposited by qualifying household members. But the video, released this year, was a big hit. It grossed $10 million in revenue, with more than 1 million views, just two weeks after its release, according to Salem Media Group, which financed the film.
Starting in 2021, Phillips and Englebrecht also turned their sights on Konnech.
A Michigan software company
Yu, 65, a native of China, founded Konnech in 1999 after earning an MBA from Wake Forest University and two years after becoming a U.S. citizen. The company, with about two dozen employees, produces a software program called PollChief, used by more than 30 municipalities to manage election workers, including in Los Angeles County.
The company has said that U.S. election worker data has never been stored overseas.
“Konnech’s software products are not and have never been involved in voter registration or ballot counting,” Yu’s attorney, Gary C. Lincenberg, said in an Oct. 21 filing seeking a review of Yu’s bail requirements. He added: “Konnech hosts all customer data exclusively in its country of origin. This means that data belonging to Konnech’s United States customers, including Los Angeles County, is hosted only on secure servers within the United States.”
Yet, in August, Phillips and Engelbrecht appeared at a True the Vote conference in Arizona in which they suggested Konnech was working with the Chinese Communist Party — and that information about election workers was stored on three servers that are physically in Wuhan, China. They said they began investigating the company in 2021, gaining access to its database with the help of others — “some kind of James Bond kind of thing,” Phillips said on one podcast — and downloading personal information on 1.8 million poll workers.
In a video interview later that month, Phillips said the group formally reported its findings to the FBI and the Director of National Intelligence with the hope of ensuring the software was discontinued before the 2022 election. But then, he claimed, despite enthusiastic interest from lower-level agents, the FBI leadership “made us the target … they turned this whole thing on us,” for allegedly hacking into Konnech’s systems.
Konnech’s suit — and Yu’s arrest
On Sept. 12, Konnech filed suit in Texas against True the Vote, Phillips and Engelbrecht, accusing them of a “unique brand of racism and xenophobia” that had damaged Konnech’s business and led Yu and his family to flee their home.
Hoyt granted a temporary restraining order the same day, saying the evidence presented showed the company “had a substantial likelihood of success” in winning its lawsuit. He barred True the Vote from accessing Konnech’s computers and ordered the group to identify who accessed the company’s computers.
Then, on Oct. 6, Yu was arrested in Michigan, Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascón announced. His news release said the arrest concerned the “possible theft of personal identifying information” and stressed the “alleged conduct had no impact on the tabulation of votes and did not alter election results.”
But the statement also echoed a key claim made by Phillips and Engelbrecht — that personal data of poll workers resided in China.
“Under its $2.9 million, five-year contract with the county, Konnech was supposed to securely maintain the data and that only United States citizens and permanent residents have access to it,” the news release said. “District Attorney investigators found that in contradiction to the contract, information was stored on servers in the People’s Republic of China.”
Meanwhile, in his courtroom on Oct. 6, Hoyt was undeterred by the report of the arrest. “On the verge of this proceeding, of this hearing, suddenly the plaintiff gets arrested so he can’t show up in court,” he noted, telling attorneys for True the Vote that he didn’t “have any confidence” in their clients’ assertions. He forced one attorney to reveal in open court the name of the person who allegedly helped True the Vote access Konnech’s systems, dismissing concerns that his safety might be in danger. “There are no secrets in this courtroom,” he said. “I want to know names.”
Hoyt also elicited acknowledgment from True the Vote’s lawyer that he had “no personal knowledge” of any FBI investigation, despite Phillips’s claim he had participated in one.
The DA’s changing story
Initially, the DA’s office told reporters that True the Vote played no role in the investigation. But True the Vote issued its own news release, saying it was “honored to have played a small role in what must have been a wide ranging and complex investigation.”
Then, the DA’s office began to acknowledge to reporters that True the Vote had played a role.
“Phillips’ report to PID [Public Integrity Division] was the first step in a thorough independent and still ongoing investigation which ultimately led to the arrest and charging of Mr. Yu,” Gascón’s office said in a statement to the Fact Checker. “We initially indicated that Mr. Phillips played no role in the investigation. While we performed an independent investigation,” the statement continued, Phillips’s report “did in fact result in us initiating our investigation.”
In an Oct. 12 court filing in the Texas case, Phillips said he had testified before a grand jury investigating Yu and that an indictment of Yu soon would be unsealed. He argued that complying with aspects of the temporary restraining order “would jeopardize national security.” The DA’s office declined to comment on Phillips’s claim. A representative of True the Vote said they could not comment on Konnech because of the judge’s order.
A day later, the DA’s office did not unseal any indictment but instead issued a criminal complaint against Yu, charging him with engaging in a conspiracy to embezzle public funds. While both carry the same weight, an indictment would have revealed more clearly Phillips’s role in the case. Moreover, the complaint did not repeat the statement in the news release that information was stored on servers in China. Instead, the DA said the company relied on third-party contractors based in China — not an uncommon practice in a globalized world.
“The District Attorney’s Office discovered that Konnech employees known and unknown sent personal identifying information of Los Angeles County election workers to third-party software developers who assisted with creating and fixing Konnech’s internal ‘PollChief’ software,” the complaint said.
In Yu’s request for bail modification, his attorney disputed this claim, saying software developers in China did not receive actual personal data from the company. “Like most tech companies, Konnech works with employees and contractors across the globe,” the filing said. “For example, programmers in China help develop and test computer code for Konnech, generally using generic ‘dummy’ data, or sanitized data, created specifically for testing purposes.”
With the filing of the complaint, the DA’s office was required to provide its evidence for the charges to the defense — and Yu’s attorney seized on the apparently shifting claims. “Contrary to the prosecutor’s statement to the court, the discovery reveals no disclosure of PII [personal identifying information] to anyone outside of the United States,” Yu’s lawyer wrote. “Nor does it suggest the release of any PII to persons unaffiliated with Konnech” or that “any information was improperly shared with contractors or stored on servers in China.”
In court on Oct. 14, prosecutor Eric Neff asserted “this is arguably the largest data breach in United States history” — an apparent reference to the 1.8-million figure used by True the Vote. Konnech says that it never had records on more than 250,000 workers at a time, scattered among different databases.
In a filing Tuesday opposing changing the terms of Yu’s bail because of “the high risk of flight” to China, the DA’s office scaled back its allegations even further. “Under the Defendant’s direction, Konnech actually exposed the PII of tens of thousands of County workers to possible compromise in violation of his agreement with the County,” the filing said.
Under the initial terms of his bail, Yu was confined to a Los Angeles hotel room, but despite the DA’s opposition, a judge modified the bail conditions Tuesday to allow him to return to Michigan and removed home confinement.
Yu’s arrest led many municipalities to suspend their contracts with Konnech, including Fairfax County and Prince William County in Virginia. But Dean C. Logan, the Los Angeles county registrar, said the county would continue to use Konnech’s software for the coming election, notwithstanding the criminal complaint filed the by the county’s district attorney.
“Konnech has affirmed their compliance with the contract and at this time, no information has been provided to the Department confirming storage of data outside the United States or specific information as to what data is associated with the allegations,” Logan said in a statement. “Absent confirmation and/or additional information specific to the County’s data, use of the application has continued with security oversight and contract monitoring to ensure against disruption to the current election.”
Now the race is on for both sides to win approval for their actions in the respective courtrooms. | 2022-10-26T07:50:06Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The strange twists and turns of an alleged election conspiracy - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/26/strange-twists-turns-an-alleged-election-conspiracy/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/26/strange-twists-turns-an-alleged-election-conspiracy/ |
A photo of Alexzandria Bell at the scene of a growing floral memorial to the victims of a school shooting at Central Visual and Performing Arts High School on Oct. 25 in St. Louis. (Robert Cohen/St. Louis Post-Dispatch/AP)
The shooter who killed two and injured seven others at a St. Louis high school this week used an AR-15-style rifle and carried more than 600 rounds of ammunition, a police official said Tuesday.
Orlando Harris, a 19-year-old former student of Central Visual and Performing Arts High School, had ammunition on a chest rig and in a bag, and dumped other magazines in a stairwell and corridors, interim St. Louis police commissioner Michael Sack said at a news conference.
“It doesn’t take long to burn through a magazine, as you’re looking down a long corridor or up or down a stairwell or into a classroom,” Sack said. “This could have been a horrific scene. It was not, by the grace of God and that the officers were as close as they were,” he said.
Police received the initial call about an active shooter at 9:11 a.m., Sack told reporters Monday. Officers entered the school at 9:15 a.m. and engaged Harris in a gunfight at 9:23 a.m. He was shot about two minutes later, Sack said.
Sack also read from a handwritten document left by Harris: “I don’t have any friends. I don’t have any family. I’ve never had a girlfriend. I’ve never had a social life. I’ve been an isolated loner my entire life,” Harris wrote, adding that it was a “perfect storm for a mass shooter.”
Sack declined to comment on how and where Harris obtained the weapon. He has previously said that the school’s doors were locked before the shooting and that the school has metal detectors.
More than 320,000 students have experienced gun violence at school since Columbine
St. Louis officials also identified the two deceased victims: 61-year-old health and physical education teacher Jean Kuczka and 15-year-old student Alexzandria Bell.
Kuczka was a lifelong teacher who said she could not “imagine myself in any other career but teaching,” according to an online biography. “I love teaching Health and Physical Education and guiding students to make wise decisions. Respect is my favorite word!”
Kuczka, an avid bike rider, was a scholarship field hockey player at Missouri State University and a member of the school’s 1979 national championship team that was later inducted into the Missouri Sports Hall of Fame. She leaves behind her husband, five children and seven grandchildren.
She died after putting herself between the gunman and her students to protect them, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported.
Bell was a talented dancer, according to CNN. Her friends remembered her as a funny companion who “always kept the smile on her face and kept everybody laughing.”
Her father, Andre Bell, said she had an outgoing personality and was a member of her school’s junior varsity dance team. “No matter how I felt, I could always talk to her and it was all right. That was my baby,” he said, according to KSDK.
St. Louis Mayor Tishaura Jones (D) said the shooting was indicative of the national “scourge of gun violence” that continues to claim the lives of children. “It’s a public health crisis that requires federal action.”
In 2020, Missouri had the fourth-highest death rate from firearms by population, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. | 2022-10-26T07:54:27Z | www.washingtonpost.com | St. Louis school shooter carried ‘AR-15-style’ weapon and 600 rounds - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/10/26/st-louis-school-shooter-ar-15-rifle/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/10/26/st-louis-school-shooter-ar-15-rifle/ |
KMOX “Total Information AM” anchor Debbie Monterrey and her daughter, Caeli. (Debbie Monterrey)
“OMG THERE’S AN INTRUDER IN THE BUILDING,” read the first message from 17-year-old Caeli, a senior at the Collegiate School of Medicine and Bioscience in St. Louis, Missouri.
“By this point, I’m like just trying to hold it together,” Monterrey told The Washington Post. “Nobody knows what’s happening but me. And then I looked up at the TV in the studio, and our local Fox affiliate was doing an aerial [shot] of police surrounding this building and saying there’s an active shooter.”
Around 9 a.m. Monday, police say a 19-year-old former student armed with an AR-style rifle and some 600 rounds of ammunition entered the building that houses the Central Visual and Performing Arts High School and the Collegiate School of Medicine and Bioscience. He allegedly screamed “You are all going to die!” before unleashing a barrage of bullets that killed 10th-grader Alexandria Bell, 15, and physical education teacher Jean Kuczka, 61. Police said seven other students were injured in the shooting — at least the 34th to take place in a school this year, according to The Post’s tracker.
The shooter, identified as Orlando Harris, was killed after a gunfight with police. He left behind a letter saying, “I’ve been an isolated loner my entire life. This was the perfect storm for a mass shooter,” St. Louis Police Commissioner Michael Sack said in a news conference Tuesday.
An American Girl: Uvalde survivor is a voice for her slain friends. She's 10 years old. | 2022-10-26T07:54:33Z | www.washingtonpost.com | St. Louis reporter was live when shooting at daughter's school began - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/10/26/st-louis-school-shooting-reporter/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/10/26/st-louis-school-shooting-reporter/ |
‘Virtually every child’ to face frequent heat waves by 2050, UNICEF says
Children cool off in a water fountain in London this summer, which was one of the hottest on record. (Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP)
Catastrophic storms and unforgiving heat waves devastated many parts of the world this year, with Earth experiencing one of its hottest summers on record in 2022.
Now, a new report from UNICEF estimates that nearly all the world’s children — more than 2 billion — will be exposed to high heat-wave frequency by 2050. That is about 1.5 billion more children than are exposed today.
“The models tell us this is the case, as does empirical lived experience,” Lauren Gifford, a research scientist at the University of Arizona, said in response to the report.
She added, “Children now and children who haven’t been born yet are going to exist in the world in very different ways, and some of those ways we can’t even conceive yet.”
In the report, UNICEF defines high-frequency areas as those with an average of 4.5 more heat waves per year. It also estimates that “virtually every child on earth” will face more frequent heat waves, even if the world achieves a “low greenhouse gas emission scenario” of about 1.7 degrees Celsius of warming.
Across several parts of the world, the unrelenting heat has proven deadly for all age groups this past summer. The United Kingdom reported 3,271 excess deaths above the five-year average during government-issued heat health advisory periods between June and August, for example, while France recorded 13 percent more deaths in July and 11 percent more deaths in August compared with the same months in 2019.
Meanwhile, extreme heat has consistently been the United States’ deadliest weather event for at least the last 30 years, according to the National Weather Service. Last year, a study also found that Africa and Asia had the highest proportion of deaths caused by non-optimal hot and cold temperatures between 2000 and 2019.
For children, heat waves pose an acute threat: Young children and infants are more susceptible to heat-related illnesses, in part because their bodies cannot regulate temperature as effectively as adults. Children also lose fluid more quickly and are at a greater risk of heat stroke because they lack the judgment needed to taper their physical exertion or rehydrate.
“Children, especially young children, are more vulnerable than adults to the effects of extreme heat, which can cause severe dehydration, respiratory trouble and make them more vulnerable to other diseases,” Catherine Russell, UNICEF’s executive director, said in the report.
Extreme heat is also known to trigger symptoms in people with asthma, an ailment that affects about 6 million children in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Many American public schools do not have air conditioning due to cost burdens — about 41 percent of school districts nationwide need to update or replace heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) systems, the U.S. Government Accountability Office said. Meanwhile, a 2020 study has found that hot classroom conditions are linked to reduced test scores and lowered learning, with a disproportionate impact on students of color.
“School is for many kids the respite from a hard life, and there are schools where you can’t sit and learn when it’s 100 degrees in the classroom or you can’t be in the building because they’re closing schools,” Gifford said.
She added: “Climate change is what we call a threat multiplier. It takes existing hazards and exacerbates them.” | 2022-10-26T08:07:55Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Most children will regularly face extreme heat by 2050, UNICEF says - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/10/26/extreme-heat-wave-children-2050-unicef/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/10/26/extreme-heat-wave-children-2050-unicef/ |
Analysis by Michael R. Bloomberg | Bloomberg
The University of California system no longer factors SAT or ACT scores into admissions decisions.
The crisis in US K-12 public education continues to deepen, and decisions by many colleges and universities to abandon SAT and ACT scores are making it worse. Instead of demanding more accountability from high schools, colleges are expecting less.
In the latest dismal signs for students, scores on the ACT college entrance exam have fallen to the lowest level in 30 years, while fourth- and eighth-grade math and reading scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (often called the nation’s report card) show devastating declines. Taken together, these results underscore the urgency of K-12 interventions and the necessity of reinstating testing standards for college applicants.
It’s true that remote learning during the pandemic was disastrous for students of all ages. But systemic declines in student performance began before the onset of the pandemic.
Average ACT scores have declined every year since 2018, while the share of students failing to meet college readiness standards in any of its four subject areas — English, math, reading and science — has increased by 7 percentage points. With the exception of Asian students, teens of every race perform worse now than they did five years ago.
For 2022 high school grads, the average ACT composite score was 19.8 out of a maximum of 36, the first time since 1991 that the overall score dropped below 20. Only 22% of students met college readiness benchmarks in each of the four subject areas. The share of test takers who met none of the benchmarks rose to 42% from 38% in the past year.
In elementary and middle school, too, declines in student performance began before the pandemic — and are now deepening. This year’s NAEP scores show that students in fourth and eighth grades suffered the largest declines ever recorded in math. Only about one-quarter of eighth-graders scored at a proficiency level in math, down from one-third three years ago. The decline in reading scores, while not as dramatic, was no less troubling.
The fact is: The US public school system is failing to prepare most students for college and careers, and the problem is getting worse. Yet colleges and universities are pretending not to notice. Since 2020, the number of schools that have stopped requiring applicants to submit ACT or SAT scores has nearly doubled to more than 1,800, including many of the country’s most selective colleges. As a result, fewer students are bothering to sit for the exams at all. Since 2018, the number of seniors taking the ACT has dropped by nearly 30%, even as overall college applications increased.
The way to reverse declining student achievement is not by eliminating standards. It’s by doing more to help students meet them — and holding schools accountable for their results.
It should be clear by now that colleges should reinstate requirements for SAT or ACT scores. Anti-testing advocates have long claimed that ending their use in admissions helps low-income applicants, who have less access to expensive test-preparation courses and tutoring. But there’s little evidence that it actually increases economic diversity on campus.
If anything, removing objective benchmarks risks tilting the process even more toward students from wealthy families, by elevating the importance of “holistic” credentials like extracurricular activities, volunteering, letters of recommendation and so on. And by allowing students to opt out of testing, colleges reduce any incentive for high schools to worry about poor performance — which leaves students at an even bigger deficit, as this year’s scores show.
Reinstating ACT or SAT test requirements would make the admissions process fairer, promote high school accountability and — not least — help ensure that students are prepared for college once they get there. At the same time, colleges should work to increase the enrollment of high-achieving, low-income students — many of whom fail to even apply, despite being qualified. This is a challenge that Bloomberg Philanthropies is tackling in a number of ways, including working with colleges to step up recruitment in poor and rural high schools.
The failings of America’s education system threaten the country’s future as a global leader. In an economy that is more competitive and skills-based than ever, to walk away from standards is to limit students’ career opportunities and leave far too many dependent on government to make ends meet — or, tragically, enticed into criminal activities.
America’s students need interventions that are bold, intensive and sustained, to ensure they learn the skills they need to succeed — not only on tests, but in life.
Michael R. Bloomberg is the founder and majority owner of Bloomberg LP, the parent company of Bloomberg News, UN Special Envoy on Climate Ambition and Solutions, and chair of the Defense Innovation Board. | 2022-10-26T09:39:09Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Colleges Should Bring Back Testing Requirements - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/colleges-should-bring-back-testing-requirements/2022/10/26/6357a3f0-550d-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/colleges-should-bring-back-testing-requirements/2022/10/26/6357a3f0-550d-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html |
Justin Verlander’s Houston Astros won 19 more games during the regular season than Bryce Harper’s Phillies. That’s the second-largest disparity between World Series opponents in baseball history. (Eric Gay/AP; Tim Nwachukwu/Getty Images)
The Astros and Phillies will meet in the World Series. Here's what to know.
With two weeks remaining in the 1906 regular season and the Cubs having already clinched a spot in the World Series, The Washington Post declared that Cubs Manager Frank Chance’s squad “looks to have cinch over either Sox or Yanks in coming clash for world’s championship.” The White Sox had the worst hitting team in the AL, but they rode a dominant pitching staff, led by D.C. native Doc White, Nick Altrock and Ed Walsh, to their second AL pennant.
The Post enlisted Ted Sullivan, “one of balldom’s greatest judges of diamond merit,” to handicap the crosstown series ahead of Game 1. He encouraged bettors to look past the Cubs’ regular season superiority.
“Because the Cubs won by a margin of twenty or more games, it is no sign they can defeat the Sox,” Sullivan wrote. “It is all very good for a club to carry everything in front of it during the season, but those world’s championship games require players of mettle. I am not saying that the Cubs are not such. Chance’s men make up the most wonderful aggregation of modern times. In these few games where every man is bending every fiber of his system to win, not more than 40 percent of real ball playing will enter into victory. Fully 60 percent of the game will be nerve.”
“The pitchers are equal all around,” he continued. “The battles will be confined to the pitchers. Walsh and his spitter working — well, look out for it. Odds 2 to 1? Why, that’s a bogus bet. Even money will be the bet Tuesday morning. The Cubs will not have a cinch. White, Altrock and Walsh will be the hardest nuts the Cubs have cracked this year. Mark my words!”
Sullivan’s words proved prescient.
The White Sox took Game 1, 2-1, behind a strong performance from Altrock, who allowed four hits and one earned run in a complete game victory. The Cubs evened the series with a 7-1 rout in Game 2, and after the teams traded shutouts in Games 3 and 4, the White Sox won Games 5 and 6 to capture the title. White earned the save in Game 5 and went the distance in the White Sox’s 8-3 win in the clincher. The Cubs hit .201 in the series, well below their NL-leading .262 clip during the regular season.
“Hail to [owner Charles] Comiskey’s great White Sox, champions of the baseball world!” Jack Ryder wrote on the front page of The Post the following day. “A game team — fighting against heavy odds, the second choice of nearly every baseball expert in the country, Fielder Jones and his men have lowered the cocksure colors of Charley Murphy’s Cubs and sent them back to the cage of oblivion. Tackling a grand ball team which had conquered the mighty Giants of New York and established a world’s record for victories in a season, the pale-socked athletes, who made the South Side of Chicago their home, were undismayed by the prestige of their famous and powerful opponents and marched on to a deserved and glorious victory, so much the more creditable to them because it was unexpected by all except themselves.”
“It was not luck,” White, who earned his dentistry degree from Georgetown and ran his dental practice during the offseason, said upon returning to D.C. a champion. “It was not our pitchers, although, of course, we had to contribute our mite. It was the nerve, skill, and indomitable spirit of true victors which make those Sox fight. … That infield is a marvel. Walsh, Altrock, [Frank] Owen, [Frank] Smith, or any of us never faltered with that stone wall behind us. They said we couldn’t hit. Why, we don’t have to hit to win games. The Sox won games this summer while their opponents were hitting our pitchers for keeps. They used the gray matter in their noodles quicker and with better results, born of years of experience, than their opponents. That is the secret of the Sox’s success.”
Bryce Harper lives for the spotlight. Now he's owning October.
No offense to Manager Rob Thomson’s club, but if the Phillies are rocking out to their postseason anthem “Dancing on My Own” after upsetting the Astros, it probably won’t have much to do with the gray matter in their noodles, or their improved-but-far-from-stellar defense behind ace pitchers Zack Wheeler and Aaron Nola. It will more likely depend on Harper, Rhys Hoskins and Kyle Schwarber continuing to mash; Philadelphia leads all teams with a .442 slugging percentage this postseason. | 2022-10-26T09:40:23Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Astros-Phillies is the most lopsided World Series matchup since 1906 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/26/astros-phillies-world-series-mismatch/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/26/astros-phillies-world-series-mismatch/ |
Aaron Rodgers and Tom Brady won’t go quietly. The greats never do.
Aaron Rodgers and Tom Brady share a 3-4 record, and unusual struggles. (Patrick Semansky/AP and Rusty Jones/AP) (Patrick Semansky and Rusty Jones/AP)
This is when you’ll want to watch and listen to Tom Brady and Aaron Rodgers most closely. It’s the point at which you might actually take something useful from them, as opposed to just awe.
It’s foolishness to study the greats in their prime. They’re largely mute about their greatness, and physically unrelatable. Far more instructive are these wintry lions, with their pained personal problems and losing streaks, their mortality finally showing in their creased faces and their irritable voices. For a master class in how to report for work when you may not feel like it, how to drag yourself from semiconscious surrender into purposeful action, watch what Brady and Rodgers do over the rest of this season, how they try to scrape the very bottom of their capacities. Promise, they won’t take their current 3-4 records passively. They’ll try to do something about it. Maybe even something great.
Older athletes are the most interesting. That conviction comes from 40 years of watching prodigies become champions, and champions become veterans, and veterans become retirees. It comes from a long-ago conversation with Nolan Ryan back in 1989, when the pitcher was 42, and the Houston Astros had insulted him by demanding he take a $200,000 pay cut despite nine years of service, which led him to consider quitting before he jumped to the lowly Texas Rangers.
“I don’t know about this growing old gracefully,” he said to me in the clubhouse one afternoon. “It’s a hell of a lot of work.”
Ryan went on to lead the league in strikeouts and inspire the Rangers to such an unexpected winning season — they’d finished below .500 in seven of the previous eight years — that the team’s new owner, George W. Bush, told me, “It’s like Disneyland every day.”
Ryan went on to pitch four more years, recorded his 5,000th strikeout and threw a record seventh no-hitter at 44. And at 46, he put an elbow around the neck of the mound-charging Robin Ventura, two decades his junior, held the younger man like a roped calf and gave him two fat lips with a flurry of fists for his insolence, and then returned to the mound with his jersey disheveled to go hitless the rest of the way and beat the White Sox.
Please Don’t Tarnish Your Legacy, that’s what everyone says about an aging great — and if they listened, how many third acts would never happen? That’s not to say it will happen for Aaron Rodgers, who at 38 has lost three in a row with the Green Bay Packers. But when he’s asked if his team can still go on a run, he says, “You’re goddamn right.” The armchair analysts are already suggesting he shouldn’t have sought a contract extension, but there’s a light in Rodgers’s lantern eyes when he talks about how Sunday night they’ve got to face the Buffalo Bills with the elastic-legged, shock-armed 26-year-old Josh Allen. “Might be the best thing for us,” Rodgers remarked. “Nobody’s going to give us a chance, going to Buffalo, chance to get exposed. Might be the best thing for us.”
A game such as that a player ought to see not as a threat but an opportunity, he said. “It should be, unless they don’t think they’re the right person for the job,” he added. “I think I’m the right person for the job.” What’s more, he suggested harshly during his weekly spot on “The Pat McAfee Show,” other jobs could be at stake. Clearly, if Rodgers is going out. he intends to go with his butt-kicking boots on.
When Ryan finally quit at 46, he did so only because of a torn ligament in his arm, and he could still hurl it 98 mph. That was partly thanks to his mechanics coach, a then-obscure guy named Tom House. Whose name you may recognize for his work in extending the arm of one Thomas Edward Brady.
You could read Brady’s decision to unretire last spring as a kind of neediness, or you could see retirement as he apparently does, an impossible demand that he abandon his “authentic” self to become a mundanity-uttering booth announcer with a thickening middle. The assumption is that Brady surely repents of the decision to return and that he is “a shell of himself,” as commentator Rex Ryan hazarded, and indeed he seems thin to the point of sickness.
But as with Rodgers, whatever tension Brady is feeling is accompanied by defiance. Brady made it clear in his weekly podcast with Jim Gray that there “is no immediate retirement in my future. … I never quit on anything in my life. I’ve never had any quit in my body, I’ve never quit on anything.” Fact is, Brady is throwing well and with velocity — with eight touchdowns to one interception, despite playing on an injury-pocked team with a new line that has yet to coalesce.
“When you have a car crash, there’s people who run to the car crash and people who run away from the car crash,” Brady said on his podcast. “And really, when it comes down to it, you want to be with the people who run to it, that are trying to fix it and solve it. And the last thing you want is the people who run away. Everyone can be there during the parades. Everyone can be there when everyone is telling you how great you are. Who are you when things aren’t great? Who are you when things don’t go your way?”
Those who are certain they know how the narratives will end for Brady and Rodgers don’t understand the influence true greats, even when they are irascible and confrontational, can have on a team.
Nobody knows what these two old boys will do the rest of the way. What I do know is, the only thing that tortures a great more than losing is the idea of quitting when there might be something left. Watch Brady and Rodgers, and you may not see their old triumphalism. You certainly won’t see a willingness to age gracefully. What you will see is an absorption in craft even in the face of intense pressures and excruciating circumstances, and an interest in what they might be able to call up in themselves even in the deepest-trough seasons of their lives. Above all, you’ll see the determination to be actors rather than spectators in their own lives. And that’s worth watching, and even imitating. | 2022-10-26T09:40:35Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Aaron Rodgers and Tom Brady won’t go quietly. The greats never do. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/26/tom-brady-aaron-rodgers/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/26/tom-brady-aaron-rodgers/ |
When things fall apart, NFL owners often turn to Black coaches to serve as interim leaders. But they face a tougher road to capitalize on those auditions than their White peers.
With the losses mounting and their top two quarterbacks injured, the Carolina Panthers this month did what flailing NFL franchises often do: They fired their coach.
The Panthers’ search for a new coach is likely to span months and will help shape the future of the franchise. But for the rest of this season, owner David Tepper needed someone to keep things from falling even further apart. After dismissing Matt Rhule, he turned to Steve Wilks, who was coaching the team’s secondary, to be its interim leader.
It’s a daunting position in which success is a rarity for any coach. But like most things in NFL coaching circles, it is even more daunting for a Black coach. An analysis of coaching data by The Washington Post shows that the biases entrenched in NFL decision-making also make it harder for Black coaches to capitalize on interim auditions.
This football season, The Washington Post is examining the NFL’s decades-long failure to equitably promote Black coaches to top jobs despite the multibillion-dollar league being fueled by Black players.
With only 32 head coaching positions in the NFL, every hire is scrutinized, but the Panthers’ decision will be even more closely monitored. Wilks, who is Black, earlier this year joined former Miami Dolphins coach Brian Flores in an unprecedented class-action racial discrimination lawsuit against the NFL and its teams. Wilks was hired as coach of the Arizona Cardinals in 2018 but was fired after one season with a 3-13 record. The lawsuit alleges Wilks was a “bridge coach” who was “not given any meaningful chance to succeed.”
Wilks declined to be interviewed for this story, but when asked at a news conference following his promotion whether he had assurances from the Panthers that he would be seriously considered for the full-time role when the season ends, he replied, “To be quite honest with you, I’m not really looking beyond [the present].”
Tepper was noncommittal, telling reporters that Wilks would be considered “if he does an incredible job.”
The Panthers are 1-1 under Wilks so far, but the team traded star running back Christian McCaffrey for four draft picks, effectively signaling that ownership is prioritizing future success.
Steve Wilks took over as interim coach of the Carolina Panthers after Matt Rhule was fired. Just a few days later, the team had traded two key offensive players. (Ashley Landis/AP)
The experiences of Black interim coaches call into question whether the Panthers will consider Wilks a legitimate candidate. Though Black coaches are vastly underrepresented among the league’s head coaches and coordinators, they have historically been better represented among the league’s interim coaches, The Post found. The trend echoes a corporate America phenomenon known as the “glass cliff,” in which women and people of color are called on to lead in times of crisis.
It also, some Black NFL veterans said, allows teams to get credit for hiring Black leaders when the stakes are low. “It might pad some of those stats” that measure the league’s diversity, said Terry Robiskie, a Black former coach who twice served as an interim coach but never received a full-time job. He said his interim stints should not count when the league tallies its Black head coaches.
“I think it’s a way to say we gave a guy a chance, to be honest with you,” said Maurice Jones-Drew, a Black former NFL running back who played under a Black interim coach, Mel Tucker, with the Jacksonville Jaguars. “We’re giving him an opportunity, even though it’s a s---ty opportunity.”
If an interim job is indeed an audition for a full-time one, Black coaches are held to a higher standard.
[How the NFL blocks Black coaches]
Typically inheriting losing teams midseason, interim coaches rarely perform well, amassing a combined winning percentage of .347 since 1990. For White coaches, The Post found, performing this poorly appears to have little impact on their ability to turn their interim experience into a full-time job: Ten of 32 White interims who replaced full-time coaches midseason were promoted to the permanent job, with a combined winning percentage of just .361.
For Black coaches, though, the bar is higher. Just three of 14 Black interim coaches, not including Wilks this season, have been retained on a permanent basis — and all three led their struggling teams to records of .500 or better.
“We hope that there’s not a double standard,” Troy Vincent, the NFL’s executive vice president of football operations, said in an interview, adding that the league must continue “reimagining” hiring practices to promote fairness.
When decision-makers look beyond tangible measures of coaching ability, such as performance, team improvement and experience, Vincent said, “this is where nepotism and cronyism shows up.”
A tryout or stopgap?
White interim coaches have been given the permanent job after varying levels of success, including seven times with a losing record as the interim. Meanwhile, the three promoted Black interims each had at least a .500 record.
The size of the circles indicates the number of games as the interim coach.
The white stroke indicates interim coaches
who were promoted to the full-time role.
Crennel
White interim coaches have been given the permanent job after varying levels of success, including seven times with a losing record. Meanwhile, the three promoted Black interim coaches each posted at least a .500 record.
The white stroke indicates interim coaches who
were promoted to the full-time role.
The white stroke indicates interim coaches who were promoted to the full-time role.
White interim
Black interim
The white stroke indicates hired interim coaches.
Black former interim coaches stress the difficulty of the job and say the experience differs significantly from a full-time role, making it an unfair gauge of their ability. Yet the wins and losses of interim coaches are recorded in NFL history the same way as those of full-time coaches, so they are often included among the count of Black head coaches.
Twenty-five Black men have served as head coaches in the league’s modern history. Just 20 have been full-time coaches.
Wilks said he's not focused on whether he will be given a chance to be the Panthers' full-time coach. (Jacob Kupferman/AP)
As more coaches inevitably are fired and replaced by interims this season, and with the threat of the Flores lawsuit looming, the hiring practices of the NFL’s mostly White owners will remain under intense scrutiny. Nearly two decades after the league implemented its celebrated “Rooney Rule,” requiring franchises to interview candidates of color for head coaching jobs, Black coaches remain disadvantaged. They’ve been hired at a lower rate over the past five years than at any other time since the introduction of the Rooney Rule, The Post found, and they recently have been fired, on average, after better performances than their White peers.
In interviews with The Post, NFL officials have acknowledged the league’s shortcomings but touted its efforts to improve diversity, including by strengthening the Rooney Rule to require additional interviews and to cover more roles. Before 2020, an NFL team could adhere to the policy simply by interviewing its own Black interim coach.
[How The Post gathered and analyzed data for its series on Black NFL coaches]
Cyrus Mehri, an attorney who co-founded the Fritz Pollard Alliance, a nonprofit that monitors the NFL’s diversity efforts, and who was integral to the introduction of the Rooney Rule, said the organization historically has welcomed opportunities for coaches of color to serve in interim roles, viewing them as a chance “to shine against tremendous adversity and to help break down the barriers of racial bias.” He points to the handful of Black coaches who used the job as a steppingstone to full-time roles.
But he said The Post’s analysis, which found drastically different performance levels are needed for Black and White interim coaches to land full-time jobs, is “devastating.”
“It just shows again,” Mehri said, “that Black coaches are held to a higher standard.”
Mike Singletary is one of three Black interim coaches to be hired as a full-time coach for the next season. He led the San Francisco 49ers from 2008 to 2010. (Michael Zagaris/Getty Images)
Set up to fail
Since 1990, the year after Art Shell became the first Black head coach in the modern era of the NFL, Black men have only accounted for about 13 percent of full-time head coaching positions, despite as much as 70 percent of the league’s players being Black.
Their representation isn’t much better at offensive and defensive coordinator, the NFL’s most sought-after and highest-paying assistant jobs. Black men held about 17 percent of those roles from 1999 to 2021, according to data compiled by The Post and the Global Sport Institute at Arizona State University.
But Black coaches have held 31 percent of the interim head coaching roles since 1990. That’s a relatively large share that wouldn’t be significant — and could even be a welcome trend — if not for the tougher road Black coaches face in securing top jobs on a permanent basis and for how it promotes the suggestion that more Black men have been head coaches.
“It’s like you trust me to take over a team in the toughest situation, but you don’t trust me or think that I can get the job done, or don’t think the fans are going to want to see me as the head coach full-time,” Tucker said, referencing the disparity between Black interim coaches and Black full-time coaches. “That’s a tough pill to swallow.”
There can be value in holding an interim role, Vincent noted. “You are the leader every day, leading the organization,” he said. “You’re talking to the media. You’re coming up with game plans.”
But a team in need of an interim coach typically is a team in disarray. And the assistant promoted to interim coach and charged with steadying the ship is at a natural disadvantage: Interim coaches can’t rely on months of offseason work developing a culture, implementing a strategy and designing a playbook. They don’t hire their assistants or spend time constructing a roster that aligns with their vision. And usually they must scramble to prepare for a game that’s less than a week away.
Mel Tucker went 2-3 as the Jacksonville Jaguars' interim coach in 2011. (Sam Greenwood/Getty Images)
Tucker is one of five Black men who served as an interim NFL coach but never as a full-time head coach. (Sam Greenwood/Getty Images)
LEFT: Mel Tucker went 2-3 as the Jacksonville Jaguars' interim coach in 2011. (Sam Greenwood/Getty Images) RIGHT: Tucker is one of five Black men who served as an interim NFL coach but never as a full-time head coach. (Sam Greenwood/Getty Images)
Tucker, now the head coach at Michigan State University, is one of the five Black men who served as an interim NFL coach but never as a full-time coach. Being Jacksonville’s interim leader for five games was the “hardest thing I’ve ever done in coaching,” he said.
Anthony Lynn, the interim coach for the Buffalo Bills in 2016, called the quick ascension to the role with one game left in the season a “terrifying” experience. Robiskie said usually with interim stints, “this ship is sinking” — or “maybe this ship is already at the bottom of the ocean.”
That’s why they rarely win. Since 1990, interim coaches have combined for a 111-209 record. Yet Vincent said coaches see these difficult jobs as ones they can’t turn down. They worry about the perception of not accepting an opportunity to serve as a head coach, and they cling to hope that the stint could be a legitimate audition for the permanent job.
Black coaches might be more likely to land these roles because “we normally have to control the locker room,” said Hue Jackson, the former full-time coach of the Oakland Raiders and Cleveland Browns. “We normally have the strongest relationships — not that our Caucasian brothers don’t, but we relate to so many different guys on so many different levels.”
Albert Connell, a wide receiver for Washington in 2000, said Robiskie, who had been elevated from passing game coordinator after the late-season firing of Norv Turner, became a “go-to” coach for most of the team’s Black players, available anytime they needed to talk. Those three games were the only time Connell played for a Black head coach in his football career. Connell, who is Black, considered Robiskie a father figure.
When he took over, “we wanted to play our best ball just to make sure Coach Robiskie would stay around or he would get this opportunity,” Connell said. But Washington went 1-2, and the franchise then hired Marty Schottenheimer, who lasted just one season.
Terry Robiskie was a “go-to” coach for wide receiver Albert Connell and Washington's other Black players. (Rich Lipski/The Washington Post)
Connell said the team “wanted to play our best ball” for Robiskie. (John McDonnell/The Washington Post)
Robiskie left the franchise after his three-game stint as interim coach and later served in the same role with the Cleveland Browns. (Jonathan Newton/The Washington Post)
LEFT: Connell said the team “wanted to play our best ball” for Robiskie. (John McDonnell/The Washington Post) RIGHT: Robiskie left the franchise after his three-game stint as interim coach and later served in the same role with the Cleveland Browns. (Jonathan Newton/The Washington Post)
The increased tendency to hire a Black coach in a moment of turbulence mirrors the “glass cliff” theory, coined by University of Exeter researchers Michelle Ryan and Alexander Haslam. Their paper, published in 2005, found companies that had appointed women to their boards were more likely to have struggled in recent months than those that appointed men. Additional research has found a glass cliff exists in areas beyond business — including law, politics and sports — and sometimes includes people of color in the group more likely to land precarious positions. In those difficult circumstances, leaders face a greater risk of failure.
In the NFL, you can see the “glass cliff” in the relative prevalence of Black interim coaches. You also can see it in team owners’ willingness to bypass top assistants when looking for a temporary leader.
As the highest-ranking assistants, offensive and defensive coordinators are the most obvious candidates to replace a fired head coach — and the vast majority of coordinators are White. In full-time hirings, NFL coordinators are the most popular picks, while lower-level assistants, including position coaches with an assistant head coach title, have been chosen just 10 percent of the time since 1990. But when looking for an interim coach, owners pass over coordinators and hire lower-level assistants nearly half the time. Far more lower-level assistants are Black.
Alison Cook, a professor of management at Utah State University whose research focuses on gender and diversity in the workplace, said a difficult time for an organization can prompt it to look outside the people it views as “traditional” leaders.
“They see qualities that, normally in good times, they don’t perceive those as maybe the best leadership qualities or what would be the most effective leader. But in a time of crisis, they say, ‘This is who we need,’ ” said Cook, who with colleague Christy Glass studied college basketball coaching hires and found coaches of color were more likely than White coaches to be hired when the team had struggled.
George Cunningham, chair of the sports management department at the University of Florida, and other researchers found women were more likely to be hired for an NCAA women’s soccer coaching job when the team had performed poorly. After Wilks’s appointment as interim coach of the struggling Panthers, Cunningham said, he “certainly enters a situation that reflects a glass cliff.”
“You’re kind of set up to fail,” Cunningham said. “You’re already in a tough spot. And the short audition time, whether it’s two or three games, or even a half a season, is just not putting you in a good spot to succeed.”
Mel Tucker's final game as interim coach of the Jaguars was a 19-13 win over the Indianapolis Colts on Jan. 1, 2012. (Joe Robbins/Getty Images)
Love from the locker room
In 2011, when Jaguars owner Wayne Weaver asked Tucker to take over as interim coach, Weaver assured him that he would get an interview and a “fair shot” at the job, Tucker said.
Struggling teams, Tucker noted, sometimes breed locker rooms where coaches can walk through and find players booking flights for offseason trips. But Tucker’s group in Jacksonville mustered a 2-3 finish — an above-average performance for an interim coach and one that showed the players remained motivated.
If that wasn’t convincing enough, his players loved and respected him, too. When Jones-Drew, the NFL’s leading rusher that year, spoke with the team’s general manager during an end-of-season meeting, the running back said he wanted Tucker to be named the full-time coach. Teammates told Jones-Drew that they had offered the same endorsement.
“We felt like we could turn this thing around with Mel as the guy,” Jones-Drew said.
History suggests the odds are not in favor of Steve Wilks becoming the full-time coach of the Carolina Panthers. (Grant Halverson/Getty Images)
But after an ownership change, the Jaguars hired Mike Mularkey, who in 2012 notched as many wins in 16 games as Tucker had in five. It was, at the time, the worst season in franchise history, and Mularkey was fired after its conclusion.
Jones-Drew looks back and tries to rationalize the team’s decision not to hire Tucker.
“If we’d have went 4-1,” he said, “that would have been different.”
He’s right — but only when it comes to Black interim coaches.
Since 1990, White interim coaches have landed full-time jobs with records ranging from 0-1 (Mike Tice with the Minnesota Vikings in 2001) and 1-8 (Dave McGinnis with the Cardinals in 2000) to 7-2 (Bruce Coslet with the Cincinnati Bengals in 1996). Seven of the 10 White interim coaches hired full-time had a worse winning percentage than Tucker.
The three Black coaches who have been elevated from interim to full-time are Romeo Crennel with the Kansas City Chiefs, Leslie Frazier with the Vikings and Mike Singletary with the San Francisco 49ers. They did so only after performances that made it all but impossible for their teams’ White owners to ignore them, posting a 10-8 record during their interim tenures and far exceeding the combined winning percentage of their predecessors.
Romeo Crennel was hired to lead the Kansas City Chiefs after going 2-1 as an interim coach in 2011. (Shane Keyser/Kansas City Star/Getty Images)
Mike Singletary parlayed his 5-4 interim record with the San Francisco 49ers in 2008 into the full-time job. (Jed Jacobsohn/Getty Images)
Leslie Frazier's 3-3 tenure as interim coach of the Minnesota Vikings in 2010 led to the full-time role. (Jerry Holt/Star Tribune/Getty Images)
LEFT: Mike Singletary parlayed his 5-4 interim record with the San Francisco 49ers in 2008 into the full-time job. (Jed Jacobsohn/Getty Images) RIGHT: Leslie Frazier's 3-3 tenure as interim coach of the Minnesota Vikings in 2010 led to the full-time role. (Jerry Holt/Star Tribune/Getty Images)
“Interim is not the best way to get one of those head coaching jobs,” said Frazier, who had a 21-32-1 record over four seasons with the Vikings. “It’s hard to separate yourself from the past. So your leash is a little bit shorter in my mind, based on my own experience. But you’ve got to win, and you’ve got to win early.”
Only two coaches, both White, have gone on to have long careers as the head coach of the team that made them an interim. Jason Garrett led the Dallas Cowboys to a 5-3 finish in 2010, then spent nine additional seasons as their head coach. Jeff Fisher turned his 1-5 performance as the interim coach in 1994 into a tenure that lasted 16 more seasons and spanned the Houston Oilers’ move to Tennessee, highlighting the value of an organization gambling on a coach after an unsuccessful interim stint — an opportunity Black interim coaches have never been afforded.
Leslie Frazier led the Vikings to one playoff appearance in his three full seasons as their coach. (Wesley Hitt/Getty Images)
It’s difficult to discern exactly how an interim stint might help or hinder one’s head coaching ambitions. Four Black men have served as interims on their way to becoming full-time NFL coaches for the first time. But five others, including three who are no longer coaching, have never received a full-time opportunity.
Cook, the Utah State professor who hasn’t researched this exact circumstance, said an owner may dismiss a White interim coach’s poor performance and reassure himself along these lines: “He did the best he could with what he had. Here, we have the resources for him. He’s really going to fit well.” But for a Black coach, his poor performance as an interim coach could be interpreted as a reason he might fail if offered the full-time job. It is human nature, Cook said, for decision-makers to find evidence in favor of their implicit bias and against others.
“You give a guy a head [coaching] job in mid-December for three weeks and then you tell him, ‘Okay, show me you can be a head coach,’ ” Robiskie said. “You know what I mean? What’s fair about that? How can a guy be a head coach for three weeks and prove that he’s capable of being a head coach?”
Steve Wilks faces an uphill climb with the retooling Panthers. (Chris Carlson/AP)
Turning it around
As Wilks, a Charlotte native, took control of the struggling Panthers, he said he was optimistic about the rest of the season. He said he believes the team, which was 1-4 at the time and down to its third-string quarterback, has the talent to succeed but just hadn’t finished games well. Wilks fired the defensive coordinator in hopes of improved performance, and he took on the role earlier than most previous Black interim coaches, who had averaged 5.4 games.
“We’ve got some time to turn it around,” Wilks said ahead of the first of 12 games in charge.
But days later, during a game against the Los Angeles Rams, Wilks had to call upon a fourth quarterback — one who had just been elevated from the practice squad — after yet another injury. The Panthers’ halftime lead disappeared, and they dropped to 1-5 with a 24-10 loss. A day after the game, the Panthers traded one of their top wide receivers, Robbie Anderson. The organization then traded McCaffrey, a move that painted a bleak outlook for the rest of the season. Yet in Carolina’s first game without its star running back, the Panthers dismantled the Tampa Bay Buccaneers — a rare moment of positivity for an organization that had lost 12 of its previous 13 games.
“That definitely wasn’t a team out there today [that] was trying to tank it,” Wilks said after the 21-3 victory.
In the locker room afterward, the players shouted and bounced in celebration, and they crowded around Wilks to hug him.
Wilks must keep his team afloat for two more months. No matter how far the Panthers may fall from playoff contention, this is his audition. This partial season with a depleted roster is his chance to prove his head coaching ability — even though history suggests the Panthers probably will look elsewhere to find a successor.
“Every situation is a little bit unique and different,” Vincent said. “But the reality is that individual is an interim, and most of the fan base and the front office is thinking: ‘We’ll have an opportunity to bring in a new person. We just want to make sure we can get through this season at least respectfully.’ ”
Wilks, a 53-year-old who has been a coach for nearly three decades, is one of just 25 Black men who have held a head coaching position in the NFL’s modern era. Yet his two chances to lead teams have come with the Cardinals, who fired him after one year, and now with a Carolina team on pace to finish near the bottom of the league.
In many ways, Wilks’s career path epitomizes the hurdles that Black coaches face in reaching and holding on to these top jobs: As the interim, the job is his, but is it really a head-coaching opportunity?
Jones-Drew didn’t believe Tucker had a chance equivalent to that of a full-time coach in Jacksonville: “I would say no, he didn’t. In order to be an NFL head coach, you have to be able to implement your plan and your vision. How can you do that in five games?”
The NFL record book disagrees. Black interim coaches accumulate wins and losses just as their full-time peers do, albeit under more chaotic circumstances. By the official tally, they are head coaches.
But many don’t feel they truly reached the sport’s peak.
“My name is in the book,” Robiskie said. “Terry’s been an interim head coach. I haven’t been a head coach.”
In his second interim stint, this time with the Cleveland Browns, Terry Robiskie went 1-4 and again was not given the full-time job. (David Maxwell/Getty Images)
Additional reporting by Candace Buckner, Dave Sheinin, Michael Lee, Adam Kilgore, Jayne Orenstein, Clara Ence Morse and Jerry Brewer. Graphics by Artur Galocha. Editing by Joe Tone and Meghan Hoyer. Copy editing by Michael Petre. Photo editing by Toni L. Sandys. Design and development by Brianna Schroer and Joe Fox. Design editing by Virginia Singarayar. Project management by Wendy Galietta.
Coaches who served in an interim role but were not credited with results are not included in The Post’s analysis. Aaron Kromer and Joe Vitt, interim coaches for the New Orleans Saints in 2012 while Sean Payton was suspended, are included in the analyses of demographics and performance but not whether interim coaches were hired for the full-time job. For more on our analysis, click here.
Emily Giambalvo covers University of Maryland athletics for The Washington Post. Twitter Twitter | 2022-10-26T10:13:46Z | www.washingtonpost.com | How interim jobs became a trap for Black NFL coaches - Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/interactive/2022/interim-black-nfl-coaches/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/interactive/2022/interim-black-nfl-coaches/ |
The Pennsylvania Democratic Senate candidate used a family-funded nonprofit to circumvent a city council he viewed as broken and intransigent.
By Beth Reinhard
Braddock, a small borough east of Pittsburgh, was hit hard by the collapse of the steel industry in the 1970s and 1980s and has seen a decline in population over the last century. (Dustin Franz/For The Washington Post)
BRADDOCK, Pa. — The website promoting this gutted steel town in the spring of 2006 presented stark black-and-white photos of dilapidated housing, aging landmarks and brick facades marred with angry graffiti. The man promising change, Mayor John Fetterman, stood tall in front of a rundown building, arms crossed.
The edgy campaign — which the newly elected mayor reportedly paid for himself without consulting the borough council — was an early sign of the unorthodox, go-it-alone strategy he would deploy to contend with a local government he viewed as inept.
Fetterman largely quit going to council meetings altogether. He began effectively using his nonprofit, Braddock Redux — bankrolled in part by his family -- as his own shadow government to try to implement his vision of a revitalized Rust Belt community of artists and other urban homesteaders. Over Fetterman’s 13-year tenure as mayor, the private group helped launch a “Free Store” that gives away donated goods, affordable housing for artists and a youth-oriented community center. Many residents of the majority Black town of 1,700 embraced Fetterman; he was reelected three times. And his nonprofit work helped foster the folk-hero narrative that later propelled him to lieutenant governor and now, Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate.
“You’ve got to learn how to work with people who don’t like you,” said Chardaé Jones, a Braddock native who was appointed by the council to succeed Fetterman as interim mayor in 2019 when he became lieutenant governor. “That’s part of being in government.”
“He used the nonprofit and his personal brand to push things forward,” said Tina Doose, who is Black and whose 16 years on the council overlapped with Fetterman’s tenure. “He elevated the role of mayor which made some people furious because it was not traditional or typical. He was okay with that, with people being against him.”
As the leader of Braddock Redux, Fetterman could make decisions privately with two or three fellow board members instead of hashing issues out at public meetings. Fetterman also is not required to publicly disclose the donors who have contributed more than $6.5 million to Braddock Redux between 2007 and 2020. Fetterman’s campaign declined to offer a detailed accounting of donors to the group, which has faced cost overruns and tax liens, and since his departure in 2018, steep declines in fundraising.
Fetterman and other board members never took salaries from the volunteer-run nonprofit, tax filings show. He has acknowledged his family’s support while earning about $150 per month as mayor in his 30s and 40s — an arrangement featured in attack ads from his Republican opponent, Mehmet Oz, who has cast the goateed, tattooed Fetterman as a phony populist.
Fetterman's Senate campaign declined to make him available to talk to The Post for this story. His wife, Gisele, said in a recent interview that he had no plans to run for political office when he arrived in Braddock two decades ago. Rather than deploying his family resources to turn a profit, allies said, he plowed them into the nonprofit and the community.
“You have an entirely volunteer organization that did immense good in town,” said Gisele, who runs the Free Store. “Anything good happening in town for a really long time was led by Braddock Redux.”
Drawing attention and donations
Nine miles east of Pittsburgh, Braddock was once a bustling town, where famed industrialist Andrew Carnegie built a massive steel plant and his first public library. The population swelled to 20,000 people in the 1920s. Braddock Avenue was abuzz with restaurants, movie theaters, furniture and clothing stores. But the decline of America’s steel industry in recent decades stripped away Braddock’s lifeblood. Today only around 1,700 people remain, of which about 72 percent are Black. About one-third live below the federal poverty threshold.
Fetterman grew up in suburban York County, more than 200 miles east of Braddock, in what he once called “this kind of comfortable, conservative York bubble.” He arrived in Braddock in 2001, trailing master’s degrees in business administration and public policy. Shaken by the death of a close friend and a relationship with an AIDS-orphaned child through the Big Brothers Big Sisters organization, the Harvard graduate had walked away from a career in the insurance business.
“I think you can best determine what your values are by where you chose to spend your life and your career,” Fetterman, 53, said during an interview earlier this month with the PennLive editorial board. “Twenty-one years ago I came to Braddock, which is an overwhelmingly majority Black community that was abandoned and forgotten and I chose to run a GED program. There’s no money there, there’s no glamour there, it was a commitment to make sure these people had the opportunity to get their education back on track.”
Fetterman ran for mayor in 2005. His young mentees plastered “JKF” stickers all around town — Karl is his middle name — and the vote was a squeaker: a 149 to 148 victory for Fetterman. It wasn’t a mandate, and the borough council was wary of Fetterman’s grand plans. For his part, Fetterman quickly concluded local government was a dead end.
“If there was a dream team of holding everything collectively back, you couldn’t assemble a finer group,” Fetterman told Pittsburgh City Paper months after his election. “I mean, if your mission was to stifle any kind of creative energy or idea …”
Several council members Fetterman served with have died, while others declined interview requests or couldn’t be reached. In an 2015 interview with the PennLive website before his death, former council president Jesse Brown said Fetterman didn’t seem to understand the mayor’s limited powers in a borough predominantly controlled by the council.
“He first come in thinking that he was in charge of everything,” Brown said. “After a couple run-ins him and I had, he stopped coming to meetings. He should have been in all council meetings to break a tie in case there was a tie or if he had some input he could put input in, but he didn’t do that.”
Doose, though, said she didn’t blame Fetterman for skipping most meetings. “He could have argued with them until he was blue in the face,” she said. “It was not a productive environment.”
Incompetence and corruption also plagued the town government in those years. Two months after Fetterman became mayor, the council sued the elected tax collector for failing to turn over records of unpaid property taxes. In 2011, the borough manager pleaded guilty to stealing about $170,000 from the town. The borough’s financial activities also were constrained by a state oversight program for poor communities.
So the new mayor turned to Braddock Redux, which he had started with his family’s money in 2003. The nonprofit spent $50,000 that year to buy a century-old, red-brick-church in Braddock, which Fetterman envisioned becoming a vibrant community hub with recreational and educational programs for kids and young adults.
Over the next few years, Fetterman’s efforts as mayor to draw attention and money to the blighted town drew outsize attention — from Rolling Stone magazine to “The Colbert Report.” The buzz attracted Levi Strauss & Co., which saw the gritty community as the ideal setting for its “Ready to Work” advertising campaign. Fetterman insisted on locals starring in the ad — and on a generous donation to his nonprofit.
Levi Strauss & Co. contributed $948,001 to Braddock Redux between 2010 and 2012 to support the renovation of the community center and a vacant, weedy lot into a vegetable farm, according to a company spokesperson. Doose said the tiny borough did not have the capacity to handle those projects.
But as Braddock Redux drew in more funding and tackled more ambitious projects, some in town chafed at the hard-charging mayor who built a national profile highlighting the town’s despair.
Fetterman’s father, Karl, said in a telephone interview that he couldn’t recall exactly how much he had donated to Braddock Redux. “Whatever support I provided was to make it possible for him to do this, and I really admired what we was doing,” he said.
The Post requested that the campaign disclose the amounts given by Fetterman’s family and other top contributors in light of his role as a public official. The campaign cited two philanthropic groups that donated, Heinz Endowments and the Pittsburgh Foundation, and emphasized that Fetterman’s family provided only a small percentage of the nonprofit’s revenue after 2007.
The nonprofit’s resources have declined since Fetterman left the board in 2018 when he became lieutenant governor. Revenue has fallen from a high of about $1.5 million in 2018 to about $56,000 in 2020, according to tax filings.
The three current board members of Braddock Redux declined or did not respond to requests for interviews from The Post. The treasurer, Tonya Markiewicz, answered some questions about the nonprofit’s finances via email and said the money from Levi Strauss & Co. a decade ago represented its single largest donation. “We have always had to put in the work to receive grants, and we are continuing to fundraise for other projects like the completion of the community center renovation,” she said.
The nonprofit spent more money than it received in six of the last eight years. The 2020 tax filing, the most recent available, shows expenses exceeded revenue that year by $104,633. Marc Owens, the former director of the tax-exempt division of the IRS, who reviewed the group’s tax returns at the request of The Post, said its struggle to keep up with expenses is not unusual in the nonprofit world.
Braddock Redux and Fetterman also faced dozens of property tax liens from the county and local school district totaling about $32,000 between 2005 and 2016, public records show. Nearly all of the liens have been paid off. “That was a mistake, that was a clerical error,” Fetterman said of the tax liens in a 2016 interview featured in an Oz attack ad.
In this economically hollowed out corner of the Rust Belt, it’s not unusual for local governments trying to boost the quality of life for residents to turn to nonprofits, experts said. In Allegheny County, Braddock is among 128 municipalities, some of which are small fiefdoms with shrinking tax bases that can’t cover basic services.
“This is considered the most fragmented local government structure of any region in the United States,’’ said Chris Briem, a regional economist at the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Social and Urban Research. “Many local governments are so small or distressed that they don’t have the fiscal capacity that is common elsewhere. The result of that is that you see a large role for nongovernmental organizations attempting to fill the void.”
‘A dying community’
The Nyia Page Community Center, which opened about a decade ago, is named after a 23-month-old child murdered by her father in Braddock in 2007. The center houses the Braddock Youth Project, a community service and job training program for teens.
Jones, the former mayor, said activities and events at the center have declined since Fetterman left the board. “It’s kind of heartbreaking,” said Jones, who once praised Fetterman’s record but has since become a vocal critic.
The community center is a microcosm of the nonprofit’s legacy in Braddock — widely admired but struggling to enact meaningful, long-lasting change.
The space can’t be used for event rentals again until the nonprofit raises more money for necessary repairs and upgrades, said Markiewicz, the treasurer. She said Braddock Redux also is looking for tenants who could use parts of the building before the next phase of renovations. “Renting the building for events and attracting additional tenants will enable the building to be more financially self-sustaining,” she said in an email.
A discreet door in the center leads down a flight of stairs to a cramped, bright orange kitchen and a few tables and chairs. This is Aunt Cheryl’s “food from the heart” Cafe, where the smell of fried fish fills the air and the mini sweet potato pies sell out almost every day.
Braddock Redux has offered the space rent-free to cafe owner Cheryl Johnson since 2016.
“It’s a dying community, forgotten, and he put some adrenaline in it,” Johnson said of Fetterman. “Did he change everything in this town? No. Did he make a difference? Absolutely he did.”
Walking down the main avenue in Braddock, most buildings are in disrepair, marred by peeling paint, rotted wood and broken glass. Ferty’s Bar, which has closed, has a faded newspaper article in the window: “Braddock upgrades its look.” The faux brick facade is peeling off. The roof has collapsed, and the interior is a mess of splintered wood and debris.
Fetterman still lives in Braddock with his wife, Gisele, and their three children in an abandoned Chevy dealership they converted into a massive loft overlooking the steel mill. When Fetterman was elected lieutenant governor, they opted not to move into the state-owned mansion in Harrisburg. Gisele said if her husband wins this election, the family would remain in Braddock.
Since 2012, she has run the Free Store, which gives away all sorts of donations out of a large shipping container painted blue. “They’re consistent, they didn’t walk out after 10 years,” observed Free Store volunteer Ann Brooks.
A few blocks away, an eight-story, former furniture store that closed in the 1970s has been converted into 37 affordable apartments for artists. Braddock Redux bought the building for $21,500 and later sold it to a group of investors led by developer Gregg Kander for $65,000 in 2019.
“It never would have happened without John,” Kander said of the project to refurbish the tallest building in town, flipping through before and after pictures on his phone.
Not everything spearheaded by Fetterman succeeded. He lured a celebrity chef to open a restaurant in a building he owned in 2017. Superior Motors won raves in Food & Wine and the New York Times. The menu included beef tartare and sashimi appetizers, while entrees ran in price from $22 to $29.
Kander, who helped raised money for the restaurant, said it offered 50 percent discount to residents and was intended to lure outsiders to Braddock and employ locals. Braddock Redux received grants for a communal oven and culinary classes. But Kander said the restaurant could not survive the pandemic and the departure of the chef four years later.
The restaurant also lacked a hometown customer base. John Paylor, who was riding down the street on a recent day in a motorized wheelchair, said the restaurant was too expensive for most Braddock residents, even with the discount.
“You’re the mayor of a depressed town … I’m not paying no $50″ for dinner, he said. “That’s a week, four days of groceries. That’s how it was. It was like, if you ain’t on his side or go along with him then he have nothing to do with you.”
The restaurant’s closing in 2021 rankled many residents, who said it proved Fetterman was out of touch. Some critics even said he was using the community to advance his political career.
But Fetterman’s decision to put down roots in Braddock speaks volumes about his intent, his allies say.
“There are a lot of guys like John who never would have given years of their life to a town like Braddock,” Doose said. “It became his community, too, and he was doing things to make change. So what if he also had goals and aspirations?” | 2022-10-26T10:13:51Z | www.washingtonpost.com | As mayor trying to revive crumbling town, Fetterman shunned local government - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/26/mayor-trying-revive-crumbling-town-fetterman-shunned-local-government/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/26/mayor-trying-revive-crumbling-town-fetterman-shunned-local-government/ |
The ultimate symbol of Silicon Valley wealth became commonplace. Then the economy shifted.
The unicorn became the ultimate symbol of Silicon Valley exuberance. Now they're becoming rarer. (The Washington Post)
SAN FRANCISCO — Hot social media network BeReal — which is gaining steam with young people as a casual alternative to Instagram — recently raised money, a key milestone in the path of any successful start-up.
It had all the elements of a buzzy start-up, like Snapchat, Clubhouse and Pinterest before it. It was popular with college students and even beat out social media video rival TikTok on Apple’s App Store. But when a recent report confirmed how investors valued it earlier this month, it was worth under $600 million — far short of the “unicorn” status of more than $1 billion many of its predecessors earned in frothier times.
While a billion dollars may seem like a big bet, unicorn status for years has helped young companies attract employees and media attention, as well as offering founders runway to pursue new ideas and cachet with potential partners. Many now-established start-ups like Airbnb and Uber that have shaken up long-standing industries depended on deep-pocketed investors to cover losses while they struggled to compete.
But BeReal’s experience is representative of a new reality in Silicon Valley.
As a growing number of employee layoffs, CEO resignations and belt-tightening eliminates some of the excessive perks tech companies are known for, investors here minted only 25 companies worth over $1 billion each in the third quarter of 2022, according to venture capital research firm CB Insights. A year ago, there were more than five times as many new unicorns.
The drop is a harsh dose of rationality much needed in an environment that rewards big promises and falls prey to hype, investors said.
“It’s going to get a ton of founders who shouldn’t be doing it out of the ecosystem — people doing it for money and fame,” said venture capitalist Paige Craig, who invested in companies including Twitter and Lyft.
But the shock waves rattling the tech sector could eventually hit innovation and reduce competition in an industry already dominated by Big Tech companies including Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon.
As interest rates spike and concerns over a global recession send shudders through the economy, tech companies big and small are slowing hiring and cutting new investments. Google’s CEO has implored his workers to show “more hunger,” and thousands of start-up employees have lost their jobs over the past six months. Stock prices for tech companies — which marched ever upward over the last decade — have finally fallen back to earth. The Nasdaq 100, an index representing the biggest public tech companies, is down 30 percent this year.
Meanwhile, investors have yet to find the next big technological innovation to transform the way we live. While unicorns in theory represent the moonshot ideas that will help Silicon Valley land on the next big thing, billions funneled into crypto, Web3, and virtual reality haven’t yet taken off.
Once-prolific investors like the venture firm Andreessen Horowitz, which invested in BeReal’s first funding round, have pared back their investments. The amount of venture capital funding going into late-stage start-ups fell nearly 50 percent in the third quarter compared to the second quarter, according to venture capital research firm PitchBook Data. Already, some are bracing for a cultural shift from abundance to survival mode.
More than a decade ago, the $1 billion unicorn start-up became an aspirational marker of success in Silicon Valley. It reflected the exuberance and optimism of a near-mythical bastion of the economy where the boom times never seemed to end.
Investors agree to commit a certain dollar amount of funding to a start-up to help it get off the ground in exchange for a stake in the company, with the expectation that it will eventually go public or get acquired. The valuation is calculated by how much an investor pays for a stake — for example, a 10 percent stake at $100 million would value a company at $1 billion. But the price tag is all on paper, and there is no guarantee the company will ever be worth that amount.
The term unicorn was coined in 2013 by venture capitalist Aileen Lee and was meant to denote the fact that a start-up that crossed that threshold was extremely rare. No other concept so neatly embodied the magical thinking that fueled sky-high valuations based not on real revenue or profit but simply on a company’s ability to keep growing.
The stock market was still struggling following the 2008 financial collapse, and start-up founders increasingly chose to stay private instead of going public and listing on the stock exchange, accepting big checks from venture capital firms who offered favorable terms without the volatility of stock price trading.
“That is what gave rise to unicorns,” said Sebastian Mallaby, author of The Power Law, about the rise of the venture capital industry.
Many of those companies never lived up to the spectacular expectations thrust upon them. At one point, office-sharing company WeWork was valued by its investors at $49 billion, but it now trades publicly on the stock market at less than $2 billion. Blood-testing company Theranos was valued at $10 billion at its peak. In January a jury found its founder Elizabeth Holmes guilty of defrauding investors.
Still, the concept of the unicorn became a lasting one in Silicon Valley, and companies that could command big valuations attracted the best employees and investors.
Venture firms, who invest money in young companies hoping to reap major rewards down the road, have historically made the biggest returns on just a few of the many firms they invest in. Those that succeed are generally founders who promise big potential upside, rather than steady profits and sustainable growth.
That growth-at-all-costs mentality helped companies like Facebook, Google and Amazon become the dominant firms they are today. For years, those companies were relatively unprofitable, instead reinvesting in their businesses. But eventually, they became some of the most valuable companies in the world, turning early investors who stuck with them into billionaires. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)
Silicon Valley braces for tech pullback after a decade of decadence
The massive amounts of money being made once companies went public attracted even larger investors to venture capital, including pension funds, sovereign wealth funds and private equity giants.
In 2021, new unicorn companies were being created at a rate of more than two per business day, according to CB Insights, becoming almost commonplace.
But as governments pushed up interest rates this year to stave off inflation, big investors such as pension funds and sovereign wealth funds abruptly left the venture capital market to focus on less risky and long-term investments, said Kyle Stanford, a senior analyst with PitchBook Data.
“There’s not enough capital to really make investments that are going to create unicorns,” Stanford said.
And as public company stock prices dropped, the private markets followed.
BeReal did not respond to requests for comment. There are additional reasons it may have raised capital at a lower rate, including the fact that brands have struggled to use its service, or that TikTok and Instagram have already copied the app’s sole feature.
Some existing unicorns have already had to do layoffs, and others have been acquired in fire sales.
Brex, a financial tech company which raised money in January at a valuation of more than $12 billion, laid off 11 percent of its staff earlier this month. BlockFi, which had been valued at $4.5 billion, was acquired by FTX, another crypto company, for $240 million.
Bird, the e-scooter start-up, was once valued at $2.85 billion as investors poured money into companies that mimicked Uber’s model for revolutionizing transport. It became publicly traded last year and is now worth $89 million.
One of the biggest effects likely to hit consumers is an increase in prices.
Tech start-ups from Uber to Amazon long subsidized prices to help ensure faster growth. Even if they eventually raised prices, other start-ups with new money often came along with their own subsidized products as they fought their way into crowded markets.
Now that dynamic may be less common. Consumers used to low fees on food delivery or free returns on direct-to-consumer glasses and mattresses may see those options disappear.
There are still exceptions to the gloom. Artificial intelligence start-ups are garnering a lot of interest and funding, as several tech breakthroughs in the field lead to a wave of excitement. Stability AI, which has released software to the public that can create elaborate images from simple text prompts, raised more than $100 million at a $1 billion valuation according to Bloomberg News.
WeWork founder Adam Neumann, who became emblematic of unfounded Silicon Valley hype, recently netted a $350 million investment and $1 billion valuation for his new real estate start-up, which plans to offer a branded product with community features in the housing rental market.
In his 2022 book, Mallaby warned about the unicorn bubble that started to form in 2016 when outsiders to late stage investing began writing enormous checks. Start-up founders were treated like “emperors of the operation,” he said, with little oversight.
The drop in unicorns could signal less excess money in the growth phase, and a check on unicorn founders “when their hubris turns toxic,” Mallaby said.
Touraj Parang, an adviser at Pear VC and author of start-up guide Exit Path, also said the drop in new unicorns is a sign of rationality, and that start-ups able to raise funding will probably have to do it at a lower valuation than their previous round.
Others are skeptical. Investor Del Johnson said Silicon Valley can’t change its spots.
“When they talk about concepts such as fundamentals and rationality, investors are merely gesturing to the conventional wisdom, which is itself based on consensus, not accurate financial math,” he said. “Venture capital has never been a ‘rational’ asset in the first place, so there can be no return to rationality.” | 2022-10-26T10:18:08Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Tech unicorn start-ups valued at $1 billion are now rare in Silicon Valley - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/10/26/end-of-tech-unicorn-start-ups/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/10/26/end-of-tech-unicorn-start-ups/ |
Some members of the masked minority have reorganized their lives indefinitely
By Ellen McCarthy
(Eliana Rodgers for The Washington Post)
Meet the covid super-dodgers, who still haven't caught the virus (they don't think!)
People who are still taking all available precautions largely fall into two groups: those with underlying health conditions for whom contracting the covid-19 virus — or, in some cases, even getting the vaccine — could be very dangerous; and those who just don’t want to get this virus, either because they fear acute illness or long term deleterious effects. Both camps have largely given up waiting for a light at the end of the tunnel. They view covid as here to stay, and have reordered their lives accordingly.
But Poveromo-Joly sees her continuing efforts to keep the virus out of their home as totally rational. She’s worried about her youngest child, a daughter who is now six and has twice been hospitalized with severe cases of the flu, and about her husband, who is a diabetic. That worry didn’t disappear with access to vaccines. So now her kids are home-schooled. They bought a new house with a home office for her husband so he could continue to working remotely. She has repopulated her social circle with new friends who are making similar choices.
The adjustments can take work — “Let me call ten dentists and see which one is still wearing masks,” Poveromo-Joly says of a recent effort — but the changes have also come with benefits. Poveromo-Joly says they spend much more time together, their life is less hectic and their daughter, who was diagnosed with dyslexia, gets more personalized instruction. So Poveromo-Joly has stopped thinking of their pandemic era changes as temporary, and stopped hoping that they could be.
“I really feel sorry for them,” she says. “Because they don’t know what they’re doing to their bodies, what they’re doing to their brains. I believe if people are given the right information, nine times out of ten they’ll make the right choices.”
“I said, ‘I really want to see your baby, I love all the pictures,” she recalls, “but are you going to take the week off before we come and then the week while we’re there?’ And she said, ‘Well, no. I can’t really do that.’” The visit never happened, Darling says. | 2022-10-26T10:26:56Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Still afraid of covid: The people are still isolating and masking - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/10/26/covid-pandemic-still-isolating/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/10/26/covid-pandemic-still-isolating/ |
Foundations and supports, destroyed by Hurricane Ian's storm surge, are seen Oct. 7 along the beachfront in Fort Myers Beach, Fla. (Michael Robinson Chavez/The Washington Post)
FORT MYERS BEACH, Fla. — Jennifer Rusk closed her eyes and placed her finger on a map of Florida, landing atop this laid-back island town on the state’s southwest coast.
That’s how she ended up here 11 years ago, after her husband persuaded her to move from Virginia to the Sunshine State, where he’d vacationed as a boy. When the couple drove across the Matanzas Pass Bridge, the arching blue roadway that connects the island to the mainland, they looked at each other and knew: “We said, ‘Oh my God, this is where we’re going to live.’”
Remembering that moment on a recent afternoon, Rusk, 51, couldn’t help but cry. She was standing on the deck of the pale-yellow cottage she and her husband bought just months after stumbling upon Fort Myers Beach. All around her: ruins.
“This is it,” she said of her home, which lost part of its roof and flooded to the second floor, leaving almost everything inside destroyed. “We were going to stay here for retirement and grow old and walk to the beach and walk our dogs and stay with our community.”
For more than a century, millions have flocked to Florida with similar visions to live out their golden years on the beach. The Florida dream exerts a powerful pull: The state consistently ranks among the fastest-growing in the nation. It is forever under construction, with new houses and condos and apartment buildings rising in already-crowded cities. Everyone, it seems, wants a piece of paradise.
But Ian, one of the strongest hurricanes ever to hit the United States, upended the idyllic lives so many had planned for themselves in this stretch of the Sunshine State, often pouring in their life’s savings. As Floridians surveyed the damage from the near-Category 5 storm, which killed at least 114 people, some wrestled with painful questions: Should they stay and rebuild? Could they?
Florida was already in the throes of a housing crisis; the storm made it worse. Damage estimates reach into the tens of billions, and rebuilding won’t come cheap. Even before Ian, Floridians scrambled to find coverage in the state’s fragile insurance market. Moreover, as climate change makes extreme weather far more common, some question the wisdom of rebuilding on barrier islands and in other delicate coastal areas.
“What we’ve done over the years is party hardy,” said Carol Newcomb, an adjunct professor of environmental humanities at Florida Gulf Coast University in Fort Myers. “We’re in a big hangover now.”
In interviews across the storm-lashed southwest coast, many residents said they were loath to give up the promise of endless summers and eternal sunshine — even as some worried they might not have a choice. They had found something here, where almost everyone is from someplace else, and they didn’t want to lose it. That was true even in neighborhoods where, days after the storm, water and power were still out and mountains of debris lined the streets.
Bob Cofield, 81, rode out the hurricane in a recliner inside his Naples trailer, jacking his feet up as the water rose around him. It was, he said, “one of those inevitable things: You know what’s coming and there’s nothing to do about it, no use getting scared, because I couldn’t go anywhere.”
As the water receded, Cofield, an Alabama native who pocketed real estate brochures when he first glimpsed the city on a motorcycle trip in 1980, took in the destruction. His van inoperable, he walked three miles from the 55-and-up mobile home park to pick up a prescription. Before kind strangers showed up to help him start repairs and find a temporary place to stay, he thought he might have to sleep in the van.
But even when a cousin called, offering to drive down from Hamilton, Ala., with a U-Haul and move him into his late aunt’s house, he refused.
“I’d like to visit. But I wouldn’t want to go up there and live,” Cofield said. “At my age, at 81, they think that I need help, that I need to be taken care of, you know. But I don’t need taken care of right now.”
A few streets over, Lawrence Plesek had set up a folding table in his now-empty trailer, spreading out a photograph, a certificate and a copy of remarks from the renewal of vows he and his wife took on a cruise ship in 2014, their 50th anniversary. He was hoping to dry them out. The couple fled the cold of the Gary, Ind., area in 1969, bringing only a pickup truck, a portable TV, two lawn chairs and a baby crib.
Recalling the day they arrived in Florida, Plesek said, “I didn’t realize that the sky was blue. Where I’m from, the sky was red from the steel mills.” Now he wasn’t sure whether he and his wife would stay in the state where they’d raised their children and spent the majority of their life together. Although their car will be replaced by traveler’s insurance, their trailer was not insured.
“We don’t know what we’re going to do,” Plesek said. He asked for prayer.
Also grappling with uncertainty was Lori Stroup. She and her husband had decided to chase a dream of living in Sanibel in 2020, around the time they turned 50. They left not only their old state of Montana but also their old jobs. In this fresh start, Stroup would do what she had wanted to do all her life: work with animals.
The former executive assistant spotted manatees and tortoises as she walked client’s dogs, savoring the feeling of sun on her face. Her husband, a onetime fishing guide, became her partner in a quickly growing business, Serenity Sitters of Sanibel.
Ian brought that blissful new life to an abrupt end. Like much of Sanibel, the ground-level house the Stroups bought last year is uninhabitable. Their company is on hold. The couple has been staying in a friend’s mobile home, waiting to find out whether they can afford to fix their home. In the meantime, they still have to pay the mortgage.
“We thought my business was going to take off and we’d really be able to have a life there,” Stroup said. “I guess I’m just hoping that this was a freak 100-year hurricane.”
For others in hard-hit areas, Ian was a sign to get out. Newcomb, the university professor, has lived in Fort Myers for more than 30 years — almost her entire adult life. She teaches sustainability, and she’s been thinking about leaving Southwest Florida for years. She was always lulled into staying. But no more.
Days after the storm struck, Newcomb made up her mind: She would sell her house and head north. She rented a place near her daughter’s in St. Augustine, about 250 miles away on the state’s Atlantic side.
“I am out of here,” she said. “It is paradise lost.”
To Newcomb, rebuilding would look something like Babcock Ranch, a community of 5,000 northeast of Fort Myers. She was a consultant on the development designed to accommodate the state’s climate — including its powerful storms. Babcock Ranch garnered a rush of publicity after residents emerged from Hurricane Ian to find that missing shingles and toppled trees made up most of the damage. The homes never lost power.
The community, Newcomb said, “really has the right ingredients.” It is 30 miles inland, entirely solar-powered, all concrete and new construction. Half the land is set aside for green spaces.
It is, in many ways, a far cry from what people loved about a place like Fort Myers Beach: charming old cottages lined up right along the sand. What they loved about it, though, was also what made it vulnerable to Ian.
“Everything that we loved about it is now gone,” said Tonya Reed, traipsing through a landscape of sand and debris to the office where she had managed vacation rentals. “Everything that’s still standing, I don’t care that much about, and that’s all that it’s going to be now from now on. The charm is gone. Fort Myers Beach is gone.”
Between talking to contractors and waiting for a structural engineer to arrive and cleaning up the heaps outside her little yellow house, Rusk allowed herself to imagine the future of the place she had come to love. In 11 years, she had become passionate about the area’s marine life, teaching residents and tourists about conservationism. She and her husband had hosted family trips and befriended their neighbors. She did not want to leave.
“Things are going to look very different,” she said. “The face of Fort Myers Beach is going to change very drastically. But it doesn’t need to turn into other places.”
It was a blank canvas, she said, ready to be painted. She listed off new dreams for the town: Maybe it could be made greener, more environmentally friendly, more sustainable. She beamed just at the thought of it. | 2022-10-26T10:39:53Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Hurricane Ian upended the lives of these retirees. Should they rebuild? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/10/26/hurricane-ian-rebuilding-retirees/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/10/26/hurricane-ian-rebuilding-retirees/ |
A sound room at the Great Plains Media building, where Cities 92.9 broadcasts, in Normal, Ill. (Jamie Kelter Davis)
NORMAL, Ill. — When Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s campaign bus came to town recently, the local conservative talk radio station covered the event, dutifully informing its audience on social media that “counter protesters were in attendance.”
The “counter protesters” were the radio station’s employees. They mugged for photos in front of the governor’s bus, held up signs that said, “Fire Pritzker” — then turned around and covered the Democrat’s event.
Since President Biden’s election, the talk radio station Cities 92.9 has upended the traditional media ecosystem in this part of Central Illinois with an unusual mix of hyperlocal news coverage — crime, weather and the like — and election misinformation. Replying on Facebook to a social media post about the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol, the station turned its focus to the 2020 election results: “What about the insurrection on Nov. 3?”
Cities 92.9 organized a sold-out bus trip to the “Stop the Steal” rally on Jan. 6, supported a man accused of making a Nazi salute at a school board meeting and co-hosted a fall “freedom” festival during which a former Marine and Jan. 6 attendee called for revolution, saying, “Violence is always the answer.”
“Conservative news serves a specific audience,” Catrina Petersen, the station’s program manager, who also hosts a morning show and reports stories, said in a recent tweet. “Don’t like it? Don’t listen.”
Petersen, who grew up listening to conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh in the truck with her father on the way to school, said she is a QAnon adherent. The extremist ideology that the FBI has deemed a domestic terrorism threat, and which is embraced by many Trump supporters, holds that the former president is battling Satan-worshiping, pedophile elites aligned with Democrats.
The station’s detractors say they are alarmed by Cities’ mix of news and misinformation and see it as a local version of what’s happening nationally, as a partisan army of pundits, influencers and politicians use the airwaves to spread Donald Trump’s false claims of election fraud across the country. A majority of Republican nominees on the ballot in November have denied or questioned the outcome of the last presidential election, according to a Washington Post analysis.
Cities 92.9’s deliberate blurring of the ethical line that separates traditional journalism and opinion is significant because polls show that while Americans are generally distrustful of national news, they tend to express more faith in local news, which they tend to see as less biased and more relevant to their lives, said Brendan Nyhan, an American political scientist and professor at Dartmouth College who has studied misinformation in local news.
“The fear is that local media becomes a pathway for misinformation,” Nyhan said. “There is a void in many communities where local news has shrunk or disappeared completely, and yet people still trust it. That combination may make ideologically motivated news sites more influential.”
Normal Town Council member Kathleen Lorenz, whose position is nonpartisan and who describes herself as a moderate-leaning Republican, called it “the national narrative seeping into Main Street America.” She no longer grants interviews to the station after becoming embroiled in a partisan shouting match with one of its reporters in August.
“This is why people are sometimes very, very scared,” Lorenz said. “If we can’t even rely on our news sources, what are we going to do?”
For years, Cities 92.9 was not a major presence in the prosperous twin cities area of Bloomington-Normal — home to two universities and the corporate office of State Farm insurance. It was known mostly as the vehicle for Limbaugh’s daily talk show and other nationally syndicated voices, rather than as a source for local news. The station is owned by Cookeville Tenn., businessman Jerry Zimmer, one of three he owns in the area, along with three more in Kansas and five in Tennessee.
Zimmer, who did not return calls or emails requesting comment, is a longtime Republican donor who has supported campaigns of Republican politicians including Reps. Matt Gaetz (Fla.) and Jim Jordan (Ohio) and Sen. Rand Paul (Ky.), Federal Election Commission records show.
Things changed dramatically in the weeks following Biden’s election, when the station organized the bus tour to Trump’s Jan. 6 “Stop the Steal” rally that preceded the attack on the U.S. Capitol. “ONCE IN A LIFETIME DO WE HAVE A CALLING LIKE THIS ONE!” the station wrote on Facebook in late December 2020. “President Trump is calling all patriots to DC on the 6th. Let’s show him and our country all of the support we can.” The post ended with the hashtag “#DoNotCertify.”
About 50 people ended up making the trip, according to David Paul Blumenshine, a former Republican candidate for state and local office who hosts a talk show on Cities on weekends. He said in an interview on Oct. 7 that he was part of the group in Washington that day, along with general manager Megan Zimmer.
The busload left to eat lunch at a Cracker Barrel in Northern Virginia without joining those who unlawfully entered the Capitol, Blumenshine said in the interview.
When the bus returned to Normal, Blumenshine told a local TV station that the group had marched peacefully, “reminiscent of Dr. Martin Luther King,” and that the people who breached the Capitol should be “swiftly brought to justice.”
But within hours, Cities had a different take on the trip online, sharing on Facebook a now-debunked video that it wrongly claimed showed the protest had been “co-opted by outside provocateurs.” The post has since been removed.
Blumenshine, too, soon had a different story, spinning tales of mysterious tour buses arriving and claiming he saw a weak security perimeter at the Capitol — assertions he has repeated to this day. In the interview, he dismissed the police officers who were assaulted by rioters during the attack — more than 140, some who suffered traumatic injuries such as brain damage and crushed spinal disks — as “political theater.”
“It’s a conservative talk radio station, so that’s what our audience expects,” Blumenshine said. “If they don’t like it, they can listen to something else. That’s what makes America great.”
That Jan. 6 bus trip was the turning point for Cities, according to operations manager Chris Murphy and Petersen, who sat down for a recent interview in the sound booth in the unassuming station headquarters next to a busy highway in Normal. Several boxes of signs for Darren Bailey, Pritzker’s Trump-endorsed Republican opponent, were stacked in the foyer. Blumenshine said he has been recruiting Republican poll workers as Bailey’s “election integrity coordinator” this season.
Murphy said the station’s listeners on the bus tour told them they wanted more local news and the station responded, stepping into a void created by cutbacks at other news organizations while injecting their own opinion — and activism — into the civic debates over tax referendums and subdivision expansions. At the same time, they doubled down on the national conservative message, including Trump’s “big lie” of a stolen election.
Listeners wanted to talk about “potholes are busted on my street,” Murphy said. “We became a community focal point, which is really cool, right?”
A few months later, the station hired Petersen, 23, fresh out of the journalism program at Illinois State University in town, and added a news reporter, Kevin Woodard, this year. It added more local talk shows on the weekend, augmenting its weekday programming of nationally syndicated Trump-allied hosts such as Sean Hannity and Dan Bongino.
On June 9, 2021, the station managers called on Facebook for protesters to show up at a school board meeting to “join the national fight against indoctrination of our kids” and protest critical race theory — the academic framework that denotes that systemic racism is part of American society. That curriculum was not on the agenda — or even taught in local schools, school officials said. General manager Megan Zimmer spoke, as well as Cities host Ty Smith, who is Black. Video of Smith’s denunciation of CRT — which he called “teaching kids how to hate each other” — went viral and attracted notice from Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), who dubbed him a “hero Dad.”
Petersen wrote the subsequent website story about the event with the headline, “A heated District 87 School Board Meeting Sees High Turnout.”
“That was when we really started seeing Cities 92.9 inserting themselves into the process — advocating, organizing and then also arguably ‘covering’ it,” said Ben Matthews, a union field staffer for the Illinois Education Association whose region includes school districts in Bloomington-Normal.
The station does not subscribe to the Nielsen ratings system because it is cost prohibitive, station officials said. That’s often the case with many smaller stations, so it’s difficult to assess their market share, according to Steve Suess, the director of convergent radio broadcasting at Illinois State University, the faculty adviser to its student-run radio station and a Cities weekend host.
“They certainly have carved out somewhat of a niche in the market. They’re not winning the day, but they’re not going bankrupt, either,” Suess said. He has been one of the chief defenders of the station locally, saying that it broadcasts a wide range of views. He said that the station had not covered the Jan. 6 bus trip as a news event and that he was unaware it had organized protests, then covered them.
Petersen posted a photo of herself on her personal Facebook page last year posing before a banner that said, “Q Sent Me,” writing, “Yeah I’m 'Q' what of it.” Asked whether she was an adherent to the extremist ideology embraced by many on the far right, she responded, “As much as you are BlueAnon, I suppose.”
During one of Petersen’s recent “Morning Buzz” shows, she conducted a straightforward interview with the county clerk on midterm voting, then went on to lament the Jan. 6 “political prisoners” still awaiting trial and suggested Biden should be “cuffed, period, full stop,” or at the very least impeached for his handling of Afghanistan.
She also called a proposed city amphitheater project “just another stupid capital project we don’t need.”
“A lot of people say that we’re blending the news coverage with, you know, a bias. But what I really think is, it is just an alternative to the bias that’s already there,” Petersen said in the interview.
Petersen says she gives Cities’ listeners credit to be discerning enough to distinguish fact from opinion.
“I think we just kind of give it up to the consumers and let them decide on what misinformation is, what’s true or false and what they want to consume,” she said. “I mean, it’s like if they’re not reading it on the Cities 92.9 Facebook page, then they’re going to read it on some other page.”
She said her typical day includes anchoring her morning show, then working the phones and filing Freedom of Information Act requests for emails and other internal local documents, which she called “good old-fashioned journalism.” But, in the next breath, she said she was “definitely not a journalist. Just somebody who writes stories from time to time. And I do it accurately.”
Some local officials disagree.
Barry Reilly, the longtime schools superintendent who retired in May, said he stopped giving interviews to Petersen and encouraged others in the area to do the same.
Town council member Lorenz quit appearing on the station after she was accosted by reporter Woodard over a routine discussion about a proposed underpass after a council meeting in August, she said. When the town’s mayor, Chris Koos, and a fellow town council member tried to defuse the situation, Woodard lunged at them and asked, “Do you want to take this outside?” the three officials recounted in interviews.
Koos, a frequent Cities target, said he had to ask Woodard to leave the building.
“They’re not journalists, they’re propagandists,” he said.
Woodard declined to comment. But he told the local NPR affiliate WGLT after the fracas that it is “a struggle to maintain neutrality as a journalist when you’re reporting from a conservative viewpoint. It’s an interesting line to try and walk.”
On a recent crisp fall day, the Super Bowl of the state’s midterm election season came to Bloomington-Normal: Illinois State University was hosting a gubernatorial debate between Pritzker and Bailey.
Petersen’s day began with her show at 6 a.m., during which she urged people to show up for a pre-debate rally for Bailey in a traffic circle in downtown Normal.
At the rally, Petersen stood in the brilliant blue sun and interviewed Bailey supporters, providing updates that she sent in for Cities’ news breaks. She wore a T-shirt that advertised a Republican state Senate candidate and had a debate ticket — courtesy of the Bailey campaign — tucked in her jeans.
She taped an interview on her phone with Paul Durr, a regional coordinator for Bailey, who told her he wanted to hear in the debate more about Pritzker’s “assumed balanced budget,” which he and other Republicans say has been helped by an infusion of federal rescue funds.
“Haha, I love it!” Petersen said.
Afterward, though, Durr seemed perplexed about her role.
“It’s hard to say without stereotyping, but I thought she was a college-age journalist,” Durr said. “She’s apparently a conservative radio host.”
Alex Horton and Razzan Nakhlawi contributed to this report. | 2022-10-26T10:40:00Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Illinois radio station adopts Trump falsehoods to appeal to the right - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/10/26/right-wing-radio-station/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/10/26/right-wing-radio-station/ |
The Colts are demoting Matt Ryan, right, in favor of Sam Ehlinger even after Ryan heals from his shoulder injury. (Wade Payne/AP)
Okay, well, some of them did.
Watson is suspended. Wilson, Wentz, Ryan and Mayfield are injured. Ryan is not expected to regain his starting job in Indianapolis even after his shoulder injury heals; Colts Coach Frank Reich announced Monday that Sam Ehlinger is slated to be the starter for the remainder of the season. Whether Wentz and Mayfield eventually return to starter status remains to be seen, with fill-in starters Taylor Heinicke of the Commanders and P.J. Walker of the Panthers coming off surprising victories Sunday.
The five teams that added quarterbacks in the trades have a combined record of 12-22-1. The Panthers already fired Matt Rhule as their coach. Some wonder whether the Broncos could be the next team to make an in-season coaching switch, moving away from Nathaniel Hackett. Wilson has been plagued by shoulder and hamstring injuries and has looked nothing like the quarterback he was for a decade with the Seattle Seahawks, even after Denver followed the blockbuster trade in March by signing him last month to five-year, $245 million contract extension.
The bye week is done for the Vikings, and the games get bigger from here. Will Kirk Cousins be up to the task?
“At 42-something [or] 43, are we worried about that right now? No, I’m not,” McKay said. “But I think if you get to the end of the year [and] it’s 41, then you do want to go back and take a look at what happened here, how did this number get there? Because we’re always going to make adjustments because we do want points to be in that sweet zone, which to us is 43 to 46 [or] 47.”
Doctors are probably more cautious with concussions. Allen Sills, the NFL’s chief medical officer, acknowledged that doctors involved in evaluating players under the league’s protocols probably are being more cautious because of the intense scrutiny on the case of Miami Dolphins quarterback Tua Tagovailoa. Sills made his comment while responding to a question about Dolphins quarterback Teddy Bridgewater being removed from a game and placed in the concussion protocols after spotters concluded that he stumble after a hit.
“Are people being more cautious and conservative now? Sure. That’s a natural human reaction,” Sills said. “As we said, we want to be conservative with our concussion protocol. … We’ll continue to be conservative. But it’s a natural reaction to take these changes and apply them in a really conservative manner.” | 2022-10-26T10:44:21Z | www.washingtonpost.com | NFL team rankings, ill-fated QB trades, notes from league meetings - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/26/nfl-rankings-quarterback-trades/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/26/nfl-rankings-quarterback-trades/ |
What if Marcel Proust, instead of growing up in sophisticated, cosmopolitan Paris, had been the son of immigrant parents who raised him — and themselves — up from the poverty of a New York City tenement slum to middle-class respectability in Brooklyn? Could the flood of memories that for Proust became “Remembrance of Things Past” been stirred not by the taste of a tea-soaked petite madeleine — but instead, as in historian Richard Rabinowitz’s deeply moving family memoir, “Objects of Love and Regret: A Brooklyn Story,” by the accidental discovery of a nearly century-old wooden-handled bottle opener?
Rabinowitz had stumbled across the well-worn object in 2015 while emptying his mother’s Florida apartment after her death at age 100. “It felt familiar, as if I was shaking hands with an old friend,” he writes. Simply holding it released a rush of family memories, starting with his mother’s tearful recollection of how, as an 18-year-old garment-factory worker in 1934 she had bought it for 20 cents — after bargaining the pushcart salesman down from 25 cents — as a present for her frugal, practical-minded mother.
Why did this ordinary kitchen gadget carry as much meaning and emotion for his mother, and in turn for him, as, say, a treasured heirloom jewel, passed down through the generations? In his career as a historian and curator at the New-York Historical Society and other museums, Rabinowitz had learned, as he puts it, that “Stories attach themselves to objects.” And the tales that accompany them can reveal the owner’s intimate relationships, aspirations and more — if only we allow them to.
That is what Rabinowitz has done, chapter by chapter, presenting the generational journey of his family from Eastern Europe to America through the lens of a curated miscellany of objects ranging from a World War I artillery shell to a cigar box filled with odds and ends to a mid-century Magnavox television-phonograph console. These tangible items illustrate his family’s progression over the decades and across continents, acting as stage props to ground each character in a particular time and place. In focusing on these objects, he’s able to lead us through the daily routines, economic struggles and moments of sadness and celebration that have fastened onto them. It’s a technique that genealogists seeking to reconstruct the lives of their own ancestors will find particularly instructive.
Rabinowitz begins with the bottle opener. He frames the gift from his nearly adult mother Sarah to his grandmother Shenka within the context of immigrant life, its purchase symbolic of the family’s immigrant aspiration to become modern, gadget-loving Americans, even if the tight financial vise of the Depression made it necessary to haggle over every last penny. The fact that it’s a kitchen utensil also captures for Rabinowitz the unbreakable bond between his mother and grandmother, who would typically be found together helping each other in the kitchen. It’s therefore also symbolic of their mutual devotion, their shared practicality and frugality, and of their shifting roles within the family. “No longer the dependent daughter, at eighteen,” Rabinowitz writes, “she was taking the guiding hand for her mother’s progress in America, as well as her own.”
In contrast, Rabinowitz uses a treacherous unspent 50-pound German artillery shell to dramatize the — literally — explosive mix of political turmoil and antisemitism that propelled his Jewish ancestors from Poland to America. This chapter of family history took place in 1920, in the Polish village of Wysokie Mazowieckie, where half of the inhabitants were Jews. Rabinowitz recounts his great-grandfather Isaac coming across a stray explosive, left over from the war. He hopes to use the brass covering in his metal salvage shop. But it explodes as he lifts it, the blast crushing him to the ground, where he lays dying as his 4-year old granddaughter Sarah holds his hand, trying to comfort him.
The tragic scene was Sarah’s first memory, but only one among many calamities that befell the family. During and after World War I, a multitude of troops and partisans from neighboring territories had marched through the village, looting and terrorizing as they went. Worst of all, in August 1920 Russian Cossacks charged through, instigating a brutal pogrom and seizing 230 Jewish men as hostages, one of whom was Shenka’s husband and Sarah’s father, Dovid.
These were what Sarah called the “hard times” of her childhood. Without Dovid in the picture — shortly after he returned from captivity, he left for America by himself, not bringing over the rest of the family until 1928 — she effectively became Shenka’s partner, as the two together endured famine and scarcity while also taking care of each other and Sarah’s two younger brothers.
Little wonder, then, that when they were all finally reunited in a Lower East Side New York tenement, Dovid the breadwinner found himself relegated to the role of family outsider in his own home. Rabinowitz comically captures his clueless presence in a chapter centering on the fact that, as Sarah put it, her Papa didn’t “know from ice cream” — or from his children’s increasingly assimilated tastes for American life.
And so the decades of family life progress, object by object. Sarah’s future husband, David Rabinowitz, courts her with an expensive bottle of perfume, symbolic of their hopes for greater financial security as they start their family life in a new apartment in Brooklyn. During World War II, mothers throughout the apartment building shudder at the sound of the postman’s whistle, fearing the arrival of news of the death of a husband, brother or son. The ’50s and ’60s bring more material comforts, including that Magnavox — which signifies the growing generational separation between Rabinowitz’s parents, who spend their leisure time watching the television screen, while Rabinowitz himself, a budding intellectual, plays and listens to his classical LPs in solitary introspection.
At times, Rabinowitz’s prose can become a bit wordy in his aspiration to eloquence. But his tenderly detailed evocation of times that are no more remind us that we, too, have the tools to pry open the past and revive what we thought we had forgotten.
Objects of Love and Regret
A Brooklyn Story
By Richard Rabinowitz
Belknap. 325 pp. $29.95 | 2022-10-26T11:10:22Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Book review of 'Objects of Love and Regret' by Richard Rabinowitz - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2022/10/26/objects-love-regret-rabinowitz-review/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2022/10/26/objects-love-regret-rabinowitz-review/ |
Whether you’re looking for a classic ghost story or a Lovecraftian tale of cosmic horror, we have a recommendation for you
A few of the horrifying tales that might get you through the scariest time of the year. (Mysterious Press; Ramble House; Kingsbrook)
So, it’s a dark and stormy night in October or November and you find yourself ensconced at an isolated but charming B&B, perhaps one located near Poroth Farm or just down the road from the pricey Overlook Hotel. On the nightstand next to your canopy bed are a half dozen new books, all of them geared to this spooky time of the year. What might they be?
As it happens, several classics of horror literature are out this fall in desirable new editions. Replete with color illustrations and stills from numerous films, “The New Annotated ‘Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’” (Mysterious Press) brings out the best — or do I mean the beast? — in editor Leslie S. Klinger, whose notes and visual extras richly amplify Robert Louis Stevenson’s masterpiece. Arguably the greatest ghost story of them all, Henry James’s “The Turn of the Screw” is atmospherically illustrated by Audrey Benjaminsen and beautifully printed by the Folio Society. Folio has also recently reissued the incomparable haunted-house novel, Shirley Jackson’s highly disturbing “The Haunting of Hill House,” with compelling artwork by Angie Hoffmeister. No one forgets the disquieting final words of its opening paragraph: At Hill House, “whatever walked there, walked alone.”
A few years ago, Jackson entered the Library of America in what is the best one-volume selection from her writing, thanks to editor Joyce Carol Oates. This fall, the LoA has issued a two-volume boxed set, edited by Jonathan R. Eller, gathering the finest works of a writer who was Jackson’s contemporary and her equal as an author of unnerving stories: Ray Bradbury. Set aside his science fiction and consider the novel “Something Wicked This Way Comes,” in which the ominous Cooger & Dark Carnival arrives in an idyllic Illinois town. It, too, has an unforgettable opening: “The seller of lightning rods arrived just ahead of the storm.” Even more unsettling are Bradbury’s early stories, including “The Veldt,” “Zero Hour,” “The Jar,” “The Small Assassin” and the terrifying Jackson-like account of a woman’s descent into madness, “The Next in Line.” Here, truly, is the October Country.
Shivery and wonderful as these acknowledged classics are, the very stuff of nightmares, what if you’re thirsting for some fresh blood in your reading? Where should you turn?
Start with the specialty presses. In particular, check out the websites of those mentioned below, but also the sites for Tartarus Press, Undertow Publications, Swan River Press and Sarob Press. What follows is simply a sampler, a few sheaves from this fall’s rich and strange abundance.
The “liminal tales” of Attila Veres’s “The Black Maybe,” translated from the Hungarian by Luca Karafiáth (Valancourt Books), are as bizarre and powerful as any since the heyday of Thomas Ligotti. For instance, the title story begins: “Tradition dictates every step of the harvest. The young ones collect the snails in the daytime, while the men oil the chains at night.” Snails? Chains? Things soon grow even creepier.
In Veres’s over-the-top “Multiplied by Zero,” a burned-out, depressed narrator — “I threw away my days like used tissues” — records his experiences on a trip with Abaddon Travels. The “Askathoth Travel Package” is advertised as “challenging” — few people survive — but those who worship the Faceless Lords embrace its nightmarish journey toward “transformation.” Early on, the tour group worships at the Ar’ktak ne Kth’far church, in which it is required that “some kind of creature must be agonizing on top of the altar every minute every day.” While the story’s horrors are Lovecraftian, one at times suspects that the Grand Guignol cruelty may reflect sly parody: “I awoke with a scream. We all woke up, except for those who were already dead by then.”
This year, the British Library’s “Tales of the Weird” features several highly original themed anthologies. “Spectral Sounds: Unquiet Tales of Acoustic Weird,” edited by Manon Burz-Labrande, resurrects many lesser-known works before reaching the Usher-like apogee of this aural subgenre, M.P. Shiel’s “The House of Sounds.” “Our Haunted Shores: Tales From the Coasts of the British Isles,” edited by Emily Alder, Jimmy Packham and Joan Passey, includes, among much else, Charlotte Riddell’s devilish “The Last of Squire Ennismore,” about a barrel of brandy washed ashore following a shipwreck and the mysterious stranger with whom it is drunk. Not least, the title story of “The Night Wire and Other Tales of Weird Media,” edited by Aaron Worth, is a pulp masterpiece about a malevolent fog attacking an unknown city called Xebico.
Worth’s fine collection also reprints Marjorie Bowen’s seance chiller, “They Found My Grave,” which is also one of the highlights of “Things That Wait in the Dark,” edited by Richard Lamb and Hugh Lamb (Kingsbrook Publishing). This is the second anthology in which Richard Lamb continues his late father’s invaluable practice of reintroducing half-forgotten tales of terror by gaslight. Read it while sipping brandy or chamomile tea.
Fans of horror-lite should certainly enjoy H.T.W. Bousfield’s “The Unknown Island and Other Tales of Fantasy and the Supernatural,” edited and introduced by James Doig (Ramble House). Bousfield’s 1930s stories may not be ambitious, but they are entertaining and chattily told in the style of a club tale — the kind in which a mustachioed brigadier or retired colonial administrator suddenly says, “That reminds me of a rather rum thing that once happened to me.” For example, “The Unknown Island” and “The God With Four Arms” relate unfortunate encounters with, respectively, Medusa and the Indian deity Indra.
Frank Belknap Long was, in his youth, one of H.P. Lovecraft’s closest friends and disciples, best known for his early stories in the manner of the master, notably “The Space-Eaters,” “A Visitor From Egypt” and “The Hounds of Tindalos,” this last a tale of angles and curves and monsters that travel through time. All three stories, and many others, appear in “Frank Belknap Long,” the most recent omnibus in Centipede Press’s Library of Weird Fiction, edited by S.T. Joshi. Fans of this Weird Tales-era author may also enjoy Peter Cannon’s complementary “Long Memories and Other Writings,” (Hippocampus), which includes a memoir of Long in his later years — he died in 1994 at age 92 — that mixes affection, pathos, frustration and gallows humor. Coupled with it is Cannon’s appealing mash-up “Pulptime,” a short novel in which Long chronicles an adventure pairing H.P. Lovecraft and Sherlock Holmes.
As I say, this is just a sampling of recent books for Halloween and beyond. But let’s return for a moment to that charmingly appointed B&B. If I were its proprietor, I would provide a shelf of older ghost-story anthologies, so that those unable to sleep might shudder under an eiderdown with Vernon Lee’s “Amour Dure,” M.R. James’s “Casting the Runes,” L.P. Hartley’s “A Visitor From Down Under,” Oliver Onions’s “The Beckoning Fair One” or Walter de la Mare’s “All Hallows.”
Of course, those are just five of my own favorites, and tastes do differ. Which spooky tales would you choose to read on moonlit evenings of mist and slithering shadow? | 2022-10-26T11:10:29Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Scary stories and novels to read this Halloween - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2022/10/26/scary-stories-novels-halloween/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2022/10/26/scary-stories-novels-halloween/ |
How does it feel to be a ‘Token Black Girl’? A new memoir explains.
In her book, Danielle Prescod shares the challenges — and lessons — of always feeling like an outsider
Review by Nneka McGuire
Memoirs are tricky little animals. What makes them effective? What makes them useful? The justification for their existence is subjective. Whose life, or slice of life, is worthy of paper and ink, glue and thread — and a savvy marketing campaign?
I tend to think a memoirist’s life should be storied and long, or in the case of a youthful writer, shaped by singular events.
Danielle Prescod’s “Token Black Girl” falls into the latter category. Prescod, 34, came of age in tony, majority-White communities. While her family lived in Westchester County, just outside New York City, she was shuttled to ritzy private schools in neighboring areas. At a Catholic high school for girls in Greenwich, Conn., where the median income is about half a million dollars, Prescod was one of just three Black girls in her graduating class. Hence the “token” in her memoir’s title. If you’re imagining a circle of “Mean Girls”-esque hell, you’ve hit the nail on the head.
Growing up in rich, White milieus, Prescod always felt like she was on the perimeter. Sometimes her otherness was cruelly called out.
Gabrielle Union wants to talk about the tough stuff. You ready?
“I remember that the reality of Blackness settled onto me like a terminal illness,” Prescod writes. “I desperately wondered how I could get rid of it so I could just be like everyone else. It distressed me that I would never be ‘cured’ of it and could never escape it.”
It’s saddening and jolting to learn that a child felt like her racial identity was a sickness. Prescod doesn’t shy away from frankly dissecting her bouts of self-loathing, at times referring to her body as a “skin prison” and a “sadistic tower” to which she was confined. This was the late 1990s, after all, long before “Black girl magic” was a thing.
So Prescod made it her mission to assimilate. She straightened her hair, adopted the same style and literary interests as her peers, dieted relentlessly to flatten her curves, developed a prolific mean streak to divert attention, and never, ever spoke of race — even in the face of covert and overt racism.
She found little respite in the Black community.
“If and when I got the opportunity to meet other Black kids,” Prescod writes, “they usually made it clear that they did not like me.”
She adds: “I am conscious of the ways that my behaviors and attitudes could have been interpreted as, well, stuck up. And, because I was so partial to whiteness, I adopted behavior, language, and mannerisms that operationally supported white supremacy.”
It’s no surprise that she was shunned. Prescod grew up with a stunning level of privilege woefully uncommon for Black people. She and her younger sister played “tennis, soccer, softball, and basketball; danced ballet, tap, jazz, and hip-hop; did gymnastics, figure skating, and horseback riding; and played piano and violin, respectively,” she writes. Plus, kids of any background can be mean.
If you’re thinking Prescod’s social situation materially improved after her upbringing, you thought wrong. She pursued a career in fashion, with its punishing rules about how to look, act and be — a veritable torture chamber for someone already saddled with plummeting self-esteem.
Her dieting became a raging eating disorder, and her dream jobs at fashion publications, such as Elle and InStyle, soon soured. Her trendy workplaces re-created the racial traumas of her youth. Prescod was often one of the few people of color in her department, and she endured racial slights and erasure. It took career changes and years of therapy for her to arrive at a healthy sense of self and a reasonable relationship with food.
“Token Black Girl” is very readable — to a point. Prescod’s voice is spirited and engaging but can be repetitious, and her pacing is a bit sluggish. Delving into a fourth-grade grievance on Page 23 is perfectly fine. Probing a fifth-grade grievance on Page 82 might strain a reader’s patience.
These challenges may be due, in part, to Prescod’s age. Thirty-four is quite young to write a memoir, particularly if you’ve led a sheltered life. Prescod is thoughtful and candid, but her incisiveness cuts only in certain directions. She notes her family’s reluctance to discuss Blackness but hesitates to dig deeper.
Telling George Floyd’s story gave us a deeper understanding of racism
It’s well established that growing up in a community devoid of diversity can hijack a Black child’s sense of self, and that, as Prescod reiterates, the media wittingly and unwittingly elevates Whiteness. The less-traveled, more intriguing analysis — one I’d be keen to read — is why Prescod’s parents, a highly educated, financially successful Black couple with a diverse circle of friends, shied away from talking to their kids about race.
A similar line of inquiry: How did Prescod’s little sister, whom she calls her constant companion, fare in majority-White settings?
Perhaps Prescod’s relatives asked that their lives not be excavated, which is understandable. But I couldn’t help feeling like her narrative needed more, or less. It could have had another layer of questioning or exploration, such as how her childhood otherness affected her adult love life. She explains how her eating disorder made dating difficult, but not how she thinks about race in romantic relationships. Or — shrink the story. I could envision this as a strong novella, if it’s possible to get a novella published these days, or a gripping personal essay.
Zooming in, or strategically pulling back, could have made this memoir more effective. But, boy, am I happy it exists. Human beings contain multitudes, and there are innumerable ways to show up as a Black woman in the world. As Audre Lord said, “If I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive.” I praise Prescod, who came up in a racially oppressive environment, for breaking free and finding her own definition.
Nneka McGuire, a former editor at The Lily, is a freelance writer in Chicago.
Little A. 256 pp. $24.99 | 2022-10-26T11:10:35Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Token Black Girl, by Danielle Prescod book review - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2022/10/26/token-black-girl/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2022/10/26/token-black-girl/ |
50 or older? A big bump in plan contribution caps means you can pump up to $30,000 into your retirement account.
It’s been a tough year for folks trying to put food on the table or pay rent. Stubbornly high inflation is making it harder to make ends meet.
But for certain taxpayers with money to spare, the higher cost of living has triggered a big bump in what they can save for retirement.
Next year, the contribution cap for employees who participate in 401(k), 403(b), most 457 plans and the federal government’s Thrift Savings Plan (TSP) is going up by almost 10 percent.
Here’s what you need to know about the new limits coming in 2023.
Why are retirement plan limits increasing?
How much will I be able to contribute to my retirement account?
Are income thresholds going up, too?
Who will benefit most from the increases?
What should I do if I can’t contribute the maximum? | 2022-10-26T11:10:41Z | www.washingtonpost.com | 401(k) limit increasing nearly 10 percent in 2023 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/10/26/irs-401k-limit-increasing-to-22500/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/10/26/irs-401k-limit-increasing-to-22500/ |
Analysis by Eduardo Porter | Bloomberg
Lula and his allies would likely blame a loss on Bolsonaro’s deployment of the public purse to juice his popularity, and the vast disinformation campaign aimed at tarnishing Lula as a corrupt drug trafficker who plans to shutter churches across the country.
But the candidate of the Workers’ Party also faces another, more complicated obstacle: The middle class doesn’t seem to like him that much.
The rightward skew is weird considering the Workers’ Party middle-class roots in an alliance between Brazil’s trade union movement with parts of the Catholic church and assorted urban intellectuals battling the military dictatorship in the 1970s and 1980s.
The trend extends beyond the Brazilian left, though. Left-of-center parties have suffered across much of Western Europe. Closer to home, Mexico’s Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who tags himself as a leftist change agent, has lashed out at an urban middle class that turned against him in last year’s legislative elections.
In Bolivia, the governing Movement for Socialism of President Luis Arce and his predecessor Evo Morales has strong support among rural indigenous Bolivians but less so among the non-indigenous urban middle class. Even in Uruguay, the Latin American country that most closely resembles Europe’s generous welfare states, the middle class turned against 15 years of government by the left-of-center Broad Front and two years ago helped deliver the presidency to the center right.
Tarso Genro, who served as president of the Workers’ Party and Lula’s minister of education, minister of institutional relations and minister of justice, places his party’s problems among the challenges faced by the “classical left” of the 19th and 20th centuries, steeped in a concept of class struggle born in the industrial age, when the workplace largely shaped people’s political identity.
The most relevant political debates today do not pit the proletariat against the bourgeoisie. Social identities are now structured around race, gender, place, religion, environmental concerns and other concepts, raising different sets of demands and fears that don’t fit the old paradigm and defy simple solutions.
“Bolsonaro conquered a set of social contingents that are tired of a liberal democracy that does not have quick answers,” said Genro. Nowhere has this been more apparent than in the political appeal of the president’s scorched-earth approach to crime, which taps into Brazilians’ deep-seated sense of insecurity.
Marta Arretche, a political scientist at the Universidade de Sao Paulo, agrees that the Brazilian election will not be decided exclusively over bread-and-butter concerns.
“There is a lot of evidence that this election is not just about economics,” she said. Issues of religion and traditional values – for the family, against homosexuals and so on – are central to Bolsonaro’s pitch. So is the corruption that embroiled Lula and his party the last time he was in power. Bolsonaro’s mobilization of hatred, says Arretche, is critical: “Bolsonaro’s use of fear is impressive.”
But the misfortunes of the Workers’ Party are not solely contingencies beyond its control. In fact, Lula’s main challenge is arguably of his own design, a consequence of what he might proudly call his mission: Trying to govern as a champion of the poor, he picked a fight with those just above poverty. But they were hardly doing great.
Between 2004 and 2014, the heyday of Workers’ Party rule, the income of the bottom half of the population rose by around 35%, according to Marc Morgan and Amory Gethin of the World Inequality Lab at the Paris School of Economics. Brazilians between the 70th and the 97th percentile of the income distribution, however, fared poorly. People from the 85th to the 95th percentile actually saw their incomes decline. They are hardly rich, making maybe two or three times the minimum wage.
Just raising wages at the bottom could draw resentment from those perched slightly above on the income scale, Arretche speculates. The bank teller making maybe $700 a month would be squeezed to pay a nanny $300 to care for her kid. “The middle classes have been pitted against the least privileged groups in society for their share of national income,” wrote Gethin and Morgan.
As resources grew scarce after the economic slowdown from 2014, life became harder for the middle class. It’s tough to win over these voters with a promise to end hunger. By contrast, you can piss them off if you discount their troubles to focus on the poor.
In 2002, Lula won 60% of the vote of Brazilians in the third and fourth quintile of the income distribution, noted Gethin and Morgan – those better off than the 40% at the bottom of the pile but poorer than the top 20%. In 2018, his political successor Fernando Haddad received less than 40%. Meanwhile, the 60%-plus share of the vote that the Workers’ Party garnered from those in the poorest quintile did not change.
It’s hard to say what Lula can do between now and Sunday to reverse this trend. And as Arretche has noted, compared with the “annihilation” of the moderate right, the Workers’ Party still has remarkable staying power. Yet if Lula ekes out a win, the middle class’s rightward drift will remain a pressing problem. For a party whose raison d’etre is helping to lift the poor into the middle class, it represents nothing less than an existential threat. | 2022-10-26T11:10:53Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Brazil’s Middle Class Isn’t Buying What Lula’s Selling - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/brazils-middle-class-isnt-buying-what-lulas-selling/2022/10/26/f4a04342-5519-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/brazils-middle-class-isnt-buying-what-lulas-selling/2022/10/26/f4a04342-5519-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html |
Within a decade, advocates say electric school buses will supplant the old polluting ones
Driver John Walters plugs in his bus for recharging in Bethesda, Md. (Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post)
A common smell of American childhood, the diesel fumes wafting through yellow school buses, may soon be obsolete, as school districts across the nation turn to electric buses amid falling costs and growing concerns about global warming.
The shift would spell a major change to children’s experience of school, replacing the sweet-noxious scent of diesel with the whizz and whir of electric motors underneath a school bus floor. The rollout is happening quickly — orders expanded more than tenfold since the beginning of 2021 — and the Biden administration aims to speed it up even faster with a Wednesday announcement of the winners of $965 million in subsidies for electric and low-emissions bus purchases around the country. Some advocates say they are hopeful they can electrify the entire American school bus fleet by 2030.
Proponents argue that school transportation is a natural candidate for electrification, since the buses operate on fixed routes with regular breaks that can be used to charge batteries. They say the children most dependent on school buses to get to classrooms — students of color and lower-income families — also suffer disproportionately from asthma and other illnesses that are worsened by constant exposure to diesel fumes. Studies also show that exposure to pollution worsens school performance.
“We are forever changing school bus fleets across the United States,” the head of the Environmental Protection Administration, Michael Regan, told reporters ahead of the announcement, which he planned to make with Vice President Harris in Seattle.
Although the upfront cost of electric school buses can be up to four times more expensive than their rumbling combustion-powered forebears, advocates and climate-friendly policymakers are trying to find ways to make up the difference. Already, fuel costs are lower, and so is maintenance, since electric buses have fewer parts that wear down.
Diesel engines account for nearly a quarter of the U.S. transportation sector’s greenhouse gas emissions. Burning the fuel is a significant source of harmful pollutants including ground-level ozone and particulate matter that can lead to respiratory diseases in children.
The Biden administration is trying to spur cheaper electric vehicles by supporting the U.S. battery industry and through incentives to school districts that it hopes will help spark more orders for buses, bringing down costs. Last year’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill funded the grants to be announced Wednesday, and it dedicates another $4 billion toward electric and low-emission school bus purchases over the next four years.
The result has been a burst of electric school bus purchases across the United States, including in the Washington region, where the Montgomery County Public Schools last year ordered the single biggest fleet in the nation, 326 of them by 2025. By the end of this school year, 86 will be on the road. The sprawling school district is a major consumer of diesel fuel, with its 1,400 school buses burning 17,000 gallons of diesel a day as they crisscross the roads. So, any effort to electrify them quickly has an impact.
“This project is momentous, not just because of its size, but because it demonstrates something pretty remarkable, which is that electrifying a municipal fleet is not a pipe dream. It’s not something that should be pushed off another year,” said Duncan McIntyre, the chief executive of Highland Electric Fleets, the company that the Montgomery County schools hired to deliver the buses along with the entire charging and maintenance infrastructure around them. The school system is paying the company $1.3 million annually for 12 years to lease the buses and provide the electricity for them, which it says is the same as it costs to buy, fuel and maintain diesel buses.
“This sets an example for the entire country,” McIntyre said.
More than a dozen of the new electric buses sat in the parking lot outside Walter Johnson High School in Bethesda this week. Had they been conventional diesels, they would have created a smelly cacophony as they idled. Instead, they were perfectly silent. When they pulled away, they made a slight whir, then a whine, as the electric motors whisked them forward. Inside the buses, the seats were just as tight as they were decades ago. But conversation was perfectly audible, and the dominant smell was of the fabric of the new seats and the wet air outside.
“Kids are going to grow up with this. They’re not going to know what it’s like,” said Rep. Jamie B. Raskin (D-Md.), whose congressional district encompasses much of Montgomery Country and who has pushed for greater funding for climate initiatives. “Your bus used to smell really bad? The transmission was always broken?”
Painted a shiny yellow, the buses were otherwise nearly indistinguishable in appearance from the diesel ones whose technology has barely evolved in a generation. The body was made by Thomas Built Buses, one of the largest bus manufacturers in the country. The electric guts — the batteries and the motors — were supplied by Proterra, which makes heavy-duty electric vehicles, including transit buses. Up front, where the engine normally sits, there were electronic components. Nothing rumbled.
At the school system’s Bethesda school bus depot, Highland has built a long new row of electric chargers where the buses replenish their batteries during their free hours. Doing so was a major undertaking: The depot used to have enough electric cables to keep on the lights and air conditioning for a couple of offices. Now it needs 10 to 20 times as much power, McIntyre said, about as much as 10 big hospitals.
That’s one challenge in electrifying the national school bus fleet: doing so requires a lot more grid capacity than exists. That means more high-voltage cables, more transformers and substations — and a whole effort that will take time and cash. It’s the same problem facing other electrification efforts, as climate advocates urge a wider use of electric cars and a shift from gas stoves and furnaces to electric-powered ones.
Skeptics of efforts to electrify buses say the extra cash could better be spent on teachers, classrooms or lower taxes. They question whether the current price premium makes them first in line. Some say going slower might save money for school districts in the long run, if other industry efforts can do the work of bringing down the price of batteries over the next few years.
But statewide efforts are going even faster than national ones: In March, Maryland passed a law requiring all new school bus purchases to be electric by 2025. In April, New York required the same by 2027. Maryland buses have a 12-year operating life by law, so the transition will not be immediate.
To recharge electric buses, drivers pirouette backward into a parking spot at an angle so that a port near the rear end — hidden under a flap that looks just like a gas cap — can be connected to a charger with a cable. Charging from zero to full takes about four hours. Each bus has about 140 miles of range. Since the average bus route in Montgomery is about 65 miles, there’s little worry about running out of juice, unlike with municipal buses, whose longer routes and greater daily usage makes them more complicated to electrify.
“This is great. It’s really smooth,” said Johnny Chiang, who has been driving buses for the Montgomery schools for three years. “Diesels are much heavier to drive. This wheel feels much easier to control.”
When the buses aren’t in use, they can feed electricity back into the grid during hours of peak demand, acting as giant batteries that spare power companies the need to fire up extra coal-fired plants during hours when solar, wind and other renewable sources aren’t creating enough juice. Highland plans to start doing that in Montgomery Country later this school year, earning money from Pepco in the process and further reducing its costs.
Electric school bus experts say they see a quick shift from where the market was in 2014, when the first handful of school buses were put into service, until today.
“It’s where the market is going and where the demand is moving,” said Sue Gander, the head of the Electric School Bus Initiative at the World Resources Institute, which is tracking the rollout of electric buses and advocating for policies that encourage their use.
The buses “have the lowest amount of greenhouse emissions as any bus on the road,” about half as much per mile, on average, she said, after accounting for emissions from the electricity generated to power them. Their carbon footprint will further drop as renewable energy supplants electricity generated from fossil fuels in the years to come, she said.
“Within this next decade, we are going to be seeing electric school buses as the option of choice,” she said. | 2022-10-26T11:11:18Z | www.washingtonpost.com | School buses may soon be stink-free, as electric models usher out diesel - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2022/10/26/electric-school-buses-climate-diesel/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2022/10/26/electric-school-buses-climate-diesel/ |
1 DEMON COPPERHEAD (Harper, $32.50). By Barbara Kingsolver. A boy born in a trailer in Appalachia faces the challenges of childhood poverty with resilience.
3 LIBERATION DAY (Random House, $28). By George Saunders. The Booker Prize winner’s short stories explore the nature of modern life.
4 THE BOYS FROM BILOXI (Doubleday, $29.95). By John Grisham. Two childhood friends grow apart as one becomes a prosecutor and the other a mobster.
6 THE LAST CHAIRLIFT (Simon & Schuster, $28). By John Irving. A young man searches for his father and becomes a famous writer.
7 FAIRY TALE (Scribner, $32.50). By Stephen King. A teenager must protect the world from being invaded by the evil ruler of a fantastical realm.
9 MAD HONEY (Ballantine, $29.99). By Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Finney Boylan. A woman confronts the possibility that her teenage son is a murderer when his girlfriend dies from a fall.
10 BABEL (Harper Voyager, $27.99). By R.F. Kuang. A Chinese orphan, who is in Regency-era London for his magical education, feels torn between two cultures.
2 AND THERE WAS LIGHT (Random House, $40). By Jon Meacham. The Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer tells revisits the life of Abraham Lincoln.
4 THE EXTRAORDINARY LIFE OF AN ORDINARY MAN (Knopf, $32). By Paul Newman. The late Oscar winner’s memoir is based on thousands of pages of interview transcripts with him and those closest to him.
5 WHAT IF? 2: ADDITIONAL SERIOUS SCIENTIFIC ANSWERS TO ABSURD HYPOTHETICAL QUESTIONS(Riverhead, $30). By Randall Munroe. A former NASA roboticist and the creator of the webcomic “xkcd” responds to ludicrous questions using research and science.
7 MADLY, DEEPLY (Henry Holt, $32). By Alan Rickman. The late theater and film actor’s diaries detail both his personal life and his career.
8 STARRY MESSENGER: COSMIC PERSPECTIVES ON CIVILIZATION(Henry Holt and Co., $28.99). By Neil deGrasse Tyson. The astrophysicist considers contemporary issues driving people apart through the lens of science.
9 CRYING IN H MART (Knopf, $26.95). By Michelle Zauner. A Korean American indie-rock star chronicles her relationship with her late mother and their shared culture.
Rankings reflect sales for the week ended Oct. 23. The charts may not be reproduced without permission from the American Booksellers Association, the trade association for independent bookstores in the United States, and indiebound.org. Copyright 2022 American Booksellers Association. (The bestseller lists alternate between hardcover and paperback each week.) | 2022-10-26T11:11:24Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Washington Post hardcover bestsellers - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/washington-post-hardcover-bestsellers/2022/10/26/05ae6d1a-5486-11ed-ac2c-d84ce98eb651_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/washington-post-hardcover-bestsellers/2022/10/26/05ae6d1a-5486-11ed-ac2c-d84ce98eb651_story.html |
Some academics hesitate to repatriate Indigenous remains. Here’s why.
Universities have long extracted knowledge from communities with whom they refuse to engage
Perspective by Rosemary A. Joyce
Rosemary A. Joyce is professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, a museum anthropologist, archaeologist and specialist in cultural heritage policy.
The entrance to an exhibit about Native Americans is closed to the public at the Alabama Department of Archives and History in Montgomery, Ala., on Aug. 11. (Kim Chandler/AP)
In August, the University of North Dakota published a statement acknowledging finding remains of over 70 ancestral Native American bodies and hundreds of sacred artifacts in a storage area on campus. In the few weeks since, the University of Alabama, University of Kansas and the University of Texas were subjects of related news stories.
The Government Accountability Office reports that universities and museums in the United States hold the remains of over 116,000 ancestral Native Americans. These staggering numbers reveal a story about how scientific racism positioned some groups of people not just as inferior, but as objects of research. Defenders of these collections claim that they should be able to continue to own them and pursue research on them as a matter of academic freedom. But this is a distortion of the concept.
The roots of these collections trace to the 19th century when measuring skulls became a way to assert that racial hierarchies were innate. Samuel G. Morton, a professor at the Pennsylvania Medical College, assembled a collection of over 1,000 human crania from around the world, some collected on battlefields, others robbed from graveyards, to delineate evidence for racial hierarchies.
The “objective” measurements assembled by Morton and others not only cast non-White people as scientifically subordinate but were used as tools to justify enslavement of Africans and campaigns against Native Americans.
For instance, politicians seeking to expand the territorial reach of the United States offered related claims in debates leading to the 1830 Indian Removal Act. Henry Clay, John Calhoun and others argued that American Indians were incapable of adapting to the expectations of “civilized” life. In his 1830 State of the Union address, Andrew Jackson justified removal of Indians from the eastern United States so they could “cast off their savage habits and become an interesting, civilized and Christian community.”
The new discipline of anthropology that solidified between the 1860s and 1900 inherited these ideas and approaches. Anthropologists continued to use collections made in support of scientific racism, like Morton's. To these were added others of dubious origin. In 1868, the U.S. Surgeon General initiated the collection of Native American remains for the Army Medical Museum from sites ranging from battlefields to hospitals under military control, “to aid in the progress of anthropological science by obtaining measurements of a large number of skulls of aboriginal races of North America.”
Researchers in new university museums and anthropology departments also undertook excavations at former sites of Native American towns, like Moundville, the source of most of the ancestral remains reported this year by the University of Alabama. Because of U.S. policies like the Indian Removal Act, however, the Native American tribes and nations claiming the ancestors once buried at Moundville now live as far away as Oklahoma, Louisiana and Florida.
Even in the early period when anthropologists first conducted excavations, Indigenous communities objected to exploitation of the burials of their ancestors. Anthropologist Chip Colwell has cited records of protests from as early as 1883 by Apache people objecting to thefts from a site in Arizona. Protests occurred across the United States. Colwell has documented that Shinnecock tribal members warned archaeologists to stop excavating ancestral burials on Long Island in 1902.
Yet with the passage of the 1906 Antiquities Act — which allowed excavations on federal land as long as they were “for the benefit of reputable museums” and so long as collections were “made for permanent preservation in public museums”— researchers had the law on their side. Shielded by burgeoning ideas of academic freedom, White university-based researchers saw the world — and especially the parts of it inhabited by non-White communities — as specimens.
Coordinated Native American activism in the 1960s began to change this situation. In 1971, the American Indian Movement interrupted excavations in Minnesota and other locations across the country. They demanded that the bodies of ancestors in museum collections be returned to communities for reburial. These efforts paved the way for the passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) in November 1990. The act required institutions receiving federal funding to complete detailed inventories of human remains and funerary objects, including results of consultation with Native American groups, by 1995.
But this process was slow, hampered by a number of factors — the scale of the collections, poor documentation, the demand on tribes to consult on collections, the discovery of new collections that have been tucked away and forgotten. Most important was the lack of regulations on what to do with the vast majority of remains that were labeled “culturally unidentifiable,” either because the group they were from had no descendants that could be agreed on through consultation between scientists and tribes, or their descendants were known, but not part of a federally recognized tribe.
Few institutions met the 1995 deadline, and individual extensions were repeatedly granted.
As university officials directed staff to chronicle their holdings, researchers debated the academic implications of this shifting legal framework. While some scholars accepted the rights of Native Americans to determine the disposition of community ancestors, others objected vehemently. UCLA professor Clement Meighan argued in 1994 that reburial was “the equivalent of the historian burning documents after he has studied them” that would make it “impossible for scientists to carry out a genuinely scientific study of American Indian prehistory.”
In a few places, researchers claimed their academic freedom would be violated by implementing the law. For critics, some of whom continue to resist repatriation today, academic freedom means an unconstrained ability to pursue research, regardless of how those endeavors damage descendants.
This issue, of course, is not unique to physical anthropology. Researchers have a long history of treating communities as sources of knowledge, extracted without sincere engagement. The Tuskegee Syphilis Study is possibly the most notorious example in the United States where, for 40 years, U.S. Public Health Service and Tuskegee Institute researchers tracked Black men infected with a treatable disease without offering that treatment to observe its long-term effects. More recently in 2004, the Havasupai sued Arizona State University over use of DNA samples, granted for research on diabetes, for other purposes.
Turning the page on this history requires more than returning ancestral remains to their rightful resting places. The United States government has proposed new regulations that reduce barriers to repatriation created by interpretation of the concept of “cultural affiliation.” Models are already emerging for how to combine academic and community interests in research. These models recognize and address the ways in which fundamental frameworks of research and reigning ideas of academic freedom elevated the concerns of researchers over the people being studied. Community engagement has now become the recommended approach even at universities that once were most resistant to returning ancestral remains for reburial. | 2022-10-26T11:11:31Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Some academics hesitate to repatriate Indigenous remains. Here’s why. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/made-by-history/2022/10/26/universities-indigenous-remains/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/made-by-history/2022/10/26/universities-indigenous-remains/ |
Chiiikeee
An emerging talent from Hyattsville, rapper Chiiikeee serves up laid-back menace reminiscent of Gucci Mane and Young Dolph over trunk-rattling beats indebted to the Memphis-Atlanta tradition. Amid the usual street rap tropes, Chiiikeee is as likely to name-drop dance legend Gregory Hines as internet comedy oddity Andy Milonakis, and his moody track “Need It” is a well-timed anthem for everyone feeling the financial crunch of inflation as he raps, “How much is a dollar worth? I don’t care, I need it.” The rapper is featured at the annual Come Alive Halloween Party alongside Cameroonian American and fellow Marylander Go Ezko and Kerim the DJ. Oct. 28 at 11 p.m. at Songbyrd, 540 Penn St. NE. songbyrddc.com. $5-$15.
Since debuting at 9:30 Club in 2019, Bent has been a must-attend party for the city’s LGBTQ community and its allies on the dance floor. DJ Lemz’s homage to and expansion of the vision of dearly departed institution Town Danceboutique has regularly delivered a night of DJs, dancing and drag performances to sold-out audiences. For Halloween, Bent transforms into HellBent, a “creature feature” that promises performances from Pussy Noir, Baphomette, Sirene Noir Jackson, Mari Con Carne and Pissy, along with sets on the decks from the party’s founder, D.C. scene leader Tommy C, Electrox and KS. Oct. 29 at 10 p.m. at 9:30 Club, 815 V St NW. 930.com. $25.
Ella Jane’s best-known song is “Nothing Else I Could Do,” a bass-driven bop released during the first summer of the pandemic. Despite its title, the song isn’t about socially distanced doldrums but is an exploration of how the singer-songwriter self-sabotages when pursuing paramours. “I am powerless in the situation, I have caused myself pain just to avoid admitting flaws in myself and the other person, and I am exempt from any external judgment,” she explained on Genius. “Obviously, there is something else I could have done, I just … didn’t want to.” Along with taking inspiration from “The Great Gatsby” and serving as the final project for her AP Literature class, the song is an entry point into her growing catalogue of propulsive pop. Oct. 29-30 at 8 p.m. at DC9, 1940 Ninth St NW. dc9.club. $17-$50 (Oct. 29 show sold out).
Let’s Eat Grandma
Let’s Eat Grandma’s third album, “Two Ribbons,” was released earlier this year after a period of personal tribulation and tragedy. Not only did the duo — Rosa Walton and Jenny Hollingworth — have to process fractures in their lifelong friendship, but they also had to grapple with grief after the deaths of Hollingworth’s boyfriend, singer Billy Clayton, and their collaborator, the groundbreaking electronic producer Sophie. The pair have emerged more self-assured in their idiosyncratic approach to synth-pop, and as stronger collaborators and friends: “Nothing that was broken can touch how much I care for you,” they sing on the album’s opener. “Because you know you’ll always be my best friend, and look at what I have with you.” Nov. 1 at 8 p.m. at Union Stage, 740 Water St. SW. unionstage.com. $20-$35. | 2022-10-26T11:11:40Z | www.washingtonpost.com | 4 concerts to catch in D.C.: Oct. 28-Nov. 3 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/music/2022/10/26/concerts-dc/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/music/2022/10/26/concerts-dc/ |
D.C. rap hero Kokayi never did things by the book. Then he wrote one.
He’ll be discussing his life, his music and his new memoir-slash-career-guide, ‘You Are Ketchup,’ at Byrdland Records
By Chris Richards
D.C. rapper Kokayi has a new memoir out. (Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post)
The central ingredient in “You Are Ketchup,” the terrific new memoir-slash-career-guide by D.C. rap mainstay Kokayi, is tough love, which he’s more than happy to dish up in person, too. “One hundred thousand new songs go up on Spotify every day,” he says. “You’re not special!” At least not to the grinding gears of a capricious music industry that treats musicians, in Kokayi’s words, like ketchup, an interchangeable sauce.
So he’s written a book about accepting one’s fate as a condiment while ultimately nurturing all of the artistic ineffables that exist beyond the edicts of the marketplace. Written in a tone so conversational you can practically hear it in your ear, “You Are Ketchup” feels like a megadose of straight advice from a muso-mentor who’s been there. And, of course, Kokayi has been all over the place.
As the book tells it, he was rapping as a member of D.C.’s legendary Freestyle Union collective back in the ’90s from which producer Ezra Greer whisked him and a few friends up to New York for a recording session with jazz saxophonist Steve Coleman. Before long, he was touring with Coleman in Europe, and when Kokayi and his fellow rappers decided to break off into their own group, Opus Akoben, they began their journey with a record deal and a built-in European audience. When the group eventually got dropped and dissolved, Kokayi continued: making music, snaring Grammy nominations, acting as an unofficial consultant to local rap stars (you remember his cameo on GoldLink’s 2017 album “At What Cost,” right?), as well as volunteering as a mentor in the community — all while holding down various day jobs, including one early gig as Lynne Cheney’s personal driver. As rap careers go, his remains highly unscriptable to this day.
Which means “You Are Ketchup” isn’t a guide to making it in the music biz so much as a manual on making it through. Instead of advice on how to get signed, Kokayi focuses on how to survive getting dropped. His business lessons aren’t about getting rich quick; they’re about making decisions that protect the creative impulse. And instead of framing a career as a climb, he talks about shifts. “My friend was telling me the other day that there are levels in music,” Kokayi says. “I said, ‘No, there are paradigms.’ Each person has a paradigm that they exist in. We’re not lower or higher. A millionaire isn’t on another level of consciousness.”
Kokayi says he hopes to write another book about artistry and mental health soon — and, in a way, he’s taking his own advice. He wants to help readers surface the art that’s inside of them and, most importantly, to continue. “Nobody told you that you had to quit. You told you. You based it on this idea of being practical. Or you let society tell you that it’s time,” he says. “Don’t quit.”
Kokayi discusses “You Are Ketchup” on Nov. 3 at 7 p.m. at Byrdland Records, 1264 Fifth St. NE. byrdlandrecords.com. Free. | 2022-10-26T11:11:46Z | www.washingtonpost.com | D.C. rap hero Kokayi never did things by the book. Then he wrote one. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/music/2022/10/26/kokayi-memoir/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/music/2022/10/26/kokayi-memoir/ |
President Biden speaks about student loan debt relief at Delaware State University in Dover, Del., on Friday. (Evan Vucci/AP)
President Biden’s latest gaffe — claiming, in a moment of confusion, that Congress had passed his student loan forgiveness plan — has provided Americans with an additional moment of clarity just before the midterm elections: It has forced the Biden administration to admit that the Inflation Reduction Act does not reduce inflation, voters’ top concern — and was never intended to do so.
In a forum with NowThis, a left-wing news site, Biden said of his student loan forgiveness plan: “You are probably aware I’ve just signed a law that’s being challenged by my Republican colleagues. … What we’ve provided for is if you went to school, if you qualified for a Pell Grant, you qualify for $20,000 in debt forgiveness. Secondly, if you don’t have one of those loans, you just get $10,000 written off. It’s passed. I got it passed by a vote or two.”
No, he didn’t. He enacted student loan forgiveness by executive fiat — unilaterally spending up to $1 trillion of taxpayers’ money in an unconstitutional assault on Congress’s power of the purse. The president of the United States is apparently completely unaware that his plan was never submitted to Congress, never received a vote and was never “signed” into law.
Please, no serious person believes that spin. But even if we did, the clarification only makes things worse. Because until recently, the White House was claiming that the Inflation Reduction Act cut the deficit by hundreds of millions of dollars in order to … reduce inflation. Now, we learn, that was apparently never the plan.
In fact, Biden did so almost immediately after signing the Inflation Reduction Act into law. Within days, he announced his massive student loan forgiveness — a plan Penn Wharton estimates will cost between $605 billion and $1 trillion, while the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office puts the price tag at about $400 billion. None of that is paid for. It’s all deficit spending.
Now, in trying to cover up for Biden’s slip, the White House has unintentionally acknowledged that this critique is entirely correct. The administration never planned to use the $275 billion in deficit reduction to address the issue that is the biggest concern to voters; it was intended as a slush fund for spending on “other crucial programs.” So first, officials misled the American people by calling their climate spending bill the Inflation Reduction Act. Then they misled the American people about Biden’s student loan gaffe — and inadvertently admitted to their first lie. | 2022-10-26T11:11:52Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Biden's latest gaffe exposes the Inflation Reduction Act - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/26/biden-student-loans-inflation-reduction-lie/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/26/biden-student-loans-inflation-reduction-lie/ |
Masih Alinejad wants Joe Biden to try wearing a hijab
Masih Alinejad in New York on Oct. 6. (Ed JONES/AFP)
Since 22-year-old Mahsa Amini died in the custody of Iran’s “morality police” in September, Iranians around the world — especially women — have taken to the streets to rebel against the country’s theocratic regime. A particular source of rage are the laws requiring women to wear the hijab: Amini was arrested and allegedly beaten before her death for not covering enough of her hair.
Masih Alinejad, an Iranian journalist with remarkable hair, has been openly denouncing compulsory hijab laws since 2014, when she launched My Stealthy Freedom, a Facebook feed featuring images of Iranian women enjoying the fleeting moments when they could uncover their hair. (It has since grown into a full-fledged “disobedience campaign.”)
Alinejad, who spent much of her life trying to contain her curls, now wears her hair as a crown. And given her high-profile role as an activist and vocal supporter of the current uprising in Iran, she arguably has the most important hair in the world.
This month, Alinejad and I spoke about the history of her hair, why she cut it on national television, and what President Biden might learn if he were to spend 24 hours in a hijab. Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
Rosenberg: When do you first remember being aware of your hair as a part of your body?
Alinejad: When I started to go to school, when I was 7. We had to wear a specific kind of hijab, which we call maghnaeh. And I couldn’t put my hair in it, because my hair was very big. My mom and my father, they just held me. My mom held me and my father cut my hair, like in the middle, not the whole, to make it smaller. They were making jokes: “Now we can make a pillow out of this.” That was when I thought, okay, this is my hair, but it’s not mine. It’s under the control of other people.
In your memoir, you seem to have a very clear idea of what made hair beautiful when you were young. Other than being told that you needed to cover your hair, what were you told about what a woman’s hair should look like?
I was never told a woman’s hair should look beautiful. But, definitely, my hair was the most hated — in my culture, in my village — because in Iran, when I was growing up, oh, my God, curly hair was a disaster. People mocked me, called people with big hair a specific name — it meant “big-head woman” — to shame us.
When I was taking an English course [to prepare to attend university in the United Kingdom], a woman asked me, “You straighten your hair?” And then she took off my headscarf and said, “My God, look at your head. What are you doing? You just straighten this part because when it’s out of your scarf, you want to show you have straight hair?” I said, “Yeah, because I don’t have time. I straighten my hair just a bit.” And she told me, “Don’t.”
I went back to my mirror and she said, “Just look at yourself.” At first I didn’t know why. She said: “Just look at yourself and don’t make your hair straight. Just look deeply at your hair. You are going to love it.”
I remember then I was like, “Wow. Yes, she’s right.” I was staring into my eyes, my hair, and I was like, “This is me.” Now, I really love my hair.
What did your mother teach you about how to take care of your hair?
My mom? Nothing. To my mother, my family, my hair was not valuable. It was something I should hide. I just learned from friends when I left Iran, when I was taking English courses to go to university. I met a lot of Black women who had big hair like me. I asked, what kind of product should I use? And still in America, I do this. I get advice because their hair is similar to mine.
When you were in Iran, was your main concern just keeping your hair contained? How did you manage it?
In Iran, if you have too much hair, you’re in a serious trouble. Because when you’re walking around, you draw the attention of the morality police if your hair is out of your head scarf. So for me, it was extra work. Some people have joked about it, saying Masih launched a campaign against hijab because she has too much hair, she couldn’t handle it.
اره گوسفند خانوم ب ارزوت رسیدی ولی بدون همش عین مرفینه برات موقته موقت
توهم خوراک مور و ملخ میشی و ایران اسلامی استوار pic.twitter.com/yUTzah3Nx2
— پاشا خان (@Soheilpashay313) September 20, 2022
But the thing is, this is quite serious, especially for schoolgirls. I remember when I was in school — not even high school, like elementary school. A teacher comes to one of my classmates. She had long hair, so it was showing. And the teacher brought scissors and cut it. I was shocked. But it seemed really normal to other students.
Would you regularly get a hint or a warning if your scarf was slipping out of place?
When you go to a school, if you ask challenging questions, if you argue with a taxi driver or have complaints just while shopping, instead of arguing with you about the issue — maybe it’s a political question, it’s a shopping matter, anything — the first thing they say is, “First cover yourself, be hijab.” It’s like cursing you: “First cover yourself.”
As a [journalist covering parliament], I remember that anytime I asked a difficult question, the member of parliament would say, “First, cover yourself properly. Then ask your question.” I’ve heard other women say this: “When we challenged our teachers or professors at university, instead of answering us, they said, ‘First, cover yourself properly.’ ” It’s something they do to make a woman shut up immediately.
It sounds like a tax on your energy and focus.
Yes. This is controlling women through their hair, controlling the whole society through women’s hair, because they’ve also been telling men in the street: “This is against the honor of your family. You have to ask your sister to cover her hair. You have to ask your mother, your daughter.” Basically, they think that this hair, on my head, belongs to my father, my brother, not to me. It belongs to men. Belongs to the law.
It must have been disconcerting to feel like your hair could betray you.
That’s it exactly. When my hair got me into trouble, it was like, “Oh, my God, this bloody hair is betraying me and my family.”
This was the narrative: It’s your fault. If you get raped, it’s your fault. If you get arrested, it’s your fault.
I tried to change this narrative when I started to love my hair. I started making comments to every single woman walking past me. Maybe people think I’m crazy, but when I’m down, when I’m under pressure, I go to the streets and I talk about women’s hair. By talking about their hair, I can make family, I can make sisterhood, I can make friends.
Finally [with women unveiling themselves in protest in Iran], the world recognizes that Iranian women have some of the most beautiful hair in the world. And then when I go out on the streets here, I just cry when I see people taking their freedom for granted. I want to tell every single woman in the street in New York, “Hey, you really enjoy your hair, you enjoy the wind in your hair, you enjoy the beauty of your hair. But people are getting killed for their hair.”
What was it like to start experimenting and sort of playing with your hair? Did you try different styles to see which ones you liked?
Everywhere I go, it’s always the same style because I really enjoy my hair like this. Especially when I go to, like, a TV interview, this is the question everyone asks me: “What do you want us to do with your hair?” I say, “Just let it be the way it is. Because I like it.”
Sometimes I put it up, which I think is like a Christmas tree. My stepchildren, when they were really young, my son would joke and say, “We don’t want to buy a Christmas tree. Masih’s hair is like a Christmas tree. Let’s decorate the hair.”
My hair actually saves me from being depressed. Anytime I’m really down, I play with my hair in front of a mirror. You can see a lot of photos of me just jumping, and a lot of people want to know why I jump. It’s because I love it when I see my hair is dancing in the air.
It sounds like you feel freer in your body and in the world now that your hair is out.
All the years I’ve been living outside Iran, loving my hair, I want to jump, I want my hair to be like a waterfall.
The moment I heard that Mahsa Amini got killed for a bit of hair — oh, my God. My husband was hugging me, and I was like, “I hate, hate my hair.” I wanted to cut my hair. I felt guilty because I thought it was my fault — I’d been campaigning for eight years, but I was not successful in putting an end to the morality police. And, finally, a girl got killed.
My husband said, “You know, now you’re feeling down, but later you’re going to complain a lot.” Because he knows that when I cut my hair, I complain: “Oh, my God, I shouldn’t cut short my hair.” He hid the scissors, and then he went to work, and I couldn’t find them. So when I went to ABC to do “Good Morning America,” I asked, “Do you have any scissors?” And they gave them to me. And I said, okay, now I’m going to join Iranian women who are cutting their hair.
Now, one part of my hair is shorter. And I’m not complaining. One part is ugly — not ugly, shorter. But it has meaning for me.
Individual women in the West have been cutting their hair in solidarity with you, with other women in Iran. What can men do to show their support? And in particular what can men in power do?
A lot of people remember that many Western feminists, they wore hijab to show their solidarity. And now a lot of women are cutting their hair to show their solidarity. You’re right. Men aren’t doing anything. A first good step might be for them to wear hijab, to understand how it feels to be forced to wear it.
Maybe President Biden should wear one to see what it’s like.
I suggest he wear it one day — 24 hours. When you go to your office. When you go to your job. When you go to a party. To understand how it feels to be forced. Then you’re not going to downplay our cause.
Solidarity is important, but it’s only a first step. What should we be asking our governments to do?
The solidarity from across the globe is beautiful. But, especially, when I see female politicians cutting their hair, I say: “Oh, my God. Is that all the sacrifice you can make? Cut a bit of your hair? No. Cut your ties with our murderers.” | 2022-10-26T11:12:05Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Masih Alinejad wants Joe Biden to try wearing a hijab - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/26/masih-alinejad-joe-biden-hijab/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/26/masih-alinejad-joe-biden-hijab/ |
Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis at his Monday night debate against Democratic challenger Charlie Crist in Fort Pierce, Fla. (Marco Bello/Reuters)
The biggest surprise in Monday night’s debate between Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and his Democratic challenger Charlie Crist might have been that DeSantis was unprepared to answer an obvious question: whether he’ll promise to complete his four-year term if he’s reelected.
DeSantis not only dodged the question, he had no witty riposte or clever one-liner to offer in response, suggesting he didn’t think one was needed, despite the fact that his eventual presidential run seems inevitable.
DeSantis’s trajectory toward a presidential bid reveals something beyond his own personality, or even the internal dynamics of the GOP: The way we think about governors of both parties running for president has changed.
For decades, conventional wisdom held that governors made the strongest presidential candidates. They could be untainted by whatever people didn’t like about Washington, and their jobs made them plausible in the Oval Office: Like presidents, governors deal with legislatures, they make decisions, they can be judged on results, and they’re the most important figures in their capitals.
Senators, on the other hand, mostly give speeches, which is one reason that relatively few of them get elected president unless they’ve worked in some other executive position. Only three in all of American history — Warren G. Harding, John F. Kennedy and Barack Obama — went straight from the Senate to the White House.
But that’s not all governors have had to offer in the past. For many years, governors running for president made the argument, “Things are going great in my state, and it’s because I’ve brought people together, no matter their party, to solve problems and get things done.”
That was George W. Bush’s message in 2000; he was “a different kind of Republican,” he would say again and again, touting his work with Democrats in Texas. In 1992, Bill Clinton said he was “a new kind of Democrat,” more moderate than what voters were familiar with. Even Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter could tout accomplishments that transcended party.
The harbinger of change might have been Mitt Romney, who had been a governor in the traditional mold: a Republican in a liberal state who found success with moderate views and bipartisan achievements, most notably a health-insurance reform plan that would eventually provide a model for the Affordable Care Act. But when he ran for president, Romney had to disavow much of his record as a governor (especially that health-care plan).
Nevertheless, he got his party’s nomination on his second try. Today a few GOP governors still resemble what Romney was then, including Larry Hogan in Maryland, Chris Sununu in New Hampshire and Charlie Baker in Massachusetts.
But here’s what’s different: None of them could win the Republican presidential nomination. And it’s not just because they’re more moderate than someone such as DeSantis on the issues. It’s also because their success at state governing has made them anathema to the party base.
The way DeSantis became a national figure shows why. Why has he become the most frequently mentioned presidential contender? It’s not because his state has done so well, or even because he has staked out far-right positions; as conservative as he is, he’s hardly an outlier in the party.
It’s because he has been more aggressive than any other governor in using state power to punish the right’s enemies, staging high-profile fights that target immigrants, LGBTQ Floridians and companies such as Disney. That’s what thrills the GOP base, and what they now want to see from any governor.
DeSantis also has a media strategy aimed at conservatives. Early in his term, he became a fixture on Fox News, as the network promoted him as the next Republican star. Records obtained by the Tampa Bay Times show that the network asked DeSantis to appear 113 times from the week of the 2020 election through February 2021 — almost daily. This turned him into a star on the right and convinced mainstream media that he’s worth watching, even as he treats reporters with hostility and contempt.
On the other side, the governors Democrats most often mention as potential presidents are Gavin Newsom of California and Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan. Newsom has gone out of his way to start fights with Republicans in other states. Whitmer has been embroiled in intense controversies with her own state’s Republicans over abortion and other issues. In contrast, Democratic governors who run red states, including Laura Kelly in Kansas, Andy Beshear in Kentucky and John Bel Edwards in Louisiana, have garnered little national attention.
If anything, governors might now need to become more partisan if they want to run for president. The days of the “different kind” of Republican or Democrat, touting bipartisan success at the state level, are behind us. | 2022-10-26T11:12:23Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Ron DeSantis is finding a new path to right-wing stardom - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/26/ron-desantis-different-kind-governor-president/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/26/ron-desantis-different-kind-governor-president/ |
Q: I’m seeking advice on behalf of my husband on how to manage an ongoing problem with my stepchildren. My husband has two kids, ages 11 and 15, with his ex-wife. They are very sweet, good-natured kids. He has been separated and divorced from their mother since the kids were 2 and 6.
From the beginning, the custody arrangement has been unfair, with my husband seeing the children for only two overnights a week (one being on the weekend), plus a separate dinner. He has never been comfortable with this agreement and wants to have the kids live with us more, but his ex has always adamantly refused. Although she has never crossed the line into bad-mouthing my husband or me to the kids, she has made it clear since the separation that she does not view my husband as an equal co-parent and that he exists to act as a free babysitter.
We’re starting to see pushback from his kids on coming here overnight during the week or when they find it inconvenient. They are complaining that they have to wake up too early here on school days, so they would prefer to just not come. (We live nine miles away from their school, which is in the town their mother lives in.) Our response to this has always been that, although we understand that they don’t like having to wake up earlier, it’s a small price to pay to be in each other’s lives. It’s very clear that their mother encourages them to think this way, and usually suggests they stay with us less.
How do we manage this situation with the kids? I want us to ensure there is not some underlying issue that we’re not aware of, but how do we talk to the kids about this without being inappropriate or putting them in the middle? My husband and I are trying to figure out how to get the children to treat our home as theirs, and to recognize that a relationship with their father matters and that we need to be involved in their lives. However, we don’t know how far we can reasonably push. To be clear, the kids obviously love their dad and always seem to be happy when they are with us.
How much do children get to decide a custody arrangement? How much can we talk to them about the hurtful complaints they are making that are leading to their mother pushing to violate the custody arrangement? Thanks so much for any advice you can provide!
A: Thank you for writing in; custody agreements and children going back and forth can be tough. To begin, I want to empathize with the children. Although there is no point in assigning blame here, we definitely know it is not the children’s fault that there was a divorce. And yet, it is most often the children who need to keep clothes and personal items at two different homes and schlep their schoolwork, technology and important items back and forth. Each family member deals with complicated schedules, but the children are the ones balancing this with school, friendships, sports, activities and all the other tween and teen changes that development brings. They are acutely aware of their friends who have one set of parents, one home and one schedule.
I am not suggesting that the marriage should have stayed intact, but I am suggesting that, rather than focusing on the unfairness of the adults’ situations and desires, we need to first understand where the children are coming from.
Developmentally, 11 and 15 are very different stages, but they share the deep desire to be with, to belong to, to matter to and to be understood by their peers. This doesn’t mean that parents don’t matter; it just means that the children are drawn toward their peers. This energy shift can feel pretty personal to all parents, and it can be even worse when kids are feeling prickly about switching homes. The kids just want things to be easy, and their hormones will cause even more eye-rolling, commentary or bad attitudes.
As far as how to move forward, I would tread very carefully when it comes to talking to them about “their mother pushing to violate the custody arrangement.” Whenever possible, do not talk about their mother. This tween and teen are aware of the disagreements between their parents, and they will not be keen to any critique coming from either you or their father. When there is even a whiff of splitting loyalties, the children will be forced to choose. We don’t want this, so avoid talking about the mother at all costs.
Focus on listening to them complain without having much to say about it. Listen to the complaints about the inconveniences and the house being too far, and take it in. Just because you don’t feel as if it’s valid doesn’t mean it isn’t a real problem for them. Maybe their mother is goading them along, sure, but listening to the kids won’t make the feelings worse. When tweens and teens feel heard and respected, they are more likely to work with you instead of against you. As you listen and mirror what they are saying to you (without any judgment), you may find that they just wanted to get this off their chests and that you don’t need to do much at all.
But if they are really miserable and/or not letting it go, I highly recommend using Ross Greene’s collaborative and proactive solutions. This approach works because you have to focus on one thing at a time (waking up earlier, for instance); you focus on the problem, not what’s wrong with the children or the mom; and you must co-create solutions that work for both the parents and the children. Although not as satisfying as, “Because I said so,” this model tends to work because people like feeling respected, heard and cared about. You could guilt these young people, or you could work with them in a way that shows everyone’s feelings matter. This way, you will also not “give in” to losing time with them, unless you are okay with that, and you may even find that another schedule could work for these intense and awesome years.
This is ongoing work, and not everything will be perfect right away (or ever). But the focus is letting the children know that you are listening to them, that you respect them and that, above all, you love them.
Keep an open mind. Good luck. | 2022-10-26T11:12:36Z | www.washingtonpost.com | We’re upset about the custody arrangement. What are our options? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/parenting/2022/10/26/custody-arrangement-options-advice/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/parenting/2022/10/26/custody-arrangement-options-advice/ |
Brookland is a D.C. neighborhood worth writing about
The Northeast Washington community is the focus of several blogs by locals
Children play outside in the Brookland neighborhood of Northeast Washington. (Photos by Maansi Srivastava for The Washington Post)
Brookland, a Northeast Washington neighborhood, may be best known for its “Little Rome” moniker, a fitting description, because it houses the Franciscan Monastery of the Holy Land in America and runs adjacent to the Catholic University of America campus. But Robert Malesky has traced the roots of the neighborhood much deeper — all the way back to namesake Jehiel Brooks, a U.S. Army colonel and Louisiana “Indian agent” who moved to the District in 1835 to begin developing the approximately 200 acres of farmland his wife owned there.
The story of Brooks — and the neighborhood that bears his name — is told in meticulous detail, complete with photos and source documents, on Bygone Brookland, a visually sumptuous blog run by Malesky, 72, who started it in 2014, a few years after wrapping up a 34-year career at NPR. He was inspired to start digging into local history, he said, while taking long walks around the campus of Catholic University, his alma mater.
“I felt that this part of the District, the Northeast quadrant, was normally ignored,” he said. “I thought there was an interesting history here. … It’s an integrated neighborhood, and the neighbors do care about each other in a way I’ve not seen in other neighborhoods.”
Other labors of love begun by locals include the blog Brookland Bridge, which informs neighbors about community events and local politics, and the two-year blog project Bipeds of Brookland, which includes profiles of residents compiled by real estate agents Jake Abbott and Shemaya Klar.
Sara Lucas was an early star of Bipeds. Lucas, 73, has lived in Brookland for 49 years and has run her locally beloved flower shop, Petals Ribbons & Beyond, on 12th Street NE since 2005.
“It’s sort of like an institution, I’ve been there so long,” she said.
When neighborhood newcomers visit her shop, she said, she often gives them a copy of “Brookland (Images of America),” a tribute to the neighborhood’s rich history written by longtime residents John J. Feeley Jr. and Rosie Dempsey.
Despite the neighborhood’s prime urban location, bordered by the Metro’s Red Line to the west and Rhode Island Avenue to the south, Lucas said she feels as if she’s in a small town inside Brookland’s boundaries. Even as the neighborhood has developed over the years, adding restaurants and some apartment buildings, the feeling persists. Residents greet each other by name, she said, and regulars stop inside the shop to say hello.
“I cannot envision living anywhere else in this city except here,” she said.
Abbott, who’s with the Abbott Klar Real Estate Group, arrived in the neighborhood in 2001 as an AmeriCorps volunteer to work with Mary House, an organization providing resources to immigrants and refugees. He said he likes the neighborhood’s activist bent. Local clergy members demonstrate against war or in favor of immigration, for example, and Brookland-based nonprofit Casey Trees lobbies and educates to protect D.C.’s tree canopy. That passion is built into the neighborhood’s history, too.
“When [Interstate 395] was supposed to come through Brookland [in the late 1960s], the whole community got together and they fought,” Abbott said. “It has a long history of being a tight neighborhood.”
Neighbors praise the Brookland Neighborhood Civic Association, a version of which was founded in 1880, for keeping the community informed and connected. The association organizes a neighborhood-wide yard sale and several community cleanup days each year. Other popular events include a weekly farmers market and an annual “Brookland Day” picnic.
Although Brookland used to have few retail and dining offerings, 12th Street NE now boasts a number of independent eateries, including the locally themed Brookland’s Finest Bar & Kitchen; bistro and wine bar Primrose; and Indian restaurant Masala Story.
Another favorite local institution is the Greater Brookland Garden Club, which organizes a popular annual house and garden tour. Brookland resident Rex Nutting, who has been with the club for most of its 24-year history, said he has found great joy in the hard work and continuous learning that the practice of growing affords.
“It’s been a very nice thing to get involved with, to try to make the community a little bit more beautiful, a little bit more friendly,” said Nutting, 68. “I find that people really like to talk about plants. They like to see what you’re doing, and they love to commiserate about their failures and celebrate successes. You know, we all live in the same environment.”
Living there: The Brookland Neighborhood Civic Association defines the boundaries as Buchanan Street NE, South Dakota Avenue NE and Michigan Avenue NE to the north; 18th Street NE to the east; Rhode Island Avenue NE to the south; and the Metro tracks to the west.
Although home values are climbing in D.C., as they are everywhere, Abbott said homes in Brookland tend to be a little more affordable than in better-known neighborhoods. Common architecture includes bungalows and center-hall Colonials and Victorians, and there are a few farmhouses that recall the neighborhood’s beginnings. He said 134 detached houses and rowhouses sold in the past year, ranging from $483,000 for a three-bedroom fixer-upper to $1.529 million for a 3,000-square-foot, six-bedroom Craftsman-style house. The average home sale price is around $860,000, and 18 single-family houses are on the market.
Schools: Noyes Elementary, Brookland Middle, Dunbar High.
Transit: The Metro’s Red Line runs along the western border of Brookland, stopping at Brookland-CUA, as well as Rhode Island Avenue-Brentwood in the southwestern corner. Multiple Metro buses also serve the neighborhood. | 2022-10-26T12:11:20Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Neighborhood profile: Brookland in Northeast Washington - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/10/26/where-we-live-brookland/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/10/26/where-we-live-brookland/ |
Courts seek to clarify voting procedures, but experts worry that last-minute changes confuse voters
A voter fills out a ballot at George C. Marshall High School on Nov. 2, 2021, in Falls Church, Va. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post)
Over the past 20 years, the rate of election litigation has nearly tripled, according to a tally by law professor Richard L. Hasen of the University of California at Los Angeles. For the 2020 cycle, election litigation increased by more than 25 percent from the previous presidential cycle.
How many ballots could be affected remains unclear, but even a small number could be pivotal in a state where elections often are decided narrowly. A review by legislative auditors of about 15,000 ballots from 2020 found 7 percent were missing at least part of the witness addresses, with the vast majority of those missing the state name or Zip code. | 2022-10-26T12:24:23Z | www.washingtonpost.com | How votes are cast and counted increasingly decided in courtrooms - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/26/2022-election-lawsuits-legal-challenges/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/26/2022-election-lawsuits-legal-challenges/ |
Progressives will pay a price for the Ukraine letter. (Photographer: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
The answer lies in what happened between Monday and Tuesday. The rapid closing of a potential schism within party’s ranks on foreign policy is actually a story of organizational efficiency and cohesion. It shows the unity of congressional Democrats, and the ability of the party currently in power to work out differences. The House’s top Republican, meanwhile, recently folded when faced with similar pressure. Call it “Democrats in Array,” complete with a mea culpa from the Representative Pramila Jayapal of Washington. “As Chair of the Caucus, I accept responsibility for this,” she said.
There will be serious costs for those on the wrong side of this dispute, from Jayapal and the signers to the House Progressive Caucus in general.(1)This is the kind of misstep that goes beyond a bad news cycle. It can hurt reputations, and with them bargaining power, in the future. Jayapal blamed staff for the episode, which is both difficult to believe and hardly likely to make anyone feel more confident in her.
But the power of ideological outliers is very different between the parties. Ukraine is an excellent example. Mainstream liberal Democrats, as we’ve seen this week, are not afraid of disagreements with the House Progressive Caucus. Indeed, many of them appear to delight in contrasting themselves with those who are more liberal.Mainstream Republicans, however, are terrified of any significant criticism from those who call themselves extreme conservatives — which allows those radicals to bully the rest of the party. We saw the results recently, with House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy admitting that Ukraine aid would probably be cut off if he becomes Speaker, even though the House as a whole would certainly have the votes for additional aid packages and even within the Republican conference there will likely still be a majority for continuing to support that beleaguered nation.
It’s not that very liberal Democrats have no influence whatsoever. After all, many of their proposals were included in bills passed by House Democrats during this Congress, even if in most cases they didn’t have the votes to win in the Senate. Overall, Democrats had a very liberal-friendly agenda, the result in large part of a presidential nomination process in which mainstream liberals prevailed over strong showings from Senator Bernie Sanders (and to a lesser extent, Elizabeth Warren). Just as important, those who wanted to make the party less liberal were wiped out early.(2)
• Obama Is More Valuable as a Pundit Than as a Politician: Matthew Yglesias
• Democrats Are Focusing on the Wrong Issues: Ramesh Ponnuru
• Biden Is Unpopular, But Democrats Aren’t: Jonathan Bernstein
(1) Jayapal’s statement backing off said that the Caucus, not the 30 signers, were withdrawing the letter.
(2) Biden himself did not run as a moderate intent on moving the party to the center; he ran as a mainstream liberal, right in the middle of the party ideologically. | 2022-10-26T12:41:51Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Democrats Govern, Republicans Bulldoze. Just Look at Ukraine. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/democrats-govern-republicans-bulldoze-just-look-at-ukraine/2022/10/26/071e236c-552a-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/democrats-govern-republicans-bulldoze-just-look-at-ukraine/2022/10/26/071e236c-552a-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html |
Analysis by Khalid Qayum | Bloomberg
Imran Khan, Pakistan’s prime minister, speaks in a prerecorded video during the United Nations General Assembly via live stream in New York, U.S., on Friday, Sept. 24, 2021. A scaled-back United Nations General Assembly returns to Manhattan after going completely virtual last year, but fears about a possible spike in Covid-19 cases are making people in the host city less enthusiastic about the annual diplomatic gathering. (Bloomberg)
Pakistan’s former Prime Minister Imran Khan, who was ousted by a no-confidence vote in early April, is making a major push to return to power. The former international cricket star has led big protest rallies nationwide and won several by-elections. Khan has also locked horns with the country’s powerful army, which has ruled the country for about half of its 75-year existence. He wants the new government of Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif to call early elections, which Khan thinks he would win comfortably.
1. What is Imran Khan’s plan?
The ex-premier warned before his ouster that he’d be more “dangerous” leading popular protests on the streets. Since then, he has demanded the 13-party coalition government that replaced him set a date for early elections, which otherwise aren’t due until October 2023. On Oct. 25 this year, he called on his supporters to march from across the country toward Islamabad, the capital, in a bid to force Sharif to call an early vote or to topple the government. It’s a strategy he’s tried before -- unsuccessfully. In 2014 Khan led a 126-day sit-in protest in Islamabad in a failed bid to dislodge then-Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, the elder brother of the current premier.
2. Why was Khan ousted?
During his turbulent 3 1/2 years in office, Khan demonstrated an approach to governing that critics characterized as haphazard and inconsistent. Facing a balance-of-payments crisis, he delayed seeking a bailout from the International Monetary Fund. He finally did so in 2019, only to see the program suspended in 2020 because of the pandemic. The plan was revived last year -- after another stall -- after Khan agreed to tougher conditions, including raising oil prices and electricity tariffs. But a few months later, Khan cut domestic fuel costs and power rates to soothe public anger over rising living costs, again putting the IMF program in jeopardy. (It was revived by the new government in August.)
3. Why is Khan still fighting?
He has accused Sharif and other politicians of conspiring with the US to topple his government because -- he says -- he had been increasingly critical of Washington while seeking better relations with Russia and China. Khan provided no proof for his claim, which was denied by the US, the Sharif government and Pakistan’s military. However, his conspiracy theory, has gone down well with his supporters. In by-elections in October, Khan won six out of seven seats that he personally contested, demonstrating his continued popular appeal. He was supposed to resign from all but one, but meanwhile has faced legal efforts to disqualify him as a lawmaker.
4. Why is the military’s position important?
Pakistan’s military has outsized power in a country conceived as a democracy. There have been three successful military coups. When Khan became prime minister, it was only the second time since the creation of Pakistan in 1947 that a civilian administration had transferred power to another. Even when elected governments are in power, the military, especially its spy wing, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency, has played a forceful role in foreign and security policies. The armed forces have entrenched positions in the economy through land ownership and shareholdings in large corporations.
5. Did the military support Khan?
Khan has said his relations with the military for his first three years in power were “excellent,” and that he and General Qamar Javed Bajwa were on “same page” on all issues -- an arrangement critics referred to as a hybrid regime. In behind-the-scenes maneuvers, the armed forces helped him survive several previous moves by opponents to remove him from power, according to interviews Khan gave after his ouster. (The military has denied helping him.) His government extended Bajwa’s term as army chief for another three years in 2019. However, relations soured in October 2021 when General Faiz Hameed, the ISI chief and a Khan favorite, was moved to a less significant post. The military announced his replacement, General Nadeem Ahmad Anjum, three weeks before the government did, sparking reports of a rift between Khan and Bajwa. When a new challenge to Khan’s leadership arose this year, the military apparently didn’t back him, opposition parties and analysts say.
The country’s foreign reserves have fallen to a three-year low and a $1 billion bond payment is due in December. Moody’s Investors Service has downgraded the country’s rating deep into junk, citing the impact of mid-year floods that have caused more than $30 billion in damage to the economy. The rupee has plumbed new lows against the dollar. Shehbaz Sharif and his finance minister, Ishaq Dar, have vowed to meet the country’s financial obligations, including the bond payment and completing the agreement with the IMF. The premier has promised a more balanced foreign policy, seeking good ties with “all-weather friend” China while also seeking better relations with the US and Europe. In September, Pakistan joined China in abstaining on the United Nations General Assembly’s resolution condemning Russia’s “attempted illegal annexation” of Ukraine. | 2022-10-26T12:41:52Z | www.washingtonpost.com | How Imran Khan Wants to Win Back Power in Pakistan: QuickTake - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/how-imran-khan-wants-to-win-back-power-in-pakistan-quicktake/2022/10/26/65ca5c74-5524-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/how-imran-khan-wants-to-win-back-power-in-pakistan-quicktake/2022/10/26/65ca5c74-5524-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html |
Fed Pullback? Not If It’s Watching the Bond Market Closely
After a widely expected fourth straight 0.75% interest-rate increase next week, there’s a growing view that the Federal Reserve will step down to a 0.50% bump at their December meeting. Even with inflation still going strong, there’s value in the Fed becoming more flexible as rates rise to a level restrictive enough to rein in inflation and growth in coming months.
But the response from financial markets this month suggests a lack of confidence that the current expected terminal rate — the level at which the Fed finally stops raising rates — is high enough to finish the job. Even if the economic data cooperates over the next month or two, there’s probably at least one more push higher in the probable terminal rate before investors can breathe a sigh of relief.
This raises the question of how the Fed is thinking about the terminal rate. At its September monetary policy meeting, the Fed’s projection was that the target federal funds rate would hit 4.6% — a range between 4.50% and 4.75% — in 2023. (The so-called fed funds rate is currently 3.25%.) The hotter-than-expected September consumer price index report has led some Fed officials to talk about getting to that range by the end of this year, which is what markets have currently priced in: a 0.75% increase next week, and then either a 0.50% or 0.75% increase at the December meeting. Markets are signaling they expect one more 0.25% increase in early 2023, taking the terminal rate to a range of 4.75% and 5%.
But if you’re the Fed, the market’s response to those expectations has been discouraging. Through Monday, the S&P 500 is up 6% on the month (though it’s still down 20% for the year, so by itself that shouldn’t be an issue for the Fed). More concerning has been the recovery in breakeven rates, which indicate the level of future inflation expected by the bond market.
At the end of September, breakeven rates had fallen to levels seen in the 2010’s, suggesting the bond market’s inflation expectations were consistent with the Fed’s objectives. That’s arguably no longer the case. Through Monday, two-year breakeven rates are up 0.93% on the month, five-year breakevens are up 0.54%, and 10-year breakevens are up 0.43% — and all are now at levels higher than we saw at any point in the 2010’s.
The bond market is expecting the consumer price index to rise an average of 2.65% annually over the the next five years, but that’s moving in the wrong direction and above the Fed’s 2% inflation target.
Market-based price signals should be given more weight at a time when the “hard data” isn’t yet providing the Fed the right indicators to slow the pace of tightening. Core inflation continues to run well above target, and even while there are signs that inflation should slow in the months to come, the Fed would likely want at least three months of data to feel reassured. At the same time, neither the labor market nor financial markets are showing enough evidence of cooling, with employment remaining strong and markets looking healthier than they did a month ago.
The Fed’s evolving approach has been like cooking a bag of microwave popcorn. Like conducting monetary policy, it’s a data-dependent process, as anyone who has ever burned popcorn despite precisely following the directions on the bag can attest. In the first two minutes the bag heats up and expands and kernels start to pop with accelerating intensity. That’s more or less what we’ve seen from the Fed since March as it aggressively raised rates from 0% at a time of high inflation. It’s not until the popping slows that you have to pay closer attention. You can’t see inside the bag, so you watch for other signs that the process is complete (or that you’ve gone too far), such as no more popping sounds or a burning smell. This is the phase the Fed is moving into now.
Conclusive data from the inflation or labor markets showing that the Fed has done its job won’t come until the first quarter of 2023, at the earliest. In the meantime, market signals should carry more weight, and unfortunately, the inflationary response of markets in October to the Fed’s perceived tightening path suggests we haven’t yet priced in enough interest rate increases. We should be prepared for the Fed’s terminal rate to end up north of 5%.
Will Jerome Powell Be Like Volcker or Burns?: Bill Dudley | 2022-10-26T12:42:09Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Fed Pullback? Not If It’s Watching the Bond Market Closely - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/fed-pullback-not-if-its-watching-the-bond-market-closely/2022/10/26/57e79e7a-5522-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/fed-pullback-not-if-its-watching-the-bond-market-closely/2022/10/26/57e79e7a-5522-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html |
The lady in the blue dress. (Virginia Mori for The Washington Post)
Kids can be (mostly) delightful little weirdos who say bizarre and baffling things from time to time. But what about those times when your kid says something that totally creeps you out? That makes it hard to fall asleep in the dark? Or leaves you wondering if maybe you should move to another house, perhaps immediately?
As parents, we understand that we should know better. We’re grown-ups! Parents are unflappable, the reassuring authorities who promise of course there’s no monster under the bed. Unfortunately, parents are also people who have spent decades being conditioned by Hollywood to believe that when kids say something freaky out of nowhere, it might mean that there are ghost twins lurking in the hotel hallway, or your TV is possessed by demons, or you haven’t yet realized that you’re actually dead.
We invited readers to share stories of things kids said that left their caregivers totally spooked. Here are some of our favorite submissions, lightly edited for length and clarity.
One day I was standing in my then-6-year-old daughter’s bedroom doorway and talking with her, and she kept looking past me into the hallway. There was nothing there. “What is it?” I asked.
“It’s the lady in the blue dress,” she said. “She walks around the house and comes into my room sometimes.”
— Kristina Rose, Chicago
When my now-9-year-old was 2 or 3, he nonchalantly reported a shadowy figure called “The Big Thief” who lived in his closet and who came out at night to watch him sleep. The Big Thief had arms and legs but vaporous smoke as a face; my son was very, very clear about what The Big Thief looked like, where he lived in the closet (hung up on hangers like the clothes), how he behaved, and he has absolutely no memory of any this today.
— Rebecca Summerlot, Windermere, Fla.
From the time our daughter was 2½ to age 5, she talked about “Offogans” visiting her at night. According to her, Offogans are creatures that live in the woods, hang out on roofs and visit children at night. She told us that Offogans were not very scary, though, because “they only eat adults and carrots.”
— Alissa Olson, Park City, Utah
When my son was 3 or 4 years old, he used to tell us about his “other Mom and Dad” and his “other family.” He had one sibling, like he does now. The comments would come up at random times — walking through a local fair, or while we were eating dinner. But once we were driving through a new town, and as we passed a building, he pointed at it and said: “We all died in a fire, in a building that looks like that one.”
— Barbara B., East Hampton, Conn.
Sitting at the top of a slide on a windy day, my 5-year-old son Gregory paused and declared, in a particularly dramatic tone: “When the wind blows, and the trees dance — that’s when the wolves come.”
— Elizabeth Villemez, D.C.
After my husband died of a heart attack, I moved in with my daughter and her family. They had just moved into an older home on a beautiful lake. The previous owners were Mona and Irvin, who had built the home, raised their children there and passed away after long lives. One day, my 3-year-old grandson, Hayden, was sitting in my lap and he touched my necklace and said, “You know, Mona used to wear a necklace just like this.” A few days later, we found a large wedding photo of Mona and Irvin in a closet. Hayden looked at it and said, “I know that guy! He swings from that tree outside into the lake.”
— Charmaine Sforza-Flick, Miami
Before having children, my husband and I had a dog, a boxer named Oscar Bean who was the best dog/fur baby anyone could hope to have. We always joked that we hoped our human children would be as well-behaved as our dog. When I was pregnant with my daughter, Oscar was 10 years old, and he died eight days before our daughter was born.
Three years later, my toddler was sitting at a table in my office, coloring and playing with toys while I worked. She looked up at my bookshelf and saw a framed picture of a dog and asked, “Is that a picture of Oscar?” I replied, “Yes, it is.” She stared at the picture for a moment and then looked at me and said in a very serious tone, “You know I was Oscar last time?” and then she went back to coloring. (Perhaps she is the reincarnation of our beloved dog. But the dog was a hell of a lot easier to train.)
— Carla Emerson, Flemingsburg, Ky.
While babysitting my 15-month-old grandson, I was feeding him his breakfast in the dining room. Suddenly, he stopped eating and looked over my shoulder into the living room. He said “hi,” smiled and waved. He excitedly chatted in his baby speech for a few moments, then waved his hand and said “goodbye.” There was no one that I could see in the living room.
— Barbara Mayers, D.C.
On a trip home from visiting grandparents when my son was about 3 years old, he started quietly and slowly counting down backwards, unprompted. It was just he and I in the car and the sun was low as we drove through winding, rural roads. “Eight, seven, six, five …” he said, looking out the window, and then trailed off into a minute-long silence. We made eye contact in the rearview mirror and he said to me: “Mom, you will die.”
Thoroughly shocked, I replied, “I’m sorry, what did you say?” My son quietly responded, matter-of-fact: “Mom, you will die. Dad will die, too.” Now thoroughly creeped out as we continued to drive through the middle of nowhere, I asked him again: “What are you talking about?”
My son, with a dead-seriousness no 3-year-old should have: “... When the numbers run out, you will die.” Before I had a chance to respond, he changed the subject to something benign and never spoke of it again. He’s 9 now and has no memory of this exchange; I, on the other hand, will never forget it!
— Keiko Zoll, Swampscott, Mass.
Our 6-year-old daughter, Eve, once made a lovely drawing with pop-up gravestones. She showed it to us and proudly explained: “Look, there’s one for each of us.”
— Meshelle Armstrong, Alexandria, Va.
We moved into a rental house when my son was in third grade. Immediately, he told me about the man who lived in his closet and died in the bedroom he was using. I used to hear my son having conversations with this man in the closet when he’d be playing alone in his room. My son said the man was very nice, and was happy a boy was living in his bedroom. I explained to my son that no one had died in this house; the woman who owned it was a widow for many years, and when she got too old to continue living there on her own, she was placed in a nursing home. The woman’s eldest son was acting as my landlord, but both were still very much alive. My son told me I was wrong. He was adamant that the man that lived in his closet died there. Three months later, I was out in my yard and the elderly next-door neighbor struck up a conversation with me for the first time. He said he missed the woman and her younger son that lived together there. He explained that he felt guilty that this younger son had once been kind enough to shovel the snow from both their driveways, then returned to his mom’s house and died of a heart attack in the room my son was staying in. That’s why the woman had to be placed in a nursing home — her younger son was no longer around to help her. My mouth dropped open. My only response: “Please don’t tell my son this.” The neighbor assured me he’d never scare a child with this information. We moved out after a year. I told my son this when he became an adult — he’s 29 years old now. He still remembers the man who lived in his closet.
— Robin Morriss, Lehi, Utah
My daughter, who was about 5 or 6 at the time, came into my bed early in the morning. She was lying next to me and I was only half awake. She whispered in my ear, “I will always love you with all my heart. Even when you’re dead.” That woke me right up!
— Elizabeth Crego, Alexandria, Va.
My husband and his family grew up in the neighborhood where we currently live with our teenage daughter. One day, when she was in kindergarten, we were waiting at the bus stop down the street from our home, and she looked up at me and told me she wanted to go to her “other house.” I asked for an explanation and she replied, “The blue one. The one with the cats.” She then pointed toward a house up the street. (There was no blue house that I could see.) Later, I told my husband about our conversation. He explained that his grandmother, who died about 30 years before, lived in a blue house on that street, but it had burned down many years before. She’d also had many cats. As far as we know, there is no way our daughter could have known any of that information about her “Grammaw Missy.”
— Gail Finney, Staunton, Va.
My father died 10 years before my son was born. My son bears a striking resemblance to my dad, and they have many interests and preferences in common. Starting around age 3, my son has mentioned multiple times, with no prompting, that he “met” my dad before he was born, “when I was a spirit.”
— Carol Katarsky, Philadelphia
Many years ago while driving with my 4-year-old son, I noticed him looking pensively out the window. I asked him what he was thinking about and he replied, “I’m talking to my friend John Henry.” My son did not know anyone named John Henry. I asked him what John Henry was saying, and my son said, “He’s telling me to hurt puppies and kittens and I told him he shouldn’t.” I nearly drove the car off the road and into a ditch. Preschool teachers and therapists were consulted. His father and I watched him carefully for any signs of violence or acting out. We would casually ask about John Henry after that, but he was never mentioned again by our son.
— Alice Allen, Austin
One fall evening, when our son was 2 years old, he was sleeping in bed with me and my husband. Suddenly, around 10 p.m., our toddler sat straight up in the bed and said: “They’re coming.” My husband and I asked, “Who’s coming?!” but our son stayed silent. Then he went back to sleep — but we didn’t.
— Frankie Cevallos, Montclair, N.J.
I take care of my two grandsons (they’re four months apart, one each from my two sons) during the week, and have done so since they were about a year old. They’re 2 years old now. One day I had my back to them and they both started excitedly and happily saying, “GG Jo! GG Jo!” over and over for several seconds, and then stopped suddenly; they’d never said it before and haven’t said it since. ‘GG Jo’ is the name all of her great-grandchildren called my mother, but as far as I know, no one in the family had told them this. These little boys are her youngest great-grandchildren. One was 4 months old when she passed away, the other was only 3 weeks old. They never knew her. I didn’t turn around when they seemed to be so happy to see her, afraid I either would or wouldn’t see her myself. It made the hair on my arms stand up.
— Colleen Jury, Seattle
My two preschoolers and I lived with my mom and brother in an older duplex with a basement. My brother and I slept in bedrooms in the basement, although I always wound up sleeping upstairs with the kids in their room. One day the power went out, and we were all upstairs in the living room with candles. My mom wanted to tell scary stories because of the ambiance. Everything was all good until my son, who was 4 at the time, interrupted and asked if my mom was talking about the “gods in the basement” while she was telling her scary story. My brother is easy to spook, and the look on his face was priceless.
— Catherine Delos Santos, Seattle
One day, after playing at the park, my 5-year-old son asked me a question about his grandmother out of the blue. I was startled, but answered him, and we talked about her a little bit. We later found out that she had died suddenly at almost the exact same time he asked about her.
— Lydia Wong, Cary, N.C.
When my younger daughter was 4 years old, we were getting ready to head out for the morning and she was taking a long time putting on her shoes. I asked her to hurry, and she nonchalantly responded, “I’m trying, but Creepy Kay is distracting me.” I tried to play it cool in the moment, but I asked her about this later, and she told me that Creepy Kay was always nice to her, but that she “is mean to mean people, and nice to nice people.” We still talk about Creepy Kay to this day.
— Mona Youngblood, Carmel, Ind. | 2022-10-26T12:42:40Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Creepy things our kids have said that spooked the %^*! out of us - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/parenting/2022/10/26/spooky-things-kids-said/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/parenting/2022/10/26/spooky-things-kids-said/ |
The FTC is doing more to protect data, but to some it’s still not enough
Welcome to The Cybersecurity 202! It was an interesting day yesterday for figurative raccoons, as you’ll soon discover multiple times in this morning’s newsletter.
Below: The Justice Department accuses a Ukrainian national of being a key player behind “Raccoon malware,” and Google reaches an agreement with the Justice Department over responding to search warrants and subpoenas. First:
There’s a debate over how aggressive the FTC should be to protect data
It’s rare for the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to hold an individual company to account in a security breach.
But on Monday, the FTC leveled sanctions against the CEO of alcohol delivery company Drizly over a data security breach that exposed millions of consumers’ personal information.
That action didn’t deter Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) from writing a letter to the commission and the nation’s spymaster the very next day about another matter: his “serious concern” that a lack of security clearances at the FTC was preventing meaningful coordination with the intelligence community to slow Chinese theft of U.S. consumers’ data.
So even as FTC ramps up enforcement of data protections for consumers, it faces criticism that it’s not doing enough.
The FTC, beyond individual enforcement actions against data security laggards, has indicated plans to expand its security oversight. Congress, too, has proposed funding increases and reorganizations, although some ideas have run into opposition from industry groups.
The FTC “has made data and privacy a top priority,” spokesperson Juliana Gruenwald Henderson told me.
She touted “several recent cases that seek to hold companies accountable for failing to take reasonable steps to protect and secure personal data they collect and store,” including sending the signal to CEOs with the Drizly case that “they must make security a priority or they may find themselves personally liable if they fail.”
“At the same time, the FTC is addressing the issue more broadly by launching an initiative exploring possible rules to address commercial surveillance and lax data security practices,” she said.
Busy, busy
FTC watchers say the commission has grown more aggressive on data security, as expected, under Chair Lina Khan, who took office in June 2021. Besides the Drizly case, the FTC also has taken action against online retailer CafePress and Twitter over allegations of lax security practices.
Those cases, though, are only one way the FTC has delved further into data security. Some prominent examples:
Last fall, the FTC said it would explore requiring financial institutions to notify it of certain cybersecurity incidents, and update requirements for companies to secure consumer information.
In January, the FTC warned firms that it "intends to use its full legal authority to pursue companies that fail to take reasonable steps to protect consumer data from exposure as a result of Log4j, or similar known vulnerabilities in the future."
In May, the agency followed up on the notification requirement idea by declaring in a blog post that the FTC Act that established the commission “creates a de facto breach disclosure requirement because the failure to disclose will, for example, increase the likelihood that affected parties will suffer harm.”
The commission said in August it would look at rules to crack down on commercial surveillance that has “heightened the risks and stakes of data breaches.” That includes granting the FTC the ability to penalize first-time violations, something it currently lacks.
The FTC will play a role under plans unveiled last week to develop cybersecurity labeling that the administration has compared to “EnergyStar for cyber.”
In some cases, observers believe the FTC is going too far.
“The FTC has already put companies on notice that failure to appropriately disclose a data breach or maintain reasonable security will be considered” a violation, Kristin Bryan, a lawyer and partner at Squire Patton Boggs who works on data security dispute cases, told me. “In my view, that is enough of a stick without additional rulemaking being required.”
About those limitations …
Despite the FTC's action against Twitter, that case renewed questions about whether the FTC can be an effective enforcement agency on data security. The FTC had placed Twitter under a consent decree in 2011, but whistleblower Peiter “Mudge” Zatko said it was never in compliance. The agency has approximately 40 people monitoring compliance with consent decrees, my colleagues Cat Zakrzewski and Joseph Menn reported in September.
Earlier this month, Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) urged the FTC to do more to combat breaches.
House appropriators have proposed an FTC budget of $490 million for fiscal 2023, a 30 percent increase over the prior year. Senate appropriators have proposed $430 million, two figures that would need to be reconciled.
But a proposal in the Build Back Better Act to establish a privacy bureau at the FTC was left out of a final deal for the Inflation Reduction Act. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce objected to the creation of that bureau.
And a Supreme Court ruling last year curtailed one of the FTC’s enforcement tools. That in turn has thrown into doubt some of the FTC’s jurisdiction to further expand its powers absent congressional authorization, James E. Lee, chief operating officer of the Identity Theft Resource Center, told me.
“You’ve clearly seen the agency stepping up. They have become more aggressive under Chair Khan,” Lee said. “At the same time, there are still people in Congress who want them to be more aggressive. But it doesn’t really matter at the end of the day how aggressive they want to be and how aggressive people want them to be if they don’t have the bodies and the legislative mandate.”
DOJ accuses Ukrainian national of being key player behind ‘Raccoon’ malware
Prosecutors accused Mark Sokolovsky of being a key part of the team behind “Raccoon,” a strain of malware that has infected millions of computers since 2019 and was leased to cybercriminals for around $200 a month. Authorities took down the malware’s infrastructure in March, when Dutch authorities arrested Sokolovsky, the Justice Department said.
A newly unsealed grand jury indictment, which was filed in November 2021, mentions a slew of Raccoon’s victims, including ones with U.S. Army affiliations. The FBI’s Austin Cyber Task Force is investigating the case with the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division, the Justice Department said.
One of the victims’ log-in credentials were stolen from a U.S. Army computer system in June 2019 and hackers stole around $15,000 from their bank account, the indictment said.
A Texas victim’s credentials for an Army service for communicating with doctors was also stolen, the indictment said.
Sokolovsky is being held in the Netherlands, the Justice Department said. Last month, a Dutch court approved his extradition to the United States; Sokolovsky has appealed, the Justice Department said.
The Department of Justice has announced an agreement with Google in which the search giant agreed to “upgrade” its internal processes to respond faster and more completely to subpoenas and search warrants, Gerrit De Vynck reports for The Cybersecurity 202. The agreement stemmed from a court case between Google and the government over the company’s response to a 2016 search warrant for information that Google had on a cryptocurrency exchange the government was investigating.
Over the past few years, Big Tech’s data troves have become a huge source of information for law enforcement agencies and government investigators, who send tens of thousands of search warrants to companies like Facebook, Google and Apple each year. Prosecutors utilize such requests to gather evidence for cybercrime and other investigations.
As part of the deal between Google and the DOJ, Google will allow a third-party representative to evaluate how it complies with the agreement.
MEPs to call for greater powers for Brussels to curb EU spyware use (Financial Times)
Ukraine documenting Russian hacks, eyeing international charges (Bloomberg News)
German cyber agency warns threat situation is ‘higher than ever’ (The Record)
A China-based ByteDance team investigated TikTok's global security chief, who oversaw U.S. data concerns (Forbes)
‘Raccoon Army’ swamps election officials in dubious campaign to disprove results (Bloomberg News)
Microsoft: Vice Society targets schools with multiple ransomware families (Bleeping Computer)
CISA’s Wales says industry engagement on incident reporting rule will be robust, meet expectations (Inside Cybersecurity)
OPM's Ahuja gets an earful from agencies over enhanced pay for cyber talent (FCW)
CISA seeks feedback on baseline measures to secure cloud configuration (NextGov)
Readout of cybersecurity executive forum on electric vehicles and electric vehicle charging infrastructure (Office of the National Cyber Director)
The Small Business Administration hosts its cyber summit today.
Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-Tex.), Col. Jennifer Krolikowski, the chief information officer at U.S. Space Systems Command, and other speakers attend the BlackBerry Security Summit 2022 today.
The Information Security and Privacy Advisory Board meets today and Thursday.
The R Street Institute holds an event on school cybersecurity today at 10 a.m.
The Aspen Institute hosts an event today at 1 p.m. on election security, audits, influence operations and other things to know ahead of the midterm elections.
The Atlantic Council hosts an event on supply chain cybersecurity today at 10 a.m.
Mandiant senior manager Jason Atwell speaks at a CRDF Global event on the theft of intellectual property fueling weapons of mass destruction proliferation on Thursday at 10 a.m.
i'm your baby too dad, pick me up pic.twitter.com/XosiOQZLMT
— theworldofdog (@theworldofdog) October 25, 2022 | 2022-10-26T12:42:46Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The FTC is doing more to protect data, but to some it’s still not enough - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/26/ftc-is-doing-more-protect-data-some-its-still-not-enough/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/26/ftc-is-doing-more-protect-data-some-its-still-not-enough/ |
What Britain's new prime minister might mean for climate policy
Good morning and welcome to The Climate 202! Below we have updates on the fracking references during last night’s heated debate in the Pennsylvania Senate race. But first:
British climate activists say Rishi Sunak might be better than Liz Truss, but it’s a ‘low bar’
Britain on Tuesday got a new prime minister, with the country now looking to Rishi Sunak, the first person of color to serve in the role, after months of political turmoil.
Sunak, a former finance minister and hedge-fund manager, is by no means a climate champion. But environmentalists in the United Kingdom are cautiously optimistic that he will restore Britain’s credibility on climate policy, which they say was seriously eroded by Liz Truss during her tumultuous stint as prime minister.
Truss, who resigned last week after just 44 days in office, angered many climate activists by overturning a ban on fracking and proposing to scrap hundreds of environmental laws, in what critics dubbed a “war on nature.”
Sunak has given little indication of whether he plans to reverse these moves. But environmentalists are hopeful that he will take steps to bolster the U.K.’s international climate reputation just weeks before the next United Nations climate summit, which he is expected to attend.
“The U.K.'s international climate credibility has really taken a serious hit, and Sunak has a big opportunity to rebuild it,” said Kierra Box, a London-based campaigner at the environmental group Friends of the Earth.
Still, she added: “I don't think he marks a massive change in approach [from Truss]. He may mark a slight softening, but it's not the kind of U-turn that we need to see.”
Doug Parr, policy director for Greenpeace UK, offered a more blunt assessment.
“Our hopes are that he’ll be better than Liz Truss, although that’s a low bar, frankly,” Parr said. “But we’ll very much have to see what he actually does.”
While much of his environmental agenda remains to be seen, here’s what to know about Sunak’s approach to climate policy so far — and what it might mean for Britain and the planet:
Sunak on Tuesday immediately started to form his cabinet, reappointing some officials and ousting others, including those in environmental roles.
Alok Sharma, who served as president of the COP26 climate talks in Scotland last year, will lose his role in the cabinet, although he will remain as COP26 president through the COP27 climate negotiations in Egypt.
Ed Matthew, campaigns director for the European climate think tank E3G, said he sees the move as political retribution for Sharma’s loyalty to former Prime Minister Boris Johnson, rather than a reflection on Sharma’s climate work.
But Caroline Lucas, a member of Parliament who has twice led the Green Party of England and Wales, slammed the move as “shameful” on Twitter:
Utterly shameful for Rishi Sunak to remove seat at cabinet table for COP26 President Alok Sharma - just weeks before one of the most important global climate summits in a generation at #COP27 in Egypt. If the new PM cares about climate, he's got a very strange way of showing it pic.twitter.com/PtGOtugaKY
Meanwhile, several cabinet ministers resigned before the reshuffle, including Jacob Rees-Mogg, the secretary of state for business, energy and industrial strategy. Environmentalists had criticized Rees-Mogg for claiming that “climate alarmism” was responsible for high energy prices and expressing skepticism about the need to address global warming.
Sunak replaced Rees-Mogg with Grant Shapp, who previously served as secretary of state for transport in the Johnson government. In that role, Shapp had a “mixed record” on climate and environmental issues, Parr said.
While Shapp was “keen to drive forward electric vehicles” and to improve Britain’s bus network, Parr said, he appeared to have “very little support” for bolder measures aimed at curbing air pollution and planet-warming emissions.
Sunak will move to Downing Street as inflation in the U.K. reaches a 40-year high, driven in part by higher energy costs amid Russia’s war in Ukraine.
Climate advocates have called on Sunak to curb Britain’s dependence on Russian gas by boosting renewable energy and home energy efficiency. But he has a complex record in these areas.
As a candidate for Conservative leadership this summer, Sunak unveiled plans to make Britain “energy secure,” including by boosting oil and gas production in the North Sea.
And as the Chancellor of the Exchequer last year, he oversaw cuts that led to the cancellation of a $1.7 billion program to insulate U.K. homes, preventing them from leaking heat in the winter.
More recently, however, Sunak has said he would prioritize insulation for low-income households over electric heat pumps.
Matthew voiced hope that Sunak, who has earned a reputation for being pragmatic, will recognize that renewables and efficiency could help stave off a winter energy crisis that his new government cannot afford.
“It’s the solution to energy security challenges, and it’s the solution to high energy bills,” he said.
“Sunak has the potential to be a global leader on climate action,” he added, “but he really needs to ramp it up.”
Fetterman, Oz face off on fracking in contentious debate
Democrat John Fetterman and Republican Mehmet Oz squared off on Tuesday night in the only debate scheduled in a Pennsylvania Senate race that could determine which party controls the chamber next year.
When asked about fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, which is used to extract oil and gas from shale rock, both candidates doubled down on their support for the controversial technique, despite their previous concerns about the practice.
In a 2018 interview, Fetterman said, “I don’t support fracking at all,” but on Tuesday, he voiced full-throated support for the practice, which provides tens of thousands of jobs and contributes millions to Pennsylvania’s economy.
“I do support fracking,” Fetterman said. “I’ve never taken any money from their industry, but I support how critical it is that we produce our own energy and create energy independence.”
Meanwhile Oz, who as a TV doctor wrote that fracking should be banned until its potential harmful health effects are studied, said fracking is “a lifeline for this commonwealth to be able to build wealth” and could help bring more high-paying energy jobs to the state.
John Kerry treads carefully on ‘loss and damage’ before COP27
U.S. climate envoy John F. Kerry on Tuesday addressed the U.S. position on “loss and damage” — the unavoidable, irreversible harms caused by climate change — ahead of next month’s COP27 climate talks in Egypt.
Kerry was careful not to commit to providing financial compensation — or even a specific funding mechanism — for developing countries to cope with worsening climate disasters.
“The word ‘compensation’ has all kinds of loaded implications,” he said during wide-ranging remarks at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington.
Still, Kerry said the United States is “determined to come up with progress” on loss and damage over the next year, especially after climate change worsened Pakistan’s catastrophic flooding this summer.
Negotiators from Pakistan, which will lead the largest bloc of developing nations at COP27, are expected to press the issue during the talks in the Egyptian resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh.
Reliance on fossil fuels threatens public health worldwide, scientists warn
Global warming caused by burning fossil fuels is exacerbating other crises and posing a growing threat to public health, according to a report released Tuesday by the Lancet Countdown, a global initiative that brought together 100 experts from 51 institutions spanning every continent, Damian Carrington reports for the Guardian.
The report, titled “Health at the Mercy of Fossil Fuels,” asserts that heat-related deaths, hunger and infectious diseases are becoming more common as the planet warms because of the burning of oil, gas and coal and other human activity.
In particular, the report found that heat-related deaths among the most vulnerable populations — babies and people over 65 — increased by 68 percent over the past four years compared to 2000 to 2004. It concludes that swift, health-centered action to combat climate change could save millions of lives each year.
“The climate crisis is killing us,” United Nations Secretary General António Guterres said in a statement. “It is undermining not just the health of our planet, but the health of people everywhere — through toxic air pollution, diminishing food security, higher risks of infectious disease outbreaks, record extreme heat, drought, floods and more.”
White House, EPA announce $1 billion in rebates for clean school buses
The White House and the Environmental Protection Agency on Wednesday announced nearly $1 billion in rebates to replace aging diesel-powered school buses with new electric and low-emission fleets, The Post’s Michael Birnbaum reports.
Vice President Harris and EPA Administrator Michael Regan will travel to Seattle to unveil the funding, which marks the first tranche of money for clean school buses from last year’s bipartisan infrastructure law.
The rebates will go to 389 school districts spanning all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and several tribes and territories. The $5 billion program created by the infrastructure law is expected to bring a total of 2,468 clean school buses to the nation’s roads this year. The EPA is preparing to receive applications for the next round of $1 billion for fiscal year 2023.
“We are forever changing school bus fleets across the United States,” EPA Administrator Michael Regan told reporters on a call previewing the announcement. “This is just the beginning of our work to build a healthier future, reduce climate pollution and ensure the clean, breathable air that all of our children deserve.”
Proponents argue that the buses are natural candidates for electrification because they operate on fixed routes with regular breaks that can be used to charge batteries. They say the children most dependent on school buses to get to classrooms — students of color and lower-income families — also suffer disproportionately from asthma and other illnesses that are worsened by constant exposure to diesel fumes.
Climate change threatens emperor penguins with extinction, officials say — Dino Grandoni for The Post
California is supposed to enter a wet season. More drought is forecast. — Diana Leonard for The Post
Most in U.S. want more action on climate change: AP-NORC poll — Matthew Daly and Nuha Dolby for the Associated Press
E.U. edges towards gas price cap with more emergency talks — Kate Abnett for Reuters
It’s pumpkin season and lots of our animals enjoy this seasonal treat, especially Fiona! 🎃 #TeamFiona pic.twitter.com/keTtX7gvIz | 2022-10-26T12:42:58Z | www.washingtonpost.com | What Britain's new prime minister might mean for climate policy - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/26/what-britain-new-prime-minister-might-mean-planet/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/26/what-britain-new-prime-minister-might-mean-planet/ |
Ask Jules: I just moved to a small town. How do I make friends online?
Hi Jules: I used to live in a big city, but I’ve since moved to the countryside and don’t have many friends here. I’ve never really found my community online and don’t have people to talk to about my interests: tech, design, start-ups, etc. I’m in my late 20s and just use Twitter, although I’m sure a low follower count doesn’t help. Any advice on how to find that community or get involved in conversations?
R: I’ve noticed significantly more people feeling pressure to find an online community lately. Although connecting with people online is amazing, the word “community” has been misused and diluted by creators, companies and others over the past few years. Community is rare, so please don’t be hard on yourself!
Approach social media as a jumping-off point. Use these platforms to build your network, which will then create connections that can eventually snowball into a deeper sense of community. The best connections I’ve created online started by directly messaging people with something that could be of value to them: media they’d appreciate, an idea for them to riff on or something similar. Don’t worry about your follower count, but pay attention to how your profile presents your character and interests. It should reveal enough about you for an observer to feel confident that they have an idea of who you are.
In any online setting, the seeds of community get planted in public spaces: feeds, comment sections, Discord channels, etc. But direct messages tend to be where you solidify meaningful relationships. For example, if you enjoy the perspective of someone in the replies of one of your favorite Twitter follows, check out their profile and see whether there’s anything valuable you can share with them. If that’s simply expressing your respect, then do that!
Though this may seem contradictory, never reach out with the expectation of a response. It’s a mind-set necessary to staying resilient as you put yourself out there to build connections. Whether it’s because life is busy, they’re not interested at the moment or something else, people don’t owe you a response. Only reach out with things that you’d be happy to know they at least received.
Also, put yourself in the position to get reached out to. Don’t be shy about giving your perspective and insight publicly. Being open to both outreach and participation will put you in a stronger position to make online connections.
When you do connect with like-minded people, make a point to learn what online spaces they’re a part of, so you can explore them for yourself. There will probably be a lot of misses, so get comfortable with being patient and consistent.
Based on where conversations take you over time, you’re bound to gain a few people in your network whom you eventually even consider to be friends. However, be aware that online connections are always going to feel a bit different than in-person ones, so don’t lose sight of fostering those as well. | 2022-10-26T13:20:59Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Ask Jules: I just moved to a small town. How do I make friends online? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/10/26/ask-jules-how-to-make-friends-online/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/10/26/ask-jules-how-to-make-friends-online/ |
How the Mama Bears, a nationwide network for parents of queer children, does the impossible: Change people’s minds.
By Britt Peterson
(Luis Mendo for The Washington Post)
It’s a Saturday afternoon in Dallas, and all around me, under a baking June sun, people are hugging and crying. We’re at the day-long Dallas Pride festival, held at the city’s art deco Fair Park. Booths line either side of a long reflecting pool, promoting local businesses and selling rainbow merch. Inside the park’s echoing, gilt-painted buildings, kids jump on moon bounces and run hamster-style inside giant inflated balls. Outside, young queer people in their Pride best race around in packs, rainbow flag capes and high-pitched laughter streaming in their wake.
I’m at the booth run by the Mama Bears, a nationwide group of parents of LGBTQ kids. They stand outside the booth in rainbow tutus, fanny packs, practical sunhats and “Free Mom Hugs” shirts. A group of kids walk by and giggle, then one ducks shyly into a hug, and finally all the kids are hugging a mom, as the moms whisper into their ears (“You are loved” or “We’re so glad you’re here”) until the kids walk away, dabbing at their glittery eye makeup.
A hug may seem like a small thing — often brief, perhaps slightly careless regarding covid-19 — but the recipients describe it in big terms. Receiving a hug from the Mama Bears was “like drinking hot cocoa on a chilly night right next to a fire,” 12-year-old Remus, wearing rainbow knee socks and a trans flag cape and surrounded by family members, told me. To Riley, 20, her hug gave her “that feeling where … everything is just muted around you and you’re just in the moment.” (Remus and Riley asked that their full names not be used.) Jared Clayton, 30, told me that he rarely sees his parents after years of conversion therapy, and “to have my mom as my best friend that I no longer get to see or hug, and then to just really feel the moms out here — it’s a lot. Because you don’t realize how much you miss it until you can’t have it.”
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Christina Pierce, an occupational therapist from outside of Dallas with loose red hair and an exuberant smile, shows up to the Mama Bears booth wearing a large button reading “BAD THEOLOGY KILLS.” Her first hug of the day is for an 18-year-old wearing a floral shirt who gives their name as Veil. (Veil also asked that their full name not be used.) Pierce steps into the embrace wholeheartedly, flinging her arms around Veil’s back. After a startled moment, Veil closes their eyes, leans a cheek sideways on Pierce’s shoulder and just rests there for a long, quiet time.
Pierce’s journey to this hug was not simple. She grew up in the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, a conservative denomination that views homosexuality as sinful. Although she’d had gay and lesbian friends, the church’s teachings on LGBTQ people mostly passed by her unnoticed. When her son Jonathon came out as bisexual in 2018 (he now identifies as pansexual), she joined the Mama Bears and found life-changing support. “I don’t know what I would’ve done” without the Mama Bears, Pierce told me. “I had no one to talk to.” The group supported her as she left the church.
It may seem logical that learning a child is queer would drive parents to question received anti-LGBTQ beliefs, even those enforced through the dual spiritual and social pressures of a conservative church. But, of course, it doesn’t always work that way — often with tragic consequences. According to research by the Family Acceptance Project at San Francisco State University, even a moderate level of what’s called “rejecting behavior” from parents — like refusing to use a new name or pronouns or mocking a child’s identity — can accompany a tripled risk of depression and a doubled risk of suicidal thoughts and attempts in queer children. “The difference between having an affirming parent and a rejecting parent is huge,” Caitlin Ryan, director of the Family Acceptance Project, told me. “It has a powerful impact on that young person’s entire … life course, on what they think is their birthright.” In the midst of a nationwide wave of anti-LGBTQ laws passed by GOP politicians, queer kids are particularly vulnerable to mental health issues. According to the Trevor Project, an organization focused on suicide prevention for queer children, 45 percent of LGBTQ kids seriously considered suicide in the past year — up from 40 percent two years ago.
Why do some non-affirming parents of LGBTQ kids change their views while others don’t? And at a time when LGBTQ kids may need their parents more than ever — to advocate for them in school systems and states where their rights are under attack — how can that change be fostered? The Mama Bears — consisting of over 35,000 members, many of whom underwent the same spiritual and emotional journey that Christina Pierce did — may point to some answers.
As a queer person myself, I felt some hesitation when I initially joined the Mama Bears Facebook group several months ago, and read post after post from parents describing “grief” after a child came out as gay or trans. If this feels hard for you, I’d think, try being your queer child. But as I began to better understand the rapid and disorienting trajectory that many of these women were on, I saw how the group’s tactics, which echoed social-science research, accomplished a task that, in America in 2022, is nothing short of remarkable: helping change minds around a seemingly intractable cultural issue.
The group’s founder, Liz Dyer, was in the tent at Dallas Pride that day, dispensing hugs, water bottles and sunscreen, trailed by her son Nick, 35, wearing crisp white shorts and carrying a rainbow printed fan. Dyer, an energetic woman with short hair and a wide, warm face, wore a T-shirt with an image of a raised fist that read “The First Pride Was a Riot.”
A Dallas resident for the past 35 years, Dyer had long been active in her Southern Baptist church. Then in 2006, Nick, the older of her two sons, came out as gay. At the time, she viewed homosexuality as an unhealthy aberration. “I believed that something had to go wrong to make them be confused,” she said. Initially, Dyer sent Nick to a counselor who claimed she could help Nick “stop being gay.” Dyer “was trying to do what she thought was best,” Nick told me later, “and I was making a cognizant decision to be very patient while she did that.”
But as Dyer did more research, reading the Bible and Christian blogs, her views evolved. One day she came upon a blog post about how Christians needed to be nice to gay people. One of the comments stuck out to her; as she summarized it to me, the argument went: “ ‘You know what? I don’t care if you’re nice to me. If you don’t believe that it’s okay for me to be gay … then just get the F out of my life.’ ” Dyer continued: “I thought to myself, You know what, if I was gay, that is exactly how I would feel.” All along, she’d been thinking that she was being a good Christian by trying to preserve her relationship with Nick, but Nick was “a better Christian, a better follower of Jesus, a better person in general. Because you still want to have a relationship with me.”
In 2008, Dyer began attending progressive Christian conferences. At the time, as gay conversion therapy was coming under broad public attack (the major evangelical ex-gay ministry, Exodus International, finally shut down in 2013 after its leaders admitted that efforts to “pray away the gay” were harmful), it was becoming more acceptable in certain circles for conservative Christians and even evangelicals to be openly LGBTQ while remaining in the church. “Evangelicals aren’t a monolith, of course,” says R. Marie Griffith, director of the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis, noting that views began to shift gradually in the late 1990s and early 2000s. “You’ve got those folks that have very strong anti-gay views, and then a rising number of people who say this is just not a big issue.”
Even within the world of LGBTQ-friendly Christians, however, Dyer saw a diversity of opinion. Some advocates for LGBTQ evangelicals, as well as other Christians, say that the Bible is a historical document not meant to be interpreted literally. Queer people are children of God, they argue, and God wouldn’t err in creating them to love each other and be their full selves. Other Christians support LGBTQ individuals but still believe that having gay sex goes against God’s will, meaning that a queer person could remain in the church provided they chose celibacy or marriage to a straight person.
For Dyer, these two approaches were not equal. As she built connections in the world of queer Christianity — blogging first at a page she called Grace Rules, then moving to a new one called Serendipitydodah in 2010 — her new friends began referring other parents to her, mostly evangelical and conservative Christians in the early stages of learning their kids were queer. Dyer often spoke to these parents on the phone or met in person if they were local. She heard heartbreaking stories of suicidal children, families who were permanently estranged — and the lifelong costs of trying to force celibacy or heterosexual marriage. (The research bears out Dyer’s instincts: According to Darren Freeman-Coppadge, a psychologist in Maryland who has studied queer Christians attempting a celibate lifestyle or mixed marriage, those choices, even when self-selected, can lead to “a great deal of anxiety, depression and even suicidality.”)
The existing groups that supported Christian parents of LGBTQ people were too open to the second approach, Dyer believed, leaving families in an ambivalent limbo that could last a very long time. Given the high rates of suicide attempts among LGBTQ kids, this seemed actively dangerous to Dyer. “I had gotten to the place where I realized, when our kids come out, they really need us right away,” Dyer recalls. She wanted to create a space that would encourage parents to fully and quickly affirm their children.
In May 2014, with about 150 moms she’d met at progressive Christian conferences or through blogging, Dyer created a private group on Facebook: “Serendipitydodah: Home of the Mama Bears.” As she began building the forum, Dyer made some deliberate choices. Many of the members were joining before going public in their communities or even their families about having a queer child. For these parents to feel comfortable sharing photos and names, everyone joining the group had to come directly through Dyer. She vetted new members carefully, asking questions about family history, checking social media profiles to verify information and enforcing a set of principles: “Sexual orientation and gender identity are not a choice. … Sexual orientation and gender identity cannot be changed although there may be a process of self-discovery for some people. … Conversion therapy in all forms is damaging no matter how kindly it is presented.”
She was also intent on making the page a space for joy. In June 2014 — the first Pride after launching the Mama Bears — Dyer invited moms to share happy photos and stories about their kids. It’s now an annual tradition: Parents have posted photos of their kids going to prom or graduating, but also of uniquely queer rites of passage, like a trans girl’s first dress-shopping trip. “I wanted them to learn to wholeheartedly celebrate their kids, because I felt like if parents can do that, then they can really get passionate about changing the world,” she told me.
Kimberly Shappley, a Connecticut woman with a trans daughter, joined the Mama Bears in the early days, when it was “still very much centered on being Christian — otherwise, I wouldn’t have stayed in the group, to be honest,” she told me. Reading other Christian moms’ posts celebrating their queer kids was transformational for Shappley. “I had never been exposed to LGBTQ things in a way that wasn’t negative or derogatory,” she recalls. “And here were these people in the group presenting pictures of their children; their parents are proud of them and they’re going to college, and they have somebody they love.”
“I had gotten to the place where I realized, when our kids come out, they really need us right away,” says Mama Bears founder Liz Dyer.
The Mama Bears grew steadily, buoyed by key endorsements from progressive Christian leaders, including pastor and author John Pavlovitz and writer Rachel Held Evans. In 2015, the Supreme Court’s decision on same-sex marriage ushered in a new wave of parents. Soon the group’s purpose expanded, with Dyer coordinating meetups where members make blankets or create care packages for LGBTQ people needing maternal comfort. Dyer has also linked up with activist Sara Cunningham, who pioneered the “Free Mom Hugs” concept and now runs a group called Free Mom Hugs; the two groups, recently featured in a documentary called “Mama Bears,” sometimes work together to provide support at events like Pride. There are now over 35,000 members and at least one chapter in most U.S. states, along with chapters in the United Kingdom and Canada. Dyer has created offshoot forums: a group for fathers and other non-mom allies; a group for moms of trans kids; groups for the Mama Bears’ children, so they can connect with one another IRL; and a group for parents of children who are both queer and on the autism spectrum. There are hundreds of posts in the main Facebook group every month, sometimes dozens of new posts daily.
Recently, members have protested anti-LGBTQ legislation. Shappley is now a prominent LGBTQ activist; her daughter Kai’s self-possessed testimony to Texas state legislators on gender-affirming care went viral in 2021. “Once [the Mama Bears] get you in, it takes like a hot minute to turn everyone into full-fledged activists,” Shappley told me. “Burn s--- down, make signs, march on whatever needs to be marched on. … It’s contagious to see people fight for their children.”
When I first joined the Mama Bears Facebook group, I found myself uneasily drawn to the posts written by parents who were struggling: unable to get used to new pronouns, uncomfortable with physical changes, worried about reactions from family or community members. I could understand that it’s lonely and terrifying moment to be the parent of a queer child, especially a trans child — yet those comments pressed on some of my most ancient bruises.
Over time, though, I came to believe that most Mama Bears put their darker thoughts on the site as a way to grow past them, instead of marinating in them or inflicting them on their kids. And I also saw how the support and acceptance offered by the group is always coupled with a steady and effective push to change.
“When I put things [on the Mama Bears page] at the beginning, there were many people who would just give me back that unconditional love and be like, ‘It’s hard, we understand, you’re doing a great job, mom.’ And you need that,” says Heather, a Mama Bears member from Missouri with two trans daughters who asked that her last name not be used. “But you also need someone to [say]: ‘What you’re doing is not okay. What you’re doing could hurt your child.’ And there were those people that did that, as tactfully as possible.” For instance: Heather had openly cried in front of her child; other Mama Bears helped her see that her behavior was hurtful. “Sometimes I needed someone to kinda push me, to be like, ‘You gotta stop talking about how you’re feeling about this, because this isn’t about you.’ ” Dyer doesn’t consider the group to be a “safe space,” she says. “When people think of a safe space, they expect to be in a place where they never feel uncomfortable or challenged. Growth is uncomfortable.”
The ethos created by Dyer in the Mama Bears recalls the road-tested technique for helping people change minds known as “deep canvassing.” Deep canvassing is a door-to-door tactic developed by the Los Angeles LGBT Center, in which a canvasser asks open-ended questions of a voter who’s considered persuadable. The canvasser listens in a nonjudgmental way and shares their personal story of how their own views were shaped, before making a more direct case for the issue at hand. In a series of peer-reviewed studies by political scientists Joshua Kalla of Yale University and David Broockman of the University of California at Berkeley, the approach has been shown to reduce prejudice, regardless of whether the canvasser is themselves LGBTQ. While the shift may sound modest — a few percentage points higher than traditional door-to-door canvassing — it was still enough to potentially swing tight elections on discriminatory legislation. And, unlike with more traditional methods, the effect endured for four and a half months after the initial conversation.
The deep-canvassing model is not, of course, applicable to all interactions. The morning after Pride, I took a 4 a.m. Lyft ride to the Dallas-Fort Worth airport. The driver asked why I was in town; I told him about my story and mentioned that I am queer. He began asking polite but slightly intrusive questions. In my deep-canvassing research, I’d learned that it could be useful for people processing complex issues to ask awkward questions, so, as an experiment, I tried to answer openly. Within a few minutes, on a deserted stretch of Texas highway, he shifted to asking about my genitals. There are major risks, both psychic and physical, for queer people in these types of conversations, and in real life no one is given the training and support deep canvassers get.
But the Mama Bears — who are mostly allies, not queer people themselves, and who are encountering each other online and not in person — do seem to manage a kind of collective deep canvassing: leaving space for complex feelings while steadily promoting a viewpoint through personal narrative. Together, they have created an accountability community, not dissimilar from a church itself, and, in many cases, replacing the community and accountability structure lost from a rejected church. And at least anecdotally, this has been tremendously effective in helping its members grow and change.
Heather Diaz grew up in the Nazarene Church, a highly conservative offshoot of evangelicalism. “I was raised that [homosexuality] was a sin,” she told me. In 1998, she married a fellow evangelical and they moved to San Diego, where they raised two children in a conservative nondenominational church. Then in 2016, her older child told Diaz that she thought she might be queer. “She was terrified to tell us,” Diaz says. Diaz didn’t feel she could tell anyone in her church community. But she did have one friend with a gay son, who told her about the Mama Bears. “At that time … I felt so scared to talk to anybody around me in my immediate world because I knew that they would not have supported me in the way I would’ve needed,” she told me. “They probably would’ve been like, ‘I’ll pray for you.’ ” But the Mama Bears “take you in right where you are, no matter where you are in the journey.” The group gave her much-needed support when she chose to leave her church, feeling that it wasn’t a safe place for her daughter.
Two years later, Diaz’s younger child came out as trans. For Diaz, this was a much more challenging revelation. “I was very angry for a very long time,” she remembers. “Being trans is super hard to understand regardless. … [And] it’s terrifying because of the way things are right now.” Every step felt painful: calling her son by a new name, going to doctor’s appointments and watching him start hormone injections, seeing him deal with his own depression and self-harm issues. While she stumbled during those months — “I believe there was a lot of damage to our relationship that I’m still trying to repair,” she says about her son — she was able to climb out of her darkness, thanks to her therapist and the Mama Bears.
That June, just a few months after her son came out, Diaz went to her first Pride parade, along with her husband and son, to watch her daughter perform in the San Diego Pride Youth Marching Band. “It is the most loving, joyful atmosphere I’ve ever been in in my whole life,” she says. “I remember just standing on the sidewalk and weeping, overcome. I just felt, this is where we’re meant to be.”
Many women I spoke to described sweeping reversals not just in their personal lives, but in their political ones. Cathy Evans, an eighth-generation Texan, grew up with gay family members but was not prepared for her younger child to come out as gay as a high school freshman. “It was a long process for me of really, really feeling one hundred percent on board,” she told me. “And I hate that — I hate that for my kid.” She and her husband left their conservative Methodist church, growing uncomfortable within a congregation that they didn’t feel supported LGBTQ rights or people.
It was the correct choice, but it left her isolated. Then a gay cousin told her about the Mama Bears. “Almost immediately it was, whoa — there are people like me,” she says. Over time, as her faith evolved, her sense of civic responsibility deepened too. “What is amazing to me is that when this happens to you, it doesn’t just open up the door of your child, it also opens up the door to looking at all of the other things that are going on the world,” she explains. Earlier this year, she and her husband joined a group of Mama Bears at the Texas Capitol to protest Gov. Greg Abbott’s order that parents of transgender children be investigated by Child Protective Services. For Evans, it was a deeply meaningful experience. “I don’t feel comfortable sitting in church, which makes me sad,” she says. “But I feel like this” — meaning civic action — “is where God is.”
The joy and sense of purpose described by the mothers on the other side of this journey are echoed by their children. “It’s amazing to me that my mom’s love for me has transferred into her showing love to so many other people … who maybe don’t get to have the same kind of relationship with their parents,” says CJ Surbaugh, whose mother, Kathy — one of the Mama Bears at Dallas Pride — left their conservative Methodist church after CJ came out as trans. “I almost can’t put into words how much it means to me to see my mom advocating so hard on my behalf.”
While talking to Mama Bears members, I often wondered whether their rapid and intense journeys were replicable outside the group. The community is highly self-selecting, and the support and push to change that it provides is hard to find elsewhere. Without that kind of scaffolding, even the most well-meaning parents can move far more slowly or stall out.
The night before the Dallas Pride festival, I sat at a dining room table in a Dallas suburb with Christina Pierce, her husband, Scott Pierce, and her son and Scott’s adopted son, Jonathon Muniz, listening to Jonathon’s coming-out story. “It was spring break,” Christina began. The mother and son resemble each other closely, with hazel eyes and ready smiles. Jonathon, 23, a teacher’s aide, has long, dark hair and a forearm tattoo of the sigil of Rohan from the “Lord of the Rings” books. (The Rohan people “had no aid of magic or fantasy races, yet they made a stand and fought for what was right,” he explained later over text.) “It was funny,” Christina said, “because I was like, ‘I’m going to walk the dog.’ … And he just came running out …”
“And so I told her,” Jonathon continued, “and she was like, ‘Oh. Ohhhh?’ ”
“There was a little bit of silence,” Christina said, laughing.
“And then we were just, like, walking the dog.”
The two of them tag-teamed the story, poking fun at each other and comparing recollections of the same events, from Jonathon’s first inklings of his sexuality when watching Johnny Depp in “Pirates of the Caribbean” to the massive personal and spiritual changes Christina underwent after that initial coming-out conversation. Of all the Mama Bears I spoke with, Christina’s transformation was the most substantial: Not only did she leave her church and upend her belief system, but she also expanded her family. Through the Mama Bears, Christina befriended Allyson Marcelle, an Oregon mother struggling with family members who didn’t accept her gay son. In early 2019, Christina invited Marcelle to move in. She is still living in the Pierces’ front room. “She’s my sister now,” Christina told me matter-of-factly. “I just expect her to stay with us for the rest of our lives.” (“We’re sisters,” Marcelle affirmed when I met her later that night.)
The Mama Bears have created an accountability community, not dissimilar from a church itself.
When the conversation shifted to Jonathon’s coming-out conversation with Scott, Jonathon mentioned “theological discussions.” Scott, who had been quiet until then, spoke up. “My background is, I am a Catholic,” he said. “So, you look at the Catholic theology and then this kid that you love and couldn’t be more proud of.” Scott told me that the Church directs followers to love homosexual people, but that it views homosexual acts as “objectively disordered” and against natural law, a teaching he struggles with when it comes to his obviously beloved son. “If you believe in Christianity, and you believe in salvation, what’s going to be the best way to get a person to heaven?” he asked, not rhetorically. Jonathon stood up from the table and went quietly into the kitchen.
For parents like Scott Pierce — reluctant to join the Mama Bears but potentially open to evolution on LGBTQ issues — there may be other avenues for change, even some that are specific to people of faith. Austen Hartke, founder of the Transmission Ministry Collective and an advocate for transgender rights within faith communities, told me that he felt Scripture-based arguments for LGBTQ affirmation can be tremendously effective, treating the texts “as a table we can all gather around.” Matthew Vines, founder of Christian LGBTQ group the Reformation Project, says he believes that for conservative Christians to change, there has to be a combination of knowing an openly LGBTQ person — a “transformative relationship” — and an interpretation of Scripture that allows someone to shift their views without abandoning their faith. “I think there are many people who, if you put those factors together, that is what allows them to change their mind,” he told me.
And then there are researchers who argue that changing someone’s mind doesn’t matter; what matters is what people do, not what they believe. Caitlin Ryan, of the Family Acceptance Project, who has developed strategies to help conservative and religious families support their LGBTQ children, highlights the importance of cultural sensitivity and of focusing on behavior, not belief: “It’s their behaviors that are really affecting their child immediately. And they can change those behaviors even when they believe that being gay or transgender is wrong.”
After our meeting in Dallas, I called Scott to get clarity on his beliefs. He said that he’s already evolved a great deal just through knowing Jonathon — learning greater empathy for people’s struggles and more awareness of the challenges facing LGBTQ people. But when I asked Scott if he thought his underlying views on homosexuality would ever change, he said it was unlikely. “I would have to see some pretty convincing evidence that natural law, first of all, is not a thing,” he said. “I’m open to hearing people try to convince me of that. But I don’t know what somebody would be able to say at this point that would convince me otherwise.”
When I reached out to Jonathon, he told me that, although he had left the room during our interview to take a break from Scott’s theology, he didn’t fundamentally mind all that much. “I understand that it’d be very hard for other people to hear that,” he said, of his stepfather’s comments about homosexuality being “disordered.” “But I’ve grown to the point where I’m just like, eh, whatever.” What mattered was Scott’s actions, and those had always been kind.
And yet, the value of a fully transformed mind, and the way that transformation can reverberate throughout a community, remains clear. The morning after Dallas Pride, Christina Pierce posted an exultant Facebook message. “We connected with thousands of people and I think I gave a couple hundred hugs! I stayed 5 hours and left so hot and tired, but it was so worth it!” she wrote. “For ALL in the LGBTQI community, you are brave and you are beautiful.”
A few hours later she received a direct message from someone she had known as a younger member of her former church. “Hey mama bear!!” it began. “I myself am nonbinary and gay, and there’s almost no one in my life that I can tell safely. It’s been very lonely over the years, but it makes my heart burst when I see you speak out and be supportive of and heap love on the LGBT community.” I spoke with this person — who asked to remain anonymous — over Zoom a couple of weeks after Pride. They’d had coffee with Christina; Christina had immediately started helping them research affordable options for gender-affirming care. “I’m like, ‘Are you my mom now?’ ” they joked.
I asked about their own mom and dad and what it would’ve meant to watch them travel the path that Christina took in affirming Jonathon. They pressed a hand to their heart, eyes going soft. “I don’t even entertain the thought anymore,” they said quietly. “It’s just a fantasy at this point. But if they did, it would just be pure relief. It would be the first time in my life that I would be truly free.”
Britt Peterson is a writer in Washington. | 2022-10-26T13:21:05Z | www.washingtonpost.com | This group might save your LGBTQ kid’s life - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2022/10/26/mama-bears-lgbtq-children/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2022/10/26/mama-bears-lgbtq-children/ |
‘Aftersun’: A father-daughter bond, seen through the haze of memory
Paul Mescal plays a troubled yet loving young father in Charlotte Wells’s ‘emotionally autobiographical’ directorial debut
Frankie Corio, left, and Paul Mescal in “Aftersun.” (A24)
The fragile fabric of memory, rendered in both mist and digital media, is the subject of “Aftersun,” the assured and emotionally complex feature debut of writer-director Charlotte Wells. Wells has described her first film — a window into the loving relationship between an idealistic young father and his in-some-ways-more-worldly-wise tween daughter — as “emotionally autobiographical.”
The filmmaker’s father died when Wells was 16, the recognition of which is only hinted at in a film that — though set on a sunny father-daughter vacation at a Turkish beach resort in the late 1990s — is overshadowed by a sense of gloom, maybe even doom. But the dad we initially meet, Calum (played by Paul Mescal with a soulful, brooding melancholy that only infrequently weighs down his sweet smile), seems mostly a goofball. Gradually, though, a darker, more nuanced portrait emerges.
The action of “Aftersun” mostly takes place in traditionally staged scenes of Calum and Sophie (Frankie Corio) on holiday: chatting poolside, dining at a restaurant, relaxing in a karaoke bar. She’s just turned 11; he’s about to turn 31. But at times, we can still catch glimpses of the teenager Calum must have been when he first found out he was going to become a father. At other times, Sophie reveals the insights of a much older person, telling her father at one point that’s it’s “sort of nice” to look up and contemplate the fact that they “share the same sky,” even though they’re apart much of the time. (Sophie lives with her mother in Edinburgh, Calum in London.)
These tender scenes are intercut with home-movie camcorder footage framed as the reminiscences of an adult Sophie (Celia Rowlson-Hall) looking back on her own youth and searching for clues to something she could not recognize as a girl. Though we see little of the now-grown Sophie, her reflections, making up the structure of the film itself, feel tinged with a sense of rue — and the realization that the man Sophie thought she knew as a child may not have been the man he was.
There are moments when this sense of foreboding — a sense of illusion about to fall — is leaned on a little too heavily. During one scene set in an arcade of (mostly British) tourists, we see the words “game over” flash on a video game screen. The double meaning of those words is a bit on the nose in a film that otherwise deftly avoids such easy readings. For the most part, understatement is the order of the day: Calum and Sophie’s interactions are light and breezy, clouded over only occasionally by suggestions that Calum may have money and job worries, feelings of loneliness, and perhaps more serious mood swings. These are subtly signaled by his increasing alcohol consumption.
One especially heartbreaking sequence takes place when Calum declines to join Sophie onstage for a (flat but endearing) karaoke rendition of R.E.M.’s “Losing My Religion.” Later that night, he accidentally locks his daughter out of their hotel room, and she wakes up later to find that he has a small injury on his shoulder. It’s a series of small and seemingly meaningless incidents that, in Wells’s telling, loom large only from the vantage of hindsight.
The seemingly happiest moments of childhood, Wells seems to argue, can take on somber overtones when seen in the rearview mirror. A day at the beach is all fun and games, in other words, until the night falls, and the burn sets in.
R. At area theaters. Contains some strong language and brief sexual material. 101 minutes. | 2022-10-26T13:30:02Z | www.washingtonpost.com | ‘Aftersun’: A father-daughter bond, seen through the haze of memory - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/movies/2022/10/26/aftersun-movie-review/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/movies/2022/10/26/aftersun-movie-review/ |
D.C. police arrest man, 19, in July slaying of 17-year-old
Davon Alston, 19, has been charged with first-degree murder while armed in the death of Dennis Simms
D.C. police made an arrest in the July 1 slaying of a 17-year-old in Southeast, D.C.
Davon Alston, 19, has been charged with first-degree murder while armed, police said. He is from Oxon Hill, Md. An attorney was not listed in court records, and his relatives could not be immediately reached.
The fatal shooting occurred in the 800 block of Yuma Street, SE, around 2:30 p.m. Dennis Simms, a 17-year-old from Southeast, died on the scene. | 2022-10-26T13:42:46Z | www.washingtonpost.com | D.C. police arrest man, 19, in July slaying of 17-year-old - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/26/dc-arrest-july-killing/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/26/dc-arrest-july-killing/ |
Del. Neil Parrott takes on Rep. Trone — and his $13 million war chest
Del. Neil C. Parrott (R-Washington), on left, gets a boost from Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) at a rally Saturday in Frederick, Md. (Meagan Flynn/The Washington Post)
There was something a little poetic in the backdrop of Del. Neil C. Parrott’s rollicking campaign rally with Republicans’ hype man of the moment, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), in Frederick, Md., on Saturday afternoon.
The rally was held at Roscoe Bartlett’s farm — home of the last Republican congressman to represent western Maryland before state Democrats drew him off a gerrymandered map in 2011. Now, in Parrott’s rematch against multimillionaire business executive Rep. David Trone (D-Md.), Parrott finally sees an opportunity to turn it red once again — because for the first time in years, race raters view Maryland’s 6th Congressional District as competitive.
And Parrott fought to make it so — joining other Republicans to successfully sue state Democrats over redrawn district lines. The new map is friendlier territory for the GOP in the 6th District in a year of projected disappointments for the state party. Political analysts see Republican gubernatorial candidate Dan Cox (R-Frederick), a Trump acolyte expected to lose to Democratic candidate Wes Moore in a blowout, as a drag on Parrott down the ballot. Cox attended but did not speak at Parrott’s rally.
Still, Parrott climbed onto the pumpkin-decked stage before a crowd of hundreds of conservatives with the energy of someone who thinks he might actually pull this off.
“Now it’s time to take back this congressional district,” Parrott (R-Washington) told the crowd after a shout-out to 96-year-old Bartlett. “Has anybody seen any commercials from the other guy? He’s spending $12 million to go after us. I’ll tell you what, he wouldn’t be spending any of it if he knew he was going to win.”
Trone, the owner of Total Wine & More, crushed Parrott in 2020, when Maryland’s 6th District dipped farther down into the D.C. suburbs. This year he still has the incumbent advantage. And a $13 million war chest — including $12.5 million of his personal wealth, allowing him to dominate Parrott, who has raised over $630,000 this campaign cycle, on the airwaves. Cook Political Report has rated the race “likely Democrat”; others have rated it leans Democrat or even, at RealClearPolitics, a “toss-up.”
Mileah Kromer, a political scientist at Goucher College, said Cruz’s decision to stump for Parrott is a good sign for his candidacy, but noted Trone’s $12 million advantage has him on a totally different playing field. “People like Ted Cruz don’t come just for kicks. They come because they identify seats where there’s a realistic, maybe a possible chance,” Kromer said. “David Trone wouldn’t be spending money on the airwaves if he didn’t see the chance that Neil Parrott could have some upset victory. But at the same time, Trone is still in the advantageous position.”
National Republicans had included the 6th District among their targets in their battle to take control of Congress this year but didn’t devote major resources to helping Parrott, making Cruz’s intervention arguably the most high-profile national help Parrott has gotten this year.
“Let me tell you what the people of Maryland deserve,” Cruz boomed, in a speech seemingly designed to dunk on Democrats. “They deserve a congressman who doesn’t just salute and jump off a cliff and spend trillions of dollars and drive inflation through the roof.”
Parrott has also gotten an assist from David Bossie, a 2016 deputy campaign manager to Donald Trump, current president of Citizens United and longtime GOP leader in Maryland. This week, Bossie promoted internal, partisan polls he said suggest Trone isn’t as secure as he should be. Bossie sees President Biden as the real drag, given Trone has supported all of the president’s major agenda items and appeared with him in Hagerstown to tout them just this month.
Bossie notes Biden may have won District 6 in 2020, but his approval rating has sunk since then and inflation has risen, noting that even under a map friendlier to Democrats, Republicans in the 6th nearly eked out a win in 2014. “This has been a district that Republicans can win,” he said.
Trone has framed his support for the president’s agenda in terms of how it will help the district: how the infrastructure package will help rural western Maryland with investments in broadband and roads. How the Inflation Reduction Act (which isn’t expected to materially impact inflation) will help seniors across the district with health-care costs.
“That is going to kick in and help seniors, but it’s not going to help today,” Trone told a Democratic club at a Gaithersburg retirement community last week, often delivering a dose of reality to crowds to let them know they won’t see the benefits of the legislation for a while, “because 2024 is when they begin to negotiate for those top 100 drugs that come through Medicare.”
While he has faced criticism for seeking to “buy” a seat in Congress — including from Parrott — Trone said self-funding most of his campaign means he doesn’t accept any PAC or lobbyist money, something he said shows voters that their lawmaker “doesn’t owe anybody anything.”
Having spent nearly $7 million of his war chest as of Sept. 30, Trone has run numerous TV ads urging Maryland voters not to vote for his “extremist” opponent while highlighting emotional testimonials from people in the district he has worked with on issues such as combating addiction and mental health crises.
His introductory ads trace his story as the son of a farmer, a background he has often pointed to while hoping to connect with the more rural parts of the district — “David may be a long way from the farm, but he never really left,” a narrator said, as Trone appears on-screen dressed in farmer garb with a pitchfork.
And the ads highlight Trone’s personal mission in Congress. Trone has been laser focused on addiction, mental health, criminal justice and medical research throughout his tenure, after his nephew died of an overdose of fentanyl-laced heroin in 2016. He speaks about those priorities at almost every and any opportunity — including when appearing with Biden at the Volvo manufacturing plant in Hagerstown to tout nationwide job growth. Trone threw in a nod to the mental health investment in the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act.
Speaking in Gaithersburg, he highlighted the same work, getting in the weeds on the opioid crisis, how fentanyl gets into the United States and the resources needed to fight addiction once it gets here. “We’re a policy shop. I’m not a CNN shop or MSNBC. We are policy,” he said.
He’s often touted his business acumen as coming in handy when negotiating with Republicans, and indeed, the majority of the bills he’s led on mental health and addiction are bipartisan. He serves as co-chair of the Bipartisan Addiction and Mental Health Task Force.
“I’m the guy in the middle who gets stuff done. That’s what we do, and that comes with business,” Trone told the room of Democratic voters. “We’re doing the same thing in Congress, working with Republicans side by side. I chase them into the Republican cloakroom. … I can get Democrats all day long, and that won’t do anything.”
State Sen. Cheryl C. Kagan (D-Montgomery), who pumped up the Democratic crowd for Trone, described him as the kind of lawmaker who “doesn’t get enough credit.” “He is often under the radar, but he gets things done,” Kagan said in an interview afterward. Familiar with Parrott from their years in the Maryland State House, Kagan described Parrott as “a nice guy — but he would not reflect the values of this part of the district for sure.”
Parrott, an engineer and a firm social conservative in Annapolis, built a reputation for leading petition drives seeking to repeal legislation passed by Democrats by statewide referendum. He’s unsuccessfully sought to repeal laws such as same-sex marriage and in-state tuition for undocumented immigrants, among other things. And while he’s taken Democrats to court over gerrymandering, he’s also sued the leader of his own party, Gov. Larry Hogan (R), over Hogan’s early pandemic mandates, which wasn’t successful.
But Parrott has also built a reputation as a friendly lawmaker who’s honest about where he stands, even if, as Kromer noted, his conservative bona fides may not help him win crossover votes that could be important in a tight race.
“He’s one of the most honest guys I’ve ever heard talk — he doesn’t, as you could say, pull the shades down. He’s an open window,” said James Parise, a Frederick resident and quality-control inspector at a local firm, sitting in a lawn chair at the Cruz rally and wearing an “Impeach Biden” ball cap.
At his rally on Saturday, Parrott delivered an “I have a vision”-themed speech in homage to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., describing his vision as balancing the budget, closing the border, ensuring parents have control in their children’s education and creating a “place where life is protected from the beginning to the end of life.”
Parrott has been a firm abortion opponent in Annapolis. During his tenure he has introduced a bill that would ban abortion after 20 weeks except in the case of a “medical emergency” threatening a woman’s life, including a provision that makes it a misdemeanor for a physician to violate certain paperwork requirements.
Trone highlighted that bill in a Halloween-themed attack ad produced like a scary movie trailer — with a “Neil Parrott for Congress” sign starring as “the scariest sight our daughters will see this Halloween season.” The same ad also went after him for being in the super-minority of Republicans who did not support a bill to repeal a provision in Maryland law allowing “spousal defense” in a sexual assault case (Parrott, defending the vote, has argued Maryland should not “put police in the bedrooms of people more easily — without making anything illegal that wasn’t already banned.”). And in a separate ad, Trone highlighted an idea Parrott proposed nearly 20 years ago to discreetly tattoo people with HIV, which he believed could prevent the spread.
“The only thing crazier would be sending Neil Parrott to Congress,” a narrator says in the ad, which featured children with prominently displayed “HIV” tattoos.
Parrott called Trone’s ads “slander.” He noted in an interview he almost considered taking the HIV ad to court, saying that he previously recanted his tattoo idea years ago. “Of course, this is not a good idea,” Parrott said. “We don’t need it. It’s not something I support.” He added he never suggested prominently tattooing children and noted medical advances over the years have improved HIV prognoses, negating the need for a dire measure that seemed appropriate to him in the circumstances at the time.
On abortion, Parrott said he believed the 15-week ban proposed by Republicans in Congress was a “reasonable bill,” adding that he believed any restrictions Congress passes on abortion should include exceptions for rape, incest and the life of the mother.
Back at his rally, Parrott’s conservative supporters said they have felt unrepresented in western Maryland since Bartlett was ousted in 2012. “Out here, there’s a lot of people with Christian values, and they’re just different from city folks,” said Jim Richards, a 66-year-old Frederick County resident who liked Parrott’s opposition to abortion, support for gun rights and position on the border.
Richards noted that he’s watched Frederick County — a key battleground — get more purple over the years, “so it’s a tough race,” he said, noting that when it comes to Republicans taking control of the House, in reality, Maryland’s 6th District probably “isn’t going to make it or break it.”
“We may win the war but lose the battle,” added Richards’s son Evan — but still, under the new redistricted map, at least now there was one.
Erin Cox contributed to this report. | 2022-10-26T13:42:58Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Parrott (R) in competitive race against Trone (D) -- but Trone has $13M - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/26/parrott-trone-maryland-congress-district6/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/26/parrott-trone-maryland-congress-district6/ |
Turkeys will cost more because 6 million died during bird flu outbreak
This year’s outbreak is on track to be the worst ever recorded, causing a turkey shortage ahead of Thanksgiving
By Erica Werner
Laura Reiley
Turkeys roam on a farm in New Carlisle, Ohio. (Maddie McGarvey for The Washington Post)
The rampant spread of the virus has already eliminated more than 6 million turkeys nationwide, about 14 percent of the nation’s total turkey production, according to the U.S. Agriculture Department. It is leaving farmers short of their usual offerings and pushing up prices for those that remain, forcing consumers already walloped by inflation to pay an additional 20 percent or more per pound for Thanksgiving turkeys compared with prices last year, according to several estimates.
Turkey farmers fear that, this year, they’ve bred too many big birds
“I get a lot of calls from politicians and others who want to donate birds to charity,” Mattos said. “I tell them, ‘I can get you chickens. I can’t get you turkeys.’ ”
The big question for turkey farmers, Schmidt said, is what happens if the virus sticks around. As with the coronavirus, it is uncertain when or how the virus will play itself out — if it ever does.
“Experts are expecting this to evolve into something we have to deal with year-round, with it surviving in the warmer months in wild birds,” Schmidt said. “We are watching closely.”
Rosemary Sifford, the chief veterinarian for the Agriculture Department, said in a statement that the agency believes the virus “will continue to infect wild birds and will bring an elevated risk to domestic birds, especially during migration seasons.” She said it is critical for bird owners to “maintain vigilance” in keeping wild birds away from poultry and domestic birds.
While both the 2015 virus and the 2022 virus were Eurasian lineage strains of highly pathogenic avian influenza, the reason for the dramatic uptick this fall is because this is a different subtype of the virus. Most avian flu viruses, including the one in 2015, were killed with the dry, hot temperatures in the summer.
This year’s subtype of the virus has been much more persistent in wild birds, so they are carrying it back with them as they migrate — something that happens in North America in the spring and in the fall. More than 85 percent of the cases this year can be traced to wild bird introductions, compared to about 30 percent of the cases in 2015, according to the USDA. This subtype is also adaptable to many species of birds and is living in waterfowl longer than the virus has in the past.
While wild birds may carry it without becoming sick, infected domesticated chickens and turkeys may exhibit tremors, trouble breathing and extreme diarrhea followed by a swift death. The USDA has scrambled to educate poultry businesses about best practices and how to identify signs of illness, which experts say has a 90 to 100 percent mortality rate in turkeys and chickens within 48 hours.
The virus kills so quickly that multiple dead or dying birds can be the first sign a flock is infected. Farmers take samples that are typically first sent to a state lab and then on to the USDA’s National Veterinary Services Laboratories in Ames, Iowa, for confirmation. A positive case triggers a public announcement, and the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service shows up to kill the affected flocks to prevent spread. This is necessary because of how extremely infectious the virus is.
The agency says its goal is to kill infected flocks within 24 to 48 hours of diagnosis, often using carbon dioxide or a water-based foam, the consistency of firefighting foam, that flows up and over, suffocating birds in seven to 15 minutes.
In May, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack approved $400 million to directly support the response efforts and to pay affected poultry farms. Additionally, some poultry farmers have avian flu disease insurance. But the ordeal, including costly cleanup, can mean catastrophic losses, which often are not entirely covered by USDA payouts, according to Beth Breeding, spokeswoman for the National Turkey Federation.
Wells Fargo analyst Schmidt said going into this fall, U.S. turkey production was already down quite a bit, with third-quarter production down 11 percent from a year ago. She said higher feed and fuel costs, labor shortages and other head winds have caused some contraction in the industry, which will further impact price. Exports are down 21 percent this year and imports are up, she said, which may improve availability a bit heading into the holidays.
That may be cold comfort for the farmers who are on the front lines watching the virus do its worst.
“I just think there’s a lot of compassion that should be had for the farmers across the country that are dealing with it,” said Diestel, the California turkey farmer. “If you’re the farmer standing there looking at a perfectly healthy flock of birds and you think of a 99 percent mortality rate in the flock, it’s devastating.” | 2022-10-26T14:00:11Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Avian flu is spiking, taking out millions of holiday turkeys. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2022/10/26/avian-flu-turkey-prices-holidays/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2022/10/26/avian-flu-turkey-prices-holidays/ |
New lawmakers were sworn into a historic New Zealand Parliament on Oct. 25 in Wellington, where women outnumber men for the first time. (Video: AP)
On Tuesday, Soraya Peke-Mason was sworn in as a lawmaker for the Labour Party, tipping the country’s legislative body to 60 women and 59 men.
Fellow lawmaker Nicola Willis echoed that joy: “I’m just really pleased that my daughters are growing up in a country where women being equally represented in public life is just normal — that’s a great thing,” she said.
Another politician, Marama Davidson of New Zealand’s Green Party, was more forthright: “About blimmin’ time,” she told press. “We’ve still got a long way to go,” she added, citing pay transparency among lawmakers as a key ongoing issue.
The female majority, however, may be short-lived, with a by-election due in the Hamilton West constituency in December that may shift the gender balance in parliament once again.
Don’t bring babies in, British Parliament tells lawmakers after outcry
New Zealand is one of a handful of countries currently led by a woman, with Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern in office since 2017. She surprised many after taking maternity leave a year later and became one of a few elected world leaders to give birth while in office — following Pakistan’s late Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto.
Globally, just over a quarter of lawmakers are women (26.4 percent), according to the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU), an international organization of national parliaments that fosters parliamentary diplomacy.
Only five countries share Wellington’s achievement where at least half of lawmakers are female, among them Rwanda, which has more than 60 percent female lawmakers, Cuba (53 percent), Nicaragua (51 percent), Mexico (50 percent) and the United Arab Emirates (50 percent), according to data from the IPU. Other countries that just fall short of 50 percent include Iceland, Grenada and South Africa.
However, despite some gains women remain largely “underrepresented at all levels of decision-making worldwide,” according to U.N. Women which cautions “achieving gender parity in political life is far off.”
Although there are more female lawmakers in general sitting in parliaments around the world, only 21 percent of government ministers are women, and often they hold portfolios related to gender, family, children, the elderly, social affairs and the environment, the U.N. body found. “At the current rate of progress, gender parity in national legislative bodies will not be achieved before 2063.”
Minna Cowper-Coles, research fellow at the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership, a London-based research group, told The Washington Post on Wednesday that politics often struggles to accommodate female lawmakers. Whether it’s making allowances for caring responsibilities, for example when voting takes place late into the evening, maternity leave and nursing provisions or tackling harassment online and in-person, which “is disproportionately directed at women in politics” and “on the rise,” political systems tend to fall short, she said.
Such pressures often put women off entering politics in the first place or can contribute to why they leave, she added.
In Europe, Finland’s female prime minister Sanna Marin has faced criticism in her role. Earlier this year, she was derided after videos surfaced on social media of Marin partying with her friends at a private event. Critics called her decision unprofessional and irresponsible amid the country’s economic crisis but it also triggered a wave of solidarity from female lawmakers, including Hillary Clinton, issuing pictures of themselves dancing in a bid to denounce what they said was unfair and sexist treatment of Marin.
Cowper-Coles also argued that having women in power does not always benefit other women, with an “increase in Europe of women leading far right parties.”
Italy’s new Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni this month framed herself as an “underdog” and cited numerous other Italian women, including politicians, who opened the way to “break the heavy glass ceiling.” However, she made little mention of social issues that impact women, aside from suggesting that individual freedoms, including on abortion, would not be rolled back.
“We also need to hold men politicians accountable” for policy issues that impact women, Sarah Liu, associate professor in gender and politics at the University of Edinburgh told The Post, stating there was a risk of “othering” women by focusing on firsts and accepting men as the “default.”
Parliaments must do more to become “women-friendly environments,” particularly given the increase in women giving up their careers since the coronavirus pandemic and amid financial crises, she added.
Female lawmakers have a unique perspective and impact, she said. “Research shows that having more women in parliaments leads to more women-friendly policy,” said Liu. “If we want to ensure the representation of women and ensure that there’s gender parity in political institutions — where decisions governing people’s lives are made — then we need to mainstream gender in all aspects of politics.”
The historic achievement of a female-majority parliament in New Zealand comes as the country boasts a long history of women’s suffrage. In 1893 it became the first self-governing country in the world to grant some women the right to vote in parliamentary elections. The United States and European countries meanwhile, granted such rights much later, only after the end of World War I. | 2022-10-26T14:13:14Z | www.washingtonpost.com | New Zealand's parliament becomes majority female - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/26/new-zealand-women-parliament-gender/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/26/new-zealand-women-parliament-gender/ |
A surge in cases of a common respiratory virus is filling up pediatric hospital beds around the US. The early and swift arrival of respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV, is stretching the limits of an already exhausted health care system. Layer on Covid and the flu, and you’ve got the makings of another unpleasant pandemic winter.
RSV is typically nothing more than an annoying cold or cough for most children, but it can be dangerous for others — particularly infants, babies born prematurely and kids with underlying medical problems or who are immunocompromised. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, some 58,000 kids under the age of 5 are hospitalized with the virus each year in the US. RSV is also risky for older adults, killing some 14,000 people over the age of 65 each year in the US.
In general, the same kind of common sense measures many people adopted to fight Covid also apply to RSV. This virus is contagious for 3–8 days after symptoms present, so if you’re bringing your littles to an event where you can’t be certain people will stay home if they’re sick, know that you’re putting them at risk of one of the myriad respiratory viruses floating around. Consider staying home, or urge attendees with any symptoms to opt out of the festivities.
• We Need to Build a Better Flu Shot: Lisa Jarvis
• Progress on HPV Vaccines Is Too Important to Lose: Lisa Jarvis | 2022-10-26T14:14:03Z | www.washingtonpost.com | What Parents Can Do as RSV Spikes Among Children - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/what-parents-can-do-as-rsv-spikes-among-children/2022/10/26/4e466f44-5537-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/what-parents-can-do-as-rsv-spikes-among-children/2022/10/26/4e466f44-5537-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html |
The Oregon Department of Justice building in Salem, Ore. The Oregon Supreme Court is expected to rule soon on whether to allow prisoners convicted with non-unanimous juries to file new appeals. (AP Photo/Andrew Selsky,File)
Rosenblum filed a brief with the U.S. Supreme Court in the Ramos case that defended the use of non-unanimous convictions, even as Gov. Kate Brown (D) and former governor John Kitzhaber (D) joined Kaplan in a brief taking the opposite position. In 2021, her office asked the Supreme Court not to retroactively apply the new unanimity standard.
“When I was sworn into this job ... I took an oath to uphold and enforce the law as it stands — not as I would prefer it to be,” Rosenblum wrote. “No Oregonian should want to vest the state attorney general with the power to disregard state law — or to substitute her judgment for that of the Legislature or the courts.”
The antisemitic and anti-immigrant roots of the practice, he said, also “weighs really heavily in favor of invalidating" split-verdict convictions. | 2022-10-26T14:14:15Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Oregon Supreme Court to rule soon on appeals of split-verdict convictions - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/10/26/oregon-louisiana-split-jury-verdicts/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/10/26/oregon-louisiana-split-jury-verdicts/ |
By Victor Horton
An election volunteer hangs polling place signs in D.C. in 2018. (Astrid Riecken for The Washington Post)
Victor Horton is the Director for Leaders of Color, DC, and a former east of the river Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner in ANC 7E.
On Nov. 8, D.C. voters will head to the polls to decide several important races, including a tightly contested race for two at-large seats on the D.C. Council and a high-profile ballot initiative on the tipped minimum wage.
Thanks to D.C.'s coronavirus-inspired practice of sending mail-in ballots to all registered voters, many have their ballot already in hand. Early voting at no fewer than 25 voting centers across the city runs from Oct. 31 to Nov. 6. Same-day voter registration means that even those not currently on D.C.'s voter rolls can still cast a ballot. The D.C. Council just advanced legislation that would permit noncitizens to vote in local elections (though it would not apply to this election cycle). Individuals with criminal convictions and those currently incarcerated are already eligible to vote.
All of this means more access to voting for more residents — a public good by any measure.
However, there remains a glaring blemish on D.C.’s electoral landscape that diminishes the democratic power of nearly six in 10 voters east of the river: under-voting in D.C.'s choose-two at-large council races.
Whether through lack of awareness, misperception or choice, communities east of the river make use of their second vote in the race at profoundly lower rates. In the 2020 general election, more than 33,000 ballots were cast in Ward 8, and nearly 39,000 were cast in Ward 7. Respectively, 60 percent and 55 percent of ballots in those wards did not make use of their second vote in the at-large council race. In 2018, 2016 and elections before, the rates of under-voting were similar.
So whom do we have to thank for this problematic piece of our local democracy?
You guessed it: Congress.
D.C.'s choose-two at-large council seats are a product of the Home Rule Act’s requirement, created by Congress, that “not more than two of the at-large members shall be nominated by the same political party.” In deep-blue D.C., that means that two can be Democrats and two must be something other than Democrats.
In the early days of Home Rule, this requirement, aimed at diversifying the perspectives on the council, resulted in those two seats being occupied by candidates from the Statehood Green and Republican parties. More recently, the seats are occupied by former Democrats who shed their party affiliation to qualify for the seat and then, by and large, vote and legislate as Democrats.
At the same time, we see what not having a D next to your name on the ballot can do to the outcomes of these elections. Indeed, three of the last four people to hold the non-majority at-large seats were White, and three of the last four Democrats to serve as at-large members were Black. Tellingly, the under-voting that we see in Black, Brown and lower-income neighborhoods remained incredibly high despite the fact that turnout increased in 2020 thanks to universal mail-in ballots.
As the city has gotten Whiter, more economically balkanized and downright gentrified, Black and Brown voters are effectively left standing with their democratic agency slipping through their fingers like sand. We are already a city of long-standing and increasing inequity. Life expectancy in many Ward 7 and 8 communities is 20 to 25 years below those in Ward 2 and 3 communities. Median household income in Ward 8 sits around $38,000 while it’s nearly 3 ½ times higher in Ward 3 at $130,000 — a $92,000 difference.
These gaps are the focus of rafts of public policy and decades of research because of our shared belief that such gaps run counter to our values. The inequity in the history of D.C.'s choose-two elections is similarly unacceptable.
Fortunately, some groups are working to educate voters on the issue. That’s a good start, but we need to do more. The D.C. Board of Elections has an obligation to increase voter understanding and second vote uptake. Our elected leaders need to keep this issue front and center in their oversight of our voting system.
We should also be keenly aware of these dynamics as we consider proposals around ranked-choice voting, instant runoff voting and the like. As we saw in places such as New York City, the effect of such practices on minority voting power is potentially fraught.
And, finally, we need to push candidates to be clear about what they stand for, communicate how they’ll govern and whether their values and policy positions align with Democrats.
It’s the kind of honesty all voters deserve. And it might be the kind of information that helps address the under-voting that is muffling the democratic voice of too many in our city. | 2022-10-26T14:14:21Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | D.C. at-large races see significant undervoting in Wards 7 and 8 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/26/dc-at-large-races-significant-undervoting-ward-7-ward-8/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/26/dc-at-large-races-significant-undervoting-ward-7-ward-8/ |
By David A. Lieb | AP
JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. — In just 20 months, Republican Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt has filed 25 lawsuits against Democratic President Joe Biden’s administration, challenging policies on COVID-19 vaccinations, climate change, immigration and education, among other things.
Missouri’s campaign season effectively began when Republican U.S. Sen. Roy Blunt announced on March 8, 2021, that he would not seek reelection. Less than three hours later, Schmitt announced he was leading a dozen states in a lawsuit challenging a Biden directive on calculating the “social cost" of greenhouse gas emissions for federal regulations.
His most recent lawsuit — contesting Biden's student loan forgiveness plan — was dismissed last Thursday by a federal judge who said the six suing Republican-led states raised “important and significant challenges” but failed to show harm giving them grounds to sue. The next day, an appeals court temporary blocked Biden’s administration from forgiving student loans while it considers an appeal from the states. | 2022-10-26T14:14:41Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Biden suits get mixed results for Missouri Senate candidate - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/biden-suits-get-mixed-results-for-missouri-senate-candidate/2022/10/26/171c1490-552f-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/biden-suits-get-mixed-results-for-missouri-senate-candidate/2022/10/26/171c1490-552f-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html |
Transcript: Kelly Ripa, Author, “Live Wire: Long Winded Short Stories”
MR. EDGERS: Hello, everybody. I’m Geoff Edgers, the national arts reporter at The Washington Post, and we have a treat for you today, somebody who makes me a little nervous to talk to her because she’s a professional‑‑and you know I just do what I can here‑‑Kelly Ripa.
And, Kelly, I'm just going to introduce you quickly, but as we know, we see you on TV on "Live." We've seen that since 2001. You are an actress, whether it's a sitcom or in the soap operas. You are a mother, and you are an author. I'm holding this book. If you'll forgive me, I got a little coffee on the cover. I'll get another. I'll give this to my daughter and buy another one for my dad, and‑‑but you have a book out now, your first, "Live Wire: Long‑Winded Short Stories." This is not a memoir, people. Do not go to the memoir section. These are essays, and they're fascinating because they're‑‑we should make this clear.
A lot of famous people have people like me, who aren't famous, write their books for them, and then they put their names on them. But, in this case, Kelly, you have written this entire book yourself. It is exactly like the person we think we know, but there are things we learned that we would have never found out. So tell me what would make a person in your position a happy life, seemingly, write a book.
MS. RIPA: Well, Geoff, first of all, thank you for having me, and I am the nervous one today. You know, I feel like I've finally‑‑I've hit the big time, Washington Post. I can, like, go home and tell my parents what I did today, and it's very exciting.
And I just want to point out that I do own more than just this shirt.
MS. RIPA: This apparently seems to be a shirt that makes me feel comfortable, so I wear it a lot. But I do, I promise, own more than this shirt.
What would compel me to write a book at this stage of my life, I would say, would be a combination of stupidity, hubris, audacity, back to stupidity again. It was far harder than I anticipated it being. I thought because I read books that I would be able to write one, and I don't really still understand what compelled me other than the fact that my children were all out of the house, with the exception of my youngest son. He was a senior in high school while I was writing this.
My husband was living in Vancouver and actually stuck there because of covid. They had closed the borders between Canada and the U.S. So he was there, and I was really alone with nothing but my thoughts and my old journals and old memories, and, you know, you start cleaning out one drawer, and the next thing you know, you are writing a collection of essays, which, Geoff, I thought would be easier and less complicated than writing a memoir. But I think I got that wrong.
You probably know better, and I didn't know, honestly, that you were available to write my book. Maybe the next book, I will utilize you.
MR. EDGERS: Absolutely. I'm always there if you need any kind of writing tips, though, frankly, I should be taking the tips from you.
I'll tell you, we're going to get into the meat of this book, but just to give you a little small thing, as a writer and a human being, I just love little lines. They're all over this book. You're driving with your husband, and we'll talk about him because he's a very handsome man. And you describe this experience. I'm trying to find this moment where you say, you know, "I'm giving him my silence for an hour, or as Waze says, four feet."
MS. RIPA: Yeah.
MR. EDGERS: I think that was the line in there. I couldn't find it in here, but I remembered it. But you have a very good sense of humor, and that comes through.
Mark. I want to ask you about this guy. It seems to me like this is‑‑you married him the way Axl Rose maybe would get married. You went to Vegas, and you got married five days after he dumped you. Dumped you.
MS. RIPA: Yes.
MR. EDGERS: What the heck is that all about? And yet here we are more than a quarter of a century later, and you and this handsome man are happily married. Please explain to me why that is a good recipe for a long marriage.
MS. RIPA: It's a terrible recipe. I can't, to this day, understand why we worked out the way we did, because it starts out on paper, and as I was writing it, I went back and I reread it and I re‑reread it. And I sort of‑‑I rewrote a lot of what I had originally written because it turns out it shouldn't have worked out the way it did, you know, and people who marry their co‑stars, it almost always ends in a disaster and especially the way we got married.
You know, we had broken up, as you pointed out, and we wound up doing a segment on "Regis and Kathie Lee" for a Mother's Day special, and we were not speaking to one another. And I firmly believe‑‑and I still believe it to this day‑‑if smartphones had existed with all of the apps and all of the bells and whistles that they have now, we would not be together because we would have been playing Wordle or shopping for real estate or on a dating app or something like that. But those things didn't exist.
So we were compelled, forced, if you will, to interact with each other the way people used to, and we wound up flying to Las Vegas the very next day and getting married. And I think the reason that we have stayed together all of these years is because before we broke up, we were really good friends. We loved each other, and dare I say we had the hots for each other. You know, at the time, we were young. We were in our mid‑twenties. We were cute, you know, and we really, you know, found‑‑we were each other's cup of tea. We found each other sexy.
But none of that sustains a marriage, right? Because none of that lasts. Everything is affected by gravity, and what we had and what we have now is what we had in the beginning, which was this mutual love for each other, but we had a mutual like for each other. We really liked each other, and we respected one another. And we grew together, and we became each other's biggest champions, and we are not competitive with each other.
It's not about who's doing this or who's doing that or who's not doing this or who's‑‑we really build each other up, and we push each other up the hill and pull each other up the hill. And we take turns doing that in every aspect of our marriage, in every aspect when it came to raising our children who are grown now, but we were really a united front, and we tackled everything about our lives, our marriage, our careers that way as a team. It was a team effort, and if you are not a good team member, you're not going to be a good spouse.
MR. EDGERS: So, in the clip that was leading into this, you were talking about being‑‑the difference between being a man and a woman in this universe, and, I mean, I don't know how much you've‑‑I believe you probably know the comedian, Sarah Cooper, but she's written these incredible books about‑‑they're drawings, but they also describe, you know, when a man comes in and he's got an idea, he comes into the room, "I've got this idea, dammit, and we're going to make it happen." And a woman comes in, they're like, "Oh, she's pushy. Why are we going to‑‑what the heck is"‑‑and you have to go, "Look, guys, I have a suggestion. I don't know if this is right or wrong, but it's an idea."
MR. EDGERS: So you've lived through this. You've seen it change in the workplace, and that's where I want to get to Regis, who's a major part of your book or has a major part in this section of your book, which is Regis, who we know as playing Regis very successfully‑‑you know, you came into that show later in the game, and we like to think of our TV people as best friends, that, you know, he was your father figure, he brought you in, he nurtured you. But, in reality, you were two people playing a role, and you finally deal with this in the book in a way that I think sets the record straight. Can you talk a little bit to that?
MS. RIPA: Sure. I think there's this common‑‑I mean, I know because I've been on the other side of it, right? So there's this common misconception that the main host, the host that's there, is sort of hand selecting their co‑host, and that is not true. It is a decision that happens in private rooms, way over our heads, way above our pay grade.
And I sort of take the stance‑‑and, you know, it's‑‑if you don't read the book, you would really not be able to understand this. I sort of take Regis's side in all of this because he had paid his dues. He had, you know, been on this show since its inception, and so‑‑you know, I don't necessarily think that he should have been assigned a co‑host. I think that when you've paid your dues that long and you've been there‑‑you know, it was‑‑I don't know if it was like 15 years or something, 10 years when I got there. He should have had the right to choose his co‑host or not have one.
I did not know any of that at the time. I sort of came in really ignorant and not prepared, and after a very short period, my first co‑hosting day was November 1st of 2000, and I was announced as the permanent host--I mean, I was announced in, I think, January or February of 2001, but they had offered me the job in‑‑I think it was December. And so it happened super fast, and I was not prepared for the internal conflicts that went on between these two divisions of the same company.
So there was local distribution, WABC here in New York City, and then there was the ABC network. I did not understand that those were different things, that there were different presidents, vice presidents, bosses, CEOs. I did not understand any of that. I thought it's all on Channel 7 here, right? So I didn't realize that we were syndicated and we were NBC and CBS and Fox and ABC and we were all over the country, and so it was this very strange ignorance‑is‑bliss moment for me, but also, I didn't get that there wasn't more of like a celebratory feeling. It didn't feel celebratory. I felt‑‑
MR. EDGERS: Well, Kelly, I read‑‑when I read the way that you describe it, it reminds me a little bit like David Letterman where‑‑or Johnny Carson, to date me even more. They sit at the table. Someone comes on as a guest, and you think they're chummy. And then during commercial, they sit in total silence. They don't go out to dinner with these people.
I mean, when you would talk to Regis, I feel like you would say, "Hey, you know, I'm going skiing this weekend." "Save it for the show," you know, like it was‑‑
MS. RIPA: "Save it of the show." Yes.
MR. EDGERS: That was‑‑and I think you're very gracious in the way you explained this, but it took you probably a period of time to realize this is a different kind of relationship. This is an old‑school kind of professional relationship‑‑
MR. EDGERS: And you're probably naturally friendly, and you want to maybe be a little bit, you know, more friendly, and that's not what this is.
MS. RIPA: Well, I came from‑‑you know, I came from this tribe of cast members at "All My Children." It's an ensemble. There were 40 of us. We were like siblings. We had very‑‑you know, that David Canary, who played my father, who was really like a father figure to me, and I had, you know, Eva La Rue, who played my sister‑in‑law, is godmother to my son, Michael. You know, we are very close. So many of us are still very close.
And so when I came to the broadcast side, I thought it was a very similar thing. I did not realize that it wasn't like that, and so it was‑‑you know, it was difficult being the new girl. I felt like it was the first day of high school all over again.
But, you know, I think that Regis had this magic that he was maybe superstitious, ritualistic. He liked everything to unfold on camera. He did not want to hear conversations off camera. Anything I had to say had to be saved for on camera, including in the morning.
MR. EDGERS: "Save it for the show. Save it for the show."
MS. RIPA: "Save it for the show" was like that was it.
And, like I said, the few times that we did socialize off camera, we genuinely enjoyed each other's company. I found‑‑I still find him to be the greatest storyteller I ever knew. He took you on a journey, and if I'm a good storyteller, it's because I learned by watching him. And it was a great privilege to sit there and watch him.
But you do realize, like, people really expected‑‑I think people expected that when he left, I would leave, as if that was a choice that I could make at that time, you know. It's all about keeping the franchise on the air and finding a replacement, and that's what it is. You know, it's like all of those franchise shows, you know, from Stephen Colbert to Jimmy Fallon, Jay Leno, Dave Letterman. Our show is a franchise show in the same way. It doesn't end with me. When I leave, somebody else will join the show. That's just the way it is, and I think that's what people really have to understand is that there are certain shows where it's really‑‑you may grow accustomed to the people hosting it, and you fall in love with them, and you want them there forever. And I get that.
I was a viewer of the show for‑‑I thought that Regis and Kathie Lee were married for years. I did not realize that they were not, and so‑‑
MR. EDGERS: Yeah. She was married to that‑‑John Davidson, I think. Was it Cathy Lee Crosby? I've never even heard of her.
Listen, I think you handled it beautifully in here, and I'm going to just say I'm going to endorse your handling of the Regis situation. It's very graceful and funny and detailed and well worth reading.
MS. RIPA: Thank you.
MR. EDGERS: I'm conscious of how much is in this book and in your life and how little time we have. So I want to shift over to something which, you know, we look at you as a totally put‑together, smart, engaging‑‑really. You even‑‑you made fun of my bosses, the guy from Amazon, you know, his rocket ship. I can't even say what you called it in the book. It's kind of profane, but‑‑
MS. RIPA: It's a little profane.
MR. EDGERS: You could say‑‑you can say it. I can't.
MS. RIPA: I'm not going to say it here.
MR. EDGERS: All right. Okay, fine.
MS. RIPA: People I know are watching.
MR. EDGERS: It's in the book.
MS. RIPA: Get the audio book. Get the audio book if you want to hear me say it.
MR. EDGERS: Oh, whoa. Tempting. All right. Wait.
MS. RIPA: [Laughs]
MR. EDGERS: So what you write about, though, in here, just to shift it a little bit, is it's quite courageous. You write about being very anxious when you have to make public speeches and also just going through‑‑I mean, there's a point where you're talking, I think, to your therapist and you're talking about how you wake up in the morning just dreading going into work sometimes. And when you're with your kids, you're, like, thinking about work, and when you're at work, you're thinking about your kids. And Sunday comes, and it's something that is very relatable, but I didn't really understand was going on with you, and I'd like you to sort of explain to us why you told us about that and what your hopes are for how that, you know, is laid out there.
MS. RIPA: You know, it's so funny because I feel like there are certain things that I say on the air and that I've said for years on the air that don't really land. Maybe people think you're joking. They think you're, you know, trying to rib yourself or be self‑deprecating. But I've talked about being extremely socially anxious and this fear of public speaking that I have, two things that necessarily don't align with the career that I have chosen to have now for 23 years. And so, you know, it's one of these things where it had started to become debilitating, like I would make it so‑‑the fear of waking up and going out and speaking in front of the audience and to the audience at home and if I had something to do after work that involved an audience, I would be, like, shaking like near wreck. I couldn't eat. If I had to do another talk show in the evening, you know, if I had to do a Letterman, say, I wouldn't be able to eat for the entire day because I would be‑‑my stomach would be in knots. And I think I‑‑it didn't really land until I wrote about it, which is such an interesting thing when you think about it.
It's like the written word sometimes has more depth to it or breadth to it, or people take it more literally when you write it down. And I think I wrote about it, because I know that I'm not alone, because I work with so many people who are functioning--you know, there are high‑functioning people that have so much anxiety in their lives, and the way that people choose to deal with it‑‑I mean, there's so many different ways people choose to deal with it.
You know, I went to therapy because I found that I was not‑‑my coping skills‑‑I didn't have the tools. I had no tools. So my tools were to allow my brain to consume itself and for me to work myself into a state of terror.
You know, when we were doing "Hope & Faith," that was in front of a live studio audience every Friday night, and Faith Ford would have to come in and sort of pull me out of the dressing room. And I would be shaking and trembling backstage, and she would just be caressing me and holding me, and she's like, "It's going to be great. You have so much fun when you're out there." And she's right. When I'm out there, I have so much fun, but it's the buildup before.
And so I really sought therapy as a way to sort of deal with the stress and learn how to manage my own anxiety and learn different breathing techniques, meditation techniques, and sort of asking myself these questions like, "So then what? Well, if you bomb, so then what? Well, then what would happen?" you know, and the answers are always, well, nothing happens. Life goes on, right?
And so I think I wrote about it to prove to people that if I can do what I do and embarrass myself literally at least six to seven times a week, right, in profound and large ways on live TV and in ways I‑‑sometimes I embarrass myself in ways I never even see coming.
But it doesn't kill you. It really doesn't kill you, and if you can just learn tools to manage your stress, whether it's with an app, whether it's with a group therapy or a private therapy or‑‑you know, there are so many different ways now because people talk about it in a more open fashion. And I think the more people talk about it or somebody like me who may seem put together, but, you know, to know that I'm really like the duck floating on the water that you see and the duck is sitting there and you don't really see the ripples, but underneath the water, the duck's‑‑you know, you see those legs are working overtime. To know that that is happening to me‑‑like, as we are doing this right now, I can honestly tell you that if you could see, my legs are shaking.
MR. EDGERS: Oh, my God. Relax. It's okay. I mean, my‑‑I'm not even wearing any socks, but look, here's the thing‑‑
MR. EDGERS: ‑‑because you at one point‑‑I know you got‑‑you got this Botox injection under your arms‑‑
MR. EDGERS: ‑‑because you were sweating so much, because you were so anxious, right?
MS. RIPA: Yep, yep. And let me tell you something. When you are turning to Botox in your armpits‑‑
MR. EDGERS: Yeah.
MS. RIPA: ‑‑that's when you know you are not managing your stress well enough, because it was just‑‑it was uncontrolled. I looked like I had run a marathon and I would‑‑I hadn't even gone out on the air yet, and it looked like I had run a marathon.
And, you know, I always go back to Albert Brooks in‑‑what's the movie?
MR. EDGERS: "Broadcast"‑‑"Broadcast News." Yeah, absolutely.
MS. RIPA: "Broadcast News."
MR. EDGERS: It's hilarious. I want to ask you your thought. I want to ask you, because we only have a few minutes‑‑so Ryan Seacrest, that guy, same problem? Does he say, "Save it for the show"? What is he‑‑is it a different relationship there because you were there and you can influence how that relationship flows?
MS. RIPA: I think there's some of‑‑I mean, obviously, there is so much of that, right? When you're the person who has been the new guy, you want to make the new guy as comfortable as possible. But, with Ryan and me, we have a 20‑year prior‑to‑this‑show relationship. We've been friends for two decades, and so we have a camaraderie. We're like siblings. We have a very different relationship.
In fact, I never thought that they would ever hire Ryan because my fear was that they're going to know somehow that we are friends, and that's going to impede the whole process, right?
MS. RIPA: And so, you know, I think because there's like group superstition, right, when the show started, it was about‑‑you know, when the show started back in whatever, the late '80s, it was about two strangers coming together and discovering what the other did the night before and, you know, all of that on live TV.
And Ryan and I frequently have dinner together the night before, but you can still talk about that, you know, the next day. You don't have to be complete strangers.
I mean, we've done 20‑minute host chats based on Ryan FaceTiming me and me going into my husband's closet to figure out what kind of underwear he wears, because Ryan is looking for a new underwear brand. I mean, literally, you know, it's like that's what relationships can be on TV. We have a very unique, for me, situation because we know each other and we were friends, you know, way before the show. We'll be friends way after the show. It's like that‑‑we're like‑‑we really are like siblings, you know, and my kids‑‑
MR. EDGERS: Do you‑‑I'm very interested in‑‑I mean, you've written this one book. It's hugely successful, right? It's like up there with John Grisham or something, right?
MS. RIPA: I can't believe that. I can't believe that. I can't believe that.
MR. EDGERS: I mean, you seem daunted in the book. You talk about being daunted about James Patterson. That guy, he doesn't write anything. He just has‑‑everybody writes for him. I've written 12 of his books. So, look, you have this great editor.
MS. RIPA: He literally said to me‑‑well, he said to me why don't‑‑he's like, "You should have had a ghost writer. What's wrong with you?" [Laughs]
MR. EDGERS: He has‑‑last book he had, he had seven ghost writers, but‑‑
So your great editor, you have this great editor, Carrie Thornton. Does she say, "Look, Kelly, I'm an editor. You've written this amazing book. It's so successful. How about number two?" or is that something you're not even thinking about right now? And what would it be?
MS. RIPA: So right now‑‑right now, she's just letting me get comfortable because she knows me now, right, and the editing‑‑she cut 200 pages out of this book, by the way. So there's‑‑obviously, we could have a book two. Obviously, there's 200 pages of pure gold.
MS. RIPA: But, you know, it's‑‑I think my second book would be about me and the attempts I made to try to get out of going on a book tour‑‑
MS. RIPA: ‑‑because I write from a place of complete‑‑everything that is happening in my life is what I write about, you know. I'm not ready to write a memoir because I just feel like I have a lot left to learn and do and grow, but I never say never to anything. But I will say to right now, I'd rather just sort of sit in the uncomfortableness of me having a book out on the market for purchase right now.
I have not yet‑‑I have yet to actually be able to walk into a bookstore right now without us document‑‑like, the first day the book came out, I walked into the Strand Bookstore downtown, and I took an awkward video of me standing next to my own books, just to show people how uncomfortable I was with the entire thing, because it just, you know‑‑Kal Penn, the great Kal Penn who had been promoting his memoir on my show while I was‑‑my book had just gone into edit. We had just started the editing process, and he said, "What level of self‑loathing are you?" And I‑‑it was the thing that I took hold of. I said, "Oh, my gosh, I despise myself," and he said, "Then you're almost done."
MS. RIPA: And it was so funny to have, like, this, this eureka. Somebody gets me. Finally, somebody understands me.
MR. EDGERS: Well, we‑‑Kelly, Kelly Ripa, we like you, and I represent America, as you know, and the journalism establishment.
MS. RIPA: Thank you, Geoff.
MR. EDGERS: This is your book right here, and I hope people will go out and pick it up. This is a good picture on here. You posted a good picture on Instagram. I'm not sure I can show that to my children either.
MR. EDGERS: But, look, it's been a pleasure, a pleasure to have you here. I'm sorry your legs were shaking, but honestly, I think you pulled it off. I think‑‑I think it went okay.
MR. EDGERS: All right.
MS. RIPA: You made it really‑‑
MR. EDGERS: Everybody else, come back to Washington Post Live, and you'll see the upcoming shows, and where‑‑you know, I'm Geoff Edgers, national arts reporter, and thanks so much for coming. | 2022-10-26T14:15:44Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Transcript: Kelly Ripa, Author, “Live Wire: Long Winded Short Stories” - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2022/10/26/transcript-kelly-ripa-author-live-wire-long-winded-short-stories/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2022/10/26/transcript-kelly-ripa-author-live-wire-long-winded-short-stories/ |
Rishi Sunak’s new U.K. cabinet looks a lot like the old one: Who’s who?
British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak departs 10 Downing Street ahead of his first prime minister's questions at parliament in London, on Oct. 26, 2022. (Andy Rain/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)
Britain’s new prime minister, Rishi Sunak, is promising to fix the mistakes of his predecessors.
His allies cast his government, which convened Wednesday for the first time, as a steady hand that brings “stability” and even a “more boring” Cabinet after the tumult buffeting the Conservative Party and the economy.
At the very top of the British government, it’s been a week of firsts: Liz Truss became the country’s shortest-serving prime minister when she resigned, and the 42-year-old Sunak is now the first Hindu and person of color to lead the country. In his Cabinet, however, many of the faces in senior jobs are not new.
Here are some of the key players.
Jeremy Hunt: Finance Minister
Hunt stays on as finance minister, after taking office less than two weeks ago to shred Truss’s economic agenda.
The reappointment appeared to initially calm the markets, although many are waiting for Hunt to outline his plans for balancing the books. That announcement, expected next week but pushed to Nov. 17, will detail a plan “to put public spending on a sustainable footing, get debt falling & restore stability,” an official statement said Wednesday.
Hunt will have to contend with record inflation, warnings of a recession and the aftermath of the government economic U-turn. Before she quit last week, Truss appointed Hunt as she jettisoned her finance minister and scrambled to reverse a vision, including tax cuts for high-earners, which spooked the markets and sank the pound.
Hunt is the only White man in the “great offices of state,” or top government posts which also include the Foreign and Home secretaries.
James Cleverly: Foreign Secretary
Cleverly keeps his job too. As foreign minister, he has maintained British support for Ukraine in its battle against Russia. One of Ukraine’s staunchest backers, Britain has sent a stream of weapons to Kyiv during eight months of war.
His role also involves talks with the European Union about a trade arrangement in Northern Ireland that became a flash point of post-Brexit tensions.
In congratulating Cleverly on Wednesday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said he hoped the two would work closely on common priorities, “including unwavering support for Ukraine.”
With Ben Wallace also remaining as Defense Secretary, two key posts in charge of Britain’s foreign policy remain unchanged.
Suella Braverman: Home Secretary
Braverman returns as Home Secretary after quitting last week when she voiced “concerns about the direction” of Truss’s government.
In her resignation letter, Braverman also cited as a reason that she had mistakenly committed an email data breach. Sunak faced criticism from the opposition on Wednesday for appointing Braverman days after she stepped down over a violation.
A hard-liner on immigration, Braverman promised to “work hard to control our borders.” She has called for deporting people who enter Britain illegally to Rwanda to press their asylum claims — a previous government policy that prompted outrage and faced legal obstacles.
She also drew attention when she blamed disruptions tied to climate protests earlier this month on what she called “Guardian-reading tofu-eating wokerati.”
Penny Mordaunt: House of Commons Leader
Mordaunt dropped out of the race for prime minister when it seemed she would not get enough support from the Conservative Party. It was her second bid for the leadership post in months. She remains the leader in the House of Commons, representing the government in the lower house of Parliament.
A minister previously little-known to the broader public and working to become a household name, Mordaunt was briefly Britain’s first female defense secretary in 2019. She once did a short stint on reality TV and as head of foreign press for George W. Bush’s 2000 presidential campaign.
William Booth and Karla Adam contributed to this report. | 2022-10-26T14:15:50Z | www.washingtonpost.com | U.K. cabinet: Rishi Sunak re-appoints Hunt, Cleverly and Braverman - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/26/uk-rishi-sunak-cabinet-appointments/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/26/uk-rishi-sunak-cabinet-appointments/ |
Blasting ‘elites’ is a U.S. political tradition as old as Samuel Adams
"Flight of Thomas Hutchinson Before the Rioters, Boston, Massachusetts, 1765" (circa 1880). (Print Collector/Getty Images)
Stacy Schiff is the author, most recently, of “The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams.”
If you want to get ahead in American politics, you might be wise to paint your opponent as a rich, clueless plutocrat. Wisconsin Lt. Gov Mandela Barnes took that line of attack in his Oct. 13 debate with Republican Sen. Ron Johnson. Or, if you’re striking out in a new direction, you might dismiss your former colleagues as an “elitist cabal” — Tulsi Gabbard’s phrase when the former representative from Hawaii announced on Oct. 11 that she was leaving the Democratic Party.
Politicians know that for an aspirational people, Americans have little patience for a ruling class. Appealing to their aversion can be politically useful. In the contest between patrician John F. Kerry’s windsurfing and patrician George W. Bush’s brush-cutting, we know who wins.
The nation’s allergy to aristocracy has been on display from the start, nowhere more vividly than in pre-Revolutionary Boston. Through the 1760s, wealth and power seemed to have migrated into a few familiar hands. Private and public business overlapped. Government answered to the interests of the elite. It appeared deaf to those of everyone else. The public believed their rights were being disregarded. Political discourse had coarsened. Common civility had departed the scene.
In and around Boston — the most unruly town in America at the time — the face of privilege was Thomas Hutchinson’s. Tall and fair, Hutchinson was an urbane, fifth-generation son of colonial Massachusetts. At 26, he took his place in the Massachusetts House of Representatives, a family tradition. He had married into a family with which his forebears had done business for decades. In the coming years, even as the Massachusetts economy faltered, both dynasties thrived.
Hutchinson was not the only rising star in Massachusetts. A Braintree farmer’s son, John Adams had barely begun his brilliant legal career when he voiced his first suspicions of rich, clueless Hutchinson. Soon thereafter, John made the acquaintance of his older cousin, Samuel. The two agreed that Hutchinson — by then a member of the upper house of the Massachusetts legislature, as well as the colony’s lieutenant governor and chief justice — posed a greater threat to American liberties than “any other man ... in the world.”
That was not altogether obvious; to most, the greatest threat to American liberties seemed new British legislation. Hutchinson himself objected to the Sugar and Stamp acts, new British taxes, though given his posts, he could not openly disavow imperial policy. Popular resentment had occasionally welled up against him, but nothing could have prepared him for the fury that vented itself in the summer of 1765.
On Aug. 14, a mob vandalized the home of the Massachusetts stamp master. Twelve days later, angered by (false) rumors that Hutchinson had encouraged the Stamp Act, rioters descended on his mansion with axes. They split open doors and demolished walls. They hacked beds to pieces. Over the course of eight hours, they reduced one of the most beautiful homes in New England to a sorry shell. Hutchinson turned up in court the next morning in a borrowed coat, tears glinting in his eyes. He had only the clothes on his back.
Days before the mansion’s sacking, John Adams had ranted in his diary about “this amazing ascendancy of one family, foundation sufficient on which to erect a tyranny.” As Samuel pointed out, Hutchinson enjoyed “every honor and favor” the colony could bestow. The existence of the 1 percent was only part of the problem. Much of the 1 percent also happened to be related.
Colonial offices reliably descended from father to son, but the Hutchinsons had made an art of the practice. Three Hutchinson children married Olivers, the family of the unlucky stamp master. After 1760, every colonial Massachusetts lieutenant governor was named either Oliver or Hutchinson. When one died, snorted John Adams, another simply stepped in to “rule and overbear all things as usual.”
John had plenty of company; any number of other prominent Bostonians, including the history-writing Mercy Otis Warren, found Hutchinson self-serving at best, scheming at worst. Those positions he did not assume for himself he distributed among cousins, brothers and in-laws. No one had ever stockpiled so many positions, protested Samuel Adams, who doubted anyone would again and who waged a vigorous campaign to cast Hutchinson’s privilege as despotism.
Samuel downplayed the Stamp Act violence: “Under cover of the night,” he wrote, “a few villains may do much mischief.” He opposed compensating Hutchinson for the damages. He decried Hutchinson’s hold on ranking posts in all three branches of government. He hinted at collusion against provincial interests. He arranged for clouds of suspicion to trail Hutchinson about town.
Educated at the same institutions, Samuel Adams and Thomas Hutchinson came away, like Ted Cruz and Elena Kagan after Harvard Law School, with radically different convictions. Adams believed that government should answer to ordinary Americans, not to a political elite. He trusted an educated, engaged populace. A friend reduced his politics to two maxims. “Rulers should have little, the people much.” And privilege should step aside to make room for genius and industry.
The collision course with Hutchinson intensified after 1771, when Hutchinson became governor. (One brother-in-law stepped in as his lieutenant, another as chief justice.) Samuel Adams turned for the airing of grievances to town meetings — assemblies that Hutchinson dismissed as “meetings of Tom, Dick, and Harry.” He scoffed that “anything with the appearance of a man” was admitted.
At the same time, Hutchinson was baffled. How were “inferior people” stealing an administration out from under men with fortunes a hundred times as great? To his mind, Samuel Adams and his friends kept the people in their deluded thrall. They were carried away “with the sound of tyranny and liberty and other big words the force and meaning whereof they do not comprehend.”
The contempt proved one of Samuel Adams’s best weapons. Hutchinson could not bring himself to take Adams and his basket of deplorables seriously. It seemed natural to him that an informed elite should lead. It seemed equally natural to him that of the six agents appointed to sell East India Company tea in Massachusetts in 1773, two should be his sons, two his relatives, and two his close friends. He knew he was not plotting against America. He did not understand why anyone should think he was.
In large part Hutchinson had his privilege to blame. It kept him from the streets, obscuring the view. He had little idea of the resentment against him, which made it easier for him to seem the villain of the piece. No one in his circle was able to explain what was afoot. Their world felt alien. They all waited for it to return to its familiar shape, as they assumed it would. The people had succumbed to a spell. They would wake from it soon enough.
Hutchinson would be reimbursed for the damage to his house but went on to suffer greater indignities. Samuel Adams blocked his reelection to the upper house of the legislature. He contested Hutchinson’s mere presence in the House. He deconstructed, reassembled and printed Hutchinson’s private correspondence — after widely advertising it as criminal.
Adams had on his side the one entity not controlled by Hutchinson and his cronies: the press. In the most-read paper in New England, Adams turned the governor into an “oily-tongued” monster, one who had never met a man he believed his equal. It had been Hutchinson’s highhanded principle since childhood, charged Adams, that “mankind are to be governed by the discerning few, and it has been ever since his ambition to be the hero of the few.”
Hutchinson finally sailed for Great Britain in June 1774, though not before he was burned in effigy in New York and Philadelphia. On his London arrival, he was spirited off to an interview with King George III. Hutchinson attributed Massachusetts unrest to Samuel Adams and his “pretended zeal for liberty.” Adams was, Hutchinson informed the king, the first to advocate for independence. For his part, Adams never lost sight of Hutchinsonian arrogance. As he saw it, American rights had been undermined as much by corrupt, conniving crown officers as by clueless, conniving authorities abroad.
In July 1776, Adams ecstatically reported that “the aristocratic spirit” seemed defeated at last. Democracy had prevailed. The post-Revolutionary Society of the Cincinnati — an honorary order for the descendants of military officers — left him nearly apoplectic. Were hard-won liberties truly, he fumed, to be sacrificed to an entrenched elite? He recoiled from cults of personality, sounding alarm after alarm. “The few haughty Families, think They must govern. The Body of the People tamely consent and submit,” he wrote in 1787. “This unravels,” he added, “the Mystery of the Millions being enslaved by the few!”
Ultimately, the proper political architecture of a republic divided the Adams cousins. John deferred to institutions. Samuel placed his faith in the people. He railed against a class that concerned itself with “hereditary shares in sovereignty, riches and splendor, titles, stars, garters, crosses, eagles, and many other childish playthings.” Indeed, he conceded, there was such a thing as an aristocracy. But it consisted of individuals of all ranks and conditions. As the children of great men did not inevitably resemble their fathers, was it not wise to steer clear of political dynasties?
“The man of good understanding, who has been well educated and improves these advantages as far as his circumstances will allow, in promoting the happiness of mankind,” Samuel wrote in 1790, “in my opinion, and I am inclined to think in yours, is indeed ‘well born.’ ”
Those words he dispatched to the Braintree farmer’s son then serving as vice president of the United States. Samuel lived another 13 years. John lived long enough to follow the protracted and hotly contested presidential election of 1824. Andrew Jackson won the popular vote. No candidate won a majority of the electoral count. The speaker of the House weighed in, deciding the contest in favor of John Quincy Adams, the eldest son of John Adams, the second U.S. president. Tears of joy were said to roll down his face when he was congratulated on his son’s honor. | 2022-10-26T15:27:19Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | From Samuel Adams to Tulsi Gabbard, blasting ‘elites’ is a U.S. political tradition - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/26/john-samuel-adams-thomas-hutchinson-elites/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/26/john-samuel-adams-thomas-hutchinson-elites/ |
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