text stringlengths 237 126k | date_download stringdate 2022-01-01 00:32:20 2023-01-01 00:02:37 ⌀ | source_domain stringclasses 60 values | title stringlengths 4 31.5k ⌀ | url stringlengths 24 617 ⌀ | id stringlengths 24 617 ⌀ |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Good morning and welcome to The Climate 202! Today we’re reading this wild story about a woman getting swallowed whole by a 22-foot python on her way to work. But first:
Exclusive: League of Conservation Voters and affiliates poised to spend record $100 million in midterms
Less than two weeks before Election Day, the League of Conservation Voters and affiliated entities are on track to spend a record $100 million in next month’s midterm elections, according to details shared with The Climate 202.
The infusion of cash is aimed at electing pro-climate Democrats in both the House and Senate, as well as in governor’s offices and state legislatures across the country. It comes as the oil and gas industry pours millions of its own dollars into helping Republicans regain control of one or both chambers of Congress.
The $100 million marks a notable increase from the 2018 midterms, when the prominent environmental group invested $80 million and Democrats picked up 41 seats in the House. The growth follows the passage of Democrats’ landmark climate law, dubbed the Inflation Reduction Act, which authorized the biggest infusion of federal spending yet to tackle global warming.
“Why are we doing this? Because the stakes are so high,” Pete Maysmith, LCV’s senior vice president of campaigns, told The Climate 202. “While the Inflation Reduction Act was so important, so much more needs to be done. We can't rest on those laurels.”
In June, a coalition of climate groups and their political action committees — including LCV Victory Fund, Climate Power Action, EDF Action Votes and NRDC Action Votes — announced plans to spend at least $100 million to elect “climate champions” at the federal and state level.
Now LCV and affiliated entities, including state affiliates, are set to spend at least $95 million alone, and they will “likely hit $100 million when all is said and done,” LCV spokeswoman Emily Samsel said.
Of the $100 million, $23 million has been invested in state and local races, while another $24 million has been raised through the GiveGreen platform for candidates at the state and federal levels.
Here’s a closer look at two key races where the green group has invested significant money and resources:
The Oregon League of Conservation Voters has spent a total of $1.5 million in the state’s unexpectedly close gubernatorial contest, including nearly $1.1 million that LCV granted the state affiliate earlier this year.
The race has major implications for Oregon’s efforts to cut planet-warming emissions, with the candidates staking out sharply divergent stances on climate policy:
LCV has endorsed Democratic nominee Tina Kotek, who helped pass the state’s ambitious Clean Fuels Program as speaker of the Oregon House of Representatives.
Kotek is running against Republican nominee Christine Drazan and unaffiliated candidate Betsy Johnson, both of whom voted against every major climate bill in Oregon’s recent history as state lawmakers. In 2020, Drazan also led House Republicans in walking out of the state Capitol to kill a cap-and-trade bill.
All three women are vying to succeed Oregon Gov. Kate Brown (D), who signed a 2020 executive order calling for the state to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 45 percent by 2035 and 80 percent by 2050 compared to 1990 levels. Both Drazan and Johnson have said that overturning this executive order would be a top priority.
Recent polls show Drazan and Kotek neck-and-neck. But Johnson, who is polling a distant third, could siphon off enough votes to propel Drazan to victory. The nonpartisan Cook Political Report rates the race a “toss-up.”
“Oregon is a place that has made a ton of progress on climate lately,” LCV spokesman Nick Abraham said. “And that progress is under threat.”
LCV Victory Fund this week launched $300,000 in Spanish-language TV and radio ads supporting Yadira Caraveo, the Democratic candidate for Colorado’s 8th District, and criticizing Barbara Kirkmeyer, the Republican candidate for the newly created seat.
“Barb Kirkmeyer has put the interests of the oil industry ahead of the needs of the people,” the ads say. “She received $50,000 from the oil and gas industry and voted to allow fracking near a school, endangering our air and water, while Dr. Yadira Caraveo stands up to the oil industry.”
The ads come after the Congressional Leadership Fund (CLF), the super PAC linked to House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), ran its own TV ads asserting that Caraveo “proudly authored a bill that could eliminate thousands of Colorado energy jobs.”
Oil and gas companies have been some of the biggest donors to CLF, Timothy Cama reports for E&E News. Chevron gave $3 million to the super PAC, while American Petroleum Institute and the pipeline company Energy Transfer Partners each contributed $2 million, according to federal campaign disclosures.
Kirkmeyer’s campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
World falling ‘pitifully short’ of meeting climate goals, U.N. report says
Despite vowing to increase their climate targets at last year’s United Nations climate summit, nations have shaved just 1 percent off their projected greenhouse gas emissions for 2030, according to a report published Thursday by the U.N. Environment Program, The Washington Post’s Sarah Kaplan reports.
The report on the emissions gap — the gulf between governmental plans to cut carbon pollution and the actual reductions needed to avert dangerous warming — found that nations’ strongest climate pledges put the Earth on a path to warm by 2.4 degrees Celsius (4.3 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the century.
To avert the most catastrophic consequences of climate change, scientists say, humanity must limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels.
In a separate report released Wednesday, the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change similarly found that national commitments under the 2015 Paris agreement would put the world on track for a 2.5-degree Celsius increase by the end of the century.
Planet-warming methane emissions rising faster than ever, study says
The amount of methane in the atmosphere is rising at an accelerating pace as the world casts aside pandemic-related restrictions, the World Meteorological Organization said Wednesday, The Post’s Steven Mufson and Sarah Kaplan report.
The WMO’s Greenhouse Gas Bulletin said “global emissions have rebounded since the COVID-related lockdowns” and that increases in methane levels in 2020 and 2021 were the largest since record keeping began in 1983.
Methane is 80 times more powerful than carbon dioxide at warming the atmosphere over a 20-year period. The WMO said the amount of methane in the atmosphere grew by 15 parts per billion in 2020 and 18 parts per billion in 2021.
The report comes ahead of the COP27 climate talks in Egypt next month. At the COP26 climate talks in Scotland last year, the United States and the European Union helmed the global methane pledge, which set a goal of slashing 30 percent of legacy methane emissions by 2030.
Granholm says U.S. is developing uranium strategy for nuclear power
The United States is working to supply its own uranium for nuclear power plants in an effort to curb reliance on Russia for the fuel, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm told reporters Wednesday during an International Atomic Energy Agency conference on nuclear power, Timothy Gardner reports for Reuters.
“The United States wants to be able to source its own fuel from ourselves, and that's why we are developing a uranium strategy,” Granholm said. “We'll be working on … enhancing that and making sure that we can fuel our own reactors as well as the partners to those who also have those ambitions.”
The United States relies on Russia and its allies Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan for about half of the uranium powering its nuclear reactors. While the Biden administration has banned Russian oil imports over Moscow’s war in Ukraine, it has not prohibited Russian uranium.
The Inflation Reduction Act authorized $700 million for bolstering the supply of high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU), which many advanced reactors under development plan to use. In March, President Biden also invoked the Defense Production Act to support domestic production and processing of critical minerals.
What it looks like as drought strangles the mighty Mississippi — Brady Dennis, Laris Karklis, Scott Dance and Tim Meko for The Post
Rishi Sunak is keeping the U.K.’s fracking ban: What to know — Andrew Jeong for The Post
‘Virtually every child’ to face frequent heat waves by 2050, UNICEF says — Kelly Kasulis Cho for The Post
E.U. Commission proposes tougher pollution rules — the Associated Press
How sunken basketball courts could protect New Yorkers from the next Superstorm Sandy — Jake Bittle for By Andrew JeongGrist
Our colleague Shannon Osaka on some climate trade-offs that aren’t woof it: 🐶
I am willing to consider many individual actions for the climate but this is where I draw the line pic.twitter.com/GmWq8imilJ
— Shannon Osaka (@shannonosaka) October 26, 2022 | 2022-10-27T13:06:19Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Major green group on track to spend record $100M in midterms - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/27/major-green-group-track-spend-record-100m-midterms/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/27/major-green-group-track-spend-record-100m-midterms/ |
‘It’s like we’re coming back from a 50-year vacation,’ one expert said
By Michelle Boorstein
People embrace and pray at a memorial in front of the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, where a gunman killed 11 people Oct. 27, 2018. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)
To survivors of even the deadliest attack on Jews in U.S. history — the 2018 massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh — the most urgent worry is that the event, which left 11 dead and at least six wounded, is already fading from public consciousness, crowded out by the dozens of mass shootings that followed.
Barton Schachter, a Tree of Life member and a former president of the synagogue, said: “This is what scares me, that in time [the shooting is] just another thing. I’m afraid this will drift into that direction. I don’t know how to save it."
He called West, who now goes by Ye, “an idiot ... but eventually he’ll be gone. Another person will take his place. The question is: How do we continue keeping the good stuff alive? That’s the hard part. The memory of these 11 [who were killed at Tree of Life] and the 6 million [Jews who died in the Holocaust], that’s the hard part.”
He and other experts noted that the 2018 Tree of Life massacre came just before the 2018 midterm elections and that the suspect had posted on the far-right social media site Gab that he was angry about “filthy” Jews who work to resettle refugees, especially Muslims.
Trump attacks American Jews, posting they must ‘get their act together’ on Israel
Trump earlier this month attacked American Jews in a post on his Truth Social platform, saying Jews in the United States must “get their act together” and show more appreciation for the state of Israel “before it is too late.” Trump has multiple times raised the old antisemitic trope that U.S. Jews hold, or should hold, a secret or dual loyalty to Israel rather than the United States. He said evangelicals are “far more appreciative” of actions on Israel than Jews.
Fox News host Tucker Carlson, in clips released by Vice News, didn’t challenge Ye during an interview when the performer cited the doctrine held by the movement known as the Black Hebrew Israelites: that African Americans are the true descendants of ancient Israelites, a belief that is often blended with accusations that mainstream Jews aren’t the legitimate Jews.
“When I say Jew, I mean … the people known as the race Black,” Ye told Carlson.
In the interview, Ye also said there is some “financial engineering” to being Jewish.
Antisemitism has also become a prominent issue in the Pennsylvania governor’s race between Republican Doug Mastriano, who promotes Christian nationalism, and Democrat Josh Shapiro, who is Jewish. Mastriano’s campaign has advertised on Gab. In a September campaign speech, Mastriano attacked Shapiro’s attendance of a private Jewish day school in Bryn Mawr, in remarks that were criticized as coded antisemitism. An adviser to Mastriano, former Trump lawyer Jenna Ellis, responded to the backlash by dismissing Shapiro as “at best a secular Jew."
Lorber said that, in a period of rampant misinformation, economic insecurity and alienation, such comments fit into the narrative of a segment of Americans looking to identify internal enemies, groups they perceive to be not sufficiently American or, in the case of Jews, part of some invisible power structure keeping them from success or censoring them. When Adidas ended its partnership with Ye on Tuesday over his antisemitic remarks, some conservatives were quick to cast him as a victim of “woke capitalism.”
“They’re like: ‘Maybe Kanye is on to something,’” Lorber said.
David Baddiel, a British comic and screenwriter, last year published a book called “Jews Don’t Count” about the ramifications of antisemitism not being seen as a form of racism equally dangerous to others.
“Since I wrote the book, I hear more and more people speaking out about antisemitism (even as I see it growing),” Baddiel wrote to The Post. “I used to think the concept of allyship, very important to progressives, would never apply to us ... but I think that’s changing.”
Greenblatt, in a statement, praised Adidas’s move as a “very positive” one that “creates consequences,” because brands today “mediate so much of our lives.” Other brands, including Balenciaga and Gap, also cut business ties with Ye.
Deborah Lipstadt, the U.S. State Department’s envoy on antisemitism, in a statement Wednesday emphasized the role of corporate accountability. She said that “social media and online spaces have been dominated by dangerous, inflammatory antisemitic rhetoric in recent weeks.”
“I commend the stand that various private companies and platforms have taken against antisemitism, ensuring their platforms are not used to spread hate, and cutting ties and ending lucrative business relationships with partners who engage in it. Corporations should continue to act responsibly and make it clear that touting hate is not profitable.”
But Oppenheimer said people shouldn’t leave it to corporate America to police prejudice.
"It’s nice when corporate leaders have a conscience,” he said, “but anyone who relies on the dictates of profit margins to enforce sane and moral norms is in trouble.” | 2022-10-27T13:07:02Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Kanye, Trump and the return of overt American antisemitism - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2022/10/27/antisemitism-kanye-trump-adidas-jews/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2022/10/27/antisemitism-kanye-trump-adidas-jews/ |
Sure, you can still find travel inspiration on the network. The place may be haunted, though.
The episode has all the glitz you’d expect from a travel show about Los Angeles: a sparkling skyline, a classic film industry location, a Spanish Revival mansion, over-the-top characters. Also: ghosts.
“That house is a containment chamber for the souls of victims, souls of killers,” says Zak Bagans, host and most-intense star of Travel Channel’s “Ghost Adventures,” a long-running hit on a network that once aired shows such as “Hotel Impossible,” “Baggage Battles” and “Bikinis & Boardwalks.”
When you turn on the Travel Channel these days, there will almost inevitably be ghosts — or other supernatural phenomena, mythical creatures or famous mysteries. It’s no surprise that the executive who oversees the network is also in charge of paranormal streaming content.
“Now it’s kind of like a joke,” said Mark Wolters, a travel vlogger and teaching associate professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s Gies College of Business. “Oh, I remember the Travel Channel. Remember Samantha Brown when she was on there, and Anthony Bourdain and ‘No Reservations?’ Those were the days.”
Travel Channel spokeswoman Caryn Davidson Schlossberg, who is also director of communications for shows in the Paranormal & Unexplained genre on the Discovery Plus streaming platform, said network executives were not available for an interview.
“We have a rotation of programming, which delivers content audiences want to watch,” she said in an email.
A look at the November lineup — following the annual “Ghostober” bonanza of spooky content — reveals some examples of that programming: “Paranormal Caught on Camera,” “Ghost Adventures,” “Conjuring Kesha,” “Ghost Hunters” and “Eli Roth Presents: My Possessed Pet.” Very occasionally, an hour is devoted to restaurants around the country, though it’s a Food Network show.
It’s a far cry from the network’s earliest days, when a subsidiary of the now-defunct airline TWA launched Travel Channel to be “devoted exclusively to travel and leisure” in 1987, the Associated Press reported. It was an era of niche programming for widespread interests, said Robert Thompson, a professor of popular culture at Syracuse University.
“When cable was first launched, the idea was it was going to be this miracle of places you could go for anything you wanted and there’d be 24-hour specific programming for that,” he said, naming MTV, the Weather Channel and Court TV as examples. “So many places, that didn’t necessarily work out.”
The Travel Channel shift started more than two decades ago, when shows about UFOs and haunted B&Bs started running alongside “The World’s Greatest Spas” and “Lonely Planet.”
As if a pandemic isn’t scary enough, I spent the night alone in a haunted house
In 2000, then-general manager Steve Cheskin acknowledged to the trade magazine Broadcasting & Cable in an interview that the network didn’t need to cater to travelers, but rather TV watchers.
“People who spend a lot of time traveling don’t spend a lot of time watching TV,” Cheskin told the publication. “We will not have a predominance of ghosts, but there will be a mix.”
For years, that mix included options as varied as “Hot Dog Paradise,” “Creepy Crypts,” “Mancations,” “Castle Ghosts of England” and “Dangerous Grounds,” about the global quests of a coffee buyer. “Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations” debuted in 2005; the series “Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern” joined two years later. “Ghost Adventures” launched in 2008 and is still running strong.
Dark tourism, explained
In recent years, the ghosts have taken over. The Travel Channel unveiled a new look, logo and focus in 2018, announcing that it was now the “all-new TRVL Channel” after Discovery Communications bought the network’s parent company, Scripps Networks Interactive. The company is now Warner Bros. Discovery after a merger earlier this year.
“New Travel Channel programs focusing on the paranormal, the unsolved, the creepy and terrifying are taking viewers into some compelling and surprising new territories,” the announcement said. “Let’s just say there are destinations you may not have been anticipating.”
Discovery said in a statement the next year that 2018 had been “the most successful year in Travel Channel history with ratings up 15 percent over the prior year.”
After the switch, Wolters, who blogs at Wolters World and has more than 900,000 subscribers on YouTube, started hearing a lot of questions about what had happened to the old Travel Channel.
“People watch the ‘Ghost Hunters’ stuff for entertainment — and you want to be entertained every day. When you talk about travel, you probably travel once a year,” he said in an interview. “There’s not as many people looking for, ‘Where am I going to go in Spain?’ as opposed to, ‘I want something to entertain myself for 15 minutes without thinking.’ ”
A post shared by Ghost Adventures (@ghostadventures)
For some travel aficionados, the changes have made the network unwatchable. A 2019 Reddit thread asked: “Any other Travel Channel fans losing their mind over all the ghost shows that now make up most of the stations content?”
Jamie Larounis, a travel industry analyst for Upgraded Points, used to love the Travel Channel’s hotel programs, especially “Great Hotels” with Samantha Brown and “Hotel Impossible.” He said he used to feel immersed in whatever destination was being featured — but no more.
“I really won’t even turn on the Travel Channel any more because I know it’s likely to be something ghost related, and have stopped watching, I’d say maybe around 5 or so years ago, when the ghost stuff really started to be pushed hard,” he said in an email.
But other viewers — clearly a significant number, given the ghostly proliferation — can’t get enough.
Madison Cummins, a 19-year-old freelance designer in Seattle, only started watching in the past couple of years but is a fan of the ghost-centric programming.
“I never knew before that that it was actually about travel,” she said.
The faith that I have in @travelchannel… I can literally turn on Travel any time of the day and enjoy the show that’s live, no if, ands, or buts ! 👻💜#BestChannelEver #Ghostober
— Madison Cummins (@MadisonCummins0) October 20, 2022
Heather Kurtz of Olathe, Kan., has been a fan for nearly two decades. The 54-year-old mother of two and insurance company employee started watching for shows such as “Mysteries at the Museum” and “Expedition Unknown.” As more paranormal content joined the lineup, her interest grew. Current favorites include “Ghost Hunters,” “Ghost Nation,” “Ghost Adventures,” “Ghost Brothers” and “Destination Fear.”
“Each of the paranormal groups have a different investigation style which makes it interesting to see what kind of evidence they get,” she said in an email. “Since the groups are still traveling to different parts of the country, we are still getting to see parts that we may never get to see as well as hearing some of the history of the area they are in.”
Kurtz also has a personal interest in the shows: It made her feel as if her deceased loved ones were still looking out for her, and as if she could do the same for her family. She was devastated after receiving a breast cancer diagnosis almost eight years ago, when her sons were 9 and 4.
“I was determined to fight for my life to be there for my young sons,” she said in the email. “But watching the paranormal shows made me realize that I could still watch over my boys if I lost my fight.”
Y’all Kesha has a ghost hunting show on the travel channel just finding out this is very important
— Paul (@paulhaslegs) October 23, 2022
Ghostly content can provide that sort of comfort, said Thompson, who is also founding director of Syracuse University’s Center for Television and Popular Culture.
“For all this scariness, there’s a sense of extreme optimism,” he said. “The idea of a ghost has in its foundation that we don’t disappear when we die, we don’t go off into nothingness.”
Popular interest in the paranormal is long-standing in the United States, dating back to the rise of spiritualism in the mid-1800s, said Darryl Caterine, a professor of religious studies at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, N.Y., and author of “Haunted Ground: Journeys through a Paranormal America.” He said the subject gained more traction in popular culture in the 1970s. As confidence in organized religion wanes, paranormal subjects can fill a void, Caterine said
“There’s great uncertainty in terms of what is real and what is not real right now,” he said. “That is sort of the essence of what the paranormal’s all about. It’s sort of the ambiguity.”
Despite all the otherworldly ambiguities, some affiliated with today’s Travel Channel shows insist that they are firmly tied to travel.
I spent the night alone in a haunted house
Jeff Belanger, an author, TV host and paranormal expert, has worked as a writer and researcher on “Ghost Adventures” since the first season. When Bagans, the host, told him the show would air on the Travel Channel, Belanger didn’t question it for a second.
“That was the most obvious slam dunk for me,” he said. “Of course the Travel Channel.”
As author of a book called “The World’s Most Haunted Places” and frequent seeker of haunted locations on vacation, Belanger said travel and ghosts go hand in apparitional hand.
“A unique way to see a city is to see it through its ghostly lore,” he said. “You have to connect with its history. It’s often tragic and macabre.”
On “Ghost Brothers: Lights Out,” which has its second season streaming on Discovery Plus and premiering on the Travel Channel on Nov. 26, an Atlanta-based trio of friends travels to investigate scary sites.
A post shared by Trvl Channel (@travelchannel)
“When you think about it, we’re going all over the world and we’re telling you stories attached to these different locations,” said Dalen Spratt, one of the stars. “We’re giving you these dope experiences.”
He recalled one episode in Jamaica that featured beaches and tropical scenery — and the legend of a murderous ghost.
“It is travel wrapped in storytelling,” he said.
The new season includes stops in Ohio, Kentucky and Rhode Island. Spratt joked that he and his co-stars wouldn’t mind even more travel.
“We tell Travel all the time, ‘We don’t gotta go all the time to Ohio,’ ” he said. “I’m telling you, people died in Hawaii. People died in Fiji. I know somebody done died in Tahiti, let’s go look.” | 2022-10-27T13:07:21Z | www.washingtonpost.com | How the Travel Channel became the ghost channel - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2022/10/27/travel-channel-ghosts-adventures-paranormal-ghostober/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2022/10/27/travel-channel-ghosts-adventures-paranormal-ghostober/ |
As Israel, Lebanon seal maritime deal, Hezbollah does awkward balancing act
Analysis by Sarah Dadouch
A Lebanese patrol boat sails on the Mediterranean Sea before the signing of a deal setting a maritime border between Israel and Lebanon. (Amir Cohen/Reuters)
BEIRUT — An agreement between Lebanon and Israel to demarcate their maritime border has put Lebanon’s most powerful military and political force in a bind: How should Hezbollah frame a historic deal with its sworn enemy?
After 11 years of snail-like negotiations, the two governments sealed a U.S.-mediated deal Thursday in Naqoura, in south Lebanon, near the Israeli border. It was a media opportunity with no media invited, underscoring the sensitivity of the agreement for all parties.
The deal, signed in separate locations to avoid a direct agreement between the warring countries, ends a decades-long dispute over maritime borders. It is arguably a boon to both Israel and Lebanon, allowing each to exploit the lucrative gas fields off their coasts, and has been hailed as a historic breakthrough.
In Israel, critics argue the government has made far too many concessions to a country it has fought two wars against in the past 40 years. In Lebanon, Hezbollah — the Iranian-backed militia and political force created in response to the 1982 Israeli invasion — is seeking to deflect any blame for being involved in a deal, no matter how indirectly, with a state it purports to resist.
Acknowledging the success of the agreement exposes the group to criticism from its hard-line supporters — opposition to Israel is, after all, central to its identity, and Hezbollah is locally referred to as “the resistance.” But not claiming the victory risks minimizing the group’s role in a deal that could have big benefits for the energy-starved Lebanese.
Hezbollah insists the deal in no way reflects a change in its position as the resistance against Israel.
“Anything that leads to normalization with Israel is out of the question,” a spokesman for the group said in an interview last week. The two countries remain enemies, he stressed, and Hezbollah will strike back if hit, as it always has.
He acknowledged the tit-for-tat dynamic has created “a kind of equilibrium,” despite constant risk of disruption. He spoke on the condition of anonymity according to the organization’s guidelines.
“The equations that we built over the last 15 years remain in place, in isolation from the indirect agreement,” he said.
Hezbollah has held the deal at arm’s length, walking a fine line since it was announced this month — cautious not to criticize it, while not fully adopting the diplomatic victory as its own. But as Lebanon’s most dominant military and political force, it cannot pretend that the negotiations happened without its acquiescence.
The spokesman admitted that the dire economic situation in Lebanon made it clear to the group that “the only pathway to get out of the economic collapse is our gas fields.” Experts caution that while the gas revenue will eventually ease the country’s severe economic crisis, it will still require more comprehensive solutions.
The spokesman described Hezbollah’s role as that of a catalyst encouraging the long-stalled deal over the finish line. In June, an Israeli gas rig arrived offshore to work on the northern Karish gas field, and Hezbollah sent three unarmed drones to the area, which were intercepted by the Israeli military.
The drones were a message to Israel to refrain from exploiting the field until an agreement had been reached, according to the group’s leader Hasan Nasrallah.
“This hastened along the negotiations,” the spokesman said, claiming “if it were not for Nasrallah’s gun that was placed on the head of the Israeli government, [the deal] wouldn’t have happened.”
The deal came at the right time for Israel because tensions have been spiking along other parts of its border recently, said David Schenker, a former U.S. mediator and now director of the Program on Arab Politics at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
Schenker noted that the presence and power of various Hezbollah-allied groups have grown in the south of the country. A March report by the international body responsible for monitoring the border described increased interference with its activities and a rising level of aggressive behavior.
“I think Israel took those threats very seriously,” Schenker said, especially with the Iran nuclear talks seemingly on the verge of collapse and the shrinking of Tehran’s “breakout time” — the long-feared point at which Iran will have enough enriched uranium to assemble a nuclear weapon.
“They don’t want to have an issue with Hezbollah right now,” Schenker said, describing the situation as a “short-term de-escalation” between the two powers. “I think this government believed that this would lock Lebanon into some sort of economic, mutually beneficial agreement with Israel,” he said.
Tensions flare between Israel and Hezbollah over disputed gas fields
The Israeli government pushed to have it formally approved and signed before national elections Tuesday. While the agreement is being disparaged by right-wing politicians as a territorial giveaway and a capitulation to Lebanon, Prime Minister Yair Lapid hopes voters will reward him for a diplomatic breakthrough with one of Israel’s enemies.
The agreement, though, leads to the odd situation of Hezbollah, which through its allies controls the largest bloc in parliament, becoming de facto economic partners with Israel.
“You feel as though they are cautious about celebrating this, as it’s concerned about its own internal constituency,” said Sami Atallah, founding director of the Policy Initiative, a Beirut-based think tank.
Instead, the group has made it a point to attribute the success to its ally, President Michel Aoun, whose time in office is set to expire on Monday, allowing him to end his crisis-laden tenure with a victory.
“They were using Aoun and the state that he’s supposed to be presiding over as an excuse for having accepted this deal, and hence satisfying their own critics in the party,” Atallah added. “They diluted their role.”
In a speech the day the deal was announced last week, Hezbollah’s leader Nasrallah addressed such criticisms. “There are people who made claims of betrayal, accused, attacked, insulted and swore on social media sites without having read anything [on the deal].” He invited everyone to read the final draft and judge its contents from the lens of “a patriotic spirit.”
“He’s giving excuses, so it seems to me that there’s some sort of internal [strife],” Atallah said. “He’s not speaking to you nor me: He’s speaking to his constituency”
Steve Hendrix in Jerusalem contributed to this report. | 2022-10-27T13:07:27Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Israel-Lebanon maritime deal puts Hezbollah in awkward position - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/27/lebanon-israel-hezbollah-maritime-deal/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/27/lebanon-israel-hezbollah-maritime-deal/ |
U.N. uses before-and-after photos to track Ukraine’s cultural destruction
The Korabelny Palace of Culture, in Mykolaiv, Ukraine, on Feb. 4, on left, and the same site July 21. (Maxar Satellite Imagery Analysis/AP)
The United Nations is reinforcing efforts to track the devastation inflicted on Ukraine’s architecture, art and historical sites by using satellite imagery to verify reports of destruction, two of its agencies announced.
Using before-and-after satellite images taken by private companies, UNESCO and the U.N.’s Satellite Center plan to systematically document confirmed reports of damage to places of cultural significance, assist authorities in prosecuting those responsible and help Ukraine prioritize its reconstruction efforts.
A preliminary list compiled by UNESCO counts 207 sites that have been damaged or destroyed since the invasion began Feb. 24. It covers 88 religious sites, 76 buildings of historical or artistic interest, 18 monuments, 15 museums and 10 libraries.
It includes the Mariupol theater, where many hundreds of civilians seeking shelter from Russian airstrikes were targeted in a devastating March 16 attack.
An Associated Press investigation estimated that about 600 people were killed when the theater, which had a white flag atop and the word “children” painted in Russian on the ground along two sides, was hit.
Civilians sheltering inside the theater when it was targeted described the noise of constant screaming in interviews with The Washington Post. Images taken from space illustrate and confirm the extent of the site’s destruction.
“Cultural heritage is very often collateral damage during wars, but sometimes it’s specifically targeted as it’s the essence of the identity of countries,” UNESCO Cultural and Emergencies Director Krista Pikkat told The Post. “The situation is bad, and it may continue to get even worse.”
“We have systematized the use of this imagery for our assessments in Ukraine and, given the significant increase in the number of cultural properties affected — there are now more than 200 — we have decided to create a dedicated platform to facilitate the work of our experts,” she said.
Ukraine’s Kharkiv and Donetsk regions have suffered the greatest damage since the invasion began, according to the U.N. tally, including to the Drobytsky Yar Holocaust Memorial — where more than 15,000 Jews were executed in World War II — when it was shelled earlier this month, according to President Volodymyr Zelensky.
In another example, side-by-side satellite images of the Donetsk village of Sviatohirsk show significant damage to its Lavra — a sacred category of Orthodox Christian monastery. It was one of only three Lavras in all Ukraine, Zelensky said in a June speech in which he accused Russia of shelling the site and burning it down.
Once alerted by Ukrainian officials to a case of potential damage to a cultural site, U.N. officials will seek to verify the reports and, if appropriate, cross-check them using satellite images before including them on a final database.
The imagery is particularly useful for officials trying to verify damage to sites located in active war zones that are inaccessible by land, said Pikkat, the UNESCO official.
The tally of destruction sheds light on a shadow Russian invasion — waged in parallel to the conventional military battle taking place at the front line — targeting Ukraine’s cultural heritage and patrimony.
A stone statue from the 9th to 13th centuries, a 2004 center for contemporary art and a Soviet monument to urban planning from the 1950s all appear on the list of damaged sites — demonstrating the rich scope of Ukraine’s history and the threat posed by Russia’s invasion to more than a millennium of artistic and architectural achievement.
In an October speech, Zelensky called on UNESCO’s executive board to exclude Russia from membership of the U.N. agency. “Let it be a historical example for everyone in the world that no one will tolerate an enemy of culture, an enemy of history, an enemy of education, an enemy of science,” he said. “This is Russia’s choice — to oppose everything that matters to humanity.”
The destruction of cultural sites may also violate the 1954 Hague Convention, ratified by Russia and Ukraine, which requires states to respect cultural sites in an armed conflict in the hope of preventing the mass-scale destruction of Europe’s cultural heritage inflicted in World War II from ever being repeated.
“Damage to cultural property belonging to any people whatsoever is internationally recognized as damage to the cultural heritage of all mankind,” the treaty declares in its preamble.
Officials say none of Ukraine’s seven World Heritage sites, considered humanity’s most precious cultural and historical artifacts, is known to have been damaged in the conflict so far. | 2022-10-27T13:07:33Z | www.washingtonpost.com | U.N. uses satellite photo database to track Ukraine's cultural destruction - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/27/ukraine-un-satellite-cultural-destruction/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/27/ukraine-un-satellite-cultural-destruction/ |
Dear Sahaj: I’ve been conditioned to compare myself to others by my parents. My parents had a lot of expectations for me, and the best way they could “scale” it was to compare my accomplishments, successes, failures and even my personality to those of the people around me. Now I see myself doing it on a daily basis, and becoming almost obsessive over it.
I’m a senior in high school on the verge of applying to college, and it’s intensified to a new level. I keep comparing myself to others, and I even compare my achievements and my “brag sheet” to my closest friends. I feel so guilty about it, but I feel like there’s no way for me to stop.
How do I unlearn this?
— Trapped in Comparison
Trapped in Comparison: Everyone compares themselves to others to some degree. At best, it makes us feel motivated or inspired, and at worst, we feel like failures and lose sight of our own pursuits and strengths.
Comparison mind-set is tied closely to the scarcity mind-set or this belief that everything is a zero sum game. So when someone else succeeds or achieves, then it feels like you’ve lost. It’s important to remind yourself that there is, in fact, room for everyone to win.
It’s likely you learned to receive validation, praise, acceptance and even love from your parents when you were performing on par or better than others. If so, then it makes sense that your self-esteem may be tied to your ability to achieve. Because of this, it’s important to add other values and characteristics to your brag street to build your self-esteem and shift from what you achieve to how you try to get there. Are you persistent? Loyal? Are you a good listener? Creative? These are worth celebrating, too.
Your parents may have relied on comparison because it was how they were able to measure success how they understood it. But what does success mean to you? You’ll want to gain clarity on goals that are important to you and make you feel empowered. This will help you feel ownership over your achievements rather than having them be something to show off to others.
The next time you want to do something to feel like you are better than others, consider this: Do you want to do this thing for yourself or do you want to do it to impress others? If the latter is what always dictates your choices, then you’ll always be chasing a fleeting feeling of temporary success and happiness.
When you feel like you are constantly competing with others, you will always have your guard up. This will make it hard for you to collaborate, trust or share — things that can help you in your pursuits rather than isolate you. To combat this, practice celebrating others. Instead of thinking, “She’s smarter than me” or instantly feeling jealous, consider pausing and recognizing that person’s strength: “She worked so hard, I’m so happy she did well!”
This might feel uncomfortable at first, but will help you separate others’ actions and achievements from your own. It can also help you recognize strengths, values and characteristics (beyond achievements) in others that are worth celebrating, allowing you to see these things in yourself, too.
My last piece of advice is to incorporate play into your life. Learn things and do things that challenge the idea that you need to always be good or “successful.” Take on a hobby you’re bad at but enjoy. Let friends and loved ones teach you skills they’re better at than you. Lean into the discomfort to shift from being performance-oriented to learning-oriented.
Remember that achievement and success require acknowledging and accepting our own limitations. If you are constantly trying to achieve things that feel out of reach, you may always be unhappy and feel like a failure. But if you are honest about where your strengths are and what you have to offer, then you can set realistic goals that feel more aligned with your values and abilities. Doing this and exploring what makes you feel happy and fulfilled in life is essential to making room for your success to live alongside others’. | 2022-10-27T13:09:09Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Ask Sahaj: I was raised to compare myself to others. Now I can't stop. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/10/27/ask-sahaj-compare-self-others-stop/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/10/27/ask-sahaj-compare-self-others-stop/ |
Smithsonian zeroes in on prime Mall spots for Latino and women’s museums
Now the Smithsonian must get approval from Congress to proceed with the locations on the southwest portion of the Mall, land that is controlled by the National Park Service
Nat’l Museum
of African
History and
of American
U.S. Holocaust
U.S. Dept. of
Nat’l
of Asian
of Natural
The Smithsonian’s Board of Regents announced Thursday that it has selected two optimal locations for its new museums, the National Museum of the American Latino and the American Women’s History Museum. The sites are on undeveloped land on the southwest portion of the National Mall that is controlled by the National Park Service.
The “South Monument site” is on Jefferson Drive SW, across the Mall from the National Museum of African American History and Culture. The “Tidal Basin site” borders Raoul Wallenberg Place SW, Maine Avenue SW and Independence Avenue SW, just west of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and east of the basin. That site is now a playing field.
Next, before the Smithsonian can finalize the locations, it must get approval from Congress, and which site will be used for which museum will be announced at that time, the Smithsonian said. Congress passed legislation in December 2020 authorizing the two new museums and requiring the Board of Regents to designate the sites before the end of 2022.
“The Board of Regents has been committed to meeting the December deadline Congress set for the selection of sites for these important new museums,” Steve Case, chairman of the Board of Regents, said in an email to The Washington Post. “Our search has narrowed to two sites on the National Mall that we believe are optimal, and appropriate. We hope Congress will now consider legislation so we can move forward, as we seek to more fully showcase our collective American journey.”
Thursday’s update marks the near-final stage of a years-long process that will affect the shape of the Mall for generations. Selecting locations at such distinguished spots on the Mall is a deeply symbolic move, underscoring the importance of the new museums, which supporters have been fighting for since at least the 1990s. The National Museum of the American Indian and the African American Museum, the most recent additions to the Smithsonian, which opened in 2004 and 2016, respectively, also received coveted — and limited — Mall slots.
Smithsonian picks four potential spots for women’s and Latino museums
The news follows President Biden’s declaration at the White House’s Hispanic Heritage Month reception in September that the Latino and women’s museums should be built on the Mall, as “a reflection of the important role each plays in the fabric of our nation.”
Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie G. Bunch III takes a sweeping, global view of the institution — and its newest museums.
“The Smithsonian is where the world comes to better understand what it means to be an American. This lens on America was widened and made better by building the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture,” he said in an email to The Post. “Our ability to comprehend the fullness and richness of America will be enhanced by the placement of the National Museum of the American Latino and the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum on the National Mall.”
Ayers Saint Gross, an engineering and architecture firm based in Baltimore, has helped in the site search and considered more than 25 potential locations for the museums. Options were whittled down to 14 in March and four in June based on the symbolism of the location, site conditions, transportation factors, environmental factors, cost and the challenges of site acquisition.
The two sites are located on the “Reserve,” a no-build zone, which could make approval tricky — but not without precedent. The African American Museum and the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial are also in that zone.
In a June interview with The Post, Bunch likened deciding on the sites to having two children. “You want to make sure each museum feels they have been given the respect, the attention, the visibility they deserve,” he said.
With this step, the Board of Regents effectively eliminates what was believed to be the most likely choice for at least one of the museums: the Arts and Industries Building, which was also considered for the African American Museum and is the only site of the four selected in June under Smithsonian control. Bunch said in June that the Arts and Industries Building, which was designed in 19th-century, World’s Fair-era “Festival” style architecture, would have to be studied to see how it could be reimagined as a 21st-century museum. The board also eliminated a Northwest Capitol site, which is controlled by the U.S. Capitol.
The site decisions are made in consultation with members of Congress, the National Capital Planning Commission, the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts and the Architect of the Capitol.
Since their creation was approved by Congress, the new museums have been ramping up their operations. Last year, the Smithsonian named an advisory council for the Women’s History Museum that includes tennis great Billie Jean King, fashion designer Tory Burch, actress Rosario Dawson and others. And the Molina Family Latino Gallery, the first physical presence of the American Latino Museum, which is housed in the National Museum of American History, opened in June with a preview of what the museum might offer. | 2022-10-27T13:43:59Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Smithsonian selects prime Mall spots for new museums - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/10/27/smithsonian-new-museums-latino-womens/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/10/27/smithsonian-new-museums-latino-womens/ |
A family of robots enjoys Air & Scare at the National Air and Space Museum’s Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center. (Dane Penland)
Pumpkin Carving Contest at Franklin Hall: Show off your spooky, scary or just plain artistic side at Franklin Hall’s annual pumpkin carving contest. The $10 entry fee includes everything you need: a pumpkin, carving tools, markers and a pint of Miller Lite. Teamwork is encouraged, though each team is limited to two pumpkins — make sure you agree on the details before you start cutting. The top three designs win gift certificates of $75, $50 and $25. 7 to 8:30 p.m. $10 per person.
Chiiikeee at Songbyrd: 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. 11 p.m. $5-$15.
Washington Chorus: After a long pandemic delay, the Washington Chorus presents “Tomorrow! A Reflection on Hope and Resilience,” described as a “visual and immersive experience” featuring a live performance of Damien Geter’s pandemic-spawned choral work “Cantata for a More Hopeful Tomorrow” as well as the short film of the same name from Emmy-winning director Bob Berg. Saturday and Sunday at 7 and 8:30 p.m. $25-$49.
Fall Festival on Woodrow Wilson Plaza: The weekly farmers market and outdoor food court at the Ronald Reagan Building becomes extra festive during this family-friendly event. The National Children’s Museum sponsors a pair of “Baby Jam” music classes, alongside a petting zoo, face painting, balloon twisting and a hay bale maze. In addition to all that, visitors can sample free hot apple cider while purchasing prepared food from dozens of vendors. 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Free.
‘Drink Masters’ Happy Hours with Lauren Paylor: Netflix’s latest reality competition show is “Drink Masters,” which finds a dozen mixologists crafting creative cocktails to wow judges and win a $100,000 prize. If one of the contestants looks familiar, it’s because Lauren “LP” Paylor has been a familiar face behind some great D.C. bars, including Silver Lyan and Dos Mamis. To celebrate the debut of “Drink Masters,” Paylor is hosting happy hours at a trio of bars this week: Friday, the day the series debuts, she’ll be at Last Call for a kickoff party from 7 to 11 p.m. On Saturday, the fun moves to Cranes for “Industry Brunch” from noon to 3 p.m., then Paylor is hosting another event at Cotton and Reed from 7 to 11 p.m. Tuesday. Times vary. All events free.
Rubell Museum DC opening weekend: D.C. is already home to many world-class art museums, and soon there will be a new venue to see the best of contemporary art. Mera and Don Rubell, owners of a private museum in Miami, are set to debut the Rubell Museum DC on Saturday. Located in a former school in Southwest, the 32,000-square-foot museum is built out with 24 galleries, event space, a bookstore and a cafe. Pieces from Keith Haring and Kehinde Wiley are among almost 200 works in the inaugural group exhibition, “What’s Going On,” which takes its name from the album and song by D.C. native Marvin Gaye. (Gaye was a student when this building was Randall Junior High School.) There’s a nice perk, too, for D.C. residents, who receive free admission to the museum. Saturday and Sunday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.; Wednesday through Friday from 11:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Free to $15.
Silver Spring Zombie Walk: After two years away, the long-running Silver Spring Zombie Walk is “back from the dead,” as organizers say. Join the hordes of the living dead, whose outfits range from scary gore to tributes to deceased celebrities, for a pre-walk party in the beer garden at Denizens Brewing Co., where a DJ, face painting, costume contest and other family-friendly fun start at 6 p.m. Around 9, the zombie pack begins shuffling slowly over the Georgia Avenue pedestrian bridge and toward downtown, ending at the pedestrian zone on Ellsworth Drive, where a “Zombie Dance Party” with DJ awaits. From there, participants have the option of stumbling to the nearby AFI Silver, where “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” screens at 10 p.m. (Separate advance ticket purchase is required for the film.) 6 to 10 p.m. Free.
Día de los Muertos Family Day: The Smithsonian American Art Museum celebrates Día de los Muertos with special crafts for all ages and face painting for little ones, too. The festivities include live performances from the local musicians and dancers of Ballet Folklorico Mi Herencia Mexicana, Mariachi Aguila DC and Sol y Rumba. 11:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. Free; register online.
Adams Morgan Apple Festival and Pie Contest: If you’re searching for something unique to do with those exorbitantly priced apples you handpicked from a local farm, look no further than the Line Hotel DC, the location of this year’s Adams Morgan apple pie contest. Up to 16 contestants compete for the title of best pie in the neighborhood while visitors enjoy a family-friendly apple festival (which includes heirloom apple tasting) in Unity Park. 10:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. Free.
Hip-Hop Halloween Bar Crawl on U Street: After years of DJ-fueled hip-hop bar crawls along the U Street corridor, RegMo Promo has the formula locked down. This edition finds DJs spinning at eight bars over the course of Saturday afternoon, each with a different theme. At Cloak & Dagger, for example, Bro DJ offers “A Tribe Called Hall-Wu-Ween,” while DJ Honcho hosts a “NY vs the CHI” battle at Pure Lounge. Each bar offers drink and food specials, and there’s a $100 prize for the best costume. (Old-school hip-hop outfits are strongly encouraged.) 1 to 9 p.m. $30.
Halloween Movie Night at Guinness Open Gate Brewery: Why watch one movie about ghosts, demons and the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man when you can watch two? The Guinness brewery and taproom in Halethorpe is showing “Ghostbusters” and “Ghostbusters II” on its large outdoor lawn, with guest appearances by Baltimore’s own Charm City Ghostbusters. No reservations are required. 6:15 p.m. Free.
Victura Park Fall Festival: The Kennedy Center’s vast beer and wine garden celebrates the changing season with hot cider and hot chocolate, a special menu with chili and s’mores, and outdoor games, such as corn hole. Bring the kids for a face painter and other family fun. Noon to 4 p.m. Free admission.
Abbondanza! A Halloween Natural Wine Party at Sonny’s Pizza: The seasonal Abbondanza! events on the spacious back patio at Sonny’s are some of the best low-key wine festivals in D.C. Wander among tables from six natural wine producers and importers, as well as cider and beer producers, tasting as much as you like as you learn about the offerings. (Feel free to go back for seconds if there’s one you fall in love with.) Meanwhile, there’s free pizza laid out on a long table, and at this event, all guests receive a free tostada from Gonzo. Because it’s Halloween, there’s a costume contest, and the grand prize is a choice between bottles of wine from Abbondanza or a three-month membership in Sonny’s Natural Wine and Pizza Club. VIP tickets allow admission at noon for an extra hour of sampling. 1 to 4 p.m. $75-$85.
Lil’ Pumpkins Festival: If your family doesn’t have a pumpkin yet — or you want to add to your collection — Germantown performance venue BlackRock Center for the Arts is giving free pumpkins to kids younger than 11 at its Lil’ Pumpkins Festival. This Halloween party includes activities like pumpkin painting, trick-or-treating and a costume parade, while adults can visit a beer garden or, after the family event wraps up, watch a screening of “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” with a live cast at 6 or 9 p.m. 2 to 6 p.m. Free.
Howl-O-Ween at the Hirshhorn: A dog-centric Halloween party in the Hirshhorn’s Sculpture Garden features art-making activities for both canines and children, music from Les the DJ, and dog portraits. The highlight, though, is a dog costume contest with prizes awarded in three categories, including “Art Unleashed” for costumes inspired by works of art. Proceeds benefit the Hirshhorn’s educational programs. 10 a.m. to 11:30 p.m. $35 per person or dog; free for children younger than 5.
HellBent at 9:30 Club: 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. 10 p.m. $25.
Tarot readings at Red Derby: Looking to add a bit of witchcraft to your Halloween bar gathering? In addition to its annual Monster Bash Halloween party, Red Derby is hosting a self-proclaimed witch to provide guests free tarot readings. 7 to 9 p.m. Free.
Día de los Muertos Celebration and Concert: Through Wednesday, the National Museum of the American Indian commemorates Día de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead, a holiday honoring and remembering departed family and friends. Visitors can view an ofrenda, or altar, in the museum’s atrium, covered with marigolds and sugar skulls, and make paper butterflies for display. Saturday features a concert by Quetzal, a bilingual East Los Angeles group that incorporates rock, R&B and traditional Mexican styles into its Grammy-winning sound. Through Wednesday; concert at 2 p.m. Saturday. Free.
Del Ray Halloween Parade: Del Ray’s 26th annual parade through the neighborhood takes over the busy Mount Vernon Avenue strip between East Bellefonte Avenue and the Mount Vernon Recreation Center, passing festively decorated businesses along the way. The festivities include stroller and pet costume contests; the latter has a category called “how could you do this to me?” while the stroller competition has divisions for “best group or family” and “less is more.” Classic rock band Mars Rodeo performs at the parade’s end. The parade is the culmination of events around the Alexandria community, including a Halloween scavenger hunt, which began last week, and the “Boos and Brews” bar crawl on Mount Vernon Avenue on Saturday, with participants including Evening Star Cafe and Barkhaus. 2 p.m. Free.
Halloween at the Harbor: Kids who wear a costume to National Harbor’s Halloween party can get a free ride on the Capital Wheel from noon until 2 p.m. with the purchase of an adult ticket. That’s in addition to trick-or-treating at nearly 30 businesses throughout the waterfront development and happenings like a pet costume parade, a pumpkin carving contest and an outdoor screening of “Hocus Pocus.” Noon to 3 p.m. Free.
Midori concert: Washington Performing Arts brings the 2021 Kennedy Center honoree back to D.C. for a unique program that shuffles Bach’s sonatas and partitas (a particular sweet spot for the acclaimed violinist) with contemporary works by Jessie Montgomery (her Rhapsody No. 1) and John Zorn (“Passagen”). 7:30 p.m. $90-$115.
Mosaic Halloween Spooktacular: Shops at Mosaic District will be handing out candy to trick-or-treaters all day, while the green space Strawberry Park plays host to a face painting station, courtesy of the royal characters at Vienna Singing Princesses, from 2 to 7 p.m. and an outdoor viewing of the animated film “The Addams Family” on a big screen beginning at 6 p.m. 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. Free.
Kill Moe Kill: Last Funset of the Season at Dew Drop: The best way to wind up your weekend with drinks and tunes? That would be the Funset, the weekly Sunday DJ party at the Dew Drop Inn. It’s run by DJ Smudge, who used to program the rooftop parties at Marvin, and the lineup changes every week, so you never know what you’re going to get: golden-era hip-hop, roller skating funk jams, yacht rock, rare grooves — sometimes all of that. This time around, the theme is “Kill Moe Kill: A D.C. Halloween,” so let that inspire your costume. An all-star lineup of Jahsonic, Harry Hotter, Kenny M and Smudge provides the soundtrack, along with a “surprise guest.” 5 p.m. to 2 a.m. Free.
Halloween Throwback Jam N’ Costume Party at Art Whino: The team behind the Daylight hip-hop and soul events at Bohemian Caverns hosts this retro dance party at the Ballston cultural space Art Whino. DJ Divine drops the ’80s, ’90s and early 2000s hits, and there’s an “’80s celebrity”-themed costume contest. 6 p.m. to midnight. $15.
‘Spooktacular Sips’ Wine and Candy Tasting: Halloween candy isn’t just for kids anymore. District Winery is hosting a two-day wine tasting featuring six pairings of wine and candy, like riesling with caramel popcorn and blanc de blancs with candy corn. Its annual fall harvest is in full swing, so guests (21-plus) can learn about the behind-the-scenes activity of a winery. Sunday at 2, 4 and 6 p.m.; Monday at 6 p.m. $50.
Harry Styles Costume Party at DC9: Dance with fellow Styles fans at this party that proves Halloween isn’t over until the morning of Nov. 1. Guests are encouraged to come in costume to “Harryween,” but if “Harry’s House” isn’t your home, try DC9’s Halloween tribute show to post-punk icons at 7 p.m. 9:30 p.m. to 1 a.m. $15-25.
Halloween Art Party: Land of Skulls: The Midlands Beer Garden is celebrating skull-themed artwork by 24 artists with a silent auction. Buyers can bid on art (with all proceeds to the artists) and expect to take home their new works the same day. Guests (both human and animal — pets are welcome) are encouraged to come costumed for a chance to win prizes. The event also features old-fashioned tintype photography developed on-site, a fortune teller, tunes by DJ R. Knight and tacos from Burro Bravo. 6 p.m. to midnight. Free entry.
Let’s Eat Grandma at Union Stage: 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.” 8 p.m. $20-$35.
Kalush Orchestra: Ukrainian ensemble Kalush Orchestra came to worldwide attention at this year’s Eurovision Song Contest. “Stefania,” which fused traditional folk melodies and instruments with hip-hop beats, booming bass and verses rapped in Ukrainian, won the competition thanks to overwhelming numbers of audience votes. The group later sold the trophy to raise funds to buy drones for the Ukrainian military. With its new international profile, Kalush Orchestra is touring the U.S. for the first time, introducing audiences to the idea of dance-floor-ready tunes pairing beatboxing with trilling flutes, while raising money to benefit Ukrainian relief organizations. 8 p.m. $85.
Día de los Muertos at the National Portrait Gallery: This Día de los Muertos celebration features dancing, art, music, a community altar, and, between 6:30 and 8:30 p.m., projections of live video artwork by MasPaz and Guache on the museum’s facade at G and 9th streets NW. 5 to 8 p.m. Free. | 2022-10-27T13:44:06Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Halloween events, fall festivals and things to do in the D.C. area - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/27/best-things-do-dc-area-week-oct-27-nov-2/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/27/best-things-do-dc-area-week-oct-27-nov-2/ |
We need more urgency in helping D.C. students with disabilities
By Julie Camerata
A classroom scene at DC Bilingual school. (Ann-Marie VanTassell/Courtesy of DC Bilingual)
Julie Camerata is executive director of the DC Special Education Cooperative.
The headlines and calls to action following the dramatic drop in test scores for D.C. students during the pandemic were clear: The city needs to do more to help students, especially Black and at-risk students, catch up to where they were before the coronavirus shuttered school buildings in 2020.
But one population has been largely absent in the discussions: students with disabilities.
Nearly 1 in 5 students in D.C. Public Schools and public charter schools have disabilities — about 16,000 children in total. Even as outcomes have improved for most groups of students, the achievement gap for students with disabilities was enormous and growing even before the pandemic. The small progress students with disabilities made couldn’t keep up with the gains students without disabilities scored.
That gap remains vast in the most recent test scores on the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers exam, or PARCC, the citywide assessment used to measure progress for all students. Just 8 percent of students with disabilities performed on grade level in English language arts; and only 6 percent did so in math. Those numbers are largely level with how the students performed in 2019, the last time the exam was given, mostly because the student scores were already so low. This data is also inextricably linked to race in D.C., because Black girls and boys are two times more likely to be identified as having disabilities than their White counterparts.
Yet, research tells us that up to 90 percent of students with disabilities nationally have the ability to perform on grade level when provided with high-quality instruction and supports and needed accommodations. The question is simple: Why aren’t we doing just that for our students with disabilities in D.C.?
The Post’s editorial board and elected officials alike say this new test data must be used to point the way to what’s working for D.C. students while finding innovative, research-based solutions to replace what isn’t serving all students well. We couldn’t agree more. It’s long past time that we step up for all students, including students with disabilities, to prioritize creating the systems and services needed to meet the needs of every learner.
D.C. State Board of Education President Jessica Sutter noted that even though schools responded urgently to ensure their diverse student populations had the resources they needed to learn from home during the pandemic, the vast majority of our students have returned to classrooms with a pre-pandemic approach to teaching and learning.
We know that D.C.’s system for serving students with disabilities can be overwhelmingly fragmented and difficult to navigate for many families. The system is designed for compliance rather than effectiveness and creativity. To put it plainly: What’s required by law should be the floor, not the ceiling, for how our schools serve students.
Thankfully, there are bright spots that could serve as models for how to truly rethink teaching and learning for these students. In general, students with disabilities attending the city’s charter schools have worse outcomes than their peers at the more traditional D.C. Public Schools, scoring 3 points lower in both math and English language arts. Still, the innovations piloted at some of the city’s high-performing charter schools could give us some clues as to how we can help improve outcomes for students with disabilities.
Take for example DC Bilingual Public Charter School, where administrators changed the school schedule to include “learning labs” where students get individualized attention based on their academic needs. The work has paid off: The school’s students with disabilities scored 11 points higher than their peers in other schools.
At Paul Public Charter School, every student receives a customized learning plan similar to the individualized educational plans, or IEPs, that students with disabilities get under federal law. This kind of approach ensures all students get the specialized instruction — as well as the wraparound services and support — needed to be successful.
Special education teachers at Paul also have instructional coaches just as math and reading teachers do, which means they receive consistent professional development and feedback for improving their craft. This kind of focus on constant improvement means that the most vulnerable students get the most effective teachers possible.
Langdon Elementary School, recently named a Bold Performance School for serving priority students, including students with disabilities, focuses on what research shows works: prioritizing effective co-teaching between special education and non-special education teachers steeped in keeping students with disabilities in the classroom with their peers to get constant access to grade-level, rigorous content.
Our city is a leader in education innovation, including a school district that has been the fastest-improving in the country and a robust charter school sector that serves nearly half of D.C.’s public school students. It’s time to build on these successes and prioritize students with disabilities. Only then can we truly be a national leader in education. | 2022-10-27T14:23:28Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | D.C. needs urgent reform for students with disabilities - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/27/dc-students-disabilities-urgent-reform/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/27/dc-students-disabilities-urgent-reform/ |
New movies to stream this week: ‘Wendell & Wild’ and more
Wendell (voice of Keegan-Michael Key), left, and Wild (Jordan Peele) in “Wendell & Wild.” (Netflix)
Revered stop-motion animation director Henry Selick returns to form with “Wendell & Wild,” his first film since 2009’s terrifying “Coraline.” Co-written by Selick and Jordan Peele (based on an unpublished book Selick co-wrote with Clay McLeod Chapman), the film focuses on Kat (voice of Lyric Ross), a young Black girl who has been failed by the system after the death of her parents — a tragedy she blames herself for. After being chosen for a second-chance program at a prestigious but underfunded private school, Kat returns to her hometown to find it in shambles, under the dark cloud of an evil corporation that has set up shop and aims to destroy more lives than it already has. It’s the perfect setup for a coming-of-age redemption story with a protagonist who loves blaring rock music and shoves off the prospect of friends, but this film has literal demons rather than just those pesky metaphorical ones. Kat learns she’s a Hell Maiden, a bit of lore that is sadly underdeveloped but involves magical powers and the ability to summon demons, two of whom contact her: Wendell and Wild (voiced, respectively, by Keegan-Michael Key and Peele, reviving their “Key & Peele” partnership). They promise Kat they will resurrect her parents if she brings them to the land of the living. Resurrection may not be a demonic power, but lying is. Why do these demons want to go aboveground anyway? Destruction? World domination? No. They want to build the best amusement park ever, something their father (Ving Rhames) has punished them for suggesting. But to get their dream park in the mortal world, they have to make a deal with a business worse than the devil. Though not as nightmare-inducing as Selick’s previous work, “Wendell & Wild” focuses on the monsters that inhabit the real world rather than those that may be hiding under your bed. PG-13. Available on Netflix. Contains some mature thematic material, violence, substance use and brief strong language. 106 minutes.
Ryan Phillippe plays an FBI agent in pursuit of a charismatic con man (Tom Pelphrey) in the fact-based thriller “American Murderer.” Also starring Idina Menzel and Jacki Weaver. R. Available on demand. Contains pervasive crude language, drug use, violence, some sexuality and nudity. 104 minutes.
In the raunchy comedy “Bromates,” Lil Rel Howery (“I Love My Dad”) and Josh Brener (“Silicon Valley”) play a pair of odd-couple best friends who decide to move in together after they both break up with their girlfriends. According to Screen Rant, the film “runs out of ideas faster than it can provide organic laughs.” R. Available on demand. Contains crude and sexual material, coarse language throughout, and some drug use. 97 minutes.
The music documentary “Louis Armstrong’s Black & Blues” uses archival footage, never-before-heard home recordings and personal conversations to paint a portrait of the jazz trumpeter, bandleader and singer. The Hollywood Reporter calls the film a “delightful experience for jazz buffs and more than an eye-opener for any youngsters who barely know who Armstrong was.” R. Available on Apple TV Plus; also opening at Landmark’s E Street Cinema. Contains strong language. 106 minutes.
Ben Foster (“Hell or High Water”) and Michael Caine (“Best Sellers”) star in “Medieval,” a historical epic inspired by the true story of 15th-century Czech national hero and mercenary Jan Zizka (Foster). According to rogerebert.com, it’s a “bleak and visually oversaturated allegory.” R. Available on demand. Contains strong and grisly violence throughout and some nudity. 125 minutes.
In the horror thriller “Run Sweetheart Run,” a single mother (Ella Balinska) has a blind date with a charming and handsome businessman (Pilou Asbaek) who gradually reveals his true nature as a violent psychopath. The Hollywood Reporter says, “Although ‘Run Sweetheart Run’ isn’t an enjoyable watch, one has to admire what it aspires to do: tell a story about the deep roots of sexism in our world through the lens of the social horror subgenre.” R. Available on Amazon. Contains horror violence, bloody images, strong language, sexual references and brief nudity. 103 minutes. | 2022-10-27T14:36:15Z | www.washingtonpost.com | New movies to stream from home this week. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/movies/2022/10/27/october-28-new-streaming-movie-roundup/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/movies/2022/10/27/october-28-new-streaming-movie-roundup/ |
The housing market has taken a direct hit already from the Federal Reserve’s fight against inflation
Kathy Orton
The average rate for a 30-year fixed mortgage, the most popular home loan product, reached 7.08 percent this week, the highest in 20 years. (Bloomberg News)
Mortgage rates topped 7 percent this week, the highest level in 20 years — and the latest sign that the Federal Reserve’s aggressive moves to slow the broader economy are hitting the housing market hard already.
The average rate for a 30-year fixed mortgage, the most popular home-loan product, reached 7.08 percent, according to data released Thursday by Freddie Mac. The last time mortgage rates climbed so high was April 2002, and they are slated to keep climbing as the Fed moves swiftly to tame a red-hot housing market, a key step in lowering rent costs and ultimately quelling inflation in the broader economy.
The central bank doesn’t directly set mortgage costs, but changes in its policy rate — known as the federal funds rate — ripple through the economy and influence all kinds of lending. Since March, the Fed has raised rates five times, bringing its benchmark rate from near zero to between 3 percent and 3.25 percent. The central bank is expected to raise rates by another 0.75 percentage points next week.
Calculate how much more mortgages will cost as interest rates rise
“People can say, ‘Well, you know, a percent [added] on the mortgage rate is still low.’ But we’ve had several percents on the mortgage rate in a short period of time,” said Diane Swonk, chief economist at KPMG. “The rapid pace at which they’re raising rates are, in and of themselves, destabilizing.”
The average mortgage rate has gone up dizzyingly fast. A year ago, it was 3.09 percent; even as late as March, the average rate for a 30-year fixed mortgage was below 4 percent. The increase from 3.22 percent in January to 7.08 percent now, a jump of 3.86 percentage points, is the steepest increase rates have gone through in a year. The previous record was 3.59 percentage points in 1981.
For much of the pandemic, low rates meant aspiring home buyers flooded into the market, competed for the few homes available and sent prices soaring. But now, wary of shelling out hundreds of dollars more per month on a mortgage, buyers are bowing out, boosting the supply of available homes and helping prices go down overall. This year, when rates were below 4 percent, a family earning the median household income of $71,000 could afford a $448,700 home with a 20 percent down payment. This week, with rates around 7 percent, they could only afford a $339,200 home, according to Realtor.com.
Home prices are falling at a record pace. The Case-Shiller home price index released earlier this week showed prices were 13 percent higher in August than they were a year ago, down from 15.6 percent higher the previous month. The 2.6 percentage point difference between those two months is the largest decline in the history of the index, which debuted in 1987.
Demand for mortgages has also plummeted as quickly as rates have spiked. Total application volume is at its lowest level since 1997, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association. Refinances are down 86 percent from where they were a year ago, and mortgage lenders nationwide, including at major banks, have let employees go as the market slows. And rising rates have boosted interest in adjustable-rate mortgages. The ARM share of applications was at 12.7 percent.
Home builders are also being pinched. Overall housing starts fell 8.1 percent to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1.44 million units in September, according to a report earlier this month from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and the U.S. Census Bureau. So far this year, single-family starts are down 5.6 percent compared to this point last year.
“This will be the first year since 2011 to see a decline for single-family starts,” Robert Dietz, National Association of Home Builders chief economist, said in a statement. “And given expectations for ongoing elevated interest rates due to actions by the Federal Reserve, 2023 is forecast to see additional single-family building declines as the housing contraction continues.”
Still, the Fed’s tools are limited, and officials routinely point to the housing market as one of the clearest signs that their rate hikes are having the intended effect.
“We are starting to see some adjustment to excess demand in interest-sensitive sectors like housing,” Fed Governor Christopher Waller said in a speech this month. “But more needs to be done to bring inflation down meaningfully and persistently.”
When or how the Fed’s rate hikes rates will overtake inflation elsewhere in the economy is not yet clear. Rate hikes are designed to snuff out demand, but they do nothing to fix supply-side issues, like shortages of oil and gas, affordable apartments or chips for new cars. Overall, consumer prices remain stubbornly high, rising 8.2 percent in September, compared with the year before.
Rent costs also are up 7.2 percent in the past year, and rents rose 0.8 percent from August to September. Goldman Sachs has forecast that overall shelter inflation will peak at 7.5 percent next spring before slowly decelerating to just under 6 percent at the end of 2023. That has major implications for Fed policy, since housing costs makes up a huge portion of the basket of goods used to measure inflation in the economy.
But the slowing housing market may also be finally cooling rental prices, too. National rent growth sank to its lowest annual pace (7.8 percent) since June 2021, according to Realtor.com. The U.S. median rental price recorded its second month-over-month decline in eight months in September.
That’s an encouraging sign that the market is returning to some version of normal. But Basten said there’s plenty of uncertainty about the future. He ticked through the recent jumps in mortgage rates: 5 percent “wasn’t too bad,” he said, and 6 percent was “workable.” But with the Fed poised to hike rates two more times before the end of the year, Basten said he and others in the industry are left “wondering if there is going to be a real downturn in the market.”
“We can only deal with what we’re dealing with now. I can’t see that mortgage rates are going to go to 10 [percent]. If they did, then that would feel like a recession,” Basten said. “Eight [percent] feels bad. Ten percent would be like, ‘Wow, where we do go from here?’ ” | 2022-10-27T14:36:16Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Mortgage rates hit 7 percent as Federal Reserve moves slow economy - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/10/27/mortgage-rates-7-percent/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/10/27/mortgage-rates-7-percent/ |
By Kathy Orton | Oct 27, 2022
This Georgian manor built for developer Albert Small is on the market for the first time. The 1.7-acre estate, one of the largest parcels in the Edgemoor neighborhood of Bethesda, Md., is listed at just under $11 million. The six-bedroom, nine-bathroom, 10,600-square-foot brick house, which was built in 1966, reflects Small’s love of history. Small hired architect Walter G. Peter Jr. and interior designer Samuel A. Morrow to design it.
Constance Gauthier/Constance Gauthier
The Georgian manor in the Edgemoor neighborhood was the longtime home of developer Albert Small. It is listed at just under $11 million.
The two-story circular foyer has marble flooring and curved stairs that ascend to the second floor.
The living room has a fireplace and wide-plank oak flooring.
The sunroom has nine sets of French doors that open to the gardens.
The formal dining room has a fireplace, built-in cabinetry and wide-plank oak flooring.
The family room has a fireplace and French doors that open to the gardens.
The kitchen has black granite countertops.
The library has built-in shelving.
The primary bedroom is on the second floor at the back of the house. It has a fireplace and windows that overlook the gardens.
One of the bathrooms in the primary suite is shown.
There are two dressing rooms in the primary suite. This is one of them.
The other bathroom in the primary suite is shown.
The second of two dressing rooms in the primary suite is shown.
A view of the back of the house, the swimming pool and the pool house. The pool house has a sauna, two bathrooms, a kitchenette and a large rec room.
Cultivated for more than 55 years, the gardens set this estate apart. They were designed by acclaimed landscape architect Anthony “Tony” Holmes of Philadelphia.
Craig Westerman/Hometrack
The 115-foot grass walk has two sets of grass steps and is lined with perennials. A raised Haddonstone fountain is flanked by curved stone walls with an arched wrought-iron gate serving as a backdrop.
The green clay tennis court is shown.
Historic farmhouse in NW D.C. on the market for $5 million | 2022-10-27T14:36:41Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Albert Small’s Bethesda, Md., estate offered at $11 million - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/interactive/2022/albert-small-house-for-sale/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/interactive/2022/albert-small-house-for-sale/ |
Few Americans remember when polio-stricken children relied on seven-foot-long iron cylinders to breathe. At its peak in early 1950s, polio caused more than 15,000 cases of paralysis a year and over 3,000 deaths in the US alone. In the decades that followed, a massive vaccination campaign nearly eradicated the disease from the globe. Now, a perfect storm of factors has made polio a threat once again. Eliminating the virus is still possible, but only if global leaders shake off their complacency.
The latest outbreak in the US is a case in point. This summer, a previously healthy, unvaccinated young adult from Rockland County, New York, was paralyzed after getting infected by a mutated strain. The US hasn’t had a case of wild polio since 1979.
Polio’s spread isn’t worrying for the fully vaccinated. But longstanding vaccine hesitancy in certain communities, the rise of misinformation and the deferral of routine treatments post-Covid has created pockets of vulnerability. While more than 92% of the US population has been vaccinated for polio, that figure drops to 60% in Rockland County. In one ZIP code, the rate is just 37%.
Unlike many other diseases, eradicating polio is scientifically possible. The challenge is mustering the will. The Global Polio Eradication Initiative, a five-year campaign to reach 370 million children annually, aimed to raise $4.8 billion in a drive last week. It secured a little more than half that amount, which included $1.2 billion from Bill Gates. (Bloomberg Philanthropies is a regular donor to GPEI.) Key contributors such as the UK have cut back because of shrinking budgets and competing priorities. Even Gates, while affirming his commitment, said it might not be “forever.”
This is troubling talk. Research has shown that even a small decrease in the intensity of immunization can lead to large outbreaks. Getting much-needed funding to close the vaccination gap is essential, particularly in places like Afghanistan and Pakistan, where health workers not only face vaccine aversion, but mass migration, flooding, political instability and poor nutrition, which requires more dosing. India’s success overcoming similar hurdles shows that eradication is possible.
• What Parents Can Do as RSV Spikes: Lisa Jarvis
• Japan’s Maskless Tourists Trigger a Debate: Gearoid Reidy
• Better Cancer Screenings Are Coming. Can We Afford Them?: Faye Flam | 2022-10-27T14:36:47Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Just One Case of Polio Is a Global Threat - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/just-one-case-of-polio-is-a-global-threat/2022/10/27/64933f96-55f7-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/just-one-case-of-polio-is-a-global-threat/2022/10/27/64933f96-55f7-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html |
Ocean scientist Douglas McCauley is trying to avoid the worst impacts of industrialization, by using data to reveal to companies, policymakers and the public what’s at stake
Story by Tatiana Schlossberg
Illustration by Stef Wong
Photos by Lauren Justice
OFF THE COAST OF SANTA BARBARA — Just yards from the Fish 1, a 22-foot research vessel, a humpback whale about twice the size of the boat hurled itself out of the water, sending shimmering droplets in a broken necklace of splash.
In the other direction, a hulking cargo ship, stacked high with containers, crept closer.
Aboard the Fish 1, a slight figure whose face is crinkled from years in the sun and saltwater, looked from one to the other. Ocean scientist Douglas McCauley wanted to see whether the near real-time detection system he and his colleagues had developed, Whale Safe, could avert collisions between whales and ships in the Santa Barbara Channel.
The tool represents one of the ways McCauley, who heads the Benioff Ocean Science Laboratory at the University of California Santa Barbara, is working to protect the ocean even as it becomes more industrialized. By collecting data from several sources — an acoustic monitoring buoy that listens for whale songs, identifies them according to species with an algorithm and sends that information to satellites; a predictive habitat model for blue whales; and sightings logged in an app — Whale Safe forecasts to ships the chances of meeting a whale. Then, it grades shipping companies on whether they actually slow down to 10 knots or less during whale migrations, from May 1 to Dec. 15.
“We can literally watch all of the ships in California and across the whole ocean; we are better positioned than ever before to try to track damage as it occurs, or before it occurs,” McCauley said a few days later in a Zoom call from the French Polynesian island of Moorea, where he is spending a month researching coral reefs. “We are in trouble if we don’t do something different, and I realized that if I kept sticking my head literally underwater or stayed in the lab, these problems weren’t going to fix themselves.”
Humans have worked in the seas for centuries: fishing, seafaring and more recently, drilling for oil and gas and the development of offshore wind farms. Shipping lanes cross almost every surface of the sea, except for shrinking swaths of the Southern and Arctic Ocean.
But as development has intensified and the planet has warmed, the 43-year-old McCauley has ventured into the gray area between scientific research and advocacy to try to fix these problems — or at least make them visible.
A cargo ship is seen in the distance near the Channel Islands on Sept. 30.
He is trying to save the whales; collect plastic; explore the links between climate change, overfishing and nutrition in the South Pacific; warn about the dangers of seabed mining; track sharks using drones and artificial intelligence; and calculate the benefits to people, animals and the planet that come from protecting broad swaths of the sea.
“One of Doug’s compelling traits as a scientist is that he is keen to explore outside the box,” said Benjamin Halpern, a UCSB professor of marine biology and ocean conservation who has worked with McCauley for about a decade. “He is a very creative thinker, and able to think differently about the solutions to problems and what kinds of research and science can help inform those.”
[These whales are on the brink. Now comes climate change -- and wind power]
In meetings with corporate executives and political leaders, McCauley has made a consistent argument: Protecting the sea is in our interest, since it already does a lot of the work for us.
In 2020 McCauley led a report that provided a framework for marine protected areas on the high seas, finding that such refuges could be powerful tools for biodiversity conservation, carbon sequestration and climate resilience. Even port and fishing communities, he argued, depend on an ocean that is still wild and alive.
“We have a globally unique chance to talk about this before it’s too late,” he said.
California sea lions swim near the Channel Islands in California on Sept. 30.
Humpback whales swim near the Channel Islands. Ship strikes killed 80 whales annually in three of the past four years, but the toll is probably much higher than reported.
Dolphins swim near the Channel Islands in California.
California sea lions swim near the Channel Islands in California on Sept. 30. Humpback whales swim near the Channel Islands. Ship strikes killed 80 whales annually in three of the past four years, but the toll is probably much higher than reported. Dolphins swim near the Channel Islands in California.
The encounter in late September, amid one of the world’s busiest shipping channels and a vibrant ecosystem, offered a glimpse of how to do just that. Minutes after the container ship had passed McCauley’s boat, the whale — possibly the same one, but it is hard to tell — had found another, and the two sent up exhales of spray.
It was as if a bulldozer operator had plowed through a herd of elephants without stopping, not too far from a major city’s downtown, hoping to avoid a crash. And it happens many times a day here in the Santa Barbara Channel, even though barely anyone sees it.
While McCauley tracks these interactions, much of the public seems to have noticed this industrial shift underwater.
Since 2000, global container port traffic has nearly quadrupled; aquaculture produces more than half of the fish we eat; about 8 million metric tons of plastic enter the oceans every year; over half the global oceans are fished; more than 700,000 miles of undersea data cables snake across the ocean floor; seabed mining may soon begin in some of the world’s last pristine ecosystems; and the fishing industry is beginning to target deep ocean life.
Douglas McCauley, director of the Benioff Ocean Science Laboratory at the University of California Santa Barbara, and his colleagues created Whale Safe.
The ocean is, by far, the world’s largest carbon sink, having absorbed about 40 percent of the excess greenhouse gasses from burning fossil fuels. But it comes at a cost: more acidic and warmer waters, which may not soak up as much carbon going forward. The fact that ocean animals evolved to a narrow range of conditions, McCauley and others found, makes them more vulnerable to climate change.
The landscape was less crowded when McCauley grew up in Lomita, Calif., and went to school in San Pedro, not far from the ports and the channel. He could see whale migrations out the window of his high school geometry class. From an early age, he would ride his bike to the beach as an escape, and “all of a sudden, I was in a super wild place.”
He spent much of his adolescence and early adulthood working at the local public aquarium, and working on fishing boats.
It was there, catching squid at 1 a.m. to sell as bait, hauling in a croaker bigger than he was, and watching people spend $20 a day to go out a boat to catch dinner for their families, that he saw how a thriving ocean economy works.
It was later, in his career as a scientist, that he had data to explain what he learned through experience: What is good for the ocean is also good for people, and possibly business too. Slowing down ships means fewer ship strikes, which means more whales. That is good for biodiversity and climate change: Whales themselves are carbon sinks and fertilize plant growth (another carbon sink). It also means cleaner air for those who live nearby, and fewer carbon emissions from fossil fuels.
McCauley and Callie Leiphardt, lead project scientist on Whale Safe at the Benioff Ocean Science Laboratory, search for whales off Santa Barbara and in California’s Channel Islands.
Christoph Pierre, director of Marine Operations and Collector Naturalist, checks an app where users can log whale sightings.
As McCauley and Christoph Pierre, director of marine operations, search for whales, they take photos that are later uploaded to a photo ID database.
McCauley and Callie Leiphardt, lead project scientist on Whale Safe at the Benioff Ocean Science Laboratory, search for whales off Santa Barbara and in California’s Channel Islands. Christoph Pierre, director of Marine Operations and Collector Naturalist, checks an app where users can log whale sightings. As McCauley and Christoph Pierre, director of marine operations, search for whales, they take photos that are later uploaded to a photo ID database.
He and others developed WhaleSafe, he said, after shipping companies asked: “These are the biggest mammals on the planet. Can’t you tell us when they’re there so we don’t run into them?”
Three shipping companies contacted for this article, as well as an industry association, said that they supported such programs. CMA CGM, among the world’s largest shipping container companies, is sending alerts above medium directly to their captains, and Hyundai Heavy Industries is working with Whale Safe to incorporate its data directly onboard new ships.
But some of the firms tracked by the tool, which has recently expanded its use to include San Francisco, have received F grades. Matson Navigation, for example, only slowed down roughly 18 percent of the time.
Lee Kindberg, the head of environment and sustainability for Maersk, which received a B for slowing down in about 79 percent of cases, said the company supports Whale Safe. But she added that shippers must balance safety and speed restrictions against weather and demands from companies — and their customers — who want everything faster.
And, as climate change scrambles whales’ migration patterns and schedules, tools like Whale Safe may become even more essential in protecting them, McCauley said.
Trying to prevent ship strikes, one of the leading causes of whale deaths, is becoming an emergency. Three of the past four years rank as the deadliest on record for whales on the West Coast — about 80 annually — but the death toll is probably much higher, since most sink to the ocean floor. There have been no known ship strikes in the Santa Barbara Channel since the launch of Whale Safe in 2020, though it is too early to make a causal link.
A moored acoustic monitoring buoy near the Channel Islands in California. Santa Cruz Island is in the distance.
While aboard the Fish 1, McCauley pulled on a wet suit, flippers and a mask and jumped into the water to inspect the buoy. Looking not unlike one of the sea lions who popped up nearby with his slick outer layer and whiskers poking out beneath his mask, he scrubbed it for barnacles, and made sure all of the hardware was in good condition.
Like the buoys, McCauley seems to be able to take in information, translate it into languages its recipients understand and make it actionable, according to Jane Lubchenco, a marine ecologist who has worked with McCauley and now serves as deputy director for climate and environment at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.
“He is adept at boiling something down to the most important components and expressing his knowledge in an accessible fashion, and he is passionate about solutions,” she said in an email.
Still, some worry that engaging with industry could allow companies to burnish their image.
“Doug does seem quite nimble and effective at engaging with the private sector, and I don’t know if that’s a good or a bad thing,” Halpern said. “Maybe it’s valuable that someone is testing those waters, because we can’t solve the climate change catastrophe we face without engaging the private sector and corporations.”
McCauley spreads his message with a billionaire’s help. SalesForce co-founder Marc Benioff and his wife Lynne decided to fund an ocean science lab after reading a landmark study he co-authored on the ocean’s industrialization. McCauley serves as the lab’s director, and the university has received $88 million from the Benioffs since 2016.
Since then, their conversations about the ocean and “carbon math” have shaped much of Benioff’s climate and environmental philanthropy, including the “Trillion Trees” tree-planting initiative. “By aligning with Doug on the ocean, we found a bigger vision on the climate,” Benioff said in a Zoom interview.
McCauley said he is aware that some might question engaging with private philanthropists and industry, but argued that he and others could not afford to wait for federal funding — and action. “We don’t have the luxury of time.”
The boat approaches the buoy.
McCauley prepares to check and clean the buoy.
McCauley steadies himself as he works on the buoy.
The boat approaches the buoy. McCauley prepares to check and clean the buoy. McCauley steadies himself as he works on the buoy.
Over the past few years, McCauley has tried to make that decision-enabling data available and legible to policymakers across the globe.
Alongside a group of other scientists, McCauley has worked in Kiribati to document how damage to coral reefs from climate change and overfishing harms the diet and health of country’s inhabitants, who depend on fish for essential nutrients. The researchers share that data with government officials to show which islands are most at risk.
McCauley is also tackling the issue of deep seabed mining, which could begin in international waters as soon as next year. McCauley and the Benioff Ocean Science Lab have tried to map potential excavation sites across the globe, since the public remains largely unaware of this development, its scope and its possible threats.
[How protecting the ocean can save species and fight climate change]
At the bottom of the ocean around the world lie significant deposits of metals, including some needed for electric vehicle batteries and other clean energy projects. Some companies see ocean deposits as key to this clean energy transition, and are jockeying for primacy in this prospective new industry.
Along with more than 400 other scientists, McCauley signed a statement last year arguing that deep-sea mining will result in “loss of biodiversity and ecosystem functioning that would be irreversible on multigenerational time scales.” They argued that there are still too many unknowns in the deep ocean to mine them responsibly.
McCauley helped bring together leaders from environmental nonprofits and businesses to discuss the risks of seabed mining. Afterward, other advocates successfully worked to pressure Google, BMW, Volvo, Samsung and others to support a moratorium.
But industry officials such as the Metals Company CEO Gerard Barron counter that deep-sea mining opponents are ignoring the trade-offs that come from keeping the ocean off limits.
“While saying ‘No’ to something is easy,” said Barron, who heads a seabed mining corporation, “finding a solution is hard and if we fail to consider all our options, we will consign our biodiverse rainforests and carbon sinks to further destruction, increase our emissions load, and further damage the oceans Douglas has set out to protect.”
McCauley, by contrast, sees these planetary puzzle pieces as interlocked. Stopping seabed mining might mean less ocean noise, which might mean more whales, which means more stored carbon, which might mean fewer forest fires in his native California, or less sea-level rise in Kiribati.
A cargo ship near the Channel Islands.
Sometimes it is impossible for McCauley to ignore how climate change has changed his surroundings. He recently took a group of students to the woods near Santa Barbara to learn about the carbon cycle, but had difficulty teaching the lesson because almost all of the trees around them had died of drought, beetle infestation, or forest fire.
“I have too real a sense of how bad things are going to get with climate in such a short amount of time,” he said.
Still, he manages to marvel at the natural world, and the mysteries it holds.
Back aboard the Fish 1, not long after the container ship — and an oil tanker — had passed by, one of the whales came right underneath the boat. It surfaced briefly about 10 feet away, flicking its tail and disappearing.
Later, over Zoom, McCauley reflected on that moment: “I have no good explanation for why a whale would swim under the boat and look up at us, other than that it can.
“Some piece of that is a reminder that they deserve a space on the planet because they are incredibly intelligent, incredibly complex and sophisticated animals, and wonder about us as much as we wonder about them.”
[Sign up for the latest news about climate change, energy and the environment, delivered every Thursday] | 2022-10-27T14:37:06Z | www.washingtonpost.com | This scientist uses drones and algorithms to save whales — and the rest of the ocean - Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/interactive/2022/whale-safe-douglas-mccauley-benioff/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/interactive/2022/whale-safe-douglas-mccauley-benioff/ |
World Series night games can be a shutout for kids
Games that end at 11 p.m. or later make it difficult for kids to stay up and watch.
Alex Bregman, Yuli Gurriel and Ryan Pressly of the Houston Astros celebrate Sunday after defeating the New York Yankees in Game 4 of the American League Championship Series to advance to the World Series. All the games are scheduled to start at 8 p.m. Eastern time. (Jamie Squire/Getty Images)
The World Series starts tomorrow night. The Houston Astros and Philadelphia Phillies face off in a seven-game series to see who will be the champion of Major League Baseball (MLB).
The World Series has been the biggest stage in professional baseball since 1903, when the owner of the Boston Americans (later the Red Sox) proposed a series of postseason games between the American and National leagues to “create great interest in baseball, in our leagues and in our players.”
There have been some changes, however, since 1903. Things were simple for many years. The two leagues had only eight or 10 teams each. The team with the best regular season record in the National League would play the team with the best regular season record in the American League for the World Series championship.
In 1969, however, the leagues expanded to 12 teams and split into two six-team divisions. The division champs in each league played each other to see who would move on to the World Series.
As MLB added more teams (there are now 30), they added more divisions and wild-card teams to the playoffs. Wild-card teams are teams that make the playoffs because they had good regular season records but didn’t win their division.
This season, 12 teams played 34 playoff games before the World Series started.
A second big change is that for years World Series games were played only during the day. The first World Series game played at night was October 13, 1971, when the Baltimore Orioles played the Pittsburgh Pirates in the fourth game of the World Series.
Night games have been great for television ratings and making MLB more money, but they have not been great for kids. Now the biggest baseball games of the year start at 8 p.m. Eastern time and last for more than three hours. That means they end too late for many kids to stay up, especially on a school night.
Perhaps MLB should have one or two World Series games during the day so kids could see all nine innings. And maybe they will grow up to be baseball fans.
Finally, the World Series used to be known as “the October Classic.” But now with all the wild-card and playoff games, the 2022 World Series will stretch into November.
I guess the folks at MLB aren’t concerned about what would happen if the Minnesota Twins or Detroit Tigers reached the World Series again. Night games in early November in those northern cities could get cold for players and fans.
The World Series has changed over the years, but some things have stayed the same. It is still two teams playing games for one championship. Games where something exciting and unexpected is sure to happen. So finish your homework early and catch a few innings.
Fred Bowen writes the sports opinion column for KidsPost. He is the author of 27 sports books for kids ages 8 to 12, including 10 books about baseball. | 2022-10-27T14:37:12Z | www.washingtonpost.com | World Series night games can be a shutout for kids - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/kidspost/2022/10/27/world-series-needs-day-games/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/kidspost/2022/10/27/world-series-needs-day-games/ |
Move over, Tall Bones, and make room for an animatronic, subliminally sexy, 9-foot-tall howler who has marked his territory on America’s front lawns.
Jill Houser’s Halloween display in Pittsburgh features a giant animatronic werewolf. (Jeff Swensen for The Washington Post)
Angela Rush already has the 12 foot Home Depot skeleton, and a whole bunch of regular-size ones, too. She has a nearly full-size hearse carriage drawn by skeleton horses, a massive tarantula, a 12-foot pumpkin-headed “inferno” skeleton, a dragon and numerous light up pumpkins. She has so many Halloween decorations that she has to rent a storage unit, and each year she must hire a moving truck to bring them all to her home. She didn’t need anything else.
“My Halloween decorating has gotten so kind of out of hand that I’m like, I’m not doing it anymore,” says Rush, 51, who lives in Augusta, Ga. She resolved not to be tempted by any other plastic ghouls or goblins. Even if they were on sale.
That was until she found out about the Home Depot’s new 9½-foot animatronic werewolf.
“I was like, ‘Hold on. Halloween’s back on.’”
She saw him and she had to buy him: A beefy, sinewy wolfman with massive hands (paws?), glowing eyes and, under his shredded buffalo-check shirt, six-pack abs. Best of all, and unlike his skeletal brethren, he talks and moves — with a growl, he opens his mouth to reveal a row of sharp fangs, tilts his head back and … aroooooooooo!
Rush bought the $399 werewolf on “Orange Friday,” which is what the most dedicated of Halloween decorators call the day Home Depot makes its Halloween decorations available online for purchase. This year, that day was July 15, when normal people are — well, what’s normal anymore?
“I was so excited when I got him that I set him up in my house,” says Rush, which was almost a problem when the werewolf couldn’t fit through the door, and had to be disassembled again. But she loves him. Her teenage son loves him. Everybody loves him, except her two huskies, who regard him with suspicion.
“They just stare at it,” says Rush. “And it’s funny, ’cause they howl like he does.”
Two years ago, Home Depot made a skeleton taller than God and changed Halloween forever. How do you follow that up? Not with a talking skeleton (too predictable) or a taller skeleton (may topple in high winds), but by expanding into an entire multiverse of giant spooky creatures: There is now a witch who appears to fly on a 12-foot broomstick, and a 15-foot phantom. But it’s the werewolf who seems to have become the breakout hit.
“People are used to the skeletons now. They’ve seen all of that. And this is something different,” says Jill Houser, 48, who has an elaborate werewolf campsite complete with a tent and body parts set up in her Pittsburgh front yard.
Jennifer Corcoran, 44, of Nashville, is the moderator of several Facebook groups dedicated to large-scale holiday decorating, including a 50,000-member, 12-foot skeleton group. Rumors began bubbling up that the werewolf would be part of the store’s Halloween lineup, but it was a tightly guarded secret.
“I sent it over to Lance” — that would be Lance Allen, the director at Home Depot responsible for the brand’s pantheon of giants, with who she is now on a first-name basis — “and was like, is this legit?” says Corcoran. It was, he confirmed. A nurse came to take her phone and wheel her into surgery.
“I remember the nurse’s face,” says Corcoran. “I was like, ‘No there’s a werewolf coming! I have to post this.’ ”
“We all were like rabid fiends trying to get it,” says Holly Agouridis, 50, of her fellow Facebook-group haunters. “I do kind of a cornfield-type scene on one of my [yard] sections, and I was like, ‘He’s definitely going to go there.’ ” The kids in her Silver Spring neighborhood have named him “Howie the Howler.”
Gregory McAdams, 48, is a big werewolf guy — “I actually just had a werewolf tattoo put on my arm Wednesday” — who counts “The Wolfman” among his favorite movies. So the prospect of a werewolf joining his 12-foot skeleton was pretty thrilling. He posed his in front of his Nashua, N.H., home holding two halves of a (normal-size) skeleton — the head in torso in one paw, the pelvis and legs in another — as if to denote the new hierarchy of Halloween. The werewolf had surpassed what was formerly his favorite decoration. “He’s my number one now,” says McAdams.
“It was such a big deal that I was kind of nervous that I wasn’t going to be able to get ahold of one,” he says. But the first one arrived safe and sound, so he canceled his second order.
“We got it all set up and everything worked great, except it had two left hands, he says. “I was like, you have to be kidding me.”
So he made a trek to another Home Depot to pick up what would be his third wolf order, “And lo and behold, that one had two right hands,” says Gridley, now the owner of a complete werewolf (he swapped the hands and returned one).
Other werewolf mishaps did not end quite as harmoniously. Unfortunately for Jim Nelson and his 6-year-old-daughter Evelyn, the werewolf (named “Mr. Howly”) arrived broken, with his jaw detached from his head. Not to worry: “I made a muzzle for him,” says Nelson, 41, of Erie, Pa. “I cut up an old leather belt and then just kind of glued it on his head.”
“They said it was too scary” for their grandchildren,” says Nelson, who was flummoxed — she’s one of those people who keep their 12-foot skeleton up all year round, dressing him up in costumes for every holiday, “in my yard 24-7, 365 days a year.” The neighbors had never complained about that.
Werewolves occupy a particular place in the horror genre, says Bryan Fuller, writer and executive producer of numerous TV shows, including “Hannibal” and “Pushing Daisies” — and also a proud Home Depot werewolf owner. They’re a metaphor for there being “something inside of me that I can’t control, i.e. my sexuality. If I let it out, bad things will happen,” says Fuller, whose werewolf was a birthday gift from his partner.
Werewolves “can hide who they are, until they can’t. And so the idea of having this giant werewolf in the middle of a queer person’s yard means a little bit more than just a fuzzy monster from a horror movie,” says Fuller, who is also the producer of the documentary series “Queer for Fear: The History of Queer Horror.” “It has all of this kind of sociopolitical resonance that is important to me.”
Part of the reason the werewolf is a hit also may be that it’s an underrated monster. There aren’t that many werewolf movies — “The Wolfman,” “An American Werewolf in Paris” and “Werewolf of London” — and werewolves are often relegated to supporting characters, as in the “Twilight” movies. Or, they’re written for laughs, like the werewolves of “What We Do in the Shadows” (“We’re werewolves, not swearwolves!”), especially when the werewolf’s transformation is a metaphor for puberty — think “Teen Wolf,” or “Werewolf Bar Mitzvah,” one of the greatest bits in “30 Rock.”
“The horror of losing control of your body and having it be taken over by your bestial self is something so terrifying,” says Fuller, “It comes full circle around to humor.”
But, well, while we’re on the topic of sexuality: The werewolves seem to have attracted an audience beyond Halloween decorators. You know who else loves the werewolf? Furries.
For the uninitiated, furries are a subculture of people who are interested in anthropomorphic animal characters — conceptually and, for some, romantically.
When she saw the 9½-foot werewolf, “I was like, wow, this is really hot,” says a 29-year-old who asked to go by the name of her vTube persona, which is Buffpup, a buxom werewolf. The Home Depot wolf has “a nice butt,” she says, and strong, muscular arms. She jokingly calls him her boyfriend, though she does have a real, human boyfriend. Even though Buffpup knows Home Depot would never admit it, she suspects the werewolf may have been designed with furries in mind.
“I think people realize how much money they can make off of furries because they’re a big-spending type of group,” she says.
And it’s not just the furries! Corcoran, the leader of the Halloween Facebook groups, found herself moderating a discussion about the werewolf’s, ahem, physique, under those shredded pants. Turns out, a lot of people wanted to know what he looked like naked. “We talkin’ Ken doll?” asked one group member. “Would it be inappropriate for me to ask if you can send me some nudes of the werewolf?” another asked Corcoran. (For the record: Ken Doll. With plastic bas-relief hair.)
This summer, Troy Sager found himself “really drooling over that werewolf,” but listen: not in that way. Sager, 54, of Arthur, N.D., wanted to add to his collection of spooky decor, which he enhances with a few DIY elements. Sager took a mannequin half-torso, dressed it with pants, used spray foam to simulate entrails, and covered the whole thing in splattered blood, splaying it out at the wolf’s feet. “It looks like the werewolf kind of had a little meal,” he says. A day-care center down the street allegedly brought the kids by to check out his display, which also includes a 12-foot skeleton and an Inferno, and he didn’t hear any screaming. “I’m sure a lot of them enjoyed it,” he says.
Houser employed similar techniques for her elaborate werewolf campsite. Branded “Camp Carnage,” her talking wolf holds a battered body and a fistful of foam guts. He’s joined by another, smaller, stationary werewolf and a zombie mannequin that Houser covered in fur, emerging from a tent: “He’s transitioning. He’s still a person but turning into a werewolf,” she says.
Meanwhile, in Rantoul, Ill., Nikia Hults, who had gone to every Home Depot within a 2½-hour radius of her home and crossed state lines to get her wolf (“We just call him Wolfie”), enlisted her mother-in-law to sew him a new outfit. She picked out some neon green fabric — “I thought green would kind of set him off and kind of make everything cohesive” — and Wolfie got a brand-new size XXXL shirt. Other werewolf parents have done creative displays with Three Little Pigs or Little Red Riding Hood themes. Next year, Corcoran thinks even more people will branch out into elaborate werewolf displays: Expect “Thriller” werewolves, Teen Wolves, and, from “30 Rock” fans who want to play to a niche audience, wolves wearing yarmulkes.
Over at Fuller’s house in the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles, the werewolf is situated in a graveyard scene beyond his driveway. He struggled putting his wolf together — for a while, it was just a pair of disembodied legs, which was both spooky and funny in its own way.
But once he was assembled, Fuller has enjoyed returning home from late nights at work to be greeted by the blinking eyes of Kevin. That’s his werewolf’s name. Most of the time, he’s just a regular dude, says Fuller, except when the moon is full. “There’s something funny about calling a werewolf Kevin.” | 2022-10-27T14:37:18Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The Home Depot werewolf is getting howls of approval - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/10/27/werewolf-home-depot-yard-decoration/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/10/27/werewolf-home-depot-yard-decoration/ |
Ariz. Democratic governor candidate Hobbs reports break-in at campaign office
Arizona Democratic gubernatorial candidate Katie Hobbs speaks to reporters before dropping off her primary election ballot on July 21, 2022, in Scottsdale, Ariz. (Ross D. Franklin/AP)
The campaign for Arizona Democratic gubernatorial candidate Katie Hobbs said its Phoenix office was broken into earlier this week and that police are investigating the incident. A spokesperson for Hobbs, currently the Arizona secretary of state, implicitly blamed Hobbs’s Republican rival, former television news presenter Kari Lake — a charge Lake scoffed at as “absurd.”
Phoenix police confirmed they responded to a burglary call at Hobbs’s campaign office on Tuesday afternoon and that unspecified items were taken, according to the Arizona Republic. In surveillance images obtained by the newspaper, a young man wearing shorts and a green T-shirt can be seen inside the building.
“Secretary Hobbs and her staff have faced hundreds of death threats and threats of violence over the course of this campaign. Throughout this race, we have been clear that the safety of our staff and of the Secretary is our number one priority,” Hobbs campaign manager Nicole DeMont said in a statement.
“Let’s be clear: for nearly two years Kari Lake and her allies have been spreading dangerous misinformation and inciting threats against anyone they see fit,” DeMont added. “The threats against Arizonans attempting to exercise their constitutional rights and their attacks on elected officials are the direct result of a concerted campaign of lies and intimidation.”
Lake told CNN that the Hobbs campaign’s statement was “absolutely absurd.”
“And are you guys buying that? Are you really buying that? Because this sounds like a Jussie Smollett part two,” Lake told CNN, referring to the actor who was found guilty of falsely reporting a hate crime. “She’s trying to deflect from her own abysmal campaign and the fact that you know, nobody even knows where her campaign office is.”
Lake and Hobbs have been engaged in a bitter campaign for governor, and polls have shown the two locked in a tight race. Lake, who was endorsed by Donald Trump, has embraced and spread the former president’s false claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. Trump and his allies, including Lake, have especially questioned the results in Arizona, where Joe Biden narrowly defeated him — the first time a Democrat took the state since 1996.
As secretary of state, Hobbs defended the election process in Arizona as the person in charge of certifying Biden’s victory in 2020. She has called Lake a threat to democracy and earlier this month referred an incident of alleged voter intimidation to the U.S. Justice Department and the Arizona attorney general.
While Hobbs has defended the use of drop boxes as a safe and secure way to ensure ballot access, Lake has encouraged doubts and expressed support for citizen surveillance.
In July, Lake posted on Twitter a photo of a drop box she said was in northern Arizona. “Potential Mules beware: we are watching drop boxes throughout the state,” she said. “Smile … you might be on camera!”
The latest: Biden dismisses ‘doomsayers’ who’ve argued U.S. economy is in a recession | 2022-10-27T14:37:55Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Ariz. Democratic governor candidate Katie Hobbs reports break-in at campaign office - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/27/arizona-hobbs-campaign-breakin-lake/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/27/arizona-hobbs-campaign-breakin-lake/ |
Phil Morgan Jr., left, and Kendall McNair look over some of the new jerseys that they developed for the uniform company Unison. They started in the kitchen and family room of Morgan's family home in Prince George's County. (Jonathan Newton/The Washington Post)
It’s the same logo Dunbar’s Michael Brown signals to after making a crucial catch during his games in Northwest D.C. In Southeast, the Anacostia Indians race onto the field with a feather design lining the outer seam of their pants; to the right of the design sits that U.
“Man, it’s crazy, to be honest with you,” said Morgan, 24, who operates Unison out of the basement of his parents’ Upper Marlboro home. “You go to almost any [public] school in the city and you are going to see our stuff.”
Back in their business class, the two bonded over their love of sports. When McNair saw Morgan designing graphics to promote high school games in D.C., McNair saw the opportunity to collaborate. Initially, McNair wanted to start a general clothing brand, but the two decided instead on an athletic brand.
What they did know through their research was that companies such as Nike and Under Armour locked down their local market and then grew from there. McNair’s hometown of Baltimore was already occupied by Under Armour, so they focused on D.C., which had become sort of a free-for-all in terms of brand allegiance after the D.C. Interscholastic Athletic Association ended its contract with the supplier BSN Sports.
“It spread through the city like wildfire,” McNair said. “At the time it felt like this starting a business [stuff] is easy.”
Still, Morgan was able to convince Coach Maurice Vaughn of Dunbar, where Morgan also works as a behavioral technician, to give Unison a shot. Again, the partnership didn’t begin smoothly. After mockups of the jerseys were posted on social media, students and alumni were excited. But upon arrival, the jerseys were closer to a scarlet red instead of the school’s usual blood-red.
A post shared by Unison LLC (@unisonthebrand)
In 2021, they introduced football gloves with D.C.-related insignias, including maps of D.C., the D.C. flag and GoGo bongos.
Morgan said each uniform set begins at $50 but can increase from there based on customization options. Unison’s willingness to be creative and maintain lower prices than bigger competitors made it attractive, its customers said.
It also helped that Morgan’s father, Phil Sr., is a respected athletic director at H.D. Woodson and his mother, Toni, was the first female football official in the District. Their reputation helped Morgan get in the door with some of the biggest programs in the city.
Every public high school football team in D.C., except for Ballou, has at least one set of Unison jerseys, a sign that McNair and Morgan have made strong inroads in the city. They plan to move their operation out of Morgan’s parents’ house and spread to other markets. They aim to go to retail and start hosting tournaments to build more brand awareness.
“It’s honestly hard to wrap my head around how far this has gone,” Morgan said. “Around the city, I’ve gone from, ‘That’s Phillip and Toni’s boy’ to ‘Yo that’s KP from Unison Brand. Seeing the whole city rocking our gear is crazy. I can’t wait till the whole world gets to see what we grew out of a basement in D.C.” | 2022-10-27T14:38:26Z | www.washingtonpost.com | He outfits D.C.’s H.S. football teams — out of his parents’ basement - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/27/he-outfits-dcs-hs-football-teams-out-his-parents-basement/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/27/he-outfits-dcs-hs-football-teams-out-his-parents-basement/ |
Ukraine live briefing: Putin to deliver key speech after repeating unfounde...
Police and personnel from the Home Guard patrol outside the plant of the Ormen Lange gas field at Aukra, Norway, on Oct. 13, 2022. (Gunn Aarones/AFP/Getty Images)
BRUSSELS — The suspected Russian spy arrested in Norway this week attended a seminar on hybrid threats recently that included a scenario about responding to a pipeline explosion, according to Norwegian media and a coordinator for the group that hosted the event.
Norwegian security officials this week announced they had arrested a man claiming to be a Brazilian academic conducting research on Arctic issues in the city of Tromsø whom they believe is, in fact, a Russian “illegal.” He has been identified in press reports as José Assis Giammaria.
The arrest comes after at least seven Russians — including the son of a close associate of President Vladimir Putin — were detained in recent weeks for flying drones or taking pictures near sensitive areas.
Norway and other countries in Europe are scrambling to secure critical infrastructure in the wake of the sabotage of the Nord Stream natural gas pipelines. In recent months, there has been a string drone sightings in Norway’s offshore oil and gas fields and at Norwegian airports.
Norwegian newspaper Verdens Gang first reported Thursday that the suspect attended a Sept. 29-30 seminar in Vilnius, Lithuania, on countering hybrid threats that was hosted by EU-HYBNET, a European network on hybrid threats, which include sabotage, disinformation, cyberattacks and other means of fighting outside traditional state-to-state military conflict. Their website and a conference brochure say the group is funded by the European Commission. A spokesperson for the commission did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Paivi Mattila, a professor at Laurea University of Applied Sciences in Finland who coordinates EU-HYBNET program, confirmed by phone that the suspected spy attended the event. She said he did not go through a security check, but declined to comment further, citing the ongoing investigation.
A brochure for the seminar in Vilnius says participants in the event would war game different scenarios, including one case of a “gas flow shutdown after a gas pipeline explosion.” In the case study, the “initial findings support the assumption that probably it is about a sabotage and not an accident.”
E.U. warns of ‘robust’ response against sabotage after Nord Stream blasts
Information about the suspect is still emerging. Norwegian domestic security officials announced the arrest this week, saying the suspect presented “a threat to fundamental national interests.”
There is concern he “may have acquired a network and information about Norwegian politics of the northern area,” Norwegian Police Security Service deputy chief Hedvig Moe told Norwegian media. Even if the information is not a direct threat to Norway, it could be misused by Russia, she said.
Before moving to Norway, the suspect lived in Canada. He attended the University of Ottawa, as well as the University of Calgary. While in Ottawa, he volunteered to canvas for a local political campaign, according to Global News.
In 2019, he wrote an article for The Canadian Naval Review. The article, titled “Third Base: The Case for CFB Churchill” argues in favor of establishing a naval base in Canada’s north.
The case comes months after another suspected Russian “illegal” was arrested in the Netherlands. In that case, a suspected Russian spy claimed to be a Brazilian seeking an internship at the International Criminal Court. He had previously studied in the United States. | 2022-10-27T14:53:40Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Suspected Russian spy arrested by Norway attended conference on hybrid warfare - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/27/norway-russia-spy-hybrid-attack/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/27/norway-russia-spy-hybrid-attack/ |
Date Lab: No French-and-runs here
Adam is 32 and director of public policy for an anti-hunger organization. His dream date is with a “founder of a successful mission-driven nonprofit who speaks multiple languages.” Emily is 33 and a public defender. Her dream date is with “a tattooed, bearded urban cowboy chef with an accent and a heart of gold.” (Daniele Seiss/The Washington Post)
Emily and Adam are two people who understand the particular assignment of Date Lab. In their own ways, they’ve been studying for it. Adam is a big fan of “Married at First Sight,” the reality TV show in which literal strangers are set up to wed upon meeting. Meanwhile, earlier this year, someone sent Emily a Date Lab column, and it ignited an obsession that launched her far into the depths of our archive. And now, having read so many of these accounts, Emily is paying it forward by providing entertainment to Date Lab’s readers. “I feel like I’m giving back to the community,” she told me, laughing. During her post-date interview, she referred to notes she took for accuracy upon arriving home.
Emily and Adam (33 and 32, respectively) entered Quattro Osteria in Shaw already aligned in many ways. They’re both out of long-term relationships that ended about a year ago, give or take. Neither is looking to settle, and they’re both having fun dating. Date Lab did not interrupt fun’s flow for either of them. In short, they showed up with great attitudes and benefited handsomely.
There was not an awkward moment on their nearly six-hour date, which, go figure, kicked off with mutual attraction. Emily thought Adam was “very cute” upon setting eyes on him, referencing his smile and facial hair in particular. As they were being photographed for this article, Adam called Emily a “beautiful woman.” At the time, Emily wasn’t sure whether Adam was just saying that or really meant it. It turns out he did mean it, or at least he was still using those very words to describe her when I spoke to him days later.
They were well lubricated by design after opting to go with a heavy-on-the-drinks distribution of their meal budget, ordering a relatively light dinner mostly consisting of snacks (a burrata salad and charcuterie). They shared a single pasta dish, the pappardelle quattro ragu.
Emily described the conversation as “organic” despite covering several topics in rapid succession. She is a public defender and tends to lead with her abolitionism when describing her work; this helps to weed out potential adversaries to her cause. “I don’t believe in prisons. I am motivated every day by keeping as many people out of the system as I possibly can,” she said with pride.
Adam was impressed with Emily’s career and reasons for it. He is director of public policy for an anti-hunger organization, and wanted to get into that work because he grew up poor. He mentioned early in the date that he went to Harvard for graduate school, something he is extremely proud of after his humble beginnings. “I grew up in a double-wide trailer, I went to community college, and went to a state school,” he told me. Emily said that Adam’s pronounced confidence “didn’t come off as cocky to me at all,” and that it made her feel comfortable. “It makes me nervous when other people are nervous,” she said. In fact, she matched his confidence: Adam described Emily’s presence as “strong.”
After throwing back three cocktails each (plus some sparkling rosé the owner of Quattro Osteria welcomed them with), sharing a lot of laughs, and engaging in some flirting, they began strategizing about where they should go next. In a conscious effort to set themselves apart from the Date Lab pack, Adam decided he’d get his nose pierced (again) and they commenced calling local tattoo and piercing joints. But every place they tried in the area was already closed by 9:30 p.m. on a Tuesday, around when they were wrapping up. They settled on drinks at the nearby bar Ivy and Coney.
There, instead of sitting across from Emily, Adam elected to sidle up next to her while they drank their Guinnesses. They discussed dating in D.C. The conclusion? Neither of them are thirsty. “Without being self-centered, I think both of us probably don’t have a hard time meeting people. We’re both outgoing, friendly, hot people,” said Emily.
As if to provide an illustration, Adam at one point returned from the bathroom and asked Emily if she’d like to kiss him. She said she would and so they did. “There was tongue,” reported Emily. They hung out a bit longer. No French-and-runs here. Adam finally said, “All right, shall we?” To which Emily replied: “Where are we going?” Home, Emily! It’s 11 p.m. on a Tuesday.
Having swapped spit, it seemed only right to swap numbers. They began texting immediately and, a few days after the date, were already figuring out when they could meet next. Though their piercing dreams were dashed, Emily and Adam ultimately distinguished themselves by simply being extremely into each other. The Date Lab bar has been reset.
Adam: 4.5 [out of 5].
Emily: 5.
They’ve been texting, but haven’t got together again — yet. | 2022-10-27T15:02:24Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Date Lab: No French-and-runs here - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2022/10/27/date-lab-no-french-and-runs-here/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2022/10/27/date-lab-no-french-and-runs-here/ |
Did we need NAEP to tell us students aren’t doing well?
Analysis by Valerie Strauss
The newly released results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) have sparked a tsunami of alarmed responses. (iStock)
After several years of a pandemic that upended schooling for millions of children, standardized test scores are coming back and the results are — can you guess? — bad. In most places, really bad, meaning much lower than before the pandemic. That’s what we just learned from the newly released results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), which have sparked a tsunami of alarmed responses.
From Education Secretary Miguel Cardona: “The results released today from the National Assessment of Educational Progress are appalling, unacceptable, and a reminder of the impact that this pandemic has had on our learners.”
Cheryl Oldham, U.S. Chamber of Commerce vice president of education policy: “This is a wake-up call for our country — for policymakers, leaders in public education, and the business community. These results show that learning loss has risen to historic levels in part due to the impact of the pandemic, which only exacerbated existing failures in the education system.”
A wake-up call? Did we really need millions of dollars worth of standardized test scores to reveal that students were badly impacted by the pandemic? Ask most teachers and they can give you a clear picture of the achievement of their students without a standardized test. The thing is that in the United States, teachers don’t get asked much about education when key decisions are being made about teaching and learning.
We have been hearing from school districts since the start of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020 that students were hit hard by the disruption in their schooling. Students aren’t shy about admitting it. Teacher-created tests show it, as do state standardized test results. Student health clinics and mental health professionals are inundated with young people suffering from pandemic school closures and the resulting social isolation and disruption to their lives. Did anybody expect average test scores to do anything but drop?
The hysteria over NAEP reflects our continued obsession with standardized testing, which began with the 2002 No Child Left Behind law and has shown no evidence of helping improve schools. The results — which can’t explain the “why” part of achievement levels rising, falling or staying the same — keep telling us what we already know.
NAEP is often referred to as “the nation’s report card” or the “gold standard” in student assessment because it is seen as the most consistent nationally representative measure of U.S. student achievement since the 1990s. The National Center for Education Statistics, which administers NAEP, says the exams can assess what students “know and can do.”
Why Virginia Gov. Youngkin is wrong about student NAEP scores
It is administered every two years to groups of U.S. students in the fourth and eighth grades — said to be randomly selected — and less frequently to high school students. Tests are given every other year in math and reading and less frequently in science, writing, the arts, civics, economics, geography, technology and engineering literacy, and U.S. history.
NAEP assessments sort student scores into three achievement levels — basic, proficient, and advanced; test results also show students who score below the basic level. Peggy G. Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, which funds and administers NAEP, has said repeatedly that if people want to know how many students are performing at grade level, they should be looking at the “basic” benchmark. The NAEP website says the same thing. “The NAEP proficient level is intended to reflect solid academic performance and is not intended to match the proficiency levels set by state departments of education. Additionally, it does not signify ‘being on grade level.’"
NAEP results are often misinterpreted (which you can read about here); when students score at the “proficient” level on NAEP, many take that to mean they are “proficient” at their grade level, but that isn’t the case. Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) made that mistake this year when he released a report on Virginia students’ achievement that was based largely on a misreading of NAEP scores.
According to state NAEP results released Monday, student scores this year declined across the country in reading and math in fourth and eighth grade to levels seen some two decades ago. Carr said the results provide the “clearest picture yet” of the impacts of the coronavirus pandemic on learning. What is also clear is that average NAEP scores have been essentially flat for at least a decade, going up in some cities and down in others.
New state standardized test scores, which are supposedly aligned with school curriculum, unlike NAEP, already have shown entirely predictable declines in academic performance. FutureEd, an education think tank located at Georgetown University, analyzed results from standardized testing conducted this past spring year in 39 states. It found that all but six of those states that released testing results saw declines in overall proficiency rates in math and English language arts from 2019.
Meanwhile, reaction to the NAEP results are, not surprisingly, being used to push education agendas.
Jeb Bush, former governor of Florida who pioneered standardized test-based accountability systems more than two decades ago, blamed “the system” for the low scores, not the pandemic. “I am certain the right policy with unflinching resolve can provide a pathway forward.”
When national 2022 NAEP scores were released last month (Monday’s were state-specific), Walter Blanks, press secretary for the nonprofit advocacy group American Federation for Children, which was co-founded by former education secretary Betsy DeVos, blamed teachers’ unions for the drop because they pushed schools to stay closed. Some local unions did; others didn’t.
But if they were to blame for declining NAEP scores, you would expect regional NAEP results differences depending on the influence of unions. Carol Burris, a former award-winning principal and executive director of the nonprofit advocacy group Network for Public Education, noted after the September NAEP score release that “there is only [a] one-point difference in the scores’ drops between the union-heavy northeast and the right-to-work dominated south. And Western states, where unions are prevalent in the most populous states, saw much smaller score drops than the south.”
What you need to know about standardized testing
James Harvey, an education policy analyst and immediate past executive director of the nonprofit National Superintendents Roundtable, noted, “It’s tempting to find fault and point fingers: the schools, the unions, the Centers for Disease Control, the secretary of education, or the man in the Oval Office. All of us enjoy the satisfaction of finding someone to blame. Our focus must be on building responses to the toxic educational effects of the pandemic. How do we find extra time for all students to help make up for what they have lost? What about counseling and mental health services? Retaining teachers who are leaving politicized classrooms and luring back those who have fled? How can we build a national capacity for individual tutoring?”
Harry Feder, executive director of the National Center for Fair & Open Testing, a nonprofit known as FairTest that advocates against the misuse and abuse of standardized testing, said the results “are not a simple product of one particular factor or policy.”
“Test scores cannot be the sole measure of school quality, as inputs, attendance, surveys of stakeholder satisfaction, success of graduates, and a variety of other factors should go into that determination. Nor should declining NAEP scores be used to conclude that public education is a failure,” he wrote.
“In 2022, the overriding factor in any unusually large decline from 2019 to 2022 can be boiled down to one word — covid. Above all, the NAEP results shouldn’t precipitate a call for more tests.” | 2022-10-27T16:08:03Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Did we need NAEP to tell us students aren’t doing well? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/10/27/what-naep-scores-dont-tell-us/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/10/27/what-naep-scores-dont-tell-us/ |
This image provided by the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department shows an AR-15-style rifle used by a 19-year-old gunman who killed a teacher and a 15-year-old girl at a St. Louis high school on Monday, Oct. 24, 2022. The gunman was armed with an AR-15-style rifle and what appeared to be more than 600 rounds of ammunition, Police Commissioner Michael Sack said Tuesday, Oct. 25, 2022. (St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department via AP) (Uncredited/St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department) | 2022-10-27T16:08:59Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Police: Gun taken away earlier was used in school shooting - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/police-gun-taken-away-earlier-was-used-in-school-shooting/2022/10/27/72d20702-5608-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/police-gun-taken-away-earlier-was-used-in-school-shooting/2022/10/27/72d20702-5608-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html |
Mike Davis, who chronicled L.A. and warned of disaster, dies at 76
Mike Davis, an author, activist and self-defined “Marxist environmentalist” whose greatest fears drove him to anticipate riots, fires, pandemics and other disasters, especially in Los Angeles, died Oct. 25 in San Diego. He was 76.
His death was announced by his friend Jon Wiener, a historian who eulogized Mr. Davis in a tribute for the Nation magazine and previously partnered with him to write “Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties” (2020). Mr. Davis revealed over the summer that he was terminally ill with esophageal cancer.
“Although I’m famous as a pessimist, I really haven’t been pessimistic,” he told the Los Angeles Times, which called him the prophet Jeremiah of Southern California. “You know, [my writing has] more been a call to action. An attempt to elicit righteous anger against those whom we should be righteously angry against. But now, there is a certain sense of doom. This is not the time or history that my kids should inherit, you know?”
Raised in San Diego County, Mr. Davis came from a working-class and conservative background, and was a onetime member of the military-oriented Devil Pups youth program. Radicalized by the civil rights movement, he volunteered for the Congress of Racial Equality, burned his draft card to protest the 1965 U.S. invasion of the Dominican Republic, joined the Communist Party and became an organizer for the left-wing group Students for a Democratic Society.
“I was like Zelig in the events of the period,” he told the New Yorker in 2020. “I was at every demonstration and several riots, just there in the crowd, rank and file.”
Mr. Davis was faulted at times for ideological bias and errors in his books, but his dark takes on Los Angeles and broader subjects often proved justified. His 1990 book “City of Quartz” condemned the race and class divides of Los Angeles and labeled the city a “carceral” society, prisonlike and overseen by an oppressive police force. The police beating of Rodney King in 1991, and the riots following the 1992 acquittal of his attackers, made his book seem like prophecy.
His later works included “Ecology of Fear” (1998), which foresaw the growing catastrophe of wildfires in California, and “The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu” (2005), which warned that a deadly pandemic was increasingly likely.
Michael Ryan Davis was born in Fontana, Calif., on March 10, 1946. His father worked as a meat cutter, and Mr. Davis followed him into the business before working in his 20s as a truck driver.
He later graduated from the University of California at Los Angeles and moved to Britain, where he was editor of the New Left Review in the 1980s before coming to Los Angeles to drive trucks and eventually write and teach.
Mr. Davis was divorced four times before marrying Alessandra Moctezuma. She survives him, as do their twin children, James and Cassandra Davis; and two children from his earlier marriages, Jack and Róisín Davis, according to the Times.
In the New Yorker interview, Mr. Davis said capitalism was unfit to handle public health and environmental disaster, but still believed a better world was possible.
“This seems an age of catastrophe, but it’s also an age equipped, in an abstract sense, with all the tools it needs,” he said. “Utopia is available to us. If, like me, you lived through the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, you can never discard hope.” | 2022-10-27T16:09:05Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Mike Davis, who chronicled L.A. and warned of disaster, dies at 76 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/10/27/author-mike-davis-dead/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/10/27/author-mike-davis-dead/ |
Garland stands up for the First Amendment — and our democracy
By Fred Ryan
Attorney General Merrick Garland at his offices at the Justice Department on May 3 in D.C. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
Fred Ryan is publisher of The Post.
The press is criticized — often correctly — for paying attention only when public officials do wrong. When leaders go to great lengths to right those wrongs, we must be just as vociferous in our praise. This is why the new protections for the news media announced Wednesday by Attorney General Merrick Garland deserve recognition and gratitude — not only from institutions like The Post, but from every American who benefits from the accountability and oversight that a free press provides.
We at The Post were disturbed by revelations in May 2021 that the Trump Justice Department had secretly obtained the home, cell and office telephone records of three Post journalists in an effort to identify confidential sources who had informed their reporting. A month later, we discovered that, instead of immediately suspending attempts to interfere in journalists’ work, the Biden Justice Department had continued to target other news outlets.
As I wrote at the time, these practices indicated a worrying disregard for the First Amendment — and posed a serious threat to the free flow of information upon which our democracy relies.
Incompetence and abuses of power don’t reveal themselves; exposing them requires the courage of witnesses in government to assume the personal and professional risk of speaking out. If these individuals know that no contact with a reporter can be considered confidential, they simply will not come forward. Citizens will lose access to the information they need to decide whether those they’ve entrusted with power should keep it.
As soon as the administration’s efforts were brought to light, the attorney general and his staff responded. They sought input from news organizations and other institutions devoted to press freedom and worked to address issues of concern. On Wednesday, the department issued historic updates to its regulations that will protect newsgathering from the government overreach that has proved so troubling in the past.
Under the new rules, the Justice Department will no longer use compulsory legal process — including subpoenas, search warrants and certain court orders — to obtain information or records relating to newsgathering activities by members of the media. Whereas previously, federal law enforcement could seek this information if it was deemed important to a leak investigation, now these measures will be reserved for extremely narrow circumstances, typically involving immediate danger to citizens’ lives and safety.
The Post and other responsible news organizations appreciate the tension between the government’s constitutional obligations to respect the First Amendment and to provide for the common defense. We recognize that balancing these imperatives can be difficult. This is why the journalists we entrust with covering our national security agencies are among our most experienced and discreet. And it’s why news organizations take great care to ensure that our reporting does not recklessly put lives at risk. The new regulations attend to this balance: They do not inhibit the government’s ability to act on immediate threats or give reporters license to break the law or special treatment outside the scope of their constitutionally protected work.
The new rules also reflect a more accurate understanding of how today’s reporters operate. Protections have been expanded to include not just the passive receipt of information but also the proactive working of sources that encourages those who have observed wrongdoing to step forward. Acknowledging the changing nature of journalism in the 21st century, actions like setting up a secure channel for receiving classified information — such as Signal or anonymous digital drop-boxes — are recognized by the new rules to be a normal, protected part of reporters’ jobs. And in an era when the images recorded by a bystander with a mobile phone can revolutionize the world, “close or novel” questions about what counts as “newsgathering” will now be elevated directly to the attorney general — ensuring they receive the attention and prioritization they deserve.
The fact that these crucial protections are now enshrined in federal regulation is important. These rules will be official procedure for the Justice Department, and we trust that staff at all levels will apply them. Yet there remains the risk that a future administration — one less respectful of citizens’ First Amendment rights — might eliminate these new safeguards. The best way to defend against this vulnerability is for Congress to give these protections the force of law.
Just as self-government requires citizens to know when officeholders abuse their power, democracy requires that the people know when their leaders wield power wisely and well. While it gives those of us in the news media no pleasure to report the former, it’s worth celebrating examples of the latter — occasions when those in government stand up for the values that make our country unique. The attorney general’s new safeguards for press freedom certainly qualify. | 2022-10-27T16:09:17Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Fred Ryan: Garland stands up for the First Amendment and our democracy - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/27/merrick-garland-press-regulations/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/27/merrick-garland-press-regulations/ |
The legal system is working better against Trump than you might think
Former president Donald Trump speaks at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando on Feb. 26. (Chandan Khanna/AFP/Getty Images)
This might surprise some skeptics, but the judicial system is working fairly well to address lawless MAGA characters, including Donald Trump.
Even the Supreme Court, which has gone off the rails to achieve right-wing partisan ends, has not bailed out the former president. The court recently rebuffed his appeal of a ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit allowing the investigation into documents at his Mar-a-Lago Club to proceed. This and other cases involving Trump should give Americans confidence about the ability to hold him and his cronies accountable.
As of this month, more than 880 people have been arrested and charged with crimes stemming from the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, the Justice Department reports. More than 400 pleaded guilty while “[a]pproximately 280 federal defendants have had their cases adjudicated and received sentences for their criminal activity on Jan. 6. Approximately 152 have been sentenced to periods of incarceration.”
In fact, every case that has gone to a jury has resulted in conviction. The Justice Department reports, “21 individuals have been found guilty at contested trials, including one who was found guilty in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia. Another 5 individuals have been convicted following an agreed-upon set of facts. Nine of these 26 defendants were found guilty of assaulting, resisting, or impeding officers.”
Substantial sentences have been handed out, including a 10-year sentence for a former New York City police officer. In the current trial of Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes and four cohorts, conviction on a single seditious conspiracy charge could carry a 20-year prison term. Former Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon was also convicted of contempt of Congress, the first such conviction in decades.
And the investigation into the coup attempt continues. The Justice Department has executed search warrants to seize phones and other records from a wide variety of figures, including former Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark and Trump lawyer John Eastman. Federal prosecutors have also marched senior aides from Trump’s White House before a grand jury, including top aides to former vice president Mike Pence.
The Justice Department is now going to court to breach the “firewall” of privilege to compel figures such as former White House counsel Pat Cipollone and former deputy White House counsel Patrick Philbin to testify fully about their interactions with Trump. (Both provided some testimony to the House Jan. 6 select committee.)
Moreover, previous attempts to block subpoenas based on attorney-client privilege have failed. Federal Judge David Carter has repeatedly found that there is a basis to find that Trump and Eastman engaged in possible crimes, thereby eliminating the privilege claim Eastman raised.
In Georgia, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis has moved full-steam ahead with a criminal investigation into Trump’s attempt to pressure state officials into “finding” enough votes to flip the state to him. Courts have upheld subpoenas for a long list of Trump enablers to testify, including former Trump lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani, former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and a batch of phony electors. Federal courts have also ordered Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) to testify, though Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas temporarily blocked the subpoena.
Massive cases against Trump and his business are also underway in New York, including one criminal tax fraud case against his company and one civil suit against him and others stemming from allegedly inflated and fraudulent property evaluations (which he has denied). Adverse verdicts may effectively shut down his businesses in New York. While the New York City district attorney has not brought criminal charges against Trump, its office has received a referral from the New York attorney general.
Finally, there’s the Mar-a-Lago case. The Justice Department received its search warrant based on probable cause that classified documents were stashed at the former president’s estate. Trump’s lame attempt to stymie the investigation sputtered; Judge Aileen Cannon’s widely panned ruling to stop the Justice Department from proceeding was thwarted at the 11th Circuit and then rejected unanimously and without comment from the Supreme Court.
Retired judge Raymond Dearie, tasked by Cannon to serve as special master to review the documents, has rebuked Trump’s efforts to raise bogus privilege claims. A final showdown on those claims is set for Nov. 8. Nothing Cannon has done would prevent the Justice Department from bringing felony charges against Trump for violating the Espionage Act or for obstructing justice.
Witnesses are feeling squeezed in that case, too. The New York Times reports, “Federal prosecutors investigating former president Donald J. Trump’s handling of national security documents he took with him from the White House have ratcheted up their pressure in recent weeks on key witnesses in the hopes of gaining their testimony.” As Just Security’s Ryan Goodman tweeted, the Justice Department “appears to be narrowing in on criminal target: Trump.”
In other words, the legal system has steadily moved along despite threats of violence and massive disinformation. Norman Eisen, a Brookings Institution fellow and former counsel to the House impeachment managers during Trump’s first impeachment hearing, observes, “Certainly, we would all like all of this to move more quickly, but it is moving and may well produce charges in the months ahead.”
Attorney General Merrick Garland is following the facts and the law all the way to the Oval Office. State prosecutors in Georgia and New York have taken their duties seriously, pushing forward on multiple fronts. Trump’s wealth certainly allows him to employ a raft of lawyers to throw up delay after delay. But that wealth — sapped by monstrous legal fees and subject to a possible civil verdict in New York — has not insulated him from the risk of prosecution.
The cases stemming from the coup attempt, Trump finances and the Mar-a-Lago search are not complete. That’s not necessarily any surprise given the scope and seriousness of each inquiry. By the same token, no one has decided to halt the investigations simply because Trump is a former president.
That should give Americans confidence in prosecutors and the courts. We might still be a nation of laws. | 2022-10-27T16:09:23Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | The legal system is working better against Trump than you might think - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/27/trump-courts-legal-system-working/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/27/trump-courts-legal-system-working/ |
Fox News host Tucker Carlson leaves the stage after talking about “Populism and the Right” during the National Review Institute's Ideas Summit in March 2019 in Washington, D.C. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
It’s important to understand that Fox News host Tucker Carlson doesn’t see the fight for power in the United States as pitting red America against blue America. It’s not really about Democrats versus Republicans. It is in his view instead a battle between a cluster of elites and the rest of America. There’s overlap between those two struggles — the elites are mostly liberal in his estimation and their opponents are mostly Republican — but the fight he’s engaged in isn’t a partisan one.
So when Carlson arrives at an explicit embrace of the idea that Americans should reject the results of a close election if the Democrat wins, as he has multiple times in recent days, he gets there by a different path than others on the right. But the important thing, given the size and composition of his audience, is that he nonetheless gets there.
On Wednesday night, the vehicle for his complaints was the debate performance of Pennsylvania Senate candidate Lt. Gov. John Fetterman (D). By now you’ve likely heard both that Fetterman had a stroke earlier this year and probably that the effects of that stroke were apparent during the debate. Carlson joined the rest of his network in scoffing at the idea that Fetterman could therefore serve in the Senate — “there is no chance that under any imaginable circumstances John Fetterman could … serve in the U.S. Senate,” Carlson insisted — but differed in that he used Fetterman’s disability as a vehicle for bashing both doctors and the media. You know, the “elites.”
The doctor who wrote that Fetterman was “continuing to improve” from his stroke was a liar, Carlson said — conveniently leaving out that the letter also mentioned Fetterman’s challenges in communication. Instead, he pretended that the physician had written that “John Fetterman was as sharp and as healthy as you or me, as anyone in America,” in Carlson’s paraphrasing.
But the point of adjudicating this wasn’t Fetterman. It was returning to his efforts to downplay medical and scientific expertise, something that most commonly manifests on his show as anti-vaccine rhetoric.
“If you’re a physician, are you allowed to lie for partisan reasons?” Carlson said. “Don’t we have enough of that in this country?”
Then Carlson went after the response to an NBC News interview with Fetterman, which noted his challenges in communicating. Carlson cherry-picked frustrated responses to the report from opinion writers and hosts — people who have his job, in other words, and all of them women — to present them as “the media” at large trying to bring NBC back to heel for Team Liberal Elites. That his claim wasn’t supported by the evidence he presented was irrelevant, as it always is. He says vitriolic, untrue stuff and staples representatives of the out-group to his words and then goes to commercial break.
It’s worth noting here that Carlson is not simply a guy who has a TV show. He is a guy who has a TV show on a heavily watched network — a show that is consistently among the most watched on that network. He is a guy who is viewed much more favorably by Republicans than hosts like Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert. Eight in 10 Republicans have an opinion of him; of those, 9 in 10 view him at least somewhat favorably.
What’s more, Republicans view him as truthful — despite Fox News’s own attorneys telling a court in 2020 that his show did not involve his “stating actual facts.” About 3 in 10 Republicans didn’t have an opinion as to whether Carlson was helping or hurting the country when asked by YouGov in May, but among those who did, three-quarters said he was helping the country.
How does he leverage his platform? Elevating spurious allegations about immigrants, the threat to White America, the Jan. 6 riot, the vaccines, elites elites elites. And, with the midterms looming, about confidence in the election results.
“The Democratic Party has such contempt for voters and for democracy itself and so much confidence in its ownership of the media and of Big Tech that it no longer has to try to win your votes,” Carlson said. “... They can even run mentally defective candidates who can barely speak and not only expect them to win but expect you to accept the outcome, no matter how transparently absurd it is.”
“On November 9th,” he continued, “they’ll be telling you that John Fetterman got 81 million votes in Pennsylvania and they’ll threaten to put you in jail if you don’t believe it. Why wouldn’t they do that? It worked with Joe Biden.” Then he introduced Glenn Greenwald.
That “it worked with Joe Biden,” is telling, certainly. Carlson was one of the rare voices on the right who, in the weeks after the 2020 election, treated claims of fraud with explicit scrutiny. When Donald Trump’s attorney Sidney Powell wanted to come on the air to hype her ludicrous and debunked claims of rampant fraud using voting machines, Carlson asked for evidence and called her out when it didn’t come. (This has come back to haunt his employer.) But it serves his purposes in the moment to suggest that the results that year were dubious.
When he hosted Arizona Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake last week, he did something similar, casting her as a rebel against a media hegemony with which she was tangentially associated and intimating that any election Lake lost was not one that could be trusted. Then, too, it wasn’t really that the voting would be tainted, just that the elites were going to writhe their tentacles and change the result.
You see that in his Fetterman rant. Carlson willfully conflated Fetterman’s obvious communications issue with broader cognitive ones, suggesting at one point that the candidate shouldn’t be allowed to operate a microwave. He wanted to reinforce the idea that Fetterman couldn’t win on the merits (even as he noted how partisanship could boost mediocre candidates to victory). Because he wanted to depict The Elites as omnipotent and nefarious.
It’s the same argument that Arizona Republican Senate candidate Blake Masters makes, as Carlson highlighted in a gushing half-hour show that aired on Fox News’s streaming platform this week: The 2020 election was tainted by elite liberal power, not illegal votes. And Carlson is helping set the stage for his allies and Republicans to cast any undesired outcome next month as invalid.
Millions of people watch his show and hear his arguments. He’s viewed favorably, as honest, as helping the nation. And this is what he’s saying. | 2022-10-27T16:09:36Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Tucker Carlson’s war on the ‘elites’ now embraces election denialism - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/27/fox-news-tucker-carlson-elections/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/27/fox-news-tucker-carlson-elections/ |
Lawmakers and aides were blindsided by the release of a letter to the president Monday that was eventually withdrawn after questions about the timing and intent
Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), chairwoman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, has had her leadership called into question after the release of a letter that was drafted in July. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
This article has been updated to correct that some signatories sit on foreign relations committees, not the Foreign Relations Committee.
It has also brought into question Jayapal’s leadership ability as she weighs launching a bid challenging Rep. Katherine M. Clark (D-Mass.) if the second position in leadership opens up next term.
Without the backdrop of escalated talks of nuclear warfare, co-signers — some of whom serve on foreign relations-related committees — publicly noted that they would not have signed onto the letter today. Rep. Sara Jacobs (D-Calif.) tweeted, “Timing in diplomacy is everything.” Rep. Mark Takano (D-Calif.), who chairs the House Foreign Affairs Committee, put out a statement clarifying that he has “remained steadfast in support of the Ukrainian people” and Biden’s leadership. | 2022-10-27T16:09:42Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Jayapal draws ire of Democrats over Ukraine letter - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/27/jayapal-ukraine-letter/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/27/jayapal-ukraine-letter/ |
Ukraine live briefing: Putin decries Western ‘liberal elites,’ address nucl...
Television anchor and journalist Ksenia Sobchak, seen in 2021. (Evgenia Novozhenina/Reuters)
Sobchak, 40, who earned fame as a reality TV star and has been known over the years as a Russian “It Girl” and Russia’s Paris Hilton, is the daughter of St. Petersburg’s first post-Soviet mayor, Anatoly Sobchak.
Anatoly Sobchak, who died in 2000, was Putin’s boss and political mentor. In 1990, Sobchak hired then-KGB agent Putin as a deputy mayor, and the two families remained close throughout the decade.
Ksenia Sobchak now runs the “Ostorozhno Novosti” project, which includes a network of Telegram news channels, a podcast studio, a YouTube channel and Sobchak’s own social media page. She has long straddled a fence between Russia’s political elite and its liberal political opposition, creating some distrust of her from both camps. In 2018, she ran for president against Putin, winning about 2 percent of votes.
Sobchak’s current legal troubles seemed to reflect tension within the well-connected elite as well as the climate of heightened anxiety amid Russia’s ongoing war in Ukraine. It also highlighted the urgency many well-to-do Russians feel about obtaining dual citizenship and a second passport.
Sobchak fled to Belarus and then Lithuania, which is a member of the European Union and along with the other Baltic states of Latvia and Estonia, is effectively closed to Russian travelers — even those with previously issued visas permitting them to enter the European Union’s Schengen travel zone. Only dual citizens or Russian nationals with humanitarian visas and residency permits can enter.
But Sobchak, who is partly of Jewish heritage, used her Israeli passport to cross the border, Lithuania’s Interior Ministry confirmed Thursday. A video from a surveillance camera emerged on Telegram channels showing Sobchak entering Lithuania on foot and talking to border officials.
Earlier this week, police raided Sobchak’s residency outside Moscow and arrested her commercial director, Kirill Sukhanov, who was ordered to be held in pretrial detention until late December.
The state-run news agency Tass, citing case records, reported that investigators accused Sukhanov and Romanovsky of publishing a post on one of the Telegram channels, “containing information that could cause significant harm to rights and legitimate interests” of Chemezov and of then demanding 11 million rubles (about $180,000) to delete the post.
Investigators also implicated Sobchak in the extortion scheme, Tass reported, and issued a warrant for her arrest, but she eluded them. “She left Moscow late Tuesday night, at first buying tickets online to Dubai and Turkey to confuse the operatives,” the report said, citing unnamed law-enforcement sources.
In a statement, Sobchak rejected the accusations. “What extortion, from who? What does any of this have to do with Rostec,” Sobchak wrote on her Telegram blog. “It is obvious that this is a raid on my editorial office, the last free editorial office in Russia, which had to be shut down.”
“Hopefully, it’s not the case, and this is all a misunderstanding,” she added, hewing to a diplomatic line that would seem to allow for the investigators pursuing her to be overruled by higher authorities.
It is not the first time that Sobchak’s home has been raided by law enforcement, nor is it the first time she has alleged an effort to silence her as a commentator and opposition figure.
Sobchak famously answered the door for the police wearing a negligee, and the agents confiscated roughly $1.5 million in cash, in dollars and euros, from her safe. She later told journalists, “They’re out to silence me.”
Sobchak is a polarizing figure in Russian independent media and opposition circles. She first gained prominence as a reality TV host in the early 2000s, establishing scandalous image compared to Russia’s Hilton — a comparison she came to disdain.
She rebranded herself as an opposition figure after participating in the “white ribbon” anti-Kremlin protests that erupted in late 2011 and continued in 2012 over election fraud and Putin’s subsequent return to the presidency after four years in which he had relegated the top job to Dmitry Medvedev, while serving instead as prime minister.
Putin over the years has often faced “loyal” opponents in his presidential contests, and the Russian opposition cast Sobchak’s decision to run in 2018 as a ploy by the Kremlin to siphon away liberal votes and create a facade of democracy after officials barred Navalny, Putin’s chief nemesis, from running.
“From the makers of ‘Sobchak on Bolotnaya’ and ‘Sobchak the President’, watch out for the comedy show ‘Sobchak In Opposition 3.0,’ ” tweeted Ivan Zhdanov, a Navalny ally and director of his Anti-Corruption Foundation. “Those who will buy into this once again are either not very smart or have bad intent,” wrote Zhdanov, who is living in exile in Vilnius, Lithuania, to avoid arrest. “Don’t get fooled.”
“Sobchak had a huge audience and she without a doubt offered it liberal and Western ideas,” Rodnyansky wrote. “In the conditions of the war and a systematic destruction of the civil society, anyone who must flee persecution deserves to be supported, in my opinion.” | 2022-10-27T16:25:09Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Ksenia Sobchak, Russian TV star linked to Putin, fled using Israeli passport - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/27/ksenia-sobchak-fled-israeli-putin-lithuania/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/27/ksenia-sobchak-fled-israeli-putin-lithuania/ |
Pedestrian killed in Fairfax County hit-and-run, police say
A pedestrian was killed late Wednesday night in Fairfax County in a hit-and-run, police said.
A driver struck the person in the 5600 block of Leesburg Pike in the Baileys Crossroads area, then fled, police said. Police did not identify the person killed.
The person died at the scene. | 2022-10-27T16:42:34Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Pedestrian killed in Fairfax County hit-and-run, police say - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/27/pedestrian-killed-baileys-crossroads/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/27/pedestrian-killed-baileys-crossroads/ |
Bryce Harper greets former teammate Jayson Werth before Game 5 of the National League Championship Series. (Mike Ehrmann/Getty Images)
Like most Washington Nationals fans, Dean Schleicher was upset the day Bryce Harper agreed to a record-setting 13-year, $330 million contract with the Philadelphia Phillies in February 2019. Harper was Washington’s homegrown, feisty, brash superstar, a worth-the-price-of-admission phenom others loved to hate. At 26 and after seven memorable seasons in D.C., he was headed to a division rival with a fan base Nationals supporters had good reason to despise, and he seemed poised to torment his former team long after his well-coiffed hair and beard turned gray.
Harper’s viral slip-up during his first news conference with the Phillies, when he famously said he “wanted to bring a title back to D.C.,” offered a brief and humorous respite from the initial disappointment, which prompted fans to deface their No. 34 jerseys and at least one family to rename their Goldendoodle. Months later, Schleicher, who tweeted the clip of Harper’s verbal gaffe, would relish the fact that the Nationals eliminated the Phillies from playoff contention in Harper’s first season in Philadelphia.
Svrluga: Bryce Harper lives for the spotlight. Now he's owning October.
Now, with Harper’s Phillies in the World Series, four wins from bringing a championship back to the City of Brotherly Love, Nationals fans are feeling all sorts of ways, from peeved, to indifferent, to even happy for the man who never won a playoff series with Washington. For some, time — and the Nationals’ 2019 title — heals all wounds.
“I saw my team win a World Series, so I’m not going to begrudge a former Nat to go get his ring,” Schleicher said. “I’m still a Bryce fan, and I think he’s been inappropriately maligned because fans hate Philadelphia.”
Peter Verasin became a casual Nationals fan when his wife’s family got season tickets in 2005 during the team’s inaugural season in D.C. Harper’s arrival in 2012 reignited his love of baseball, which had waned since Baltimore Orioles star Cal Ripken Jr. retired in 2001. Verasin, 41, was optimistic about Harper playing his entire career with Washington after watching him win the 2018 Home Run Derby in front of an adoring crowd at Nationals Park and then profess his love for the city, but instead was left to try to explain the business of sports to his Nats-loving children.
For Verasin, who flew to Houston on a whim to see the Nationals win the 2019 World Series, watching Harper during these playoffs has evoked memories of some of his best moments with Washington. He couldn’t help but smile when Harper hit a two-run opposite-field home run in the eighth inning of Game 5 of the NLCS to help the Phillies clinch a spot in the Fall Classic.
“Watching that home run, it was just like, ‘Man, how can you not root for him?’” Verasin said.
“Because he plays for the Phillies and he left us,” fellow Nationals fan Mike Stanton said when posed that question.
Stanton, a die-hard D.C. sports fan, had a slightly different reaction to the biggest hit of Harper’s career. It reminded him of when Pittsburgh Penguins star Sidney Crosby scored the overtime winner for Canada against the United States in the gold medal game of the 2010 Olympics.
“Like, why did it have to be him?” Stanton said.
Stanton hasn’t forgiven Harper for signing with the Phillies, even though he understands the financial reasons that led to him leaving the Nationals. Harper wanted to remain in D.C., but as The Washington Post reported after he signed with Philadelphia, the Lerner family offered him a heavily deferred 12-year, $250-million contract, with the last payment coming in 2072.
“I understand fans are upset that he plays for the rival, but he went to the rival because what choice did he have?” said Schleicher, who called the Nationals’ offer to Harper laughable and insincere.
“I was disappointed that he signed with the Phillies but I understood it was his decision to make and he did what he thought was best,” said Melissa Moss, who named her cat Bryce in 2018 and kept his name after Harper left town. “I have no resentment toward him at all.”
Still, Stanton and plenty of other Nationals fans couldn’t help but feel spurned. Harper was showered with boos in his return to Nationals Park, just as former Phillies outfielder Jayson Werth was for years by the Philadelphia faithful after he signed with the Nationals.
Matt Schulman, who said he probably would have joined in the chorus of jeers were he in the ballpark for Harper’s first game back in D.C., said it’s been weird to see so many former Nationals in addition to Harper — including Max Scherzer, Josh Bell, Juan Soto and Trea Turner — in the postseason with different teams.
“I definitely wasn’t rooting for them,” Schulman, 31, said. “The adult part of me wants to be happy for them, because I liked these players a lot on the Nats and I should want them to do well, but I just don’t.”
Instead, Schulman found quiet joy in watching Scherzer surrender four home runs in the New York Mets’ Game 1 loss to the San Diego Padres in the opening round. In his mind, the Phillies breaking through, with Harper leading the way, was among the worst possible outcomes.
“It’s good for the sport, but as a Nats fan, you couldn’t have drawn up a more painful result than him going to the Phillies and being this hero and carrying them to the World Series,” Schulman said.
Unlike cheering for Soto and Bell on the Padres, rooting for Harper is complicated by the team he represents. Nationals fans’ deep-seated disdain for the Phillies and their fans dates back to when the nascent Nats stunk and Harper was a teenager hitting 500-foot home runs in high school showcases in the late 2000s.
“It was Citizens Bank South here,” Schleicher said of the Phillies fans who would pack the stands at RFK Stadium and Nationals Park — sometimes at the invitation of Washington’s team president. “It would have been a lot easier to see the Padres advance, because I wouldn’t have those twinges of pain when I see that stupid Phillie Phanatic dancing all around.”
Given the residual stench from the 2017 cheating scandal that hangs over the Astros, Philadelphia’s World Series opponent, rooting for Houston isn’t an obviously superior alternative, even with the presence of beloved former Nationals manager Dusty Baker.
Schleicher feels conflicted, but he will be cheering for the 73-year-old Baker to win his elusive first championship as a manager. Harper, he figures, should have more opportunities to win a ring, and he’ll be happy for him if he ever does. Moss will be rooting for Baker, too. Stanton and Schulman can’t stomach the thought of Harper hoisting the trophy, though the Nationals winning a title without him takes some of the sting out of the possibility.
Verasin, who sees some parallels between this Phillies team and the 2019 Nationals, said he’ll be pulling for Harper to go all the way. There are more Nationals fans like him than could have been imagined in the immediate aftermath of Harper’s departure.
“It’s forgiveness, right?” he said. “You take the time to be mad or sad, but in the end you want the best for people — even your exes.” | 2022-10-27T16:59:59Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Nationals fans are conflicted about Bryce Harper in the World Series - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/27/bryce-harper-nationals-fans/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/27/bryce-harper-nationals-fans/ |
The rebound in US gross domestic product in the third quarter comes as a welcome surprise for Democrats heading into midterm elections, potentially putting to rest the notion that the country is already in a recession. But for workers and investors, the report isn’t quite so reassuring.
Consider the impact on public perception. GDP, arguably the most publicized economic statistic in America, had contracted in the previous two quarters, bolstering the argument that the US was already in a downturn, based of course on a flimsy rule-of-thumb definition of recession as two consecutive quarters of declining real growth. This year has been a master class in why rules of thumb are so perilous because the weak first-half numbers were driven by volatile inventory and trade components and could yet be revised to look much more benign.
For all practical purposes, the US almost certainly skirted recession in the first half of the year. The most palpable aspects of any recession are job losses and declining income, and unemployment has hovered near a five-decade low in the period while consumers, the US’s economic engine, have spent their money at a mostly steady pace. The US’s official arbiter of recessions, the National Bureau of Economic Research’s Business Cycle Dating Committee, defines recession as a “significant decline in economic activity that is spread across the economy and that lasts more than a few months.” As the committee makes clear, it will make its final call based on considerations of depth, duration and diffusion, and the apparent first-half contraction can’t possibly be considered diffuse.
It’s complicated, of course, and Republicans have done an effective job thus far of using the confusion to their advantage, with the odds growing that the party could seize control of both the House and Senate. Less than two weeks before midterms, Democrats have to be pleased that they have strong ammunition to counter the deceiving recession talking point. Of course, slick political discourse is a two-way street, and Democrats aren’t likely to fess up to the bad news about the future, either.
For markets, the latest numbers will give traders little solace. Final sales to domestic purchasers, a gauge that looks past the volatile inventory and trade components, rose just 0.5% in the third quarter. Residential investment is contracting, and formerly hardy consumer spending is starting to lose steam. In a sense, that’s the intended consequence of aggressive interest-rate increases meant to slow the worst inflation in 40 years; they take significant time to filter into the economy. With the Federal Reserve committed to stopping inflation, the most punishing consequences may well be several quarters in the future.
Meanwhile, another piece of data released Thursday morning — capital goods new orders, nondefense excluding aircraft and parts — fell a seasonally adjusted 0.7% in September, its second-biggest contraction since April 2020. The measure, although far more obscure than GDP, has proved helpful in assessing the direction of corporate earnings, and if the latest data is any guide, the US could be on the cusp of a turning point. Third-quarter earnings reports have painted a picture of a corporate America that isn’t quite falling apart yet but is bracing for a tough year ahead. Tellingly, the S&P 500 Index has reacted to the spate of mixed data by fluctuating between gains and losses.
All told, the bounce in GDP should put to rest a false and politically motivated narrative about the state of the economy, but it will do little to settle the debate about where it’s going. It won’t dissuade the Fed from forging ahead in its bid to raise interest rates to bring down inflation, and it leaves little settled as to whether the country is heading for a real recession — the kind that has tangible consequences on Americans’ livelihoods.
• Corporate America Faces a Compensation Conundrum: Karl W. Smith
• Consumers Are Starting to Crack Under Inflation: Andrea Felsted
• Fed Pullback? Not If It’s Watching the Bond Market: Conor Sen | 2022-10-27T17:39:18Z | www.washingtonpost.com | GDP Gives Hope to Democrats But Not Many Others - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/gdp-gives-hope-to-democrats-but-not-many-others/2022/10/27/6aa884cc-5615-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/gdp-gives-hope-to-democrats-but-not-many-others/2022/10/27/6aa884cc-5615-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html |
Three men from Miami are accused of stealing $9 million in meat and equipment. (Keith Srakocic/AP)
It started with stolen beef.
Nearly $400,000 of it, in two semi-trailers taken from a lot in Emerald, Neb., in June.
By the time authorities had finished tracing the missing steak, they’d uncovered what they say was an organized enterprise by three Florida men who pulled off about 45 thefts of meat and equipment over a year and a half.
Federal investigators allege that Yoslany Leyva Del Sol, Ledier Machin Andino, and Delvis L. Fuentes, all from the Miami area, stole $9 million in meat and equipment from beef and pork packaging plants in the Midwest. They were arrested Oct. 20 in Florida on charges related to thefts this month.
Authorities had spent more than a week tracking them across multiple states as a string of thefts occurred, according to a criminal complaint filed Oct. 21 by Homeland Security Investigations, the Department of Homeland Security’s investigative arm. When police detained them, they found pallets of stolen ham and pork in their trucks.
Though those thefts amounted to about $730,000 in meat, Homeland Security investigators said in a news release that the scheme had been much broader, operating since June 2021 and reaching $9 million in losses for various companies.
“We look forward to fighting the case,” Del Sol’s attorney, Alfredo Izaguirre, told The Washington Post. He said Del Sol would plead not guilty.
Attorneys for Fuentes and Andino did not immediately return emails from The Washington Post seeking comment.
In what authorities called a “sophisticated organized criminal enterprise,” the three men allegedly drove semi-trailers around Nebraska, Iowa, Minnesota, South Dakota, North Dakota and Wisconsin, stealing pallets of frozen meat and loading them in their tractor-trailers.
Court filings did not say what the men were alleged to have done with the stolen beef and pork or whether they resold it.
Cellphone data led authorities to the trio in June, after the frozen beef was stolen from the Nebraska plant, according to the criminal complaint. Phones registered to Fuentes, Del Sol and Andino were at the site of the theft, and surveillance footage showed them at a truck yard in the area.
Federal investigators, with a warrant, began tracking their phones. Two weeks ago, the men left Miami and drove three semi-tractors to Tennessee, according to the complaint.
On Oct. 13, they allegedly crossed into Iowa, where authorities covertly put GPS trackers on their trucks and watched as the trio slowly drove around trailer-truck lots. The next day, the men reached Sioux Falls, S.D.
That night, 19 pallets of ham were stolen from a company in Sioux Falls. The GPS trackers allegedly put Del Sol’s trailer at the site of the theft, as well as a spot where police later found the stolen trailer empty.
The next morning, the men allegedly drove to Worthington, Minn., where a similar pattern played out. First there was a theft from a warehouse of two semi-tractors and three pallet jacks, then later that night, two trailers from a meat company — each containing 22 pallets of pork worth $150,000.
Fuentes, Del Sol and Andino’s tracker pinged at the warehouse and the meat company, authorities contend, then showed them heading toward Miami.
They were driving about 48 hours later, when Fuentes was stopped by a Tennessee Highway Patrol officer around 2 a.m. on Oct. 18. The officer allegedly found 19 pallets of ham in the trailer, in boxes with labels that matched the products that had been stolen in Sioux Falls.
Fuentes handed over a bill of lading, meant to prove his lawful receipt of the goods, but the officer recognized it as a fake – the state of origin and transporting company listed were wrong, and it was only one page, “which is unusual in a shipment of meat,” the complaint said. It also didn’t match the actual bill of lading that the victim had provided.
Because Fuentes was not registered with the Department of Transportation to haul goods, the officer cited him for violations but didn’t arrest him. The three men continued driving while authorities monitored them until Oct. 20, when they reached Florida.
As they exited a highway, Florida state troopers followed them and pulled over Fuentes, who again showed the bill of lading and the ham. Nearby, police found Del Sol and Andino parked at a rest stop and inspected their trailers, which allegedly contained the same goods that had been reported stolen in Minnesota and South Dakota.
The men were arrested and detained in Miami. They have been released on bail, Izaguirre said, and are awaiting arraignments. | 2022-10-27T17:39:36Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Florida men allegedly stole $9 million in meat theft ring - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/10/27/florida-meat-theft-truckers/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/10/27/florida-meat-theft-truckers/ |
A group of visitors from the group “Pray for the Lou” places hands on the building during prayers Tuesday at the site of a school shooting at Central Visual & Performing Arts High School in St. Louis. (Robert Cohen/AP)
Days before a 19-year-old former student opened fire inside a St. Louis high school, killing two and injuring seven, his family called authorities to report he had a gun at home, police said.
When officers arrived at the residence at about 5 p.m. on Oct. 15, they confiscated the weapon from Orlando Harris and handed it to an adult who was lawfully able to carry it, interim St. Louis police commissioner Michael Sack said at a Wednesday news conference. Police did not identify the adult.
The gun is believed to be the same AR-15-style rifle Harris fired Monday inside the Central Visual and Performing Arts High School, Sack told reporters. But how Harris got the weapon back is a question detectives are still trying to answer.
“The mother at the time wanted it out of the house so they facilitated that,” Sack said. “How he acquired it after that, we don’t know.”
Police do not know for how long Harris possessed the weapon before his family called police to take it from him. Harris died Monday after a gunfight with police.
Police told The Washington Post in an email that on Oct. 15 — nine days before the shooting — officers who arrived at Harris’s residence deemed he was legally authorized to possess the gun. Police did not answer specific questions about why they handed the weapon to a third party or that person’s relationship to the suspect.
St. Louis school shooter carried AR-15-style weapon and 600 rounds
The new details about the legally obtained gun police say Harris used to target his alma mater come a day after authorities revealed the man carried 600 rounds of ammunition during the rampage and left a note inside the vehicle he drove to the school, hinting at a possible motive.
Sack read part of the note during a Tuesday news conference: “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.”
But new information shared by police on Wednesday shows Harris’s family worried about him, Sack said.
The family, who was aware he had a weapon and was concerned for him, went through his mail, checked his room and monitored his interactions with other people, police said.
“They had been working with mental health institutions in the local area,” Sack told reporters. “They hooked him up with medical professionals. They’d been supportive of him … They’ve done everything that they could have possibly done, but sometimes it’s not enough.” | 2022-10-27T17:39:42Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Police took away St. Louis shooter's rifle days before rampage. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/10/27/stlouis-highschool-shooter-gun-confiscated/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/10/27/stlouis-highschool-shooter-gun-confiscated/ |
Antiabortion and abortion rights activists protest outside the Supreme Court on June 8. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post)
The Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade this summer has changed the abortion debate in many ways. Mostly, Republicans have struggled to account for their hard-line positions now that they have the ability to enact them, and have retreated from those stances.
And perhaps the epitome of that dynamic is the sudden decline of the no-exceptions abortion opponent.
The Public Religion Research Institute came out Thursday with its regular American Values Survey, which is an extensive, frequent review of where Americans stand on a host of issues. It thus allows us a more complete window into how various issues change over time.
The findings on abortion are particularly striking.
Last decade, the number of Americans overall who said abortion should be illegal in all cases topped out at nearly 2 in every 10 Americans. But today, it’s down to just 8 percent.
Among Republicans, that number has dropped from as high as one-quarter all the way down to 11 percent today. And if you look at the chart, you’ll see when the sharp decline began: in June of this year. That survey was conducted immediately after the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.
That 11 percent of Republicans who say abortion should be illegal in all cases is now the same as the percentage of Republicans who say abortion should be legal in all cases: 11 percent.
The findings come even as many red states have instituted abortion bans — many of them passed as “trigger laws” for the day when Roe was overturned — that do not have rape and incest exceptions. Nine states have abortion bans in effect with no exceptions for rape and incest.
The poll question did not specifically ask about rape and incest exceptions. It’s likely some who oppose a total ban want only an exception for the life of the mother, or the health of the mother. For instance, a poll this month from NBC News showed 24 percent of Republicans opposed rape and incest exceptions, and only 14 percent oppose exceptions for when the mother’s health is seriously endangered.
But polling has repeatedly shown the vast majority of Republicans support those exceptions, too — even as the party’s legislators have declined to include them in their abortion bans. And the decline on the no-exceptions contingent in the GOP demonstrates how buyer’s remorse could be creeping in for GOP legislators who passed more extreme trigger laws back when this issue was still in the realm of the hypothetical.
Importantly, the PRRI poll isn’t the first to show a significant decline in the no-exceptions contingent in recent months. Fox News polling last year showed 11 percent overall and 19 percent of Republicans said abortion should always be illegal. By September, those numbers were down to 6 percent and 11 percent, respectively — very similar to PRRI’s new data.
(Fox’s poll also showed the numbers began dropping in June — albeit not in a statistically significant way.)
A major question is how much people’s minds have truly changed, and how much of the effect is driven by people suddenly reckoning with what their previously professed hard-line views actually entail. If you say “abortion is murder,” after all, can you justify murder even in cases of rape and incest? That’s not something whose real-world consequences the antiabortion rights crowd had to reckon with, until now.
But for Republicans, the dilemma is the same. They passed a bunch of laws whose particulars are opposed not only by the vast majority of Americans but also by the vast majority of Republicans. Democrats are now using that to their political advantage, which it clearly is — even if it might not help them enough to save the House and Senate.
Though candidates in swing states have tried to tack to the middle, Republicans more generally have shown little appetite thus far for pulling back from their most extreme laws and adding rape and incest exceptions. But now they’ve got more evidence that total abortion bans are decidedly unpopular — and perhaps even more unpopular than we realized over the summer. | 2022-10-27T17:40:20Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The drop in support for no-exceptions abortion bans — even among Republicans - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/27/abortion-laws-exceptions-polling/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/27/abortion-laws-exceptions-polling/ |
The 80-minute flight from Dulles isn’t cheap, but you get a scenic trip straight to Manhattan
Perspective by Andrea Sachs
Video captures the view from a seaplane as it lands in the East River at the end of the journey from Dulles International Airport to Manhattan. (Video: Andrea Sachs/The Washington Post)
Eighty minutes in the air, plus a splash in the East River, and I was in Manhattan.
Tailwind Air’s seaplanes are the latest mode of transportation to connect the Washington area to New York City, and the amphibious flights eliminate much of the dread associated with the trip north. Passengers won’t hit traffic snarls (car, bus) or find themselves exiled in the wrong borough or state (commercial air). The travel time is also quicker than the train, including Acela, which clocks in at just under three hours.
While a seaplane ticket is pricey, with one-way fares starting at $395, the views from the air are exclusive to private planes and birds. Plus, the water landing will cause the jaded heads of New Yorkers to turn.
On an afternoon suitable for flying and boating, I boarded a Tailwind seaplane to determine whether the journey to New York City could be as appealing as the destination.
Flying by air, landing by sea
Tailwind Air was founded in 2012, but the carrier only recently started offering amphibious flights. The company flies eight-seater Cessna Caravans, which are popular in Alaska, where seaplane travel is almost pedestrian.
In 2020, it introduced seaplane service on routes bookended by bodies of water, such as Manhattan to the Hamptons. The following year, it launched flights between the East River and Boston Harbor, and it has been on a tear ever since, adding Plymouth and Provincetown, Mass; Sag Harbor, N.Y.; and, most recently, the Washington area.
The company’s original plan was to depart from College Park, which is disappointingly landlocked, so passengers would not experience a water takeoff and landing on the same trip. Security issues, however, forced Tailwind to scout for a new airport, which it found in Virginia, but, strike two, not on the Potomac. Washington Dulles does have a little pond, if that’s any consolation.
The company’s maiden voyage took place on Oct. 14. I booked a flight departing three days later. Before taking off, I had to break my old commercial air habits and become versed in the ways of seaplane travel.
Regular rules do not apply
Tailwind Air leaves from Jet Aviation, a fixed-base operator (FBO) permitted to manage private, charter and commuter flights out of Dulles. Passengers departing from here do not have to go through the same security rigmarole as they do in major airports. The airline screens travelers in advance using a national database. This means no body scans, bag inspections or stressful queues of any type.
The 3-1-1 rule does not apply. Passengers can bring grown-up-size liquids onboard. So, fill up that Big Gulp cup and toss in the 125-milliliter bottle of Chanel No. 5. One dog — or two, if they belong to the same family — is permitted in the cabin. The owner must pay the regular fare for pups weighing 25 pounds or more, and secure smaller dogs in an approved carrier.
Passengers are allowed 20 pounds of baggage each. The company charges $250 for extra luggage and may ship the items separately. When booking, you must provide your weight, and while it’s important to be honest, no one is going to come after you with BMI calipers.
Seaplanes follow the same weather advisories as other aircraft, with one notable exception: “The pilot has to be able to see the water,” said Alan Ram, the airline’s chief executive, explaining that seaplanes don’t fly at night.
Because seaplanes don’t fair well on ice, Washington’s season will end on Dec. 21 and resume on March 21.
If the aircraft can’t splash down, the pilot will divert to the nearest terrestrial airport, such as New York’s Westchester or Teterboro in New Jersey. The company will cover the cost of shuttling you to Manhattan, so you won’t be stranded.
Preboarding rituals
Jet Aviation is not directly attached to Dulles, so driving is the best option. Parking is free, a nice perk if you fly round trip but not, if like me, you booked a one-way ticket. If you don’t have a car, you can catch ground transportation from the main airport or grab a taxi or car share.
According to the company, Jet Aviation has an on-demand shuttle that will transport passengers to and from IAD’s main terminal. When I called Tailwind to arrange a ride, I was told to drive or take a cab; I later learned that I should have called Jet Aviation. To eliminate a step, I ordered a Lyft from the Wiehle-Reston Metro station for about $15.
The gate closes 10 minutes before takeoff. Ram recommended gliding in no more than 20 minutes beforehand. I arrived a half-hour before the 2:05 p.m. takeoff and checked in at the front counter. There was no need.
“We will pass along the message to Tailwind,” an employee said with the same unhurried tone of a nail salon receptionist.
Two guys dressed in khakis and blue polo shirts were relaxing on a couch, heads deep in their gadgets. Let me guess: Bachelor party? College reunion? Company retreat? Nope: They were my pilots.
“Just relax. You didn’t have to be here so early,” said Capt. Adam Schewitz, when he overheard me checking in. “But they do have good free coffee at FSOs.” Indeed, a hot beverage machine has nine options.
I didn’t think 30 minutes was excessively early until I discovered that our plane was delayed by 45 minutes, for what Schewitz described as “not a good reason.”
A “VIP passenger” had asked for a later departure, he told me apologetically. I had not received notification, which led to another apology. (The company said passengers should receive real-time alerts about delays. On the day I flew, the automated system was not yet operating on the new route.) However, the airline contacted the two other travelers, and the delay was cut in half.
As soon as the other passengers arrived, we made our way to the plane, a quick walk from the main building.
We could choose our seat. For the best panoramas, I followed Schewitz’s advice and plunked down on the right side of the plane. I had significant leg room and didn’t have to worry about a beverage cart slamming into my shins, since there was no food or drink service or flight attendants (or bathrooms).
From the cockpit, Schewitz swiveled around and gave us a Maverick-caliber thumbs-up. And then we were off, rumbling down the runway, headed for the river.
Using your phone in the air
“We have phone service,” said a very pleased, business-suited passenger, as the plane climbed toward the pillowy clouds. “That’s a reason to fly right there.”
I switched out of airplane mode — another commercial air rule I could ignore — and watched our blue dot in Google Maps move through Loudoun County, Va. “I am looking for my house,” a Tailwind employee-cum-passenger said.
The flight was smooth until we hit a stormy patch in Maryland. I placed both feet on the floor to steady myself. The pilot found a keyhole in the dark clouds and headed for a patch of blue. I resumed my relaxed pose.
“No bars,” said the man on Cellphone Service Watch, as we flew over West Chester, Pa.
After passing over a Trader Joe’s in New Jersey, Schewitz informed us that we would be landing in “mmphf” minutes. “Fifty?” I asked. He lifted up one finger and then five.
Ahead, the New York skyline appeared like a pop-up card. Schewitz flew toward the tip of Manhattan and up the Hudson River. He took a loping right turn and traversed the island. Through my window, I saw Central Park in its totality, a giant green carpet unfurled.
Marine landing in Manhattan
On the East River, the plane landed with a whoosh and a thud. The finale was as scream-worthy as a rapids rafting ride at a water park. However, I only let out a soft “whoa.”
The co-pilot hopped out and balanced on a pontoon while Schewitz steered the plane toward the shore. “Welcome to New York.,” he said, after co-pilot Austin Tichy had tied us up at the Skyport Marina dock as if we were a boat.
On the pier, Schewitz told us that we had reached an altitude of 9,500 feet and a speed of 220 knots. “I wanted to see how fast I could go.”
From the dock, it took me 60 seconds to enter the maw of Manhattan.
The seaplane is more than just a conveyance to New York City: It is a sightseeing flight that ends with a double exclamation point. It earned practicality points for being speedy and convenient, at least in the destination. Since the service is new to Dulles, I can overlook the few hiccups.
For the price, I could not become a frequent flier, but I might splurge on a ticket for a special occasion — and spring for a driver from Washington, too. | 2022-10-27T17:42:45Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Testing Tailwind Air's seaplane flights from D.C. to New York - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2022/10/27/seaplane-flight-dc-ny-manhattan/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2022/10/27/seaplane-flight-dc-ny-manhattan/ |
Vermont has never sent a woman to Congress. That could finally change.
Vermont State Sen. Becca Balint speaks to Sarah Waldo, a customer at Moon Dog Cafe, in Bellows Falls, Vt., in early October. Balint, a Democrat, is running for the U.S. House of Representatives. She would be the first woman to represent the state in Congress. (Bonnie Jo Mount/The Washington Post)
BURLINGTON, Vt. – Vermont was the first state to legalize civil unions for same-sex couples. The first state to permit recreational use of marijuana. The first state where a major party fielded a transgender candidate for governor. It is also, of course, home to the liberal icon Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), an avowed democratic socialist.
Yet by at least one measure, this bastion of liberal politics is at the back of the pack.
Vermont is the only state in the union that has never elected a woman to Congress. Mississippi, the second-last state, reached that milestone four years ago.
That situation — a source of some chagrin here — is poised to change. Becca Balint, a 54-year-old liberal Democrat, is running for Vermont’s lone seat in the House of Representatives in a contest that may make history.
Balint is the heavy favorite in her race in November’s elections. If she wins, as polls indicate, she will break two major barriers: not only will she be the first woman to represent Vermont in Washington, but she also will the first openly gay person to represent Vermont in the nation’s capital.
On a recent sunny afternoon, Balint walked into a farmers market in Burlington on the shores of Lake Champlain, past a miniature electric-powered food truck and a group giving away free tree saplings.
Balint, a former teacher, said the prospect of being the first woman elected to Congress from Vermont is both exhilarating and daunting. Asked whether liberal politics can coexist with male chauvinism, Balint paused briefly and fixed her gaze on her interviewer. “You’re asking me if there is still sexism?” she said. “Yes, there is.”
The story of why it has taken Vermont so long to reach this moment is an illustration of the hurdles that women still face when entering electoral politics. Some of the obstacles are straightforward — the difficulty of dislodging long-serving incumbents, who are more likely to be men, or the need to take time away from a paying job to mount a campaign, or the obligation for a partner to assume domestic responsibilities.
Vermonters are “very loyal to their incumbents,” said Madeleine Kunin, who served as governor of Vermont from 1985 to 1991, the first and only woman to do so. “We just don’t have that much turnover.”
Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) was elected in 1974. Sanders has held his office for nearly 16 years. After Leahy announced he would retire, Rep. Peter Welch (D-Vt.) decided to run for his seat. And that meant there was a rare opening in the state’s congressional delegation.
Other obstacles confronting female candidates are more subtle. Balint has been a state senator since 2014 and was repeatedly encouraged to run for statewide office, she said. Such races are expensive and time-consuming. One reason Balint hesitated: female candidates in Vermont who had campaigned for such positions and lost did not return to politics, unlike their male counterparts. They were considered “damaged goods,” Balint said.
When the congressional seat opened up, Balint was one of five candidates in the race leading up to the Democratic primary. Four of them were women.
Her chief rival was Lt. Gov. Molly Gray, who represented the more moderate wing of the Democratic Party. Balint was endorsed by Sanders and embraces liberal priorities such as single-payer health care and a “New Green Deal” to combat climate change. She won the primary handily, with nearly 61 percent of the votes to Gray’s 37 percent.
Since Balint emerged victorious from the primary in August, she has received a deluge of advice from well-wishers and political insiders on how to win the general election. She needs to wear brightly colored clothing; she should not include photos of her wife of 18 years in her campaign materials; she should be less intellectual.
“Nobody likes a smart woman,” Balint said wryly.
“But also –” interjects Balint’s campaign manager, Natalie Silver, “no one likes a dumb woman.”
Balint and Silver both laughed. Balint continues to wear her trademark blues, grays and black. Her wife is pictured on her campaign website. She talks about history and cites management theorists. She drives a motorcycle — but also a banana-yellow Honda compact.
Female politicians still face more constraints than men in terms of expectations for how they look and act, said Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University. But “the range of what is acceptable has expanded.”
Balint is, in her own way, a test case. “I will be fascinated if Becca Balint has the freedom to be what she wants to be while serving,” Walsh said.
Balint’s Republican opponent in next month’s election is Liam Madden, a former Marine who identifies as an independent. Madden is running an unusual campaign without the support of the state Republican Party.
“Do I think it is important to elect a woman to Congress?” Madden wrote in an email. “It is more important to elect someone who has a pathway out of the deep political dysfunction and corruption rather than to glorify another partisan under the delusion that sending similar people to Washington will change anything.” Coverage of the historic nature of Balint’s run is akin to “picking winners,” he said.
Prior to entering politics, Balint — who has master’s degrees in education and history — worked for years as a middle school teacher. Then she became a full-time parent to her two children, now 15 and 12. For nearly a decade, she wrote a column in her local newspaper, the Brattleboro Reformer, on topics ranging from her love of nature to her grandfather’s death in the Holocaust.
As a young person, she dreamed of running for office, but that path seemed impossible for someone from a working-class family who had not come out to those closest to her. When Balint was growing up, the only openly gay politician she knew was San Francisco city council member Harvey Milk, who was assassinated in 1978.
By the time she was in her 40s and the mother of two young children, Balint believed it was too late. Her wife, Elizabeth Wohl, a lawyer, encouraged her to run anyway. So did Laura Coyle, a personal coach that Balint calls her mentor.
In her first campaign for state senate, Balint challenged an incumbent. She has not lost a race since. Last year, her peers elected her majority leader of the state senate, the first woman and first openly gay person to serve in that role.
“At this point in my life, to be doing the thing that I always felt like was the right path for me, to make positive change — it feels incredible,” Balint said. She was sitting cross-legged on a patch of grass in the autumn sunshine at the farmers market with two of her campaign staffers and multi-tasking: eating a burrito while answering questions.
Although Vermont will be the last state in the union to send a woman to Congress, it fares better on measures of female representation in its state legislature. Out of 180 legislators, 75 are women — or 41 percent, putting it 10th in the nation.
Still, sexism persists. When she announced her first run for office, Balint said, she received an anonymous note in her mailbox telling her she should stay home with her children. During the current campaign, she is repeatedly asked about whether she has thought about the impact serving in Congress will have on her family (answer: many times).
Balint said she finds herself wondering whether Leahy, Sanders or Welch, ever faced such questions. “I feel pretty confident that they’ve never had someone come up to them and say that they need Botox,” said Balint. It happened to her at a recent campaign event, she recalled, touching the creases in her forehead.
At the farmers market, people recognized Balint and offered words of encouragement. When a woman with a Saint Bernard on a leash struck up a conversation, Balint asked the dog’s name (Biggie), how much it weights (100 pounds) and what type of car its owner drives to fit the pooch (a Subaru SUV). She joked that she is running a “canine-forward campaign.”
As the waters of Lake Champlain sparkled in the middle distance, there was both happiness and incredulity at Balint’s historic run for office. “It’s certainly beyond time,” said Amy Brousseau, 53, who weaves rainbow-hued rugs by hand from recycled wool. “I mean, what year is it?”
Not far away stood Katelyn Whitman, 30, a vendor selling small-batch, artisanal marshmallows. The delay in electing a woman to Congress “seems so backward given all the other things that Vermont has been at the forefront of,” Whitman said.
Sasha Wintersteller, 18, was spending the fall working at a sheep farm that makes award-winning cheeses before starting college in January. Knowing that Balint might be the first woman to represent Vermont in Congress made her feel “empowered,” Wintersteller said. At a time “when the country is going in a very wrong direction in a lot of other things, at least this is going in the right direction.”
Later in the day, Balint attended a book festival at a local library. She read two pieces from a new collection of her newspaper columns: one about the danger of political divisions and the other about neighborly generosity. For the occasion, she changed from jeans into gray pants and put on black heels instead of sneakers. Her dark hair remained in a sleek bob.
Ella Spottswood, one of Balint’s closest friends, was in the audience. Spottswood said she hoped a time would eventually come when Balint would have her own Bernie-Sanders-wearing-mittens at the Capitol moment: a moment when she could show up at a national event and demonstrate a cheerful indifference to her attire.
To “not worry about what I’m wearing,” said Balint said with a grin. “That will be a relief for women everywhere.” | 2022-10-27T18:14:02Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Vermont has never sent a woman to Congress. That could finally change. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/10/27/becca-balint-vermont-woman-congress/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/10/27/becca-balint-vermont-woman-congress/ |
The U.S.-Saudi alliance does not advance the cause of freedom
President Biden fist bumps Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Jiddah, Saudi Arabia, on July 15. (Bandar Algaloud/Saudi Royal Court/Reuters)
In his Oct. 23 letter, “The U.S.’s ties to Saudi Arabia,” Reg Mitchell didn’t mention that 15 of the 19 terrorists who attacked the United States on Sept. 11, 2001, were Saudi citizens. Although this alliance is astronomically profitable for U.S. weapons manufacturers, it does not advance the cause of freedom for the average person in the United States, in Saudi Arabia, or anywhere else. A case in point is the kingdom’s genocidal war in Yemen, “the largest humanitarian crisis in the world,” according to Human Rights Watch.
“Having the moral courage to do the right thing matters,” Mr. Mitchell wrote. Yes, indeed, and that would be for the United States to end its addiction to Saudi petroleum and cash-for-weapons. Andrew J. Bacevich, a professor emeritus of international relations and history at Boston University and an Army veteran of the Vietnam and Persian Gulf wars, wrote: “Perpetuating the war for the Greater Middle East is not enhancing American freedom, abundance, and security. If anything, it is having the opposite effect. And one day, the American people may awaken to this reality.”
Steven Sellers Lapham, Gaithersburg
The writer is a member of the board of directors of the Unitarian Universalists for Justice in the Middle East. | 2022-10-27T18:14:14Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | The U.S.-Saudi alliance does not advance the cause of freedom - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/27/costs-us-saudi-alliance/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/27/costs-us-saudi-alliance/ |
The Post’s ‘both sides do it’ approach is a disservice to democracy
As the founder of the American Independent, I write in response to the Oct. 24 editorial “A media masquerade.”
The Post wrongly and unfairly characterized the work of the American Independent by falsely equating it with a network of right-wing websites run by shady operative Brian Timpone, who uses artificial intelligence and international reporters with fake bylines to spew disinformation on more than 1,000 sites across the country.
The American Independent is and must be part of the answer to the threat to journalism and democracy posed by these sites. While it is undeniably true that we have a center-left point of view — a fact we make no effort to conceal — our articles are entirely based on fact. Readers of American Independent articles can count on the information they receive to be accurate and verifiable, whether they find us in their mailboxes, in their inboxes, on our websites or through social media.
The Post might not like our sponsorship or agree with our headlines, but it is simply false to place our work in the same disreputable category as that of the right-wing media online cesspool, which is filled with anti-vaccine misinformation, incitements to insurrection and antisemitic conspiracy theories. The Editorial Board’s “both sides do it” approach here was itself a disservice to democracy.
David Brock, Washington | 2022-10-27T18:14:33Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | The Post’s ‘both sides do it’ approach is a disservice to democracy - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/27/posts-both-sides-do-it-approach-is-disservice-democracy/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/27/posts-both-sides-do-it-approach-is-disservice-democracy/ |
Mark Morris’s tribute to Burt Bacharach is what the world needs now
Nothing is as it seems in this brilliant journey performed by Mark Morris Dance Group at the Kennedy Center
Nothing is as it seems in “The Look Of Love,” a tribute to Burt Bacharach and Hal David music, at the Kennedy Center. (Skye Schmidt)
There is no emotional glop in Mark Morris’s witty, wounding and brilliant new dance production, “The Look of Love,” which opened at the Kennedy Center on Wednesday.
No excess of sentiment whatsoever, though, good lord, there could have been, since the live musical accompaniment is a string of brokenhearted hits from the 1960s by songwriters Burt Bacharach and Hal David.
It would be easy for a choreographer to get tripped up by the earnest passions of these familiar songs. Familiar, that is, to a certain generation, though they’re absolutely timeless: “Walk on By,” “Do You Know the Way to San Jose,” “I Say a Little Prayer” and nearly a dozen more. But Morris’s imaginative exploration of this music dives beneath the surface lushness to expose honest feeling.
In doing so, he reveals that nothing is quite as it seems. The piece begins with a few tinkling piano notes of “Alfie” — you’ll hear the lyric in your head, “What’s it all about, Al-fie?” — and this is the first hint of the searching, constantly shifting journey that’s in store. What’s it all about, indeed: The question haunts “The Look of Love.”
If love is the answer, it’s not without peril. As the waltzy “What the World Needs Now” begins — performed by luminous chanteuse Marcy Harriell, two backup singers and a marvelous jazz band — the 10 dancers enter with deliberate uncertainty and flashes of paranoia, as if they’ve wandered onto Mars. Soon they’ve paired up for cheerful whirling — and just as quickly half of them are casually knocked over by the others. Cruel intent or obliviousness?
The bright, fun costumes, by Isaac Mizrahi, are a riot of Barbiecore pink, purple and orange, with acidic counterpoints of mustard yellow and olive, to take the sweetness down a notch. One woman’s long, slinky gown has a deeply cut neckline and a slit up the side, but she’s more guarded than she appears. Underneath she’s wearing pants.
It’s all lively and colorful, loose and bouncy, but this is not a daquiris-on-the-beach dance party. No, thankfully, nothing is what you’d expect here. The hour-long production — Morris’s first big, evening-length work since his 2017 Beatles-inspired hit, “Pepperland” — is more like a series of predicaments. They escalate in intensity, each one resulting in the devastating aloneness and mystifying breakups that are at the core of rom-coms and advice columns. As the progression of songs unspools, the dancers conjure up moments of ineffable, universal experience that begin to feel as familiar as the tunes, and as intimate as muscle memories. It’s as if they’re dancing the way the human heart behaves in the fog of love.
For love has its sour side, as these songs tell us over and over. Lyricist David makes that abundantly clear in “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again,” though Bacharach’s tune is deceptively perky. Accordingly, with a few deft, musical gestures, the couples bicker, get back together, break up. But Morris goes deeper. He is in exquisite control of point of view here; his command of the stage space directs our eye to a single dancer, the elegantly restrained Billy Smith, so that we feel his isolation as he stands in quiet confusion, watching his partner, Karlie Budge, stride away from him with the kind of forward force in her hipbones that says she’s never coming back.
The paradox of love: It can destroy us, yet still we yearn for it. That’s the truth that Morris builds upon, song by song. Your special someone might leave town and change their name and you’ll be reduced to begging a bird (a bird!) to track them down. That’s the story told, of course, in the searing ballad “Message to Michael,” where Morris changed the title character’s pronoun to “they” as a nod to the mystery at its heart and the reference to a discarded identity. Harriell’s voice ranges masterfully from hushed intimacy to a desperate, raging plea, making you feel the destruction of a soul.
The soul is on the line here. In Morris’s interpretation of the song, it’s not just about a breakup; it’s spiritual death. Amid a circle of chairs onstage, the exquisitely musical dancer Dallas McMurray lip-syncs to Harriell’s vocals, but is he singing or preaching? He adopts a Christlike pose, arms spread, palms forward, and those gathered around him leap to their feet, fists thrust at the sky. Meanwhile, Smith is going through more emotional disintegration, chasing Budge as she flies past, out of reach, gazing elsewhere. Everyone is searching, searching, endlessly grasping.
The songs — beautifully arranged by Ethan Iverson, who also plays piano in the band — are brilliantly organized to highlight those twin pillars of loss and hope, with the optimism of one replaced by hardened reality in the next. In a charismatic solo accompanied by “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head,” Domingo Estrada Jr. brings to mind Gene Kelly’s insouciant puddle-jumping. Around him, couples cluster under floor cushions raised overhead as umbrellas, but, as we’ve come to expect by this point, sharing doesn’t come easily.
Bacharach wrote the theme song for “The Blob,” the 1958 sci-fi horror film starring Steve McQueen, and that’s in here too, its weird vibe continuing the vaguely uneasy mood that’s been gathering steam. This unease builds to a climax in “Don’t Make Me Over,” when Harriell’s voice reaches theater-filling force and the band kicks up the heat. At this point, under Nicole Pearce’s lighting design, the stage glows like a nightclub in the devil’s basement. McMurray runs madly about, looking for someone he never finds; he collapses into a chair on a heavy downbeat that seems to suck the life out of him. By the song’s end, he’s melted to the floor like a lump of candle wax.
But the choreographer doesn’t leave him there, or us. Alongside the brief flashes of cruelty there is plenty of light. It floods the stage like sunshine after a storm. Yet Morris is too honest an artist to deliver unalloyed gushing. He’s too sensitive to the incongruities of our current state of existence, where humanity seems to be spiraling backward into endless war, loss of rights, unconquerable disease and the crumbling away of what once felt solid. Yes, this is the big question: What’s it all about?
There are few answers here. We simply go on. And being vicariously swallowed up in a big, whizzing circle dance is a fine way to gather the strength to do so.
Mark Morris Dance Group performs “The Look of Love” at the Kennedy Center Eisenhower Theater through Oct. 29. $29-$119. (202) 467-4600. kennedy-center.org. | 2022-10-27T18:35:48Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Mark Morris’s tribute to Burt Bacharach is what the world needs now - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/theater-dance/2022/10/27/mark-morris-dance-burt-bacharach/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/theater-dance/2022/10/27/mark-morris-dance-burt-bacharach/ |
Republican Cheney endorses Democrat Elissa Slotkin in Michigan race
Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) speaks at an Oct. 16 campaign rally in East Lansing, Mich. (Bill Pugliano/Getty Images)
Slotkin faces Republican Tom Barrett, a state senator, in a competitive race in Michigan’s 7th Congressional District. Barrett has continued to dispute the results of the 2020 presidential election, which was a factor in Cheney’s decision, according to a person familiar with her thinking who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share more freely.
Besides their shared committee work, Cheney and Slotkin both have backgrounds in national security, with Cheney having previously served in the State Department and Slotkin having worked in the CIA and Defense Department.
“At a moment when the very heart of our democracy is being challenged, Rep. Cheney’s voice has been critical,” Slotkin said.
Cheney will be leaving Congress at the end of this term after losing in a Republican primary to a challenger backed by former president Donald Trump. Cheney has become a fierce Trump critic in her capacity as vice chairwoman of the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by a pro-Trump mob.
Slotkin has frequently talked about the need for bipartisanship.
“Something that is very important to me as a person and as a candidate is that in between those tours in Iraq, I was working for whoever was my commander in chief,” she said at a recent town hall event in Corunna, Mich., a conservative part of her district.
Earlier this month, Cheney urged voters in Arizona to reject Republican nominees for governor and secretary of state, describing them as threats to democracy because they have worked to overturn election results in 2020 and indicated they may not accept the outcome this year.
Marianna Sotomayor contributed to this report. | 2022-10-27T18:40:09Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Republican Cheney endorses Democrat Elissa Slotkin in Michigan race - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/27/cheney-slotkin-democrats-house-trump/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/27/cheney-slotkin-democrats-house-trump/ |
The Miss Universe Organization is investigating claims by contestants that the 2022 Miss USA pageant was rigged. (leykladay/iStock)
After Miss Texas R’Bonney Gabriel was crowned Miss USA 2022, she walked forward to greet the crowd, and then walked back from the runway to the stage. That’s when the other contestants should have greeted her.
In the days since the pageant’s final night on Oct. 3, contestants have accused the organization of giving preferential treatment to Gabriel. Miss USA’s umbrella corporation, Miss Brand, run by Crystle Stewart, has been suspended and is under investigation by Miss Universe, which has taken over Miss USA for now.
In a statement to state directors seen by The Washington Post, Miss Universe said that Stewart is cooperating with the investigation. Miss Universe operated Miss USA until it was licensed to Stewart in 2020.
Stewart and Miss USA did not respond to requests for comment.
After Gabriel was crowned, only the show’s emcees greeted her on stage, according to Bill Alverson, a lawyer from Alabama who has been a pageant coach for 30 years.
“There was a lack of support from her fellow sister competitors,” said Alverson, who coached seven contestants who lost to Gabriel that night, including first runner up Miss North Carolina Morgan Romano.
That was only the first sign that Miss USA, a beauty pageant held since 1952 and not to be confused with the not-for-profit Miss America pageant, was about to face challenges.
The morning after the competition ended, fellow contestant and Miss Montana Heather O’Keefe posted on TikTok that the pageant was “suspect”.
“The girls, including myself, felt disrespected because R’Bonney was very close to the staff members and directors of the pageant, and they were blatant about that. She also had personal ties with a judge who scored the costume competition, and we can see that she was personally communicating with national sponsors, which is a violation of the contract,” Miss District of Columbia Faith Maria Porter told The Washington Post.
Gabriel told E! News that she did not receive any preferential treatment. “It was not rigged. I would never enter any pageant that I know I would win,” she told E! News. “I have a lot of integrity.”
But allegations against the pageant continue to fly on TikTok, and O’Keefe is careful to blame the organizers and not Gabriel.
For beauty pageants, most of which are judged subjectively, allegations of preferential treatment are not rare. “The idea that pageant contestants are catty, competitive, and out to get each other feeds into a big stereotype in the industry,” said Hilary Levey Friedman, the author of “Here She Is: The Complicated Reign of Beauty Pageants in America.”
Alverson said every competition, no matter how small, has complaints and rumors about rigging.
However, he added: “I have never heard of a pageant with this level of rigging.”
Alverson’s specialty is preparing contestants for the interview round. The coach, who worked with Gabriel’s competitors, suspects that the organization preplanned Gabriel’s questions. He said she was treated like “the favored child of Miss Academy.”
The stakes for a beauty pageant that has been moved off major network TV are low, especially compared to the risk of getting caught cheating. But Friedman said there are a few reasons why organizers might want to rig it.
The winner of the competition represents and works for Miss USA for a year. “It’s possible that an organization would want the winner to be easy to work with, to not have an attitude, to be really savvy at social media,” said Friedman.
“The only reason you would rig a competition like this is for financial advantage,” said Alverson. If sponsors appear to love a contestant, that could be incentive to push that girl forward, he said.
“There is also a conflict of interest at play,” said Freidman. When Stewart took over Miss USA, she was already heading Miss Academy, a pageant training school in Texas, that coached many of the contestants for Miss USA.
She added that the pageant world is quite insular, and since both Miss USA and Miss Academy are for-profit, people didn’t think it was too unusual that Stewart headed both organizations.
Alverson believes Stewart should have divested her ownership of one of the organizations.
This is not the first time Miss USA has been accused of letting its organizers have influence over who would wear the crown. “When former president Donald Trump owned Miss USA, everyone knew that he would pick the favorites,” said Freidman. “This has been the organization’s historical reputation.”
“Moving forward, Miss USA needs to be more transparent about how they are scoring the contestants,” said Freidman. She says that if the organization doesn’t improve its credibility, the pageant may have fewer interested contestants in the coming years.
“I love pageantry, I think it teaches us confidence and uplifts women,” said Porter, 2022′s Miss District of Columbia. “But it’s hard to have faith in a pageant that shows signs of deep corruption and unethical practices. It’s time pageants evaluate their scoring system.” | 2022-10-27T18:44:30Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Miss USA pageant under investigation after allegations of rigging - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/10/27/miss-usa-pageant-investigation-rigged/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/10/27/miss-usa-pageant-investigation-rigged/ |
James Bennet, then editor of the New York Times editorial page, in on 2017 in New York. (Larry Neumeister/AP)
His outburst in Semafor furnishes a toehold for reassessing one of the most consequential journalism fights in decades. To date, the lesson from the set-to — that publishing a senator arguing that federal troops could be deployed against rioters — will forever circumscribe what issues opinion sections are allowed to address. It’s also long past time to ask why more people who claim to uphold journalism and free expression — including, um, the Erik Wemple Blog — didn’t speak out then in Bennet’s defense.
It was published on Wednesday June 3, under a headline written by the Times: “Tom Cotton: Send In the Troops.”
Many Times staffers, however, forwent the rigor of argumentation and tweeted out the following line — or something similar — to express their disgust: “Running this puts Black @NYTimes staff in danger.” The formulation came from the internal group Black@NYT and received the blessing of the NewsGuild of New York as “legally protected speech because it focused on workplace safety,” Smith, then the Times’ media columnist, reported at the time.
Such was the spirit of the editor’s note, which went heavy on regrets about tone, process and other squishy considerations. While asserting that the op-ed failed Times standards, it also claimed that the essay’s arguments were a “newsworthy part of the current debate” — a line that Dao championed, according to two sources. Elsewhere, it said the op-ed should have undergone greater scrutiny, even though at least five opinion editors participated in editing, according to sources. (National Review’s Rich Lowry reported on the process here.) Although Bennet said that he hadn’t read the piece, he was involved in some early decisions about it, including the deletion of a criticism of Hannah-Jones. Other critiques from the editor’s note included that the essay needed “further substantial revisions”; that it contained an “overstatement” about police bearing the “brunt” of the rioting; that the tone was “needlessly harsh”; that more context was necessary; and that an Oxford comma was misplaced.
Except, in hindsight, it wasn’t a straw at all. In initially sticking up for the Times’s role in publishing controversial fare, Sulzberger had it right. The paper had published an opinion by a U.S. senator (and possible presidential candidate) advocating for a lawful act by the president. That’s not to say it would have been a good idea: Elizabeth Goitein, an expert on national security law at the Brennan Center for Justice, says that invoking the Insurrection Act amid the Black Lives Matter protests would have been “inappropriate” because local authorities had a handle on the instances of unrest taking place “at the margins,” but that a deployment “likely would have fallen within the capacious bounds of this poorly drafted statute.” | 2022-10-27T19:06:17Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Blame NYT Tom Cotton op-ed scandal on A.G. Sulzberger, not James Bennet - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/27/new-york-times-tom-cotton-oped-james-bennet/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/27/new-york-times-tom-cotton-oped-james-bennet/ |
Concerns about crime and the fallout from 2020 protests in Portland have become a focus of the gubernatorial race
By Camila DeChalus
The candidates running for governor in Oregon — from left, Republican Christine Drazan, Democrat Tina Kotek and unaffiliated candidate Betsy Johnson — at a July debate in Welches, Ore. (Jamie Valdez/Pool/Pamplin Media Group/AP)
PORTLAND, Ore. — Inside a local sports bar, more than 20 business owners gathered around Betsy Johnson, the unaffiliated Oregon gubernatorial candidate, to vent their frustrations.
One business owner said crime in Portland has become so rampant that, for the first time, she has felt concerned about the safety of her staff and customers.
Another business owner said his store had been vandalized several times in the past year.
Loretta Guzman, who owns the Bison Coffeehouse in the city, said her storefront windows were broken late one night earlier this month after she announced she was going to hold a “Coffee with a Cop” event.
“Things have gotten so out of control,” Guzman told The Washington Post. “If you want to commit a crime, then right now is a really good time to do it. There is no accountability.”
In 2020, after the Minneapolis killing of George Floyd, Portland was a hotbed of protest activity, with demonstrations lasting for weeks that resulted in more than 500 arrests and millions of dollars in damage. In time since that unrest, Portland has — like other communities across the country — seen a rise in violent crime. From January to the end of August of this year, Portland recorded a 7.8 percent increase in violent crime — including homicide, robbery and aggravated assault — compared with the same period in 2021, according to a Post data analysis. In 2021, violent crime in Portland was up 27 percent compared with 2020.
Concerns over crime and the fallout from the 2020 protests in the state’s largest city have now become a major focus of the gubernatorial race. While Oregon has been a reliably blue state for decades — voters have not elected a Republican governor here in nearly 40 years — growing frustrations with outgoing governor Kate Brown and attacks painting Democrats as soft on crime have some in the party worried that this year’s race could break the party’s winning streak.
Johnson, a longtime Democratic state legislator who left the party last year, is hoping to capitalize on voters’ discontent with Democrats, looking to siphon off voters who are looking for an alternative but are not yet sure they want to vote for a Republican. The unaffiliated candidate is running a campaign around supporting abortion rights, increasing the budget for law enforcement and addressing homelessness.
Democratic candidate Tina Kotek also has campaigned on preserving abortion access, as well as addressing climate change and tightening gun regulations. But she has struggled to distance herself from the attack that Democrats want to defund the police, despite saying she supports state law enforcement and would invest in hiring more officers.
With voters on the left possibly split between Kotek and Johnson, Republican candidate Christine Drazan could be in position to top them both. She has campaigned on improving Oregon’s public school system, declaring a state of emergency related to homelessness and repealing a 2020 drug decriminalization law while increasing funding for police and prosecutors.
And the governor’s race isn’t the only contest that has Republicans feeling hopeful: There also three open U.S. House seats that Republicans think are in play. The Congressional Leadership Fund, which supports Republican House candidates, on Wednesday announced a new investment of $800,000 in one race. If Democrats can’t hold the two seats they have and pick up the newly formed district seat, it could signal deeper problems for the party in less reliably liberal areas.
“It’s the first time in a number of years that some of this Democrat stronghold on the state is really in jeopardy,” said Oregon Republican strategist Rebecca Tweed.
2020 lingers
In many ways, the political climate in Oregon mirrors the last time a non-Democrat appeared close to taking the governor’s race. In the 2010 midterm elections, with President Barack Obama in office and Democrats controlling the House and Senate, Republican gubernatorial candidate Chris Dudley lost to Democrat John Kitzhaber, who had previous served as governor, by just 1.5 points.
But Democrats and Republicans point to the racial reckoning in 2020 as a key difference this time. Hundreds of protesters marched in the streets of Portland for weeks that year, clashing with the police. At one point, protesters erected barricades downtown to create an autonomous zone. A Cook Political Report ranking in September rated the gubernatorial race a toss up.
Jake Weigler, a Democratic strategist based in Portland, said the issues of crime and homelessness in the city have gained more visibility since the protests.
“It has killed off a number of Democratic voters that would normally vote for the Democrat automatically in the governor’s race, but in this race, they are kind of having some second thoughts,” he said.
Mary Paselk, a resident of Happy Valley outside Portland who attended a Drazan campaign rally in Aurora, Ore., earlier this month, said she had voted for liberal candidates in past elections but remained on the fence about which gubernatorial candidate will bring the change she wants to see in the state.
“I’m really disappointed at the drug use, at the homelessness,” she said. “I know we need to change. I just don’t know which candidate is best for that.”
Drazan and other Republican candidates in Oregon have jumped on that discontent, arguing Democrats were responsible for the protests escalating in Portland.
“Tina Kotek is the original defund-the-police candidate,” Drazan said during a recent debate. “She did not support the police even when rioters were attacking a police station. It’s stunning to me that she would talk now like she supports law enforcement.”
Johnson similarly went after Kotek, saying during the debate: “We’ve got to start by respecting our police. That doesn’t mean walking with the rioters or excoriating the police when the riots were happening.” Johnson was referring to a letter Kotek send to Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler, criticizing the tactics police officers were using against the protesters.
Kotek pushed back, saying she supported funding the police to combat the shortage of law enforcement officers in the state.
“They’re both misrepresenting my record. I do support law enforcement,” she said. “I also think it’s important to hold law enforcement accountable. You can do both.”
Entire Portland police crowd-control unit quits over fellow officer’s assault charge
In a recent West Coast swing, President Biden offered his support for Kotek.
“She’s rational. She’s smart,” Biden said at an event with Kotek. “She knows what needs to be done. She knows we need more police officers.”
Angela Pederson, 54, who described herself as a longtime Democratic voter, said she is voting for Drazan and Lori Chavez-DeRemer, a Republican running in the 5th Congressional District, because she believes they are serious about addressing crime.
“What I’m witnessing happening in our school systems, and just in our community at large, is indicative that the Democrats’ policies are not working and they are destroying our state,” she said while canvassing for Chavez-DeRemer in Gladstone, another Portland suburb. “They are going to bring back some law and order that’s desperately needed.”
Some voters want the conversation shifted away from increasing funding for the police to finding more solutions to issues contributing to the rise in crime, such as the cost of living and the economy.
“It’s not a top concern for me as a voter to have more law enforcement to solve the problems that they haven’t solved for the entirety of their existence,” said Donovan Smith, a Portland resident who typically votes for Democratic candidates.
Darrell Grant, a jazz composer based in Portland, said that homelessness and crime were always present in the city but that the pandemic intensified those issues.
“The seeds of what is happening now has been planted over many years,” Grant said. “So yes, the challenges of the pandemic, the challenges of the racial reckoning that we faced, of course those have exacerbated the problem and diverted the attention and resources and compassion and everything from those challenges that were with us all the time.”
A fight for a revamped district
Oregon’s 5th District is represented by a Democrat, but redistricting brought in more-rural areas that could pose a challenge for Democratic candidate Jamie McLeod-Skinner.
McLeod-Skinner, a small-business owner, beat the seven-term incumbent, Rep. Kurt Schrader, in the Democratic primary. McLeod-Skinner ran as a more liberal candidate than Schrader, who had been endorsed by Biden.
Each of the 5th District candidates could make history if elected. Chavez-DeRemer is one of two candidates who would be the first Latinas to serve in Oregon’s congressional delegation. McLeod-Skinner could also be the first openly gay lawmaker in its delegation.
Chavez-DeRemer, the former mayor of Happy Valley, said Democrats’ rhetoric around defunding the police had dissuaded voters.
“People are feeling fearful. People and business owners say they don’t have protection,” she said. “We pay our tax dollars for security and safety, and that’s what people want.”
McLeod-Skinner, an attorney, has pushed back on Chavez-DeRemer’s claims. McLeod-Skinner said she has a track record of increasing funding for the police and wants to continue to help address staffing concerns.
“Here’s the bottom line. … It’s about public safety,” said McLeod-Skinner, who served as the interim city manager in Talent, in southwestern Oregon. “And that means safety in terms of making sure our police officers are fully trained, are fully resourced and have the accountability standards.”
But what happens in the congressional races could come down to how voters are feeling about the top of the ticket.
As Election Day approaches, Ramzy Hattar, who owns the Portland bar where Johnson’s roundtable event was held, said he is willing to shut down his business and move to another state if the crime problem does not improve.
“I just need to plan if things don’t go my way,” he said.
Tyler Pager in Portland and John D. Harden in Washington contributed to this report. | 2022-10-27T19:06:23Z | www.washingtonpost.com | In Oregon, GOP looks to gain edge with public safety top of mind - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/27/gop-looks-gain-edge-oregon-with-public-safety-top-mind/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/27/gop-looks-gain-edge-oregon-with-public-safety-top-mind/ |
The Supreme Court may end college affirmative action. Then what?
Universities have followed similar bans to the letter but tried other ways to admit racially diverse classes – with mixed results
Analysis by Lauren S. Foley
The sun sets on the U.S. Supreme Court in January. (Joshua Roberts/Reuters)
On Monday, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in two cases: Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina and Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard. The court last discussed the topic in Fisher v. University of Texas, which the court heard in 2016. Since then, Trump appointees have shifted the court in a much more conservative direction, and affirmative action might not survive this constitutional challenge. If it does not, universities will no longer be able to take student racial identity into consideration in admissions.
However, even if the court bans college affirmative action, my research finds that the goals behind these programs may survive. While in the past, state restrictions on affirmative action have decreased the numbers of underrepresented minorities on elite campuses, universities maintained their commitments to racial diversity through other admissions methods.
Some states already ban affirmative action
Over the past two decades, conservative reformers have waged war on affirmative action through state ballot initiatives and won bans on race-conscious practices. The effect? Elite public universities, such as the Universities of California, Michigan, and Washington, cannot consider race in admissions. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit in Hopwood v. Texas stopped universities in Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi from practicing affirmative action from 1996 to 2003.
Universities followed these bans to the letter and interpreted them as banning a particular method of recruiting a racially diverse class, but not the commitment to diversity itself. They responded by removing the explicit consideration of race from their policies when admitting students and awarding scholarships. These policy changes did decrease the numbers of students from underrepresented races and ethnicities in their incoming classes.
But legal change is not the same as practical change. In my forthcoming book, I find universities followed the letter of the law but aggressively pushed to thwart its spirit. For instance, the University of Texas relied on an unlikely source — segregation — to craft a policy solution after the 5th Circuit ruled that race-conscious admissions programs were unconstitutional.
Justices will hear a challenge to affirmative action that isn't really about affirmative action
Because Texas had such a high proportion of single-race high schools, UT faculty and state legislators realized that automatically admitting the top 10 percent of graduates from every public high school in the state would result in consistent racial diversity at Texas universities — without ever mentioning race. Shepherded by influential Democrats in the statehouse, the bill passed the Texas legislature and was signed into law by then-Gov. George W. Bush in 1997. The Top Ten law increased the geographic diversity of students entering UT. But the law was not effective at maintaining or increasing the numbers of underrepresented racial minority students.
For its part, the University of California at Berkeley was already receiving more than 20,000 applications per year when the UC Board of Regents banned affirmative action in 1995. In 1996, the state’s voters passed a referendum measure that put that ban into the state constitution.
At the time, admissions officers relied on a student’s grade-point average and standardized test scores to make their admissions decisions; officers took note of whether a student identified as an underrepresented racial minority, which would help students receive a positive admissions decision. Removing race consciousness from this process would have resulted in a mostly White and Asian American admitted class. To avoid this, faculty and administrators revamped admissions to consider other variables that would produce a class that was broadly diverse, including students from different socioeconomic, family education and racial backgrounds.
They asked admissions officers to evaluate factors such as whether students had taken leadership roles in their communities, had significant home responsibilities, had overcome challenging family circumstances or whether their high school’s resources may have affected their success.
Of course, assessing how these factors might have influenced student achievement was a subjective and highly personalized process compared with the old system, and admissions evaluators could disagree on whether a student was outstanding given the context. To account for that, Berkeley made sure each application had at least two reviewers and held weekly “norming sessions” to make sure readers were on the same page. The readers evaluated these factors on all applications, which meant a tremendous increase in workload for the admissions staff. Ultimately, the flagship campuses of the University of California at Los Angeles and Berkeley experienced tremendous declines in underrepresented racial minority enrollment.
Similarly, in Michigan in 2006, voters amended the state constitution to ban affirmative action. At the University of Michigan, administrators heard that software from the College Board called Descriptor Plus might offer a way to prioritize diversity while complying with the ban. The software was marketed as a way to target high school students who had the resources to afford higher tuition but would not otherwise have applied. It grouped high schools and neighborhoods together in clusters based on similar data points, such as percentage of adults in a community with professional jobs, percentage of students who were the first in their families in college, and percentage of families below the poverty level. The same cluster number could be shared across geography, so a rural Upper Peninsula high school (likely nearly all White) might be in the same cluster as an urban Detroit high school (likely nearly all Black). Admissions personnel integrated these clusters into their admissions process, giving preference to those underrepresented at the school. It has taken more than a decade since the ban for Hispanic undergraduate enrollment to rebound; Black and Native American student enrollment has plummeted.
A bill in Congress would end ‘legacy’ college preferences. Here’s why that matters.
The Supreme Court will likely issue its opinions on Monday’s cases sometime in 2023. As my research finds, affirmative action bans succeeded in removing race from university application review in states where they were implemented, and the overall numbers of enrolled minority students declined as a result. Nevertheless, the bans failed to end universities’ priorities for racial diversity.
See all TMC’s analysis of the Supreme Court in our classroom topic guides
Lauren S. Foley (@LSFoley) is an assistant professor of political science at Western Michigan University and author of “On the Basis of Race: Legal Resistance and Compliance in United States History and Politics” (NYU Press, forthcoming 2023). | 2022-10-27T19:11:46Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Will the Supreme Court strike down affirmative action in college admissions? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/27/harvard-supreme-court-affirmative-action/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/27/harvard-supreme-court-affirmative-action/ |
Mexican Formula One Red Bull driver Sergio “Checo” Perez waves at fans while holding a Mexican national flag after an exhibition race through the streets of Guadalajara, Mexico, Tuesday, Oct. 25, 2022. Perez will compete in the upcoming Mexico Grand Prix in Mexico City. (AP Photo) (Uncredited/AP)
MEXICO CITY — Formula One on Thursday announced a three-year extension to continue the Mexico City Grand Prix at the Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez through 2025. | 2022-10-27T19:12:23Z | www.washingtonpost.com | F1 signs 3-year extension with Mexico City Grand Prix - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/auto-racing/f1-signs-3-year-extension-with-mexico-city-grand-prix/2022/10/27/868ca8c0-5620-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/auto-racing/f1-signs-3-year-extension-with-mexico-city-grand-prix/2022/10/27/868ca8c0-5620-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html |
Matthew F. Delmont on history of Black Americans in World War II
More than 1 million Black Americans served in World War II. Even as they defended their nation abroad, they battled racism at home. On Thursday, Nov. 3 at 10:00 a.m. ET, join Washington Post associate editor Jonathan Capehart for a conversation with historian Matthew F. Delmont about his new book, “Half American,” which looks at the war from the perspective of Black soldiers.
Author, “Half American”
Professor of History, Dartmouth College | 2022-10-27T19:13:57Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Matthew F. Delmont on history of Black Americans in World War II - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2022/11/03/matthew-f-delmont-history-black-americans-world-war-ii/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2022/11/03/matthew-f-delmont-history-black-americans-world-war-ii/ |
Albuquerque Head received the second-longest sentence yet for Jan. 6 rioters. He had yelled ‘I got one’ as he pulled officer Michael Fanone into the crowd.
Pro-Trump protesters clash with D.C. police officer Michael Fanone on Jan. 6, 2021. (Shannon Stapleton/Reuters)
As rioters fought fiercely against police in the Lower West Terrace tunnel of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, one of the rioters said to D.C. police officer Michael Fanone, “Hey, I’m going to try to help you out here, you hear me?”
“Thank you,” Fanone replied before his body camera captured what happened next.
Albuquerque C. Head, a recovering drug addict and father of two from Kingsport, Tenn., then slung his arm around Fanone’s neck and dragged him into the roiling crowd just outside the tunnel.
“Hey! I got one!” Head yelled.
The mob descended, beating and kicking Fanone, snatching his Taser and repeatedly shocking him with it, Fanone’s body camera shows. The officer suffered a heart attack and a traumatic brain injury.
“These were some of the darkest acts committed on one of our nation’s darkest days,” U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson said after watching the video from Fanone’s camera. Then she sentenced Head to 7 ½ years in prison, just short of the eight-year maximum for assault on a police officer. It is the second-longest sentence imposed on a Jan. 6 rioter, and the longest for one who pleaded guilty. Jackson also ordered Head to make restitution to the District police for medical expenses they may have covered for Fanone, in an amount to be determined later.
The only rioter to receive a longer sentence was former New York City police officer Thomas Webster, who was sentenced to 10 years in prison last month for assaulting police.
NYPD veteran who assaulted police receives longest Jan. 6 sentence yet: 10 years
Head, 43, was one of very few Jan. 6 defendants who declined the judge’s offer to speak at his sentencing. Most defendants have spoken of their remorse or even apologize. Head stared straight ahead and rigidly shook his head. As he was led from the courtroom, he turned and grinned at his fiancee, who wept. He has been in jail since his arrest in April 2021, one of about 80 Jan. 6 defendants who were detained before trial or sentencing.
Investigators used multiple videos, from journalists, crowd members, police body cameras and surveillance cameras to document Head’s movement through the crowd outside the Capitol that day and to debunk lies Head told to the FBI after his arrest.
The videos show him pushing his way to the Lower West Terrace tunnel, moving to the melee with police, being forced back twice and returning twice to the fray. Along the way, someone hands him a gas mask, and then he snatches a police shield. When the police snatch it back, he gestures for another from the crowd behind him, and another shield appears, the videos show.
Head can be seen battling with officers at the glass doors beyond the tunnel, where one officer was briefly crushed, and facing off with Fanone. The officers eventually begin to push the rioters out of the tunnel, at which point Head convinces Fanone that he is trying to help him, then drags him out of the tunnel to the mob.
“Mr. Head had the presence of mind,” Fanone told the judge, “to say maybe there was someone in the crowd that would offer me help … Mr. Head had every intention of dragging me into the mob and subject me to a brutal beating.”
After Fanone was beaten and directly shocked in the neck several times, some of the rioters encircled him to try to get him help. But the videos show Head trying to get back into the group to resume the assault on Fanone. The officer was rescued, but his injuries forced him to retire from D.C. police.
‘We got to hold this door’: How battered D.C. police made a stand against the Capitol mob
“I think many see my outspokenness and the attention I have gained,” Fanone said, referring to the interviews and testimonies he has given about Jan. 6, “as a measure of my success. It is not. I would trade all the attention to return to my career. The reason for the suffering I have endured the last 18 months is Albuquerque Head.” He asked Jackson to impose the maximum eight-year term, as did federal prosecutors.
Prosecutors noted they agreed to dismiss a charge with a 20-year maximum, obstructing an official proceeding, in exchange for Head’s guilty plea to the assault charge.
Court records indicated Head was a construction worker with 45 prior convictions in Tennessee beginning at age 18, mostly for misdemeanors but several for assault. Jackson said Head had been addicted to various drugs until achieving sobriety in 2015. His defense lawyer, G. Nicholas Wallace, offered an apology to Fanone and all officers present on Jan. 6, and said Head’s conduct “is reprehensible and needs to be dealt with appropriately.” He asked for a five-year sentence.
Wallace argued in his sentencing memo that Head was not responsible for what happened after Fanone entered the crowd.
“I cannot accept that for one moment,” Jackson said. “When he exposed him to the mercy of the crowd? That forced walk down the steps changed Officer Fanone’s life forever.”
The judge noted that Fanone’s body camera captured one rioter joining the fray, looking down at Fanone and saying, “Oh my God, I’m getting out of here.” But Head did not leave.
“This case falls within the category of the most serious offenders,” Jackson said. “This is one of the most serious cases there is.”
Fanone’s body camera captured something else, after he was dragged out of the mob and lay on the floor unconscious: his partner imploring him, “Mike, stay with me buddy.”
Fanone soon revived, and his first words were, “We take the door back?”
“We did,” his partner said. “We f------ did.” | 2022-10-27T19:45:29Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Albuquerque Head receives 7 1/2 year sentence, second longest for Jan. 6 rioter - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/27/jan-6-rioter-who-dragged-dc-officer-into-mob-is-sentenced-7-12-years/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/27/jan-6-rioter-who-dragged-dc-officer-into-mob-is-sentenced-7-12-years/ |
A woman was fatally shot around 12:20 p.m. in Northwest, and a man was killed just after 1:45 a.m. in Northeast
Two people were fatally shot in separate incidents Thursday in D.C., according to the police department.
Around 12:20 p.m., a woman driving a vehicle was killed in the 1300 block of New Jersey Avenue NW. Gunfire erupted inside the vehicle as a red light turned green, D.C. police Third District Commander James Boteler told reporters. The victim then crashed the car into a telephone pole, he said.
First responders with D.C. Fire and Emergency Medical Services responded from a station across the street from the incident, but the victim was pronounced dead on the scene, authorities said.
Soon after the incident, officers began questioning the only other occupant of the vehicle, who was another woman, authorities said. The victim and that woman appeared to know each other, police said.
The incident occurred near Dunbar High School, but authorities did not put the school on lockdown because the incident appeared to be “self-contained to what happened inside this vehicle while traveling through our district,” Boteler said.
Eleven hours earlier, just after 1:45 a.m., a man was fatally shot in the 1200 block of Trinidad Avenue NE, police said. Officers in the area responded to the sound of gun shots, the department said, and found the man deceased.
By Thursday afternoon, police had not released the identities of those slain. Investigations into both fatal shootings are active.
On Wednesday night, separate shootings injured a man, a 16-year-old male and a 17-year-old male, according to D.C. police. | 2022-10-27T20:02:54Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Two slain Thursday in D.C. in separate shootings - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/27/dc-homicides-october-thursday/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/27/dc-homicides-october-thursday/ |
Xi’s totalitarian power grab bodes poorly for U.S.-China relations
Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing on Oct. 23. (Tingshu Wang/Reuters)
TAIPEI, Taiwan – Now that the Chinese Communist Party congress is over, we’re getting a clear picture of President Xi Jinping’s new team — the result of a broad purge of senior officials who might stand in the way of his rising economic nationalism and aggressive foreign policy. By surrounding himself with hard-liners and loyalists, Xi has consolidated control and accelerated the demise of the era of engagement in U.S.-China relations.
Over the past two weeks, as the party endowed him with the new title of “core” leader, Xi has purged his rivals and elevated his confidants and cronies in a manner even more drastic than most outsiders anticipated. Apparently, he coldly ordered the removal and humiliation of his predecessor Hu Jintao at the closing ceremony of the congress. Perhaps Xi did not want the ex-president to see that the new Politiburo Standing Committee of the CCP would no longer include two of Hu’s associates — Li Keqiang and Wang Yang — who were both evidently seen as less committed to Xi’s hard-line policies.
Additionally, two senior CCP officials who were key to the relationship between Washington and Beijing have lost positions in Xi’s Politburo: Liu He, who negotiated the “phase one” trade agreement with the United States during the Trump administration, and Yang Jiechi, who had been China’s top diplomatic interlocutor with the Biden administration until now.
On the rise are officials who have demonstrated their obedience to Xi or proved their hard-line credentials. Shanghai Party leader Li Qiang, who oversaw a disastrous two-month covid-19 lockdown, is positioned to be named premier, second only to Xi. China’s ambassador to Washington, Qin Gang, a hawkish “wolf warrior” diplomat, was promoted to the Central Committee and is rumored to be in line to become foreign minister.
Until now, the CCP attempted to maintain at least an appearance of checks and balances inside the top leadership by including members from different factions. But Xi has done away with that pretense. Nathan Law, a former Hong Kong legislator now living in exile in the United Kingdom, told me that Xi’s consolidation of total power means less stability and less predictability.
“We are going to witness a more threatening, more unpredictable and more reckless regime in China,” Law said. “It brings more insecurity to the world.”
Other moves Xi made this week seem to foretell a more aggressive stance toward Taiwan. In his speech, Xi said that China will “never promise to renounce the use of force” to reunify China and Taiwan. Congressional delegates amended China’s constitution to add a line promising to “resolutely oppose and contain Taiwan independence.”
“We just have to factor in that this more reckless government in Beijing may make more risky decisions in terms of military action to Taiwan, so the calculation of the risk has to be recalibrated,” Law said.
Even as President Biden reiterated this week that the United States does not seek conflict with China, his officials acknowledged that they are increasingly worried by Beijing’s behavior. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Wednesday that the Chinese government had made a decision that the status quo across the Taiwan Strait “was no longer acceptable” and was speeding up its plans for reunification.
Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen issued an even more ominous warning in remarks Tuesday to the Global Assembly of the World Movement for Democracy here in Taipei.
“At this moment, democracies and the rules-based order are facing their greatest challenges since the end of the Cold War,” she said. “Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine is a prime example. It shows that authoritarian regimes will do whatever it takes to achieve expansionism. The people of Taiwan are all too familiar with such aggression.”
There’s a tendency in Washington to look at Xi Jinping as a weak leader because he is dealing with economic challenges, an unpopular zero-covid policy and an international backlash to his expansionism. But U.S. leaders shouldn’t lull themselves into this false comfort, Xiao Qiang, research scientist at the School of Information at the University of California at Berkeley, told me.
“Washington should clearly see they are dealing with a totalitarian regime with a powerful but insecure dictator, with a nationalist agenda to take Taiwan,” he said. “It’s time to develop an effective response to this.”
Xi’s accumulation of totalitarian power presents a heightened danger to his neighbors and the world. Like it or not, the opportunities for cooperation and engagement with Xi’s government will be few and far between in the years ahead. The best the United States and its partners can do is to remain clear-eyed about the nature of Xi’s China and plan accordingly. | 2022-10-27T20:37:52Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Xi's consolidation of power will hurt U.S.-China relations - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/27/xi-power-grab-threat-relations-west/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/27/xi-power-grab-threat-relations-west/ |
New U.S. citizens listen as Secretary of State Antony Blinken delivers remarks during a naturalization ceremony in Philadelphia on Oct. 19. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
Donald Trump was explicit about his political appeal from the moment he announced his candidacy in June 2015. He pledged to “make America great again” — to restore America to its past greatness, a greatness it no longer possessed. Within the first minutes of his announcement speech, he articulated one way in which that greatness had eroded: dangerous immigrants crossing into the United States from Mexico.
The backlash to those comments cemented his position with Republican voters and delivered him the party’s nomination. As the 2016 election approached, it became clear that immigration and often-but-not-always submerged concerns about race were a strong motivation for his supporters. The great America for which his mostly White supporters were nostalgic was one in which there wasn’t a focus on or accommodation for discrimination against Black or gay people.
None of this is to say that America is flawless. Indeed, the poll found that most Americans think the country is heading in the wrong direction. As might be expected, given who controls the government, that sentiment is much more common among Republicans than Democrats. But a heavy majority of the country feels that way.
Of course, there are certainly wide differences in why people think the country is headed in the wrong direction, which we’ll get to in a moment.
So what does that “change for the worse” look like? Well, there’s certainly some concern about immigration. More than half of Republicans, for example, think that immigrants are “invading” the United States and “replacing” American culture. This isn’t quite the white supremacist “great replacement theory” — that involves a cabal of elites intentionally manufacturing the replacement — but it’s close enough to warrant the comparison.
The response was even stronger for the statement that new immigrants to the United States “threaten traditional customs and values.” More than two-thirds of Republicans think that’s true.
It’s impossible to separate this out from that prior question about the 1950s. As it turns out, not only has immigration increased since the 1950s (thanks to the liberalization of immigration laws in the 1960s), but the nature of immigration has changed. Before World War II, most immigrants were from Europe, triggering a backlash a century ago about Eastern and Southern Europeans tainting the United States. Now, immigrants are mostly Hispanic and Asian. So “immigration” and “concerns about race” overlap to a large extent if not, in some contexts, entirely.
Remember that Trump’s arrival in 2015 came as the country was just starting to process the issues raised by the Black Lives Matter movement. This also colored his reception by Republican voters. Because then, as now, Republicans tend to be less likely to believe that long-standing discrimination negatively affects Black Americans.
Consider this statement from the AVS: a Black person is more likely than a White person to receive the death penalty for the same crime. This has been shown to be true. But only a third of Republicans think it is.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, Republicans are also less likely to say that white supremacy remains a major problem in the United States.
This question carries more weight than it might seem, however. In the past few years, many on the right have come to view “white supremacist” as a phrase usually deployed in bad faith by the left to gain the moral high ground. Being asked whether the ideology is still a major problem, then, becomes entwined with a desire to neutralize that moral judgment.
Another question from the AVS, though, gets at something similar — are concerns about discrimination overblown? — from the other direction. Most Republicans say that discrimination against Whites is as big a problem as discrimination against minority groups.
This isn’t a new finding, but it’s still eternally fascinating. Consider how it sits alongside the other questions detailed above: If you think America is changing for the worse since the 1950s, a time when the power of Whites was codified in the law, and if you think that immigrants are ruining real America but “invading” anyway, perhaps it’s to be expected that you’d think Whites were facing enormous discrimination. What’s the saying? “When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.”
Now we get into the grimmer terrain. Trump’s bid for a second term — focused even more explicitly on issues of race than his 2016 campaign — was stymied by voters. But most Republicans think it wasn’t, that the system they see slipping away from them worked nefariously against the former president. This, too, is obviously false but, as PRRI notes, the percentage of Republicans who think the 2020 election was stolen is the same this year as last.
More alarming was PRRI’s continuation of the question about whether the country was on the right track: Have things gotten so bad that “true American patriots may have to resort to violence”? The vast majority of Americans say no. But more than a quarter of Republicans say they completely or mostly agree with that sentiment.
You can see how this builds. America is being eroded, Whites are under threat. We may need to resort to worst-case measures.
One bit of good news, if you want to call it that: The percentage of Americans willing to embrace violence hasn’t changed since last year. | 2022-10-27T20:42:54Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Race, immigration — and the right-wing backlash they trigger - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/27/race-immigration-trump/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/27/race-immigration-trump/ |
Nearly half of Americans think U.S. should be ‘Christian nation,’ poll finds
But Pew respondents differed widely in describing what that term might mean
By Jack Jenkins
(Brad Dodson/Unsplash/Creative Commons)
Close to half of Americans say the United States should be a “Christian nation,” one of several striking findings from a sweeping new Pew Research Center survey examining Christian nationalism.
But researchers say respondents differed greatly when it came to outlining what a Christian nation should look like, suggesting a wide spectrum of beliefs.
“There are a lot of Americans — 45 percent — who tell us they think the United States should be a Christian nation. That is a lot of people,” Greg Smith, one of the lead authors of the survey, said in an interview. But “what people mean when they say they think the U.S. should be a Christian nation is really quite nuanced.”
Christian nationalism has become a trending topic in midterm election campaigns, with extremists and even members of Congress such as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) identifying with the term and other Republicans, such as Rep. Lauren Boebert (Colo.) and Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano, expressing open hostility to the separation of church and state. In the roadshow known as the ReAwaken America Tour, unapologetically Christian nationalist leaders crisscross the country spouting false claims and baptizing people.
Right-wing roadshow promotes Christian nationalism before midterms
Pew’s findings, released Thursday, suggest the recent surge in attention paid to Christian nationalism has had an effect on Americans, although some suggested that politicians may be staking out positions to the right of those who merely say America should be a “Christian nation.”
“I used to think it was a positive view, but now with the MAGA crowd, I view it as racist, homophobic, anti-woman,” read one response to the survey question.
According to the poll, which was conducted in September, 60 percent of Americans believe the United States was originally intended to be a Christian nation, but only 33 percent say it remains so today. Most (67 percent) say churches and other houses of worship should keep out of political matters, with only 31 percent endorsing faith groups’ expressing views on social and political issues.
Even those who believe America should be a Christian nation generally avoided hard-line positions. Most of this group (52 percent) said the government should never declare any particular faith the official state religion. Only 28 percent said they wanted Christianity recognized as the country’s official faith. Similarly, 52 percent said the government should advocate for moral values shared by several religions, compared with 24 percent who said it should advocate for Christian values.
But the pro-Christian U.S. group was more split on the separation of church and state: 39 percent said the principle should be enforced, whereas 31 percent said the government should abandon it. An additional 30 percent disliked either option, refused to say or didn’t know.
Most in the group (54 percent) also said that if the Bible and U.S. laws conflict, Scripture should have more influence than the will of the people.
Smith stressed that some respondents who expressed support for a Christian nation “do mean that they think Christian beliefs, values and morality ought to be reflected in U.S. laws and policies.” But many respondents “tell us that they think the U.S. should be guided by Christian principles in a general way, but they don’t mean that we should live in a theocracy,” he said. “They don’t mean that they want to get rid of separation of church and state. They don’t mean they want to see the U.S. officially declared to be a Christian nation. It’s a nuanced picture.”
Among U.S. adults overall, only a small subset believe the U.S. government should declare Christianity the national faith (15 percent), advocate for Christian values (13 percent) or stop enforcing the separation of church and state (19 percent).
Partisanship strongly shaped the responses. Those who are or lean Republican were far more likely to say America should be a Christian nation (67 percent) than Democrats or Democratic leaners (29 percent). Republicans were also significantly more likely to say the founders intended the country to be a Christian nation (76 percent), although nearly half of Democrats agreed (47 percent).
These divisions appear to reflect national political trends. While Democratic lawmakers — especially members of the Congressional Freethought Caucus — have voiced concerns about Christian nationalism’s role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, many congressional Republicans have declined to condemn the ideology, with only a small number affirming support for the separation of church and state.
How the Capitol attacks helped spread Christian nationalism in the extreme right
The outsize presence of White evangelicals in the GOP may play a role. In Pew’s survey, White evangelicals were the faith group most likely to say America should be a Christian nation (81 percent). But they were followed by Black Protestants (65 percent), a heavily Democratic group. White nonevangelical Protestants were more split, with 54 percent agreeing the United States should be a Christian nation.
Catholics were the only major Christian group where a majority did not express support of the idea (47 percent) of a Christian nation, though they were split along racial lines: Most White Catholics (56 percent) agreed America should be a Christian nation, while Hispanic Catholics were the least likely of any Christian group to say the same (36 percent).
Few Jewish (16 percent) or religiously unaffiliated Americans (17 percent) thought the United States should be a Christian nation, followed by an even smaller subset of atheists and agnostics (7 percent).
Age is also a factor. Among Americans ages 65 or older, 63 percent said America should be a Christian nation, compared with 23 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds.
Republicans mostly mum on calls to make GOP ‘party of Christian nationalism’
Pew asked half of respondents to define a “Christian nation” in their own words and used their open-ended answers to group most people into three categories: those who see it as general guidance of Christian beliefs and values in society (34 percent); those who see it as being guided by beliefs and values, but without specifically referencing God or Christian concepts (12 percent); and those who see it as having Christian-based laws and governance (18 percent).
Those who think the United States should not be a Christian nation were more likely to describe a Christian nation as having Christian-based laws and governance (30 percent) than did those who believe it should be (6 percent).
The survey polled the other half of respondents about their views on Christian nationalism as a distinct concept. Among all U.S. adults, fewer than half (45 percent) said they had heard the term. Non-Christians were more likely than Christians overall to have heard or read about Christian nationalism (55 percent vs. 40 percent), and Democrats were more likely to express familiarity than Republicans (55 percent vs. 37 percent).
But researchers noted that while 54 percent of those surveyed said they hadn’t heard of Christian nationalism, respondents overall were far more likely to view the concept unfavorably (24 percent) than favorably (5 percent), suggesting that people familiar with the concept generally view it negatively. | 2022-10-27T20:43:19Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Nearly half of Americans think USA should be Christian nation, Pew finds - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2022/10/27/america-christian-nation-pew-nationalism/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2022/10/27/america-christian-nation-pew-nationalism/ |
Senate GOP report argues lab leak theory is most likely origin of covid
Dan Diamond
Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) questions Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and Chief Medical Advisor to President Biden, during a Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee hearing on monkeypox in September. Paul has promised hearings on the so-called lab leak theory if Republicans win the Senate. (Sarah Silbiger for The Washington Post)
Senate Republican staffers have produced a report laying out their argument that the most likely origin of the coronavirus pandemic was some kind of “research-related incident” in China, citing safety lapses in laboratories there and arguing that there are evidentiary gaps in published scientific research that points to a natural origin from animals sold at a market in Wuhan.
The report, while not a formal scientific document, represents a possible template for a future investigatory hearing in Congress if Republicans gain control of the House or Senate — or both — following the midterm elections. The so-called lab leak theory is a talking point for some Republicans seeking office, and Sen. Rand Paul (R.-Ky.) has promised hearings if his party wins the Senate.
The 35-page “interim” report released Thursday comes from Sen. Richard Burr (R.-N.C.) and Republican staffers on the Senate Health Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, which has been probing the origin of the virus.
Although the report favors the “lab leak” origin, it does not rule out a market origin. The report also does not indulge the more provocative conspiracy theories for how SARS-CoV-2 entered the human population. There is no claim that the virus was engineered as a bioweapon, for example.
Nor does it mention Anthony S. Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who has been a frequent target of Paul and other lab leak proponents because his institute helped fund virus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
The report takes issue with two peer-reviewed studies published in the journal Science this summer that presented the case for the Huanan Seafood Market as the epicenter of the outbreak. One study found a geographical bull's eye on the market among early cases of the disease that came to be called covid-19. The other study presented an analysis of two early strains of the virus suggesting that there were two and maybe many more distinct spillovers of the virus from animals sold at the market.
What the market-origin hypothesis lacks is the identity of the animals infected with the virus.
“Critical corroborating evidence of a natural zoonotic spillover is missing. While the absence of evidence is not itself evidence, the lack of corroborating evidence of a zoonotic spillover or spillovers, three years into the pandemic, is highly problematic,” the new GOP report states.
Michael Worobey, a professor at the University of Arizona who co-authored both studies published in Science, said the new GOP report “gets the science completely wrong.”
“As the saying goes, when you mix science and politics, you get politics,” he said.
Worobey said the hypothesis of some kind of laboratory incident was worth investigating, and he was among the scientists who wrote a letter to Science in May 2021 arguing that all possible origins should be probed. But he said his investigations and those of other scientists point to a market origin. Although it’s true that no animals were found with the virus, there were none tested at the market before it was closed and cleaned in the earliest days of the outbreak, he said.
He said he is willing to testify if the Republicans call hearings.
Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan and co-author of one of the Science papers, dismissed the new GOP report as “speculative hand-waving” and views it as a partisan document.
“This is in service of trying to set up something that would be politically advantageous for one party,” she said. “It’s to make it easier to have essentially show trials for people’s adversaries, which has unfortunately come to include scientists.”
The report lands in the final days of an election cycle where multiple Republicans — including Paul, who sits on the health panel — have accused Fauci of hiding information about the virus’ origins.
“We owe it to the Americans who have lost their lives to the virus, their families, and those still struggling with the pandemic’s societal and economic consequences, to continue investigating the coronavirus’s origins,” Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) said in a statement Thursday, calling on Fauci to “release all texts, emails, communications, and grant records completely and without redactions.”
Burr, who is retiring this year, has taken a more conciliatory approach with Fauci, praising the longtime government scientist’s work at a hearing last month and attempting to focus the report on broader questions of biosafety.
While concluding that a research-related incident is the “most likely” origin of the outbreak, the new report stops well short of a case-closed declaration. Burr’s introductory note is equivocal.
“This conclusion is not intended to be dispositive,” it states. “The lack of transparency from government and public health officials in the [People’s Republic of China] with respect to the origins of SARS-CoV-2 prevents reaching a more definitive conclusion. Should additional information be made publicly available, and subject to independent verification, it is possible that these conclusions would be subject to review and reconsideration.”
The panel’s report was steered by Robert Kadlec, an adviser to Burr who served as assistant secretary for preparedness and response at the Department of Health and Human Services during the Trump administration.
Some health officials, including Robert Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention during the Trump administration, have reiterated their belief that a lab-leak in China is the most likely cause of the pandemic.
“I think you’re going to see the preponderance of the evidence for the origins of covid-19 is that it didn’t come from natural origins. That’s my own view,” Redfield told a House committee investigating the government’s coronavirus response in March.
In a statement on Thursday, the panel’s top Democrat reiterated that a separate probe into the origins of the virus is ongoing.
“[I]n 2021, I announced a bipartisan oversight effort with Sen. Burr into the origins of this virus. The HELP Committee is continuing bipartisan work on this oversight report,” said Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), the Senate health committee’s chair. | 2022-10-27T20:43:25Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Covid lab leak theory supported in report from Senate Republicans - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2022/10/27/covid-lab-leak-theory-origin/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2022/10/27/covid-lab-leak-theory-origin/ |
Defense contractors hire thousands of foreigners. Many are trapped by employment practices banned by the U.S. government.
By Katie McQue
An office at the U.S. Army's Camp Arifjan in Kuwait, where foreign employees working for defense contractors say they were trapped in their jobs by abusive employment practices. (U.S. Army)
“The kafala system is abusive precisely because it grants such disproportionate power to employers over migrant workers,” said Michael Page, deputy director in the Middle East and North Africa division at Human Rights Watch. “When employers are allowed to confiscate a worker's passport or deny a migrant worker the ability to change jobs, this undermines not only the worker's power to decide where to work but even the ability to leave abusive situations. At its worst, this reality can even lead to situations of forced labor.”
“We have our passport all the time, as that is Amentum's guideline,” said Gurung. “But having our passports on hand doesn't mean we are free to leave.”
“If you don't pay, they will not send you overseas,” Gurung recalled. “Although I knew it wasn't legal, I had no choice.”
Previous public warnings | 2022-10-27T20:45:17Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Abuses by defense contractors at U.S. military bases in Persian Gulf trap migrant workers, employees say - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/27/defense-contractors-persian-gulf-trafficking/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/27/defense-contractors-persian-gulf-trafficking/ |
Iranian forces open fire on protesters as government buildings burn
Videos posted online on Oct. 27 show several protests throughout the city of Mahabad, where a protester was buried the night before igniting the protests. (Video: Twitter)
Violence erupted Thursday in the city of Mahabad in the Kurdish region of western Iran, where protesters attacked government buildings, including the offices of the governor and the mayor. Security forces responded by opening fire on demonstrators, according to videos posted on social media and verified by The Washington Post.
At least two people were killed and dozens were wounded, activists said, though The Post could not independently verify their claims.
The clashes came after security forces killed a young man named Ismail Mowludi in Mahabad the day before during a ceremony commemorating the 40th day since the death of Mahsa Amini, the Kurdish woman who has become the symbol of a nationwide uprising. Thousands took to the streets Wednesday in Amini’s hometown of Saqez and across the region.
The unrest in Mahabad started after Mowludi was buried early Thursday and large crowds joined the funeral procession as it moved toward the center of the city, chanting “Kurdistan, Kurdistan will be the graveyard of fascists” and “Death to the Dictator,” a reference to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
A video posted online showed a large crowd chanting outside a burning building. Another showed protesters pelting the entrance to the Mahabad governor’s office with rocks as shots ring out in the background.
The semiofficial Tasnim news agency denied that security forces used live ammunition and blamed the violence on protesters: “Some in this group take advantage and in their path they attack and throw rocks at any office or institution that they see and destroy public property,” the report said.
Protesters across Iran have mostly avoided targeting government buildings, even as they have continued to take to the streets in the face of intensifying violence by security forces. The crackdown has been especially brutal in Kurdish areas, which have long been neglected by the Iranian government, and where residents have described a “military-style” occupation over the last six weeks.
Mowludi’s death on a day of mourning appears to have emboldened the protesters, encouraging them to take out their anger on state institutions, according to Rebin Rahmani from the Kurdistan Human Rights Network.
“The people were furious,” he said.
By nightfall, demonstrators had taken control of one of the entrances to the city of Mahabad, Rahmani said, and unrest had spread to at least two other cities in the Kurdish region, Baneh and Dehgolan.
Mahabad was the capital of a short-lived autonomous Kurdish state in northwest Iran in 1946 and still holds great symbolism for Kurds.
The escalation in the west came a day after an attack on a mosque in the southern city of Shiraz, which killed at least 15 people, according to state media. Though the Islamic State claimed credit for the attack, the Iranian government has sought to link it to the protest movement — an unsupported claim that protesters have broadly ridiculed on social media.
In a clear message to demonstrators Thursday, Khamenei issued a statement calling on security forces and the judiciary to confront “the incendiary enemy and traitorous agents.” | 2022-10-27T20:59:31Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Iranian security forces open fire on Kurdish protesters in Mahabad - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/27/iran-protest-mahabad-mahsa-amini/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/27/iran-protest-mahabad-mahsa-amini/ |
D.C. says it has ‘fallen short’ of goal to end traffic deaths
Mayor Muriel E. Bowser made the commitment to reduce traffic fatalities in 2015, but deaths have been trending up.
Two officers stand in front of a traffic safety sign at the event in front of Van Ness Elementary School. (Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post)
The District on Thursday issued a report laying out new measures to improve road safety, while also acknowledging it has “fallen short” in its work to end traffic deaths by 2024, a goal Mayor Muriel E. Bowser set seven years ago.
“Our original target of achieving zero deaths by 2024 was ambitious and has not been without its challenges,” Bowser (D) said in an update of her Vision Zero safety initiative, which aims to reduce traffic-related fatalities and severe injuries.
Fatal crashes have been trending up since Bowser made the pledge in 2015. The increase has come alongside the administration’s push for stricter traffic rules, including reduced speed limits, more speed cameras and higher fines for traffic violators.
The city recorded 40 traffic deaths last year, a 14-year high, up from 26 deaths in the year Bowser launched Vision Zero. So far this year, 26 people have been killed in traffic crashes in the city, down from 36 at the same time last year, D.C. police records show.
The Vision Zero report, issued by the District Department of Transportation, promises new actions and resources over the next two years with a focus on high-crash corridors. The plan calls for more traffic cameras, a reevaluation of speed limits in more corridors, an expansion of the DDOT traffic patrol program and the deployment of more police to school zones during arrival and dismissal times.
The Bowser administration said the city also will shift more resources and attention to address equity concerns, noting more traffic fatalities occur in wards 7 and 8, and east of the Anacostia River — areas that also have the city’s highest rates of poverty.
A Washington Post analysis earlier this year found nearly half of traffic deaths last year were in those two wards, which contain less than one-quarter of the city’s population. The Vision Zero report indicates the annual fatality rate in Wards 7 and 8 is 8.2 and 9.6, respectively, per 100,000 residents. That’s compared to wards 1 and 3, where the rates are 1.9 and 0.9, respectively.
D.C. traffic deaths at 14-year high with low-income areas hardest hit
The report noted progress in reducing fatal crashes in the past two decades after the number of traffic fatalities peaked at 69 in 2003. The city’s rate is “on par or better than other large U.S. cities,” the report said, while adding, “our progress has fallen short of our goal to achieve zero deaths by 2024, as originally planned in 2015.”
Residents and advocates for years have criticized the city’s commitment to the program, citing perceived shortcomings in the speed at which the city is embracing safety changes. Some critics say the efforts have been too focused on adding automated enforcement and fines, and in making driving conditions more difficult while yielding few benefits to pedestrians and non-drivers. Others say the city has been too slow to target aggressive drivers or redesign streets prone to speeding.
Conor Shaw, a Northeast D.C. resident and advocate for safer streets, praised Bowser’s plan Thursday for its focus on arterial roads and adding transparency about crash data. Shaw said that while the report acknowledges the challenges in reducing traffic deaths and injuries, he is encouraged the city continues to embrace the goal of eliminating them “and sets out a robust and comprehensive strategy to get there.”
“The proof is in the product — not the plan,” he said. “The actual street design changes, improved enforcement and investments in transit are what will make the difference.”
The District last month reduced speed limits from 30 mph to 25 mph on some major commuter corridors, including New York Avenue NE and Connecticut Avenue NW. Two years ago, Bowser set the default speed limit on D.C. streets at 20 mph, down from 25 mph, citing concerns about speeding and other dangerous driving behaviors.
D.C. cuts speed limit to 25 mph in major routes to curb fatal crashes
Bowser is also pushing a modernization and expansion of the city’s automated enforcement program, promising to more than triple the number of traffic cameras by the end of next year. The cameras would target speeding, drivers who run red lights and stop signs, and those who illegally use bike and bus lanes or pass school buses.
The D.C. Council last month approved banning right turns on red lights at all intersections beginning in 2025, expanding DDOT’s actions in recent years to ban such turns at more than 100 intersections in school zones, within downtown or near bike lanes, where risks to pedestrians are highest.
The District’s renewed approach comes with a new Vision Zero website, which provides information on traffic safety projects as well as crash data. While this year’s update sets strategies over the next two years, Bowser said in the report “a comprehensive refresh” of the program is expected in 2024.
“We know our efforts must ever-evolve by applying lessons-learned and data-driven solutions, especially to our most vulnerable street users and populations,” DDOT director Everett Lott said in a statement. | 2022-10-27T21:08:14Z | www.washingtonpost.com | D.C. Vision Zero program has ‘fallen short’ of ending traffic deaths, city says - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2022/10/27/dc-vision-zero-traffic-deaths/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2022/10/27/dc-vision-zero-traffic-deaths/ |
NEW YORK — Amazon returned to profitability after two consecutive quarters of losses this year, but its stocks tanked due to weaker than expected revenue as well as the company’s disappointing projections for the current quarter. Amazon reported revenue of $127.1 billion, less than the $127.4 billion analysts surveyed by FactSet had predicted. The company expects revenue for the fourth quarter to be between $140 billion and $148 billion, a growth of 2% and 8% compared with the fourth quarter of last year. Amazon said it anticipates an unfavorable impact from fluctuations in foreign exchange rates.
WASHINGTON — The U.S. economy grew at a 2.6% annual rate from July through September, snapping two straight quarters of contraction and overcoming high inflation and interest rates just as voting begins in midterm elections in which the economy’s health has emerged as a paramount issue. The better-than-expected government estimate showed that the gross domestic product grew in the third quarter after having shrunk in the first half of 2022. Overall, though, the outlook for the economy has darkened. The Federal Reserve has raised interest rates five times this year and is set to do so again next week and in December. Concern about the likelihood of a recession next year has been growing.
DETROIT — Average prices on new and used vehicles have begun easing from their record highs, and more vehicles have become available at dealerships. The average used vehicle price in September was down 1% from its peak in May. Even so, auto purchases remain unaffordable for many, with average prices still 30% to 50% above where they were when the pandemic erupted in early 2020. The average used auto cost nearly $31,000 last month. The average new? $47,000. With monthly payments on a new vehicle averaging above $700, millions of buyers have been priced out of the new-vehicle market and are now confined to used vehicles.
WASHINGTON — Average long-term U.S. mortgage rates topped 7% for the first time in more than two decades this week, a result of the Federal Reserve’s aggressive rate hikes intended to tame inflation not seen in some 40 years. Mortgage buyer Freddie Mac reported Thursday that the average on the key 30-year rate jumped to 7.08% from 6.94% last week. The last time the average rate was above 7% was April 2002, a time when the U.S. was still reeling from the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, but six years away from the 2008 housing market collapse that triggered the Great Recession.
FRANKFURT, Germany — The European Central Bank has made another outsized interest rate hike aimed at squelching out-of-control inflation, moving at the fastest pace in the euro currency’s history. The hike of three-quarters of a percentage point Thursday underscores the bank’s determination to control prices despite the threat of recession. The ECB has matched its record increase from last month and is joining the U.S. Federal Reserve in making a series of rapid hikes to tackle soaring consumer prices. The ECB has now raised rates for the 19-country euro area by a full 2 percentage points in just three months and expects more hikes ahead. | 2022-10-27T22:13:45Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Business Highlights: Amazon profits, US economy rebounds - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/business-highlights-amazon-profits-us-economy-rebounds/2022/10/27/38a9a606-563b-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/business-highlights-amazon-profits-us-economy-rebounds/2022/10/27/38a9a606-563b-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html |
One of Dinesh D’Souza’s 2,000 alleged ‘mules’ sues, alleging defamation
A ballot is inserted into a drop box in Willow Grove, Pa., in October 2021. (Matt Rourke/AP)
Right-wing commentator Dinesh D’Souza welcomed a special guest to his podcast on Tuesday: former president Donald Trump. The two spent about 20 minutes discussing the subject that has animated them both for the past two years: false claims about rampant ballot fraud affecting the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.
Trump has seen D’Souza’s film “2000 Mules.” He held a screening of the film at his Mar-a-Lago event facility. He’s advocated for it regularly, and for good reason: “2000 Mules” purports to show that Trump didn’t lose his reelection bid but, rather, that it was stolen by a network of people shuttling ballots around swing states. The film is entirely unconvincing both in its specific assertions about the number of ballots shuttled (a figure that D’Souza admitted to The Washington Post was essentially a guess) and in its overall methodology. But no one on this planet is less fazed by obviously false claims about voter fraud than Trump.
After declaring that he won by “millions of votes,” Trump praised “2000 Mules” as being particularly useful to his effort to subvert his loss. The film, he said, showed fraud in a “very conclusive way, because you were taking government tapes” as evidence. That is, the film’s claims that a group called True the Vote had compiled geolocation data to show people visiting multiple ballot drop boxes was augmented by video from those drop boxes — and who could argue with that?
One person who could is Mark Andrews.
Here are two stills from “2000 Mules” showing Andrews depositing ballots in a drop box in Georgia before the election that year. As the footage airs, D’Souza speaks in a voice-over.
“What you are seeing is a crime,” D’Souza says. “These are fraudulent votes.”
But it was not a crime. And that’s not just our weighing in; that was the determination of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, which investigated Andrews’s behavior and established that the multiple ballots Andrews submitted were simply his and his family’s ballots — fully in compliance with state law.
D’Souza insists that anyone shown on-screen was a “mule,” someone who True the Vote’s crack detective work had identified as visiting multiple ballot drop boxes as well as unidentified left-wing organizations. (Those organizations are unnamed in the film but were named in the first release of D’Souza’s companion book to the movie. That release was pulled from shelves and the organization names removed.) But no evidence is shown in the film to suggest that’s true of Andrews, no evidence of his visiting more than one drop box with video footage or even a map of his activity. (There was one such map in the movie, which True the Vote’s Gregg Phillips admitted to me was fake.)
Nonetheless, according to a lawsuit filed Wednesday against D’Souza and True the Vote by attorneys representing Andrews, footage of Andrews was shown as part of 11 programs as D’Souza and True the Vote promoted the film — including at least three occasions after Andrews had been cleared. (The lawsuit establishes that D’Souza knew that Andrews had been cleared, in part because of his conversation with The Post.) A representative for True the Vote told The Post that the organization “is confident that the claims regarding True the Vote in this litigation will be found to be without merit.” D’Souza did not respond to a request for comment.
“Combining junk pseudoscience and excerpted surveillance video of innocent voters,” the lawsuit states near the beginning, “Defendants produced, distributed, and widely marketed 2000 Mules, which they label a ‘documentary’ proving their ‘mules’ theory.”
This is an important point. There’s no evidence at all that any of the video footage used in the film was linked to the purported geolocation analysis.
“Defendants never had any means to connect this video footage of voters such as Andrews with their individualized cell phone geolocation data,” it adds later. “... Moreover, Defendants appear to lack any surveillance footage that actually shows any individual depositing ballots at multiple locations.”
Among the examples of media appearances in which Andrews is put forward as an example of someone casting illegal votes is one featuring True the Vote’s Phillips. Appearing on a show hosted by the right-wing Epoch Times, Phillips introduced the footage of Andrews by saying: “The data itself is immutable. Even if you don’t believe your lying eyes on that, then just go look at the video. ... I can show you the [cellphone geolocation] pings, and then we can show you where he did it again and again and again and again. It really takes an extraordinary person with an agenda that’s probably not America’s agenda to say, ‘I don’t believe that.’”
But, of course, he didn’t show any of that, so saying “I don’t believe that” is perfectly warranted. Last week, the office of Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich (R) sent a letter to federal authorities suggesting that True the Vote’s activities surrounding “2000 Mules” be investigated. At an event this summer, Phillips and the head of the organization attempted to explicitly close the book on the subject.
Andrews’s lawsuit isn’t just about correcting the record, though. He details the ways in which this false accusation disrupted his life. The lawsuit aims to paint as sympathetic a portrait of him as possible, certainly, but he describes the importance of voting to him and his family, since he grew up in the Jim Crow South. A technology executive at a Fortune 500 company, he became aware of his inclusion in the film only when a reporter contacted him about it.
That snippet of his casting his family’s ballots has been clipped and published on social media. The lawsuit details some of the responses it generated:
“Comments on these posts include threats to have the ‘mules’ ‘forcibly amputated from the country and sent somewhere else en masse,’ and proclamations that the ‘mules’ should be arrested, ‘face a firing squad,’ or receive ‘Bullets to Mules Heads.’ Defendants’ followers have also assured ‘mules’ through social media comments that ‘we’re coming after you.’”
It further claims that Andrews has installed security cameras at his home and attempted to disguise his vehicle, since it is easily identifiable in footage. In the film, at least, his license plate and face are blurred. When the clip was shown in some media appearances, neither was.
He’s not the only one affected. The claim elevated by the film that people are stuffing ballot boxes — a claim for which, again, no evidence is presented — has led to a rash of encounters at ballot boxes in Arizona. Voters casting ballots have been challenged by self-appointed observers. One group affiliated with the right-wing Oath Keepers extremist group was sued and forced to end its drop-box monitoring effort.
“At all times, Defendants knew that their portrayals of Mr. Andrews were lies,” the lawsuit states, “as was the entire narrative of 2000 Mules. But they have continued to peddle these lies in order to enrich themselves.”
The trailer to the film remains online. In it, you can see Andrews depositing his and his family’s ballots. | 2022-10-27T22:14:59Z | www.washingtonpost.com | One of Dinesh D’Souza’s 2,000 alleged ‘mules’ sues, alleging defamation - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/27/2020-election-fraud-claims-voting/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/27/2020-election-fraud-claims-voting/ |
Americans are more aware of who represents them than you might assume
People cast their votes in Lansing, Mich., in 2020. (Seth Herald / AFP)
I had a theory, namely: Americans are less aware of their local elected officials than they are of political machinations at the federal level, that people generally have a vague sense of their own senators or representatives but a keen sense of who controls the House and Senate.
In part, this is born of years of observing how local politics has been infected with national themes and rhetoric. One reason that split-ticket voting has declined — Senate and House candidates are increasingly likely to win places that presidential candidates of the same party do — is that even local candidates are viewed through the lens of what’s happening nationally.
My theory also incorporated a sense that Americans are paying a lot more attention to the party that controls the House and Senate than whom they send to those chambers. What’s more important to voters, that they send a member of their party to the Senate or that the person they send reflect their own morals and values?
As it turns out, this is a fairly hard question to assess. I figured that familiarity with politicians was a good start, but how do you measure familiarity with local officials versus national ones? There are various polls measuring how people view their senators, but few that do the same for members of the House.
Then I came across data from the 2020 iteration of the Cooperative Election Study. Conducted around every federal election, it surveys thousands of Americans about their political views. Among the questions: Can they correctly name their elected officials?
Digging into the numbers, I made a surprising discovery: They could! Well, at least they knew what party their elected officials belonged to, which gets at the same idea. About 8 in 10 could identify the party of their governor. A lower percentage, 6 in 10, could identify their representative. The two senators came in at about 70 percent.
Now compare that to awareness of which party controlled either chamber of Congress: About the same percentages got the question right, but far more people got it wrong. Why? Because a larger percentage of respondents said they didn’t know the party of their local officials, bolstering my theory. See the light-gray segments above? Those are the “don’t know” segments, and more people say that when asked about their own representatives.
When we break this out by party, another pattern develops: Independents and third-party voters are less likely to be able to identify the party of their elected officials and who controls the chambers of Congress.
This isn’t really surprising. We regularly see from polling that independents aren’t as aware of political issues as partisans are and, often, that they report lower interest in politics overall. That they would be less likely to identify their own elected officials or the composition of Congress fits with that pattern.
If we directly compare awareness of control of Congress (orange) with individual representatives (purple) you can see that Democrats and Republicans are more likely to know the party of their own representatives and less likely to be wrong when asked to identify them.
What does this tell us? Well, it’s admittedly hard to say! What it doesn’t suggest, though, is that Americans are unfamiliar with their local elected officials in favor of obsessing over their national leaders.
Nor, however, does it show that Americans solely vote for elected officials after studious consideration of their positions and histories. Which is not a theory I have entertained. | 2022-10-27T22:15:06Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Americans are more aware of who represents them than you might assume - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/27/americans-are-more-aware-who-represents-them-than-you-might-assume/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/27/americans-are-more-aware-who-represents-them-than-you-might-assume/ |
Russian President Vladimir Putin at a session with the Valdai Discussion Club on Thursday. (Pavel Byrkin/Sputnik/Kremlin Pool/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)
Russian President Vladimir Putin recited familiar grievances and criticisms of the hegemonic “Western elite” while offering an ideological pitch to Asian leaders and to conservative groups in the U.S. and Europe during a keynote foreign policy speech on Thursday.
Putin also blamed the West for the war in Ukraine that he started with a full-scale invasion in February and he insisted that Washington could end the conflict by directing the Ukrainian government to seek peace.
In the speech, delivered to the annual meeting of the Valdai Discussion Club in Moscow, Putin portrayed Russia as a champion of rising nations in a new multipolar world, which he demanded that the United States and other Western powers begin to respect as equals. And seeking common ground with the right-wing in the West, he described Russia as a defender of traditional Christian values as society has lost its way.
“I am convinced that sooner or later both the new centers of a multipolar world order and the West will have to start an equal conversation about a common future for us, and the sooner the better, of course,” Putin said. He added that he believed the West was losing its dominance and “quickly becoming a minority on the world stage.”
In reality, it is Russia that has grown deeply isolated as a result of Putin’s brutal invasion, and his attempt to illegally annex four regions of Ukraine in violation of international law. Earlier this month, the United Nations General Assembly voted overwhelmingly not to recognize Putin’s annexations and calling on him to reverse course. The results were 143 to 5 with 35 abstentions. The four countries to side with Russia were Belarus, Nicaragua, North Korea, and Syria.
The Kremlin boasted that future generations “will read and reread” the speech, but on Thursday Putin spoke to an assorted crowd of guests from India, Pakistan, China and Indonesia as well as fringe pro-Kremlin politicians from Moldova who asked him fawning questions about his vision for the post-conflict, post-American hegemony world. There were few Westerners in the audience.
Despite making the rivalry with the West a cornerstone of his foreign policy and his every day talking points, Putin insisted that Russia does not fundamentally see itself as the enemy of the West but instead opposes the West’s attempts to instill “strange” and “neoliberal” values in other societies in the world.
These alien values, according to Putin, include “cancel culture,” “dozens of gay parades” and the right to express one’s gender identity.
On Thursday, Russia’s lower house of parliament, unanimously adopted a law that bans “propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations” among Russian citizens, and imposes heavy fines for mentioning the LGBTQ+ community in public.
“There are at the very least two Wests,” Putin said. One is the West of “traditional, primarily Christian, values, freedom, patriotism, the richest culture” that Russia is close to. “But there is another West — aggressive, cosmopolitan, neocolonial, the one acting as a tool of the neoliberal elites,” he continued. “And Russia, of course, will never put up with precisely the dictate of this West.”
‘Russian’ arrested by Norway was at European seminar on hybrid attacks
In the nearly 3-hour speech and question-and-answer session, Putin made a number of far-fetched claims, including that the West instigated the war in Ukraine.
“Unlike the West, we do not climb into someone else’s yard,” Putin said, asserting that Moscow doesn’t interfere in the affairs of other states.
In the past 15 years, Russia invaded two of its neighbors, Ukraine and Georgia, interceded militarily in Syria, and spent millions to curry political favor in Albania, Bosnia, Montenegro and other countries.
Putin once again decried U.S. President Donald Trump’s ordered assassination of Qasem Soleimani, a top general in Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, whom the Pentagon blamed for attacks on U.S. citizens. “They killed Soleimani on the territory of another state and said: ‘yes, we killed him,’ ” Putin said. “What is that? What world are we living in?”
Russia has been accused of organizing attacks on several Kremlin critics abroad, from assassinations of Chechens in Germany to poisonings of former secret services agents and defectors in London. Putin’s top critic, Alexei Navalny, is currently imprisoned in Russia after surviving a poisoning attack.
“Whatever comes from Russia is always labeled as ‘intrigues of the Kremlin,’ ” Putin said. “But look at yourself! Are we that powerful? Any criticism of our opponents is perceived as ‘the hand of the Kremlin,’ but you can’t just blame everything on [us.]”
In recent years, Putin’s government has grown increasingly repressive, cracking down on political opposition figures, journalists, activists, and scholars — labeling hundreds as “foreign agents.”
The panel moderator, political analyst Fedor Lukyanov, pressed Putin on whether Moscow underestimated its opponents in Ukraine, an implicit reference to battlefield setbacks suffered by the Russian army in recent weeks, and the overall pace of the war that is now entering its ninth month despite the initial Kremlin expectation that it would quickly capture Kyiv.
“The society doesn’t understand — what’s the plan in this operation?” Lukyanov continued, alluding to the brewing discontent with Moscow’s military strategy and an unpopular mobilization drive that has conscripted 300,000 or more, but sent nearly hundreds of thousands more fleeing the country to avoid being sent to fight.
Putin dismissed the criticism. He said the balance on the battlefield would have been worse for Russia in the future given Western supplies of weapons to Ukraine and “the construction of fortified areas.”
Putin also repeated Russia’s unsupported claims that Ukraine was preparing to use a “dirty bomb” containing radioactive material. Western leaders have dismissed this accusation as false and a potential pretext for Russia to escalate the war by its own use of such a weapon.
In previous remarks, Putin has often said that he is prepared to use “all available means,” hinting at Russia’s vast nuclear arsenal, but he insisted Thursday that Russia never openly threatened to use nuclear weapons and had no need to do so in Ukraine.
Putin repeated his false accusations of state-sponsored “Nazism” in Kyiv, and he insisted the United States could end the war. “Those who implement the policy in Washington can solve the problem of Ukraine very quickly through diplomacy,” he said. “They only need to send a signal to Kyiv to change the attitude and strive to peace talks.” | 2022-10-27T22:17:29Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Putin insists U.S. respect 'multipolar' world and tell Kyiv to seek peace - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/27/vladimir-putin-speech-valdai-war/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/27/vladimir-putin-speech-valdai-war/ |
Ms. Goldberg, a literary agent, urged former White House aide Linda Tripp to secretly tape her friend Monica Lewinsky, who had an affair with the president
Lucianne Goldberg in New York on Jan. 24, 1998. (Emile Wamsteker/AP)
Author and political commentator Jonah Goldberg confirmed the death and said his mother had kidney and liver ailments.
For decades, Ms. Goldberg had cultivated a reputation as brash, brassy and sharp-tongued in her takedowns of progressive causes. As a younger woman, she co-wrote an anti-feminist manifesto called “Purr, Baby, Purr” and said she had been a spy for President Richard M. Nixon’s campaign in his 1972 reelection bid. Later, after a long career writing or ghostwriting sexy potboilers and representing such authors as Kitty Kelley and discredited Los Angeles police detective Mark Fuhrman, she delighted in taking aim at Bill and Hillary Clinton.
At the suggestion of conservative columnist Tony Snow, former White House aide Linda Tripp had first contacted Ms. Goldberg about a possible project on White House deputy counsel Vincent Foster, whose 1993 death was ruled a suicide but remains a focus of conspiracy theorists. Tripp was reportedly one of the last people to have seen Foster alive and was deeply shaken by his death. The project fell through, but Tripp then tried to sell a tell-all White House memoir highly critical of the Clintons before telling Ms. Goldberg that the president had an affair with a former White House intern.
“And I said, ‘Yeah, yeah,’ you know the kind of agenting that I did, I heard a lot of wild stuff, and people have to prove things,” Ms. Goldberg said in an interview for the 2020 PBS show “American Experience” on the Clinton years.
Tripp said she had conversations nearly every day with Lewinsky, who had left the White House and was working with Tripp in the Pentagon’s public affairs office.
“And I said, ‘You say you talk to her every day — how about taping your phone conversations?’” Ms. Goldberg recalled.
Ms. Goldberg even suggested the type of tape recorder: a Radio Shack model like the one she kept on her desk at her Manhattan office. Tripp wasn’t sure.
“She always was reluctant,” Ms. Goldberg recalled to The Washington Post in late 1998. “She said, ‘I think it’s kind of sleazy.’”
Ms. Goldberg pressed Tripp and reportedly assured her the taping was legal, even though recording someone without the person’s permission is illegal under the law in Maryland, where Tripp lived at the time. Yet the recordings became a centerpiece for special prosecutor Kenneth Starr, whose probes of Clinton began with allegations over improper real estate deals in Arkansas but mushroomed into a blanket inquest on the Clintons.
The tapes became key evidence in Starr’s probes and led to Clinton’s impeachment by the House in December 1998 on charges that the president had lied under oath when questioned about the affair with Lewinsky and obstructed justice. The Senate acquitted Clinton in February 1999.
Ken Starr, who led probes into Clinton, dies at 76
“I’m not ashamed of it,” Ms. Goldberg told PBS about her role. “I’m proud that I knew the truth. That once I knew the truth, I got the truth out. … This was a great national soap opera.”
With the tapes in hand, Ms. Goldberg said, she initially wanted to give access to Newsweek and the lawyers investigating Paula Jones, a former Arkansas civil servant who alleged she was sexually assaulted by Clinton while he was governor. (The case was settled out of court.) After Newsweek apparently hesitated with a story, Ms. Goldberg received a late-night call from journalist Matt Drudge in January 1998. He had heard that Ms. Goldberg had information that suggested Clinton had a sexual affair with Lewinsky.
“I wasn’t going to lie to” Drudge, Ms. Goldberg told The Post. “I mean the man had all the information. He’d already written it when he called me. He read me parts of it. It would have been kind of dumb of me to say, ‘Huh?’”
Once Drudge posted the story, everything went, in Ms. Goldberg’s words, “kaboom.” Starr’s investigators zoomed in. Tripp went into hiding to avoid the media. Ms. Goldberg was having her moment.
She drip-fed tidbits to the New York Post and other eager tabloid outlets. “I wanted to keep this beast alive,” Ms. Goldberg told The Post. “I wanted to give the story legs.”
How the Starr Report became a literary bodice ripper and bestseller
Ms. Goldberg also had her own brief cult of celebrity in right-wing circles. In late October 1998, chants of “Lucy, Lucy, Lucy” greeted her as she stepped off an elevator at a Washington hotel on the eve of an anti-Clinton rally on the National Mall.
Ms. Goldberg smiled at the hotel crowd.
“They need heroes,” she said.
Lucy Ann Steinberger was born in Boston on April 29, 1935, and grew up in Alexandria, Va. Her father was a government physicist, and her mother was a physiotherapist. According to her own accounts, she left high school at 16 to begin working.
“I had 15 jobs before I was 21,” said Ms. Goldberg, who later merged her first name into one. “I got fired from 14.” (She earned a degree in 1957 from George Washington University.)
A friend, former Washington Star drama critic Emerson Beauchamp, told The Washington Post in 1998 that Ms. Goldberg once said she was practicing a British accent “so she could pretend to be her English secretary when people called.”
In 1970, Ms. Goldberg and journalist Jeannie Sakol founded the Pussycat League as an anti-feminist group and together published “Purr, Baby, Purr.” During the 1972 presidential race, she claimed she was paid by Nixon’s staff to pose as a journalist covering Democratic nominee George S. McGovern, a U.S. senator from South Dakota, and report back insider dirt from the press corps and campaign trail.
Ms. Goldberg dipped heavily into the media world with her own novels, often with lurid plotlines. Her 1979 “Friends in High Places” features a “star feature writer who will take almost any man to bed for her next day’s lead.” In “People Will Talk” (1994), the main character is a tabloid columnist named Baby Bayer who “can unzip a fly with her toes.”
As a literary agent, she found a niche with right-wing conspiracy theories and tell-all memoirs. In a 1983 lawsuit, author Kelley accused Ms. Goldberg of breach of contract and other charges for failing to pay for foreign sales on “Elizabeth Taylor: The Last Star” (1981). Ms. Goldberg was ordered to pay Kelley more than $41,000.
Ms. Goldberg took on author Leo Damore after Random House rejected his 1988 book “Senatorial Privilege,” on Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) and the 1969 Chappaquiddick car accident that killed passenger Mary Jo Kopechne. Ms. Goldberg was also the agent for Fuhrman’s account of the O.J. Simpson trial, “Murder in Brentwood” (1997), and she was ghostwriter for “Washington Wives” (1987) by Maureen Dean, the wife of Nixon’s Watergate-era White House counsel John Dean.
Ms. Goldberg’s second husband, newspaper executive Sidney Goldberg, died in 2005. In addition to her son, she is survived by a granddaughter. Another son, Joshua, died in 2011 after a fall.
In the past, Ms. Goldberg had often described herself as political independent, but she increasingly found a home in conservative media and with her own website, Lucianne.com.
“I was ready for my Warholian 15 minutes,” she told the New York Times, “but it really wears you down.” | 2022-10-27T22:39:41Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Lucianne Goldberg, who leaked tapes over Bill Clinton affair, dies at 97 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/10/27/lucianne-goldberg-clinton-tripp-dies/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/10/27/lucianne-goldberg-clinton-tripp-dies/ |
Federal court won’t wait for U.S. Supreme Court to release Trump taxes
Donald Trump asked a court to delay the release of his tax records. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
A federal court on Thursday cleared the way for Donald Trump’s records to be handed over to Democratic lawmakers.
The full U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit declined to reconsider an August ruling from three judges that gave a House committee the right to Trump’s tax returns for 2015 to 2020. The former president can still challenge the decision in the U.S. Supreme Court, but the appeals court declined a request from Trump to automatically hold the release of records pending that challenge.
The House Ways & Means Committee sought the records in 2019, saying they would inform legislation to improve the way presidents are audited by the Internal Revenue Service. Under Trump, the Treasury Department refused to hand over the documents; under President Biden, Trump sued to bar the agency from doing so. He argued the lawmakers’ true purpose was political. But the appeals panel agreed with a lower court that lawmakers had “a legitimate legislative purpose” in examining the records, which was to assess whether the current audit system is sufficient.
“It is not our place to delve deeper than this,” the appeals panel wrote. “The mere fact that individual members of Congress may have political motivations as well as legislative ones is of no moment.”
Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, Richard E. Neal (D-Mass.), said in a statement that “the law has always been on our side.”
“Former President Trump has tried to delay the inevitable, but once again, the Court has affirmed the strength of our position,” the statement said. “We’ve waited long enough—we must begin our oversight of the IRS’s mandatory presidential audit program as soon as possible.”
Trump broke with other major presidential nominees in refusing to release his tax returns during the campaign and while in office declined to divest himself of business holdings that profited from both the federal government and foreign powers. In a separate lawsuit, the House Oversight Committee also sought financial records from Trump’s accounting firm, which made a deal to hand material over in September. | 2022-10-27T23:27:34Z | www.washingtonpost.com | U.S. appeals court in D.C. won't reconsider Trump's bid to block tax records - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/27/trump-taxes-court-release-house/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/27/trump-taxes-court-release-house/ |
Crystal Dunn celebrates her stoppage-time goal against San Diego on Saturday that put the Portland Thorns into this weekend's NWSL title game at Audi Field. (Amanda Loman/Getty Images)
Somewhere in the soccer delirium of Portland, Ore., last Sunday, 5-month-old Marcel Jean Soubrier was supposedly awake when his mother scored a thunderbolt of a winning goal in the dying moments of a National Women’s Soccer League semifinal.
“I was told he was awake when I subbed in because he’s been sleeping every time I go into games,” Crystal Dunn said Thursday. “I’m sure he was just like, ‘I don’t know what’s happening, but cool.’ ”
When Marcel is old enough to appreciate his mother’s craft, he will undoubtedly see video of the goal that rocketed the Portland Thorns into the NWSL championship game against the Kansas City Current on Saturday night at Audi Field. He will also learn that his mother, a World Cup champion and onetime league MVP, had returned to light training just a month after he was born and was in competitive action 3½ months after his May 20 birth.
He will hear the tales, perhaps from his father, Pierre, the Thorns’ head athletic trainer, how his mother scored in her fifth appearance of the season — all as a substitute as she steadily regains her fitness — and had also played for the U.S. national team in two friendlies overseas early this month.
The crowning moment of her return came last weekend before more than 22,000 at Providence Park. In the third of four additional minutes, Dunn’s wicked one-timer from the top of the penalty area roared into the top left corner of the net for a 2-1 victory over the San Diego Wave.
“I’ve got to be honest: I have watched it [on replay] probably 50 to 100 times because it just made me smile so big, seeing the joy and the passion, not only on her face, but everybody on the field and then everybody in the stands as well,” Thorns defender Meghan Klingenberg said.
Dunn said she knew she had struck the ball well and “it had a chance” to become her first goal since May 2021.
“For a moment, I felt a sense of relief, like, ‘Whoa, thank goodness we scored. Yay,’ ” she said. “And also for myself, my goal was always to get back to this game, and doing it in the same year that I gave birth was icing on the cake.”
A post shared by Crystal Dunn (@cdunn19)
Dunn, 30, trained until late in pregnancy and, within a month of giving birth, was back at the training grounds and exercising on her own. Within another month, she was running and participating in passing patterns. No contact in training evolved into low contact and, three months postpartum, she told her teammates, “You can tackle me, guys — and I can tackle you back!”
Coach Rhian Wilkinson and the training staff did not set a timetable for Dunn’s return.
“I didn’t want to rush her,” Wilkinson said. “It was always very clear the goal posts would move depending on where Crystal was [but] obviously it became, ‘Okay, she might be getting some minutes this season.' That was exciting.”
Dunn made her season debut Sept. 10 in a four-minute appearance; her time had grown to 28 in the semifinal. She also logged 55 combined minutes in U.S. matches against England and Spain. Marcel travels everywhere with her and the family’s nanny, who takes care of him at the stadium.
“That is just a beautiful story,” said Kansas City goalkeeper Adrianna Franch, Dunn’s teammate on the 2019 World Cup squad. “I am so happy for her and so proud of her. Coming back from giving birth is a tough one to climb. She might not be at her peak [physically], but what a goal to take her team to the championship. It’s pretty cool to see that journey from afar.”
From a fitness standpoint, Dunn said the journey wasn’t easy. Even though she remained in good shape during pregnancy, “I was back to square one,” she said. Her husband, whom she met when both worked for the Washington Spirit early in her career, helped design her fitness plans.
If asked to start this weekend, Dunn said she wouldn’t say no, but her reserve role has suited her and the Thorns. Portland, without her most of the year, finished second in the 12-team regular season standings behind Seattle’s OL Reign.
Dunn said she is not the same player she was before pregnancy, and that’s okay.
“Whether it’s injury or pregnancy, there’s this immense amount of stress on you to be what you were before,” she said. “I stepped into motherhood being like, ‘I don’t need to ever compare myself to Crystal-before-the-baby because I’ll never experience that again.’ I am a mom. My body went through this massive change but the change doesn’t have to be like, ‘Oh my God, I’m worse off now.’ It actually could be, ‘Oh, this is the greatest thing for me — a new perspective.' ”
Dunn appreciates the support system, as well. The Thorns, she said, cover her nanny’s travel expenses and have given her the time and space to return to active duty.
Dunn also said she appreciates her teammates, calling them “25 aunties.”
His mom’s winning goal notwithstanding, Marcel has stolen the family spotlight.
“We’re always saying to her, ‘How’s Marcel doing? Is he smiling? What’s he up to?’” Klingenberg said.
Dunn said, “I’m second now.”
“That’s what happens,” Klingenberg said, “when you make a really cute baby.”
For Dunn, the postgame reunion Sunday topped the in-game thrills.
“Scoring that goal obviously was amazing,” she said, “but honestly, going up to my son after the game made it that much more incredible.”
Notes: Portland forward Sophia Smith was named league MVP, becoming the youngest player, at 22, to win the award. She scored 14 regular season goals. San Diego’s Alex Morgan, who won the scoring race with 16 goals, finished second in the voting and North Carolina’s Debinha (12 goals, four assists) was third. …
More than 16,000 tickets have been sold to the championship match, which is being played in Washington for the first time. | 2022-10-27T23:40:38Z | www.washingtonpost.com | New mom Crystal Dunn’s return fuels Thorns’ run to NWSL title game - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/27/nwsl-title-game-crystal-dunn/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/27/nwsl-title-game-crystal-dunn/ |
University of Florida faculty has ‘no confidence’ in Sasse selection
The Nebraska senator is the sole finalist to become the school’s president.
Students walk on the campus of the University of Florida in Gainesville in September 2021. (Phelan M. Ebenhack for The Washington Post)
Days before University of Florida trustees are set to interview Sen. Ben Sasse, the sole finalist for the presidency of the flagship school, debate over the selection has intensified across the campus.
On Thursday, the university’s faculty senate passed a no confidence resolution with a vote of 72-16. Earlier in the week, a faculty union had criticized Sasse’s selection. And UF’s outgoing president said this week that the school would enforce a rule banning protests in campus buildings after student demonstrators disrupted a visit previous visit by Sasse to the campus.
Faculty members said the vote was against “a flawed process” that led to Sasse becoming the only finalist for the job. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and the GOP-led state legislature this year changed the way university and college presidents are chosen, making the process more secretive.
The position is one of the highest paid public jobs in Florida; current UF President Kent Fuchs makes more than $1.4 million a year.
Some on the Gainesville campus are strongly supportive of Sasse. Amanda Phalin, faculty senate chair, said this week that she believes Sasse would be a transformational leader for UF. “I’m excited about what he has to offer,” said Phalin, who is also a member of the university’s board of trustees. “I think he’s the right choice.”
But at a university where political influence and academic freedom have been intensely debated in recent years, the sudden emergence of Sasse as the only finalist prompted resolutions condemning the choice — and an emergency meeting of faculty leaders.
“The next President should come already equipped to lead an institution of this caliber rather than aiming to learn on the job,” the Faculty Senate resolution read. “Anything less will result in a lack of faith in leadership. The process of the thirteenth Presidential search, conducted in accordance with the updated Florida State Bill 520, has undermined the trust and confidence of the University of Florida Faculty Senate in the selection of the sole finalist Dr. Ben Sasse.”
The law, passed this spring, exempts applicants for the presidency of Florida universities from some of the state’s open-records requirements.
That prevented UF faculty members from learning about other candidates, the faculty senate resolution noted, and “members were informed that multiple well-qualified candidates who are leaders at higher education institutions were unwilling to be named as finalists due to the 21-day public notification requirement.”
Some faculty leaders warmly endorsed Sasse at a faculty senate meeting last week, saying he had convinced them with his vision for UF and responses to their concerns about politicization of the university. Several faculty members echoed that support Thursday.
“I still view him as kind of an accidental politician,” said David Bloom, chairman of the Department of Molecular Genetics and Microbiology, who served on the search committee.
Bloom added: “I don’t think his Republican affiliations will hurt with negotiations with the state legislature.”
But other faculty members remained skeptical. On Wednesday, the UF chapter of the United Faculty of Florida passed a resolution expressing deep concern with the choice of Sasse as a finalist. “We applaud the UF Student Government for its vote to condemn both the search process and its result,” they said in a statement, urging faculty senators to support the vote of no confidence in the presidential search process at the Thursday meeting
Paul Ortiz, a professor of history who is president of the union on campus, said students and faculty members have worked hard to be at UF. “And then they have a process that essentially refutes all of that, and says, ‘We’re just going to allow this person to waltz in and be president because he’s a sitting U.S. senator.’ It’s an insult. And that’s how the faculty and many of the students have responded.”
“You know, we don’t have anything against this individual,” Ortiz said of Sasse, a Republican from Nebraska. “I’ve been told he’s a major force inside the Beltway. That’s fine. That’s great. But he has no academic credentials, and that’s the thing that’s troubling.”
Sasse earned his bachelor’s degree from Harvard University, his doctorate in history from Yale University and served as president of Midland University in Nebraska before his election to the Senate.
But some faculty said that falls short of qualifications for leading a large research university. They said they would like to see more evidence of academic writing and experience advising graduate students, for example.
The Independent Alligator, a campus newspaper, wrote in an editorial, “For a university that’s been under fire in recent years for being a political pawn of Gov. Ron DeSantis, the choice is a bad look at best.”
Some faculty and students have objected to Sasse’s 2015 remarks opposing the Supreme Court decision in Obergefell v. Hodges that established a constitutional right to same-sex marriage, and questioned whether he can be supportive of all people on the public university campus.
A crowd of protesters gathered when Sasse visited campus earlier this month, with students shouting and chanting, “banging their fists on windows, walls and furniture and making it difficult for audience members to hear Dr. Sasse’s responses,” current president Fuchs wrote in a message to the campus community earlier this week.
Fuchs said he was protecting everyone’s right to speak and be heard with the resumption of a rule that he acknowledged had not been enforced in recent years: “To ensure that those rights are protected at upcoming events,” he wrote, “the university will resume enforcement of a regulation on the books for at least two decades, prohibiting protests inside campus buildings.” | 2022-10-27T23:45:11Z | www.washingtonpost.com | University of Florida faculty has ‘no confidence’ in Sasse selection - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/10/27/ben-sasse-university-florida-faculty-resolution/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/10/27/ben-sasse-university-florida-faculty-resolution/ |
Virginia guidelines limiting rights for transgender students delayed
The policies, released last month by Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s administration, will not take effect until Nov. 26 at the earliest
Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) speaks in Bristol, Va., on Wednesday. (Emily Ball/Bristol Herald Courier/AP)
An order that would restrict the rights of transgender students in Virginia schools will not take effect until at least late November, according to the state’s department of education.
Known as “model policies,” the guidance was released by Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s administration in September. It directed the state’s 133 school districts to adopt guidelines directing transgender students to school facilities and programs that match their birth sex. It also stipulates that students who want to change their name or gender on official school records can do so only if their family submits legal documentation, and that school staff cannot refer to students by their desired name or pronoun unless their parents request the change in writing.
The order could have taken effect as early as Thursday, following the end of a 30-day public comment period on the measure. But Jillian Balow, superintendent of public instruction, has said the education department would take time to review the comments and possibly make recommendations based on the feedback, said Charles Pyle, an agency spokesman.
However, because the measure received comments saying the guidance contradicts existing state law, implementation will be delayed an additional 30 days, per a state regulation, Pyle said, referencing the state’s code. Now, the education department will respond to those comments.
Youngkin (R) and supporters of the guidelines have said the directives are about ensuring parents rights and bringing them into issues pertaining to gender. Opponents argue the policies are illegal and would create dangerous situations for LGBTQ students.
In the month since the model policies were introduced, reaction from residents, school districts and organizations in Virginia has been mixed. The measure has received more than 71,000 comments through an online portal, although it is unclear how many people who submitted statements live in Virginia or out of state, Pyle said.
Shelly Arnoldi, who has four students enrolled in Fairfax County Public Schools, said she was happy that Youngkin rolled out the new policy, since it brought parents into the discussion.
“I can’t believe they had a policy that was otherwise,” said Arnoldi, 53. “I’ve known parents who have had their children keep things from them, and they were shocked at the end of the school year that teachers were calling them by a different name.”
Arnoldi, who posted her support in the comment portal, added education department officials should travel to school districts to speak to parents directly, or survey families to get their thoughts, rather than relying on the public comment forum. She said the online process could be subject to activist groups and others, which would not fully represent the parents’ voice.
But Bridget Weston, who has a third-grader in Arlington Public Schools, said the guidelines create “a more dangerous and hostile school environment that’s really targeting a subsection of children,” Weston said in an interview with The Post. She also commented through the education department’s portal.
Some school systems, including Culpeper County Public Schools, have embraced the guidelines. Last month, Culpeper officials said the system was already in compliance, requiring staff to use the names and pronouns listed on a student’s record, and families who want to make changes to submit a request to their school’s principals, among other rules.
But other systems have not been as supportive. In Loudoun County, leaders are considering the model policies and whether they will require the district to change its existing protocols, according to a statement. Still, the district “will continue to provide a learning environment that is safe, welcoming, affirming, and academically rigorous for all students,” the statement said.
Some Va. districts seem ready to fight Youngkin plan for trans students
In Alexandria, the city’s school board submitted comments asking that school divisions not be required to enforce the guidelines, said Meagan L. Alderton, the group’s chair.
“Now that the public comment period has closed, we will wait to see what the final outcome is for this process and any new information that we receive from the governor’s administration,” Alderton said, adding the body is not considering any legal action.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia did not say if it was planning any litigation, but the group said it expects state education officials to review the public’s comments closely.
“Impacted people — including thousands of students who walked out of school in protest of policies — have been very clear that these policies will cause them clear harm, and we’ll be closely monitoring [Virginia Department of Education’s] policies to ensure that they create safe and welcoming school environments for LGBTQ+ students,” said Eden Heilman, legal director for ACLU-VA.
The state’s branch of the NAACP has also sharply opposed the measure. “A student’s first amendment right does not end at the schoolhouse door,” Robert N. Barnette Jr., the group’s president, said in a statement.
Youngkin’s restriction on trans students’ rights is probably illegal, experts say
Del. Danica A. Roem, the first openly transgender member of the Virginia House of Delegates, said she expects there will be legal action now that the comment period has ended.
The Prince William Democrat referred to policies put in place just two years ago by Younkin’s Democratic predecessor, Gov. Ralph Northam (D). The former governor’s version mandated that transgender students be granted access to restrooms, locker rooms and changing facilities that matched their gender identity. It also stipulated that schools let transgender students participate in school programs matching their gender identity, and required that districts and teachers accept and use students’ gender pronoun and identity, without question.
But school boards have been allowed to reject those guidelines, Roem said. “Even if the governor is now saying, ‘they’re mandatory, I expect them to be followed,’ that is not the precedent that he has set.” | 2022-10-27T23:45:17Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Virginia guidelines limiting rights for transgender students delayed - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/10/27/virginia-guidelines-limiting-rights-transgender-students-delayed/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/10/27/virginia-guidelines-limiting-rights-transgender-students-delayed/ |
NEW YORK — The sentencing of a former United Nations communications specialist to 15 years in prison Thursday was punctuated by the tears and eloquence of some of his 13 sexual assault victims who said being drugged and raped by a man who first befriended them left them shattered and hopeful that justice might help them heal. | 2022-10-27T23:45:35Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Ex-United Nations employee sentenced for multiple rapes - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/ex-united-nations-employee-sentenced-for-multiple-rapes/2022/10/27/9249161a-564a-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/ex-united-nations-employee-sentenced-for-multiple-rapes/2022/10/27/9249161a-564a-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html |
It turns out that those smoke-filled rooms weren’t as bad as we thought
State Sen. Doug Mastriano, center, a Republican candidate for governor of Pennsylvania, takes part in a primary night gathering in Chambersburg, Pa., on May 17. (AP/Carolyn Kaster)
History and current polling both tell us that the House of Representatives will likely flip over to Republican control in the November midterms. What happens then? Actual governance will come to a standstill. There will be a flurry of investigations on everything from the Justice Department to Hunter Biden to the border crisis. The Jan. 6 committee will almost certainly be disbanded. And it’s not implausible to imagine that President Biden will be impeached.
The primary system American parties use to choose their candidates is extremely unusual; no other major democracy has one quite like it. Primaries ensure that the candidates chosen are selected by slivers of the parties — around 20 percent of all eligible voters. And this selection is not at all representative — these are the most intense, agitated activists, often far more extreme in their views than run-of-the-mill registered Republicans or Democrats. Add to this decades of sophisticated, computer-enabled gerrymandering, and you get extreme candidates who run in safe districts where the only threat to them is a primary candidate who is even more extreme.
The Washington Post has analyzed Republicans running for the Senate, House and certain statewide offices and found that a majority could be classified as “election deniers” — people who have in some way questioned, challenged or refused to accept the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. Of these 291 candidates, 171 are running in safe Republican districts. So what began as a fringe theory, promoted by Donald Trump but (initially) rejected by most of the Republican Party’s leaders, has now become the majority view of the party.
Election denial is not a majority view in the United States. In an NBC poll, 57 percent of those asked said that they would be less likely to vote for someone who claims Trump won the 2020 election, while only 21 percent said they would be more likely to support an election denier. But between primaries and gerrymandering, the majority view gets drowned out. Catering to the right-wing base means constantly ratcheting up the rhetoric: Nancy Pelosi is a would-be dictator, Biden is a communist, Democrats are pro-criminal. “Democrats want Republicans dead,” says Marjorie Taylor Greene, “and they have already started the killings.”
The alternative system of candidate selection, used in the United States before the era of primaries and in most other major democracies, is what is often called the “smoke-filled room” (a pejorative description even before we knew that smoking kills you). In this system, candidates are selected by party bosses. But consider who these “bosses” have traditionally been: aldermen, mayors, governors and legislators. These are people who have won general elections by appealing to the entire electorate, people who have a feel for the broader public. (No group of party elders would ever choose a candidate like Herschel Walker.) Primaries, by contrast, entrust candidate selection to the most radical section of the party. Social media has added fuel to the fire by amplifying the noisiest and angriest voices within the party, who are themselves an even smaller group than primary voters.
While the problem is far worse and much more dangerous on the Republican side, these pressures also affect Democrats. Many of the issues where Biden is constrained in his actions — in particular immigration and energy — are ones where the activist base of the party has much more extreme views than the mainstream. And pivoting to the center, as Pennsylvania Senate candidate John Fetterman did on fracking in recent months, is increasingly difficult in today’s world, where you can instantly and easily play old clips of a politician before he changed his mind.
In a recent piece in the New York Times, Max Fisher describes how the recent dysfunctions of British politics can be attributed to the two main parties choosing — over the past two decades — to adopt more of a primary-type system to select their leaders. The Labour Party ended up with an unelectable, far-left leader like Jeremy Corbyn and rejected a charismatic moderate like David Miliband. The recent Conservative Party travails illustrate the problem perfectly. Liz Truss, with her totally impractical, warmed-over Thatcherism, almost always came third in votes from elected members of Parliament (the old system of party “bosses”). But she was the darling of the party membership — which is highly unrepresentative of the British public — and they were the ones who made the final decision.
It is not an accident that Germany and France have both been run largely by solid centrists in a time of populism. They have chosen to keep to the old system of democracy based on the principle of majority rule. In the United States, and to an extent in Britain, democracy has become minority rule, and the minority holding power is unrepresentative, angry and increasingly radical. | 2022-10-27T23:46:06Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | It turns out that those smoke-filled rooms weren’t as bad as we thought - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/27/america-primaries-driving-polarization-radicalization/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/27/america-primaries-driving-polarization-radicalization/ |
Jackson-Reed's cross-country teams, led by Tyler Kenney, Daniel Whitley, Coach Tia Clemmons, Nora Parsons and Rebecca Khoury (from left), took home the DCIAA cross-country titles. (Spencer Nusbaum)
As Jackson-Reed junior Nora Parsons took her final exhausted strides to the finish line at the DCIAA cross-country championships, her eyes stayed on the ground beneath her at the Colmar Manor Park course.
Had she turned around, she wouldn’t have seen her nearest pursuer — her winning time of 21 minutes 23 seconds left more than a 40-second gap between her and second-place finisher Rebecca Khoury (22:09.4), a Jackson-Reed senior and fellow teammate on the Tigers soccer team that won a DCIAA title less than 24 hours earlier.
The Jackson-Reed boys delivered an equally dominant performance, claiming the top two spots and helping the Tigers to their 12th consecutive boys’ and girls’ DCIAA cross-country titles.
“Well, my body definitely hurts,” Parsons said with a laugh. “But it’s kind of incredible, hopping from team to team. I love both [soccer and cross-country] so much, so to share the experience of winning with both of them, it’s something you never really [expect] to do again.”
On the boys’ side, seniors Daniel Whitley (17:55.9) and Tyler Kenney (18:09.9) were more than 30 seconds clear of the field. Coach Tia Clemmons, recognized as D.C. teacher of the year later Thursday evening, attributed her athletes’ camaraderie to a culture built from trips to go bowling, play laser tag and attend a Nationals game.
“It’s just the culmination of the culture,” Whitley said. “We all take running really seriously, doing the little things like stretching before runs, eating the right things, pushing each other. . . . At the beginning of the season, we were all a little immature when it came to the little things. But now we have it down pat.”
School Without Walls was runner-up in both meets, and the Penguins appear to be closing the gap. The Tigers (30 points) were just seven points clear of SWW on the girls’ side; the boys’ margin was 17 (34-51). Dunbar’s girls (70 points) and Banneker boys (71) also claimed medals.
Walls Coach Nick Scott said the program’s turnaround is a direct result of an approach to athletics similar to the school’s mind-set for academics.
“The main thing I emphasize to these kids is that Walls was like Harvard, meaning it is an amazing academic institution, but Harvard is not going to get top-notch athletes,” Scott said. “The goal is to change Walls from a Harvard to a Stanford … turning a strictly academic-based institution to a school with athletes.”
Thursday’s competitors will race at the DCSAA state meet on Nov. 5, when D.C.’s private schools will enter the field. | 2022-10-27T23:46:37Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Jackson-Reed sweeps DCIAA cross-country championships - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/27/jackson-reed-sweeps-dciaa-cross-country-championships/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/27/jackson-reed-sweeps-dciaa-cross-country-championships/ |
Pierre Soulages, French painter with a palette of black, dies at 102
Pierre Soulages in 2014 with one of his paintings at the newly opened Musée Soulages in his hometown of Rodez, France. (Pascal Pavani/AFP/Getty Images)
Like fellow Frenchman Yves Klein, who made monochrome paintings with a vivid blue hue, and American artist Robert Ryman, who worked almost exclusively with white, Pierre Soulages found a universe of possibilities in a single color. For more than four decades he painted only in black, laying his large canvases flat on the floor and brushing, raking or scraping thick pigment that shimmered in the light of his studios in Paris and the south of France.
“Black has been fundamental for me since childhood,” he told the New York Times in 2014, explaining how he liked to dip his paintbrush in black ink from the age of 6, if not earlier. He had access to other colors, he said, but ignored them altogether, once confusing an older sister who asked what he was drawing with such thick black lines. He replied simply, “Snow.”
Mr. Soulages grew to become one of the most successful French artists of the postwar period, making paintings that sold for seven figures at auction and captivated — or mystified — viewers around the world. His work was shown at museums including the Hermitage in St. Petersburg (in 2001, he became the first contemporary artist to be exhibited by the Russian institution) and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, which organized a 2009 retrospective that drew more than a half-million people.
It was the largest show the museum had ever devoted to a living artist, although Mr. Soulages insisted that he never lingered on such achievements. “I only think about what I am going to do tomorrow,” he told the Times. “And tomorrow, I want to paint.”
Mr. Soulages, 102, was still painting until a few weeks before he died Oct. 26 at a hospital in the port city of Sète, France. His death was confirmed by Swiss gallerist Dominique Lévy, a co-founder of the art consortium LGDR, which represents Mr. Soulages in the United States. She did not cite a cause.
“Pierre Soulages knew how to reinvent black, by bringing out the light,” French President Emmanuel Macron said in a tribute on Twitter. “Beyond the dark, his works are vivid metaphors from which each of us draws hope.”
A sculptor, draftsman and stained-glass artist in addition to a painter, Mr. Soulages was an elder statesman of abstract art, a literally towering figure who stood more than 6 feet tall and dressed only in black. He was perhaps the only contemporary artist who could claim to be a peer of Willem de Kooning and Helen Frankenthaler as well as a friend of Alberto Giacometti, Max Ernst and Mark Rothko.
Although he remained better known in Europe than in the United States, Mr. Soulages was a significant part of the New York art scene in the 1950s and ’60s, when he was represented by the influential dealer Samuel M. Kootz and grouped with abstract expressionists such as Rothko and Franz Kline, another painter known for his love of the color black. Mr. Soulages said that while those artists were expressing their emotions through brushstrokes, he sought to do the opposite, trying to make paintings that led viewers to explore their own inner lives.
“It happens between the surface of the painting and the person who is in front of it,” he told the Times in 2019. “The reflection of light is what moves us.”
When he launched his career in the late 1940s, Mr. Soulages used walnut stain to apply thick, dark strokes to paper. In later years he painted large, calligraphic lines of white, gray, red or ocher, then applied streaks of black that he would scrape away to reveal the underlying colors. Then, in 1979, he simplified his palette, using only black and developing a style that he dubbed “outrenoir,” or “beyond black.”
The turning point came when he was working on a painting that seemed to have gone terribly wrong, devolving into a “black swamp,” as he put it. He kept at it anyway, believing that it would improve if he continued to work. “Eventually I went to sleep, and a few hours later I looked at what I had done,” he told the Times. “I was no longer working in black but working with the light reflected by the surface of the black. The light was dynamized by the strokes of paint. It was another world.”
Harry Cooper, the head of modern art at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, said Mr. Soulages “thrived with limitation,” restricting his range of colors so he could focus on what was left: “Light, texture, scale, shape, direction of stroke.”
He added that Mr. Soulages — like Ryman in the United States — experimented with the way his paintings were installed, hanging some in space so that you could walk around them. “They’re both pushing some limits in thinking about what the conventions are and why we have to obey them,” Cooper said.
Still, he added that Mr. Soulages was less concerned with issues of form and material than with fundamental questions of life and existence.
Mr. Soulages said as much himself. “If painting doesn’t offer a way to dream and create emotions, then it’s not worth it,” he told Interview magazine in 2014. “Painting isn’t just pretty or pleasant; it is something that helps you to stand alone and face yourself.”
Pierre Jean Louis Germain Soulages was born in Rodez, in the Aveyron region of southern France, on Dec. 24, 1919. His father made horse-drawn carriages and died the year Mr. Soulages turned 5, according to Le Monde.
Growing up, Mr. Soulages was captivated by prehistoric art, visiting a local natural history museum to examine the carvings on ancient stone monoliths. As a teenager he went on archaeological digs of his own, helping to excavate a Neolithic burial chamber and unearth artifacts that were preserved at a museum. He also became interested in ancient cave paintings, looking at reproductions that showed animals drawn with charcoal — dark figures that further stimulated his interest in the color black.
Mr. Soulages studied at the school of fine arts in Montpellier, where he met a fellow student named Colette Llaurens who shared his interest in pre-Renaissance art. After he saw her trying to persuade three young men that Pablo Picasso was “a great artist,” he invited her to a museum. “She came with me,” he recalled decades later, “and we haven’t been apart since.” They married in 1942, and she became his professional partner, helping to manage his business affairs. She is his sole immediate survivor.
During the Nazi occupation of France, Mr. Soulages went into hiding, pretending to be a winemaker to avoid being deported to Germany as a forced laborer. He and his wife moved to Paris after the war, and in 1947 he made his artistic debut at the Salon des Surindépendants. Unlike the other paintings, his was dark, not red or yellow. “Next to the other works, it looked like a fly in a glass of milk,” he told Interview. “Everyone was saying, ‘Who is this country boy making black paintings?’”
Mr. Soulages received much-needed encouragement from avant-garde painter Francis Picabia and soon caught the attention of American curator James Johnson Sweeney, who helped bring his work to museums in New York. Kootz, the dealer, organized Mr. Soulages’s first American solo show in 1954.
Beginning in the late 1980s, Mr. Soulages took a break from painting to craft more than 100 stained-glass windows for the Abbey Church of Sainte-Foy in Conques, not far from where he grew up. He later donated hundreds of his works to the Musée Soulages, which opened in Rodez in 2014.
Other works never made it outside his home. When a painting didn’t capture his interest or work as he hoped, he took the canvas to his garden, rolled it up and burned it.
“I paint by crisis,” he told the Times. “Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. If we know exactly what we are going to do before we do it we are not artists but artisans.” | 2022-10-28T00:19:48Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Pierre Soulages, French painter with a palette of black, dies at 102 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/10/27/french-painter-pierre-soulages-dead/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/10/27/french-painter-pierre-soulages-dead/ |
Some Fetterman backers see a poor debate showing. But they are planning to stick by him.
The only televised debate in the U.S. Senate race in Pennsylvania has itself been the subject of debate across this key battleground state
Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. John Fetterman speaks to supporters at a “Get Out the Vote” rally in Pittsburgh on Wednesday. (Branden Eastwood/AFP/Getty Images)
WAYNE, Pa. — Jamie Umstattd had heard about John Fetterman’s stroke. But when he watched clips of the Democrat debating Republican Mehmet Oz, he was surprised at how much Fetterman struggled verbally.
“It’s like, holy cow, buddy. There were times where he had long pauses,” Umstattd said Thursday. “I don’t know how he has been in the past, but certainly I could see people wondering about his reaction times, how he stumbles over words a lot.”
But the 65-year-old voter is still leaning toward casting his ballot for the Democratic Senate nominee, who has acknowledged sometimes fumbling over his words and has said he suffers from symptoms of an auditory processing disorder.
Of Oz, Umstattd said, “I think this is simply an opportunity for him, for his celebrity status. I don’t know if he really stands for anything.” Fetterman, he said, “strikes me as someone who is more low-key.”
The only televised debate between Oz and Fetterman has itself been the subject of debate across this key battleground state in the days after it ended Tuesday night. The Democrat read questions on a monitor that provided closed captioning, and he frequently stumbled over his words and struggled with the quick-fire format of the debate, prompting many Oz supporters to question the Democrat’s ability to serve in Congress and jarring many Fetterman supporters.
But in interviews with 15 voters across the state on Wednesday and Thursday, Fetterman supporters and leaners said the debate did not deter them from casting their ballots for him or from likely doing so. Such loyalty to a candidate who has established an enthusiastic following by eschewing political norms — the 6-foot-8, tattooed and goateed Fetterman’s preferred campaign-trail attire is a hoodie and shorts — is what Fetterman’s campaign hopes will propel him in the final stage of a close race.
But some Democrats are nervously trying to turn the page in a contest that was tightening before the debate, as Oz and his allies relentlessly attacked Fetterman over crime and other issues. J. William Reynolds, the Democratic mayor of Bethlehem, a swing area, commended Fetterman for not dodging the debate.
“He is a straight-up guy and he showed up because he was going to answer the questions, so people could see him,” Reynolds said. “And when you represent people, you don’t get to choose when you show up.”
Part of what is keeping them in Fetterman’s corner, supporters said, is a sense that he is a more authentic person than Oz. Umstattd sat across from his girlfriend’s brother, Carlos Reyes, at a diner in the Philadelphia suburbs and debated the issue. Both are registered Republicans who voted for President Biden. Reyes, like Umstattd, is leaning toward voting for Fetterman.
“I just think he’s come across in the last 10 years as just some guy who sort of is very much impressed with himself,” Umstattd said of Oz, a celebrity doctor. “I wouldn’t want him to operate on me because I think that he’s going to be distracted thinking about what’s he going to be doing for his next television show. He’s a guy who’s real self-ego-driven.”
Reyes challenged his friend, pointing to one of Oz’s commercials that shows him on the streets of Kensington, a Philadelphia neighborhood plagued by violence and fentanyl overdoses, advocating for more drug-treatment facilities. “Is that a person only in it for himself?” Reyes posed.
Reyes, 59, who until recently was supporting Oz because of the antiabortion position he is running on, said he has been influenced by commercials attacking the celebrity cardiothoracic surgeon over his history promoting dubious medical cures on his television show. “There’s a lot of things I don’t like about him,” Reyes said.
Bob Viola, 71, was in a nearby shopping mall as he reflected on the race to a reporter. He said he watched the debate to “see how Fetterman did after the stroke.”
“I thought he’d do a little better than he did,” said Viola, a Democrat. “Oz talked fast so Fetterman couldn’t follow him.” Still, Viola said he plans to vote for Fetterman.
Fetterman’s doctors have said he is fit to serve in the Senate. But pressed during the debate to release more-complete medical records, he declined to do so.
Ben, 54, who spoke on the condition he be identified by his first name only, was finishing breakfast with his wife and son, who attends Villanova University nearby. An Oz supporter, he said Fetterman’s debate performance “raised questions” about the Democrat’s “capacity to function.”
The debate grabbed the attention of Republicans and Democrats beyond Pennsylvania. “Looks like the debate didn’t hurt us too much in Pennsylvania,” Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) was overheard telling President Biden during a hot mic moment during Biden’s trip to New York. “So that’s good.”
Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel on Thursday mocked the speaking abilities of Fetterman during an interview with syndicated radio host Hugh Hewitt. “Well, maybe they can get a full sentence out,” McDaniel replied to Hewitt after he was critical of Biden and Vice President Harris, who have planned to appear at a political event to boost Fetterman and other Pennsylvania Democrats.
To prevail in Pennsylvania typically requires performing well in the suburban counties, like this one, that surround Philadelphia, where voters tend to swing between political parties. As they weigh their choices in a high-stakes Senate race that could decide the balance of power in the Senate, many bring up their perceptions of the character of the candidates more than the issues.
Sitting alone eating a salmon salad, Mark Cross, 61, who is also a registered Republican, said he is supporting Fetterman and did not vote for Donald Trump in the past two presidential elections. He said he can’t support Oz because of his associations with Trump. The former president endorsed Oz in the Republican primary and has campaigned for him in the general election.
“The Republican Party is a piece of trash,” Cross said.
Cross, who said he had a brain tumor removed four years ago and can personally relate to Fetterman’s recovery path, doesn’t think Fetterman’s health should be an issue.
“I can think, but interpreting what he’s saying is different. It takes time,” he said. “It takes time to think, my off-the-cuff thinking is affected. The thought is in your head, but it’s not coming out of your mouth.”
Across the state in Pittsburgh on Wednesday, more than 3,000 people gathered at an outdoor concert venue for a Fetterman rally headlined by musician Dave Matthews the night after the debate.
In his own remarks before introducing Matthews to perform, Fetterman quickly addressed the debate.
“Doing that debate wasn’t exactly easy,” he said. “I knew it wasn’t going to be easy after having a stroke after five months. In fact, in fact, I don’t think that’s ever been in American political history.”
Maryellen Rutkowski, 67, voted twice for Trump to shake things up — “I didn’t like the good ol’ boy’s network” — but she said she has “soured” a little bit on the ex-president as of late.
Rutkowski said she finds Fetterman “strong enough” to go to Washington and not let the political town change him, as she believes it does to many other politicians.
David Stash said he had spoken to Fetterman three or four times the past two weeks and winced watching Tuesday’s debate. “It just seemed so static, so immersive, it threw him off,” said Stash, 73, a volunteer at a store that Fetterman’s wife runs in Braddock, Pa.
Stash said his support is unwavering for his friend.
Kane reported from Pittsburgh. John Wagner and Mariana Alfaro contributed to this report. | 2022-10-28T01:16:24Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Some Fetterman backers see a poor debate showing. But they are planning to stick by him. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/elections/2022/10/27/fetterman-debate-voters-pennsylvania/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/elections/2022/10/27/fetterman-debate-voters-pennsylvania/ |
Five wounded, including Arsenal player, in deadly knife attack in Italy
Arsenal's Pablo Mari, left, spent some time last season on loan to Serie A side Udinese. He is now on loan to Monza. (Filippo Monteforte/AFP/Getty Images)
A knife attack that killed a man near Milan on Thursday also resulted in the wounding of four others, including an Arsenal soccer player on loan to an Italian team.
Pablo Mari, who has been playing this season for the Serie A side Monza, was described by Arsenal as “not seriously hurt,” with the English Premier League club adding that the information came from his agent. Mari, a 29-year-old central defender, reportedly was recuperating at a hospital while awaiting surgery Friday.
Police, per multiple reports, said a male employee at the supermarket where the attack occurred was killed. A 46-year-old man suspected of involvement in the attack, at a Carrefour grocery store in Assago, reportedly was arrested. Apart from Mari, three other people reportedly were taken to a hospital in serious condition. Another person was treated at the scene but not hospitalized.
The attack did not initially appear to be linked to terrorism, said police, who indicated it might be related to psychological instability.
“We are all shocked to hear the dreadful news about the stabbing in Italy, which has put a number of people in hospital including our on-loan centre-back Pablo Mari,” Arsenal said in a statement. “… Our thoughts are with Pablo and the other victims of this dreadful incident.”
Top U.K. diplomat tells LGBT World Cup fans to ‘be respectful’ in Qatar
Monza’s chief executive, Adriano Galliani, told Sky Sports that Mari was pushing his son in a shopping cart when the Spanish player was attacked.
“He told me about this incredible incident,” Galliani said of Mari. “He had his son in a trolley and his wife next to him. He didn’t notice anything. He then felt something painful in his back, which was the criminal’s knife.
“Unfortunately, he also saw the criminal stab someone in the throat. He saw everything that happened, and it was deeply disturbing.”
Galliani added that while Mari has a “fairly deep wound on his back,” which will require surgery, the stabbing “fortunately did not touch vital organs such as the lungs.” The Mari’s height, at 6-foot-4, may have “saved” him, Galliani said.
Arsenal signed Mari from the Brazilian club Flamengo in 2020. He spent part of last season on loan to another Serie A side, Udinese. | 2022-10-28T01:17:07Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Five wounded, including Arsenal's Pablo Mari, in deadly knife attack in Italy - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/27/italy-stabbing-arsenal-pablo-mari/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/27/italy-stabbing-arsenal-pablo-mari/ |
What Is the Metaverse, and Will It Be Worth the Wait?
Analysis by Nate Lanxon | Bloomberg
An attendee wears a Oculus VR Inc. virtual reality (VR) headset during a demonstration of the Metaverse on the Accenture Plc stand on day two of the MWC Barcelona at the Fira de Barcelona venue in Barcelona, Spain, on Tuesday, March 1, 2022. Over 1,800 exhibitors and attendees from 183 countries will attend the annual event, which runs from Feb. 28 to March 3. Photographer: Angel Garcia/Bloomberg (Bloomberg)
Imagine a three-dimensional online world where you teleport from your London office to a meeting room in Singapore, shop at a digital replica of your favorite clothing store then join a friend for a round of virtual golf. To some, this aspirational version of the internet known as the metaverse is the future of human interaction. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg changed the company’s name to Meta Platforms Inc. and is pouring billions of dollars a year into efforts to dominate this “next frontier.” But it’s unclear what a unified virtual universe would look like, or whether people really want it.
1. How would the metaverse work?
It would combine technologies including video-conferencing, games like Minecraft and Roblox, crypto tokens, email, virtual reality, social media and live-streaming. Just as you might create a document in Microsoft Word and send it via Google’s Gmail to a colleague to read on an Apple iPad, items in the metaverse would be able to move across an ecosystem of competing products, holding their value and function. A digital work of art bought as a non-fungible token, or NFT, from Company A, say, would be displayable on the virtual wall of a house in a game made by Company B.
2. What would you do there?
Work and play. An example: “Jane” creates a 3D avatar — a digital representation of herself — within Facebook or Microsoft Teams and uses it in virtual office meetings. After work, Jane has tickets to a virtual concert with friends and all their avatars appear among the hundreds of heads in the audience. The music finishes and the band says, “Don’t forget to buy a T-shirt!” Through her avatar, Jane browses the designs at a stall just as she would on Amazon, Asos or Taobao today, pays for one with cryptocurrency and wears it at the virtual office the next day. A colleague asks to borrow it for his daughter to use that evening in a Roblox game, and Jane lends it to him. This scenario involves corporate communication tools, live-event streaming, e-commerce and sharing something of value. It only works if each provider builds its system in a way that makes assets such as avatars and shirts compatible and transferable.
3. When can I enter the metaverse?
Not for several years, if ever. You can already use crypto tokens to buy “land” in browser-based virtual worlds like Decentraland, attend conferences in VR using vFairs or use Sizebay’s 3D dressing room to try on clothes. But these products are far from being the cohesive, interoperable world envisioned by Zuckerberg and others. While there’s no shortage of investors betting the metaverse will come into being, the biggest checks are being written for chipmakers, video game studios and other companies whose products can thrive whether or not it happens. Microsoft Corp. CEO Satya Nadella said in January the company’s planned $69 billion takeover of game maker Activision Blizzard Inc. will help to build “the next internet.” But, he added, there “won’t be a single centralized metaverse and there shouldn’t be.” The metaverse would also need ultrafast internet that can handle hundreds of concurrent streams of data, and most of today’s wireless connections can barely support multiplayer games like Fortnite.
4. Is there demand for it?
It’s proving hard to persuade people to hook a VR headset to their face and hang out with cartoonish versions of their colleagues and best friends. Zuckerberg was widely mocked in August when he posted a primitive “selfie” from the metaverse to promote Meta’s VR platform, Horizon Worlds. There’s not a great deal of evidence that people working from home want to switch from regular Zoom calls to meetings in VR. For some, the benefit of feeling “in the room” is offset by sensations of dizziness and nausea that can come with the constant motion. When social media platform Snap Inc. announced layoffs in September, people working on technologies that could play a role in a future metaverse were first to go. Meta’s VR division has been making headsets since 2014 and is still reporting heavy losses, and revenue that’s only a fraction of its core ad-funded business.
5. What if it succeeds?
It could be a technological leap forward similar to the web’s transformation in the 1990s from static text and images on a page to a place to buy a book or watch a movie, and then into a way to attend college lectures and collaboratively design products. It might change how people congregate, interact and spend money, creating a distinct virtual life experience. It’s the kind of future imagined in science-fiction novels such as Neal Stephenson’s “Snow Crash” and movies like “The Matrix” and “Ready Player One.” Each of those, it should be noted, depicted a form of dystopia. | 2022-10-28T02:47:50Z | www.washingtonpost.com | What Is the Metaverse, and Will It Be Worth the Wait? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/what-is-the-metaverse-and-will-it-be-worth-the-wait/2022/10/27/68cd52bc-5666-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/what-is-the-metaverse-and-will-it-be-worth-the-wait/2022/10/27/68cd52bc-5666-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html |
Ask Amy: My 9-year-old grandson has terrible table manners
Concerned: There is a big difference between intervention and influence.
We have a small cottage on a lake in Upstate New York. Over the past decade, most of the homeowners in the area have stopped using lawn chemicals, over concerns about the effects of the chemicals on wildlife, as well as human and pet health.
Recently, a family moved in from out of state. They visit their cottage only occasionally. I have not met the family, as they live about a quarter-mile away, but I walk past their property regularly. I noticed that they have started having a company come regularly to apply chemicals to their lawn.
What is the best way to approach this family to tell them that the vast majority of people in our town don’t use lawn chemicals anymore? Should I leave a note on their door? Write them a letter to their home address? Stalk their property on weekends and talk to them in person?
Susan: If you are a chemical or environmental engineer and have knowledge of the damage caused by the specific products used (and the impact on your water supply), then you could share your knowledge with these neighbors — with your name attached, in case anyone has questions.
Dear Amy: “Allergic Employee” was a hospital worker who had extreme allergic reactions to the scents her co-workers chose to wear to work. Thank you for standing up for her.
Recovering: Medical personnel especially should understand the impact of their choices on the health of the people they are treating. | 2022-10-28T04:19:15Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Ask Amy: My 9-year-old grandson has terrible table manners - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/10/28/ask-amy-grandson-table-manners/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/10/28/ask-amy-grandson-table-manners/ |
Carolyn Hax: Bridesmaid is torn over attending without boyfriend in tow
Dear Carolyn: I will be a bridesmaid in the wedding of a dear friend who lives out of state. My partner of four years is also invited. I’m torn about whether he should come.
On the one hand, I will be busy with wedding stuff for nearly the whole time, and I know he would be bored and stressed about work if he came. (He has met the bride only once and has never met the groom.) I would be just as happy for him to stay home.
On the other, I would hate for my friend to feel it was some sort of snub if he didn’t come. I’m also nervous because his history of depression has meant that he frequently did not accompany me to things in the past, and I don’t want my friends and family to get a bad impression of him.
— Bridesmaid + 1
Bridesmaid + 1: To those who have grown weary of wedding questions, please note: This is not a wedding question.
That’s because the wedding element here is a nonissue. The partner attends if he wants to, or stays home if he wants to.
The underlying issue is the important one. Bridesmaid-plus, you apparently have appointed yourself guardian of: your partner’s mood; your friend’s feelings; your friends’ and family’s opinions of your partner; and the way all of their feelings and opinions reflect upon you.
It’s fine to care about all these things, and, in fact, it’s important that you do to some extent. If you’re oblivious or impervious to people’s feelings, then you’re bound to trample them often.
But when you mistake caring about people’s feelings for an obligation to try to control those feelings, then you’re going to be “torn,” “nervous” and emotionally overextended; you’re setting yourself up to fail. You simply can’t control other people. You’re also setting yourself up to annoy the people closest to you, because it’s just not your place to get so involved in people’s decisions.
Whether your partner would be stressed or bored at this wedding is his responsibility. Your job ends at laying out the facts of the event, to the best of your knowledge, and letting him decide whether he wants to be there.
The way the bride feels about your partner’s absence is her responsibility. Your job ends at telling her the truth about why he stayed home.
The impressions that your friends and family have of your partner are their responsibility. Your job ends at choosing your partner well, believing in that choice and letting it speak for itself — or in being honest about your own doubts.
Distancing yourself from these outcomes may seem selfish, but the opposite is true. By trying so hard to make everyone happy, you’re actually inserting yourself into the middle of all these emotional transactions. You tell yourself it’s because you’re concerned for others, but, in practice, it usually turns out that everything’s focused on you.
Take the following two basic facts — that you are responsible for yourself, and that you are not responsible for other adults — and use them to create for yourself the most basic emotional job description: Do your best, and let others do theirs. | 2022-10-28T04:19:21Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Carolyn Hax: Bridesmaid is torn over attending without boyfriend - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/10/28/carolyn-hax-bridesmaid-boyfriend-wedding/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/10/28/carolyn-hax-bridesmaid-boyfriend-wedding/ |
Miss Manners: My co-worker texts me on my personal phone too much
Obviously this would not bother you if you sought any kind of friendship with this person outside of work. And while you do not want to presume romantic intentions, you want to make it clear anyway that none are welcome.
The whiff of threat should be enough to convince this person not to pursue this — and that if he does, you now have evidence that he was asked to stop.
It's interesting that when previously dining at their home, after asking if I could be of help in the kitchen, I was directed to sit in the dining room — which, of course, I did.
“Now Meredith. Fair is fair. When we had that delightful dinner at your house, you would not let me help. So now you really must let me finish my preparations while you relax. I can assure you that it will be easier for me to double-check my ingredients if I can focus solely on that.” | 2022-10-28T04:19:27Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Miss Manners: My co-worker texts me on my personal phone too much - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/10/28/miss-manners-personal-texts-coworker/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/10/28/miss-manners-personal-texts-coworker/ |
The climate news is as grim as ever. Despite the stated ambitions of the international community to take action, the world’s nations have shaved just 1 percent off their projected greenhouse gas emissions for 2030, according to a new U.N. report. The meager outcome places the planet on a path to warm by 2.4 degrees Celsius (4.3 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the century — below some of the greatest fears of climate watchers but still beyond the safe temperature threshold set at 1.5 degrees Celsius. It precipitates a dangerous future of extreme weather, rising sea levels and “endless suffering,” as the United Nations put it itself.
Two other reports this week from U.N. agencies compounded these woes. An analysis by the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change found that few countries had adjusted their climate pledges since a major U.N. climate conference last year held in Glasgow, Scotland. This year’s conference is set to be hosted in Egypt next month. Another study by the World Meteorological Organization found that methane emissions are rising faster than ever. The evidence raises “questions about humanity’s ability to limit the greenhouse gas that is 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide in the near term,” my colleagues reported.
"I've been traveling around, talking to people whose lives have been destroyed by climate change."
Moulid from Somalia asks for international solidarity with his country, which has experienced unprecedented droughts, putting millions at risk of famine.#DearWorldLeaders pic.twitter.com/Nc6zxTmXSi
— UNDP Climate (@UNDPClimate) October 25, 2022
I covered Somalia’s last famine a decade ago. It’s about to happen again.
As people try to avert famine and seek safety, many have been forced to flee.
High Commissioner @FilippoGrandi sounded the alarm as he concluded a five-day visit to Somalia and Kenya. https://t.co/ES9bOgILKI
Earth could soon briefly hit threatening climate threshold
The severity of the crisis was not unexpected, but the international humanitarian system has been forced to play catch up. “The war in Ukraine came at a very inopportune time,” Dunford said. He said they had recognized that the situation in Somalia was continuing to deteriorate, and they started advocating for the needs of the country. “And then everyone’s attention was diverted to Europe. So we lost time and we lost attention,” he said. “The funding came late… and it meant we are starting further back in our response than we liked.” | 2022-10-28T04:20:34Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Climate change realities are on show in Somalia amid famine and drought - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/28/somalia-famine-climate-change/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/28/somalia-famine-climate-change/ |
FILE - In this photo provided by the North Korean government, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un inspects military exercises at an undisclosed location in North Korea on Oct. 8, 2022. South Korea says Friday, Oct. 28, 2022, North Korea has fired a ballistic missile toward its eastern waters. Independent journalists were not given access to cover the event depicted in this image distributed by the North Korean government. The content of this image is as provided and cannot be independently verified. (Korean Central News Agency/Korea News Service via AP) (Uncredited/KCNA via KNS) | 2022-10-28T04:20:40Z | www.washingtonpost.com | N. Korea fires ballistic missile toward sea, Seoul says - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/n-korea-fires-ballistic-missile-toward-sea-seoul-says/2022/10/27/2e6d0bfe-566f-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/n-korea-fires-ballistic-missile-toward-sea-seoul-says/2022/10/27/2e6d0bfe-566f-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html |
Anton, 26, fears for the safety of his pregnant wife, who returned to Russian-occupied Kherson. He sits by his bed at a shelter for internally displaced Ukrainians in Zaporizhzhia on Oct. 24. (Heidi Levine for The Washington Post)
ZAPORIZHZHIA, Ukraine — When Russian tanks rolled into the southern Ukrainian city of Kherson last spring, the young couple decided it was time to leave.
They fled to Kyiv, where Anton got a job driving a taxi and soon Nastya became pregnant. But she missed her mother, who had been left behind. So, last month, newly married Nastya did the unthinkable: She went back.
Back into Russian-occupied territory. Back into a city teetering on the edge of chaos, where both sides are preparing for what could be one of the fiercest battles in the now eight-month-old war. Back into the maw of a Russian military accused of committing atrocities.
Anton could not follow. And it was the Ukrainian side that blocked him.
“They won’t explain why,” he said Monday in a camp for internally displaced people in Zaporizhzhia, 200 miles from Kherson. “They just keep turning me around.”
Anton spent last weekend trying to reach Nastya, who suddenly stopped answering her phone.
“Sweetheart, I’m worried,” he texted. “Write me call me immediately when you get this.”
He received only silence.
Almost 15 million Ukrainians — a third of the population — have been forced from their homes since Russia invaded in February, according to the United Nations, many leaving loved ones behind. Among the displaced are the Kherson residents now desperate to return home despite the danger and uncertainty of life under Russian occupation and the acute risk of being trapped in heavy fighting.
The seemingly crazy decision to go back, by Anton, Nastya and others like them, highlights the impossible choices that war throws at ordinary people, who are caught in a conflicting swirl of allegiances and emotions. Is it better to be safe while friends and relatives remain in harm’s way? Or should all be together in the line of fire?
In Zaporizhzhia, an industrial city now infamous for the nearby nuclear power plant and for being the capital of a region that Russia claims to have annexed but does not fully control, countless people who fled Kherson or surrounding towns and villages are queuing to return for their relatives.
Their mission is growing more desperate, and also more dangerous, as Ukrainian forces prepare an expected assault to retake Kherson, the first key city seized by Russia after the start of the invasion on Feb. 24. Ukrainian troops have been advancing on the city from the north and west, and the Russians have been in retreat, and consolidating positions on the east bank of the Dnieper River, which splits the city.
Last week, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said “Russian terrorists” were planning to blow up the dam at the nearby Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant to flood Kherson and the surrounding area. Russia claims that Ukraine is planning to sabotage the dam, and over the weekend, occupation officials announced they were relocating as many as 60,000 people — roughly one-fifth of Kherson’s prewar population.
For months, people fleeing Kherson and nearby towns have arrived in Zaporizhzhia, often after harrowing, multiday journeys through dozens of checkpoints and across contested territory. They are welcomed at a converted big box store and then housed at a former hotel complex. Theoretically, they are supposed to stay for a few days before moving on. Some, however, remain for weeks — not because they can’t find other accommodation but because they are waiting for permission to go back.
Konstantyn Buhlyai, a 38-year-old potato farmer from the town of Chaplynka, roughly a two-hour drive from Kherson city, had just marked a month in Zaporizhzhia. Buhlyai had previously sent his wife and two children to live in Utah via a religious group his wife found online. But as a man of military age, he cannot leave Ukraine. Nor can he return to his town to retrieve his parents.
Ihor Samoylychenko, 45, also has spent the past month waiting to return, in his case to Kherson city, where a neighbor had been taking care of his two children, ages 8 and 10. He has put his name into an electronic queue for permission to return but has no clue how long it will take.
Samoylychenko, a truck driver, had used his 4.5-ton vehicle to take three families out of Kherson before returning with humanitarian aid. But when he tried to ferry a second batch of families, he was stopped in Zaporizhzhia. Regional Ukrainian officials would not let him return to Russian-occupied territory.
Samoylychenko wrote a letter to the Zaporizhzhia governor and to a local official at the crossing point, asking to be allowed to go home to his children and ailing mother. But the local official denied his request, citing martial law that restricts the movement of civilians.
Regional officials blamed the travel restrictions on the National Guard, which did not respond to a request for comment. It was unclear whether the restrictions were in place to prevent people’s willingly or unwittingly providing the Russian authorities with information, or a result of safety concerns, or were merely a feature of wartime bureaucracy.
As the fighting around Kherson intensified, Samoylychenko has grown more desperate.
“Zaporizhzhia says we can’t go because they fear for our lives,” he said as he leaned against his bunk in the converted hotel complex. “But I’ll sign anything, I’ll waive any risk; just let me go back.”
On the bed across from him, another angry parent stirred uneasily.
Svetlana Yeremenko said she had arrived in Zaporizhzhia more than a month earlier after a 24-hour trip from her occupied town of Velyka Lepetykha, across the front line, so that her older son, 22-year-old Ivan, could have an operation. But she had left behind her elderly mother, husband and younger son, age 12.
“We can’t get permission to go back,” Yeremenko said. “They say there is a waiting line, but it’s so long it never gets to us.”
It was a bitter irony, the two parents said, that it wasn’t the Russians but fellow Ukrainians who were keeping them from their families. They said they had no sympathy for the Russian occupiers, or illusions about what awaited them if they were allowed back. Living under Russian control, they said, they had felt like second-class citizens in their own homes. People who refused to work under Russian occupation were fired, and those who agreed to take Russian passports were given cushy jobs and lump sum payments, they said.
“What they are trying to implement is that you’re either with us or you’re not,” Samoylychenko said. “If you’re with Ukraine, then it’s, ‘Dosvidaniya.’ ”
Yeremenko and Samoylychenko said they had also heard rumors of Russians raping, torturing and killing local people, stories that echoed accounts now being investigated in newly liberated towns.
The road back is also dangerous. Last month, a convoy of cars waiting to return to Russian-occupied territory was hit by a suspected Russian missile, killing more than two dozen people and injuring scores.
Yet, life in Zaporizhzhia has its own risks. There have been explosions near the welcome center. Consequently, internally displaced people are no longer allowed to gather there, volunteers said. And just a week ago, a suspected Iranian drone was shot down above the hotel serving as a shelter. The explosion shattered some windows, and glass still littered the parking lot outside. “We are kind of safe here, but our families back home are not,” Samoylychenko said. “We’re living on the edge.”
Without word from his pregnant wife, Anton was at risk of going over that edge. The couple had met about a year earlier at their job building small airplanes. Nastya worked on designing the planes, and Anton built them. They began flirting, then dating, and on New Year’s Day this year, he proposed.
“What, are you an idiot?” she said before hugging him and saying yes. Russia invaded less than two months later, sweeping into southern Ukraine from occupied Crimea. Within a few days, the Russians had taken Kherson.
Anton and Nastya fled to the capital, where they found an apartment and he found a job. Soon, they learned she was pregnant.
But Nastya worried about her mother, and wanted to get her out of Kherson. “She was saying, ‘I want to go home, I want to go home,’ ” Anton recalled. He thought it was such a bad idea that he took her to Bucha, Irpin and Hostomel: suburbs near Kyiv where Russian soldiers were accused of committing atrocities.
“I showed her the mass graves,” he said. “And I told her it could be repeated.”
Nastya was undeterred. So last month, the couple traveled to Zaporizhzhia by train. But they could not go home together; Anton was told he could not accompany her. When he said goodbye, he thought he would quickly win permission and rejoin his pregnant wife. But now it has now been almost a month, and he is living and volunteering at the hotel turned shelter: 200 miles from his wife and soon-to-be first child.
On Saturday, she sent him a photo of her baby belly.
“Oh my god,” he replied. “Amazing.”
And then the photos stopped.
Anton called her once, twice, nine times, but there was only silence.
“My sunshine I love you endlessly,” he texted. “Please you and mom be careful, when you read my message please call me immediately and write.”
He tried not to think of all the things that could have happened. And then, on Sunday, a text.
“Bunny, hello,” she wrote.
“Everything okay???” he replied. “I was worried. Almost didn’t sleep.”
As with many in Kherson, her internet service had been cut. Anton scrambled to find a way to call her, but neither cellphones nor Facebook nor other apps worked. Finally, he remembered using Skype years ago and gave it a try. Suddenly, her phone began to ring and Anton could feel his heart leap.
“Hello?” he said. “Are you alive?”
Nastya’s reply was the same one as 10 months earlier, before the war and their separation and the baby he prayed he would one day get to see.
“What, are you an idiot?” she said, and burst into tears. | 2022-10-28T05:24:33Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Kherson residents escaped Russian occupation but want to go back - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/28/kherson-refugees-filtration-war-russia/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/28/kherson-refugees-filtration-war-russia/ |
Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman has had enough. The Saudi Energy Minister, object of vitriolic criticism in Washington since he led the OPEC+ cartel into an oil output cut this month, said he keeps hearing: “Are you with us, or against us?” But the kingdom isn’t choosing sides, he told Wall Street’s good and great this week in Riyadh. “Is there any room for ‘We are for Saudi Arabia and for the people of Saudi Arabia?’”
It’s been the reigning message at the kingdom’s annual Future Investment Initiative conference this week — and one that matters for everyone else as oil hovers close to the $100-a-barrel barrier.
The signs have been around for a while. Earlier this year, Prince Mohammed, who runs the day-to-day affairs of the kingdom, said he didn’t mind whether US President Joe Biden understood his approach. “It’s up to him to think about the interest of America,” he told The Atlantic. Left unsaid: MBS, as Prince Mohammed is known, was concentrating on the Saudis’ interest.
What I heard this week in Riyadh is the manifestation of that thinking: a bolder, determined and ambitious kingdom, still allied with America, but at the same time unshackled from the almost 80-year-old relationship. It’s a nation now more focused on Asia and its top oil clients — China, India, Japan and South Korea. Together, the four countries account for 65% of all Saudi oil exports.
And yet, away from the Ritz Carlton hotel, where the annual “Davos in the Desert” conference takes place, and the moneyed districts of Riyadh such as Al Olaya where bankers stay, Saudi Arabia is a relatively poor nation. Its GDP per capita stood at $23,500 in 2021, well behind the $45,000 of the United Arab Emirates and the $68,000 of Qatar. With the country’s population growing by about 600,000 people every year (projected to reach 36.2 million in 2022), Riyadh has to run hard to stay still.
It’s a sign of what’s to come. Be prepared hear “no” from the Saudis much more often. | 2022-10-28T07:22:17Z | www.washingtonpost.com | What the New ‘Saudi First’ Policy Means for Oil and Power - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/what-thenew-saudi-first-policy-means-for-oil-and-power/2022/10/28/f58057b8-568e-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/what-thenew-saudi-first-policy-means-for-oil-and-power/2022/10/28/f58057b8-568e-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html |
People walk by Old Main on the Pennsylvania State University main campus on Nov. 9, 2017 in State College, Pa. (Gene J. Puskar/AP)
Pennsylvania State University is scrapping much-touted plans for a Center for Racial Justice that began amid a civil rights movement responding to the police killing of George Floyd and after allegations surfaced that the university routinely failed to hire and retain Black faculty members.
The university said Thursday that it would instead focus on existing efforts, pledging to invest as much in diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging initiatives as it would have spent on the center over the next five years. Penn State suggested that it would, among other efforts, enhance coordination for initiatives such as the university’s Africana Research Center and Antiracist Development Institute.
“I have determined that enhancing support for current efforts by people who know Penn State best will be more impactful than investing in a new venture,” university president Neeli Bendapudi said in a release.
Penn State initially pledged to form the center to “address the challenges of racism, racial bias and community safety that persist in our nation.” It was supposed to create a fellowship program that would fund research for faculty, create scholarship opportunities for students and otherwise support the university in advancing diversity. Then-university president Eric Barron called it “just the beginning” and part of a broader action plan “in the wake of senseless tragedies.”
The university’s decision to backtrack on the center struck a nerve, with critics drawing comparisons between the canceled project and a Penn State student group’s invitation for Gavin McInnes, founder of the Proud Boys far-right extremist group, to speak at an event this month. After some initial resistance, the university stepped in and shut down the event over fears of escalating violence.
Bernice King, chief executive of the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change, wrote on Twitter in response to news of the scrapped center that diversity, equity and inclusion work is not the same as attempting to eradicate racism.
“We can have diversity, inclusion, and a semblance of equity, and still not have justice,” she said. “The Center could have helped get there at this institution and beyond.”
The university formally announced the formation of the racial justice center in 2021, more than a year after two Black professors released a report alleging that progress in hiring Black faculty had been “exceedingly slow and devoid of sustained commitment.” | 2022-10-28T07:22:18Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Penn State scraps racial justice center, disappointing activists - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/10/28/penn-state-racial-justice-center/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/10/28/penn-state-racial-justice-center/ |
UNITED NATIONS — The U.N. Security Council called for a revival of U.N-led negotiations on the disputed Western Sahara in a resolution adopted Thursday that expressed “deep concern” at the breakdown of the 1991 cease-fire between Morocco and the pro-independence Polisario Front whose decades-old dispute shows no sign of ending. | 2022-10-28T07:22:52Z | www.washingtonpost.com | UN urges revival of negotiations on disputed Western Sahara - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/un-urges-revival-of-negotiations-on-disputed-western-sahara/2022/10/28/6e4feb52-568c-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/un-urges-revival-of-negotiations-on-disputed-western-sahara/2022/10/28/6e4feb52-568c-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html |
SOUTHAMPTON, Bermuda — Arjun Atwal went to Bermuda without having competed in the three months since his father died and without the guarantee of a tee time. He walked off Port Royal with an 8-under 63 that left him a shot behind in the Butterfield Bermuda Championship.
VILAMOURA, Portugal — Despite not feeling well, Jordan Smith shot a 9-under 62 to take a one-stroke lead at the Portugal Masters.
MILWAUKEE — David Stearns is stepping away from his role as the Milwaukee Brewers’ president of baseball operations, saying he just needs a break and isn’t thinking about taking a job with any other organization.
DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. — An appeals panel denied the attempt by Stewart-Haas Racing to overturn $200,000 in NASCAR fines for manipulation of a playoff race.
CINCINNATI — Cincinnati Bengals star wide receiver Ja’Marr Chase could miss several games with a hip injury, a person familiar with his condition told The Associated Press,
PORTLAND, Ore. — Portland star guard Damian Lillard has a minor right calf strain and will be re-evaluated in a to two weeks, the Trail Blazers said.
BASEL, Switzerland — Home favorite Stan Wawrinka advanced to the Swiss Indoors quarterfinals, beating American Brandon Nakashima 6-4, 5-7, 6-4.
MILAN — A man grabbed a knife from a supermarket shelf and stabbed five people, killing one and wounding four others, including Spanish soccer player Pablo Mari. | 2022-10-28T07:23:04Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Thursday's Sports In Brief - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/thursdays-sports-in-brief/2022/10/28/aae19100-5683-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/thursdays-sports-in-brief/2022/10/28/aae19100-5683-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html |
A trove of sensitive materials obtained by Ukrainian intelligence and reviewed by The Washington Post illustrates how Moscow continues to try to manipulate countries in Eastern Europe
Supporters of the Shor political party clash with riot police during a protest in downtown Chisinau, Moldova, on Oct 23. (Dumitru Doru/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)
CHISINAU, Moldova — When thousands of protesters gathered last month outside Moldova’s presidential palace calling for the country’s pro-Western leader to step down, the man behind the demonstration — an opposition party leader in exile in Israel — soon received plaudits from Moscow.
One senior Russian politician praised the protest organizer, Ilan Shor, as “a worthy long-term partner” and even offered the Moldovan region led by Shor’s party a cheap Russian gas deal, according to Shor’s press service. Referred to as “the young one” by Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB), the 35-year-old Shor is a leading figure in the Kremlin’s efforts to subvert this former Soviet republic, intelligence documents and interviews with Moldovan, Ukrainian and Western officials show.
The documents — part of a trove of sensitive materials obtained by Ukrainian intelligence and reviewed by The Washington Post — illustrate how Moscow continues to try to manipulate countries in Eastern Europe even as its military campaign in Ukraine falters. The FSB has funneled tens of millions of dollars from some of Russia’s biggest state companies to cultivate a network of Moldovan politicians and reorient the country toward Moscow, the documents and interviews indicate.
The U.S. Treasury on Wednesday imposed sanctions on multiple Russian or Moldovan organizations and individuals including Shor, saying he was “coordinating with representatives of other oligarchs to create political unrest in Moldova” and had “received Russian support,” as well as working in June “with Moscow-based entities to undermine” Moldova’s bid to join the European Union.
In the first months of the Ukraine war, officials said, the Moldova government feared Russian tanks would stream over its border, especially if the southern Ukrainian port of Odessa, 40 miles away, fell. That immediate military threat has ebbed, but tension is mounting over the use of natural gas — as well as the fallout from Russian airstrikes on energy infrastructure in neighboring Ukraine — to force a change in political leadership.
Management control of Moldova’s two main pro-Russian TV channels was transferred to a close Shor associate at the end of September, according to Shor and the head of Moldova’s media oversight council, providing him with a major platform to advance a Moscow-aligned agenda in this small country sandwiched between Ukraine and Romania. In addition, intercepted communications show, the FSB sent a team of Russian political strategists to advise Shor’s party. And, according to the documents, the FSB oversaw a deal in which a Russian oligarch acquired one of Shor’s main assets, to shield it from the Moldovan authorities.
The Shor party was to be positioned as one “of concrete action,” populist “in the real sense of the word,” a party that was “changing people’s lives for the better,” the Russian strategists wrote in a report to the FSB, which was among the documents reviewed by The Post.
In an interview, Shor denied ever receiving support from Moscow, including from the security services. “We are an absolutely independent party which defends only the position of Moldovan citizens,” he said. He blamed the Moldovan government’s pro-Western tilt for bringing the country close to what he said was “economic collapse.” In a statement issued Thursday following the imposition of U.S. sanctions, Shor defiantly dismissed them as a “victory” that showed Moldova’s president had “really become frightened by the protests, understanding that her days are numbered and that we will throw her out of her seat.”
Moldovan and U.S. officials fear the Kremlin’s efforts to subvert Moldova, part of a campaign that dates back decades, could only intensify if it suffers further losses in Ukraine. “Recently, as Russia faces military setbacks and global outrage over its brutal actions in Ukraine, Russia’s operatives have considered increasingly desperate measures to prevent further erosion of its influence,” Treasury said in its statement announcing sanctions against Shor and other individuals.
Moldova, which along with Ukraine was granted E.U. candidacy status in June, is particularly vulnerable to Russian pressure because of its near 100 percent dependence on Russian gas. More than fivefold increases in gas prices this year have hit its population of 2.5 million hard, and energy bills now amount to more than 60 percent of an average Moldovan’s living costs, officials in Chisinau said.
“They are very embarrassed about the entire Ukraine operation, and they need a success somewhere,” Oleg Serebrian, Moldova’s deputy prime minister, said in an interview. “My personal fear is that Moldova is an easier target than Ukraine. So, for a kind of moral rearmament of Russian society, they could use different tools in Moldova. The first one is the economic one.”
Gazprom, Russia’s state-controlled natural gas monopoly, cut supplies to Moldova by 30 percent this month and is threatening further reductions in November. Russian airstrikes targeting Ukraine’s energy infrastructure are further increasing the pressure. Ukraine had supplied 30 percent of Moldova’s electricity, but the bombing of Ukrainian power stations means Moldova has had to turn to Romania instead, and already the power lines from there are transmitting at full capacity.
In addition, Transnistria, the enclave occupied by Russian troops that controls the power station supplying the remaining 70 percent of the country’s electricity needs, this week said it was sharply reducing those volumes because of cutbacks to the Gazprom gas supply, leaving Moldovan authorities desperately scrambling to make up the deficit. “Every bomb that falls on a Ukrainian power plant is a bomb that falls on the Moldovan electricity supply as well,” said Nicu Popescu, Moldova’s foreign minister.
Officials fear that the Shor-organized protests, though relatively small for now, could escalate once winter hits and that an energy crunch could be used to topple the government.
“After Ukraine, Moldova is the one we’re focusing attention on,” said one Western official.
Moldova’s new anti-corruption prosecutor this month detained 24 people, including members of Shor’s party, in connection with the alleged illicit financing of the demonstrations, with the prosecutor saying investigators had seized 20 black bags stuffed with 3.5 million lei (about $181,000) in cash. The Shor party said the arrests were “pressure” from the authorities to disrupt the anti-government protests.
Shor in the interview said the Moldovan government was to blame for the growing economic crisis because it “is breaking Moldova’s neutral status and bringing harm to the people of Moldova because today, for normal people, [good relations with Moscow] is the basis for getting normal gas prices.”
‘A real idol’
The documents provide a rare glimpse inside the shadowy world of Russia’s influence operations in Moldova and the twin instruments of natural gas and illicit financing that the Kremlin wields here.
“The Russians are very good at exporting two things: one, energy, and the second, corruption,” said a senior Moldovan security official, who like some others spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter.
Since 2016, FSB operations in Moldova have been led by Dmitry Milyutin, a general in the security service who serves as deputy head of the Department of Operational Information, according to the documents. For most of his time in the post, officials said, Milyutin worked through Igor Chaika, a Russian businessman who is the son of Russia’s former prosecutor general. Chaika is the ambassador to Moldova of a Kremlin-linked business association, Delovaya Rossiya.
Treasury also imposed sanctions on Chaika on Wednesday, saying that “in conjunction with Kremlin press secretary Dmitry Peskov,” he had “developed detailed plans to undermine Moldovan president Maia Sandu and return Moldova to Russia’s sphere of influence.”
In addition, Treasury said, the Russian government used Chaika’s “companies as a front to funnel money to the collaborating political parties in Moldova. Some of these illicit campaign funds were earmarked for bribes and electoral fraud.”
Milyutin communicated with Chaika more than 6,000 times between December 2020 and June 2022, according to the Ukrainian intelligence documents.
The FSB was “checking with [Chaika] what needed to be done at any moment,” a Ukrainian security official said, referring to the documents. Chaika “is like a wallet for them.”
The FSB, Milyutin and Chaika did not respond to requests for comment. Peskov told The Post that he “of course” knows Chaika, but had never worked on any plans with him to restore Russian influence in Moldova. “I have nothing to do with Moldova,” he said.
Until recently, the documents show, the FSB’s primary vehicle in Moldova was the Socialist Party, headed by Igor Dodon, who served as Moldova’s pro-Moscow president between 2016 and 2020. Chaika has never hidden his close connections with Dodon: He has jointly owned businesses in Russia with Dodon’s younger brother in real estate and waste management since 2019, according to official company registration documents.
The Socialist Party strategy backfired badly, however, in 2020 when the Moldovan population rejected Dodon after he became mired in a series of corruption scandals. In one secretly recorded video leaked in 2019, Dodon admitted to receiving Kremlin funding — including from Gazprom — and said he required $800,000 to $1 million per month to cover his party’s “running costs.”
Dodon, who has been charged with treason, illegal enrichment, corruption and illegal party financing, did not respond to requests for comment sent to the spokesperson of the Socialist Party, where he is still a member. In court, he has denied the charges, saying the case against him is “100 percent political.”
Moldovans voted in Sandu, a former World Bank economist, as the country’s new president on Nov. 15, 2020.
In response, the FSB drafted a plan — dated Nov. 21, 2020, and reviewed by The Post — to use the Socialists’ position as the largest party in Parliament in conjunction with Shor’s party to maintain the Russian agency’s influence, including by passing a law that would shift control of the Moldovan security and intelligence service from the president to the Parliament. Dodon’s party, however, was also routed in parliamentary elections in July 2021, and the plan went nowhere.
Moldovan political strategists hired by the FSB reported back to Moscow in September 2021 that the Socialist Party’s defeat was “the result of a systemic crisis” and that Dodon was a person with an “irreversibly damaged reputation” whose removal from the political scene should be carried out with “surgical virtuosity.”
The virtuosity came in the form of a golden handshake, the documents show. After Dodon stepped down from the Socialist Party, he was appointed chairman of the Moldovan-Russian business council, an organization established by the Kremlin-linked Delovaya Rossiya. Dodon’s monthly salary, paid by the business council, was $29,016, plus a $14,508 monthly bonus, documents show.
The contract, however, came with strings attached. Dodon had to clear everything he said publicly with his new employer, a screenshot of a text conversation between Dodon and Chaika shows. In the Dec. 2, 2021, conversation, Dodon insisted he was “a free person.”
“Free, but restricted by the corporate ethics of the [Russian-Moldovan] Union,” Chaika said.
“You have begun burying me early,” Dodon replied. “If you are forwarding the condition that for one of my public statements you will cut my wages and close the new business council … then let’s speak about this in detail.”
Moscow quickly stepped up its search for Dodon’s political replacement. Shor, who had entered politics from a background chairing a major Moldovan bank and a chain of duty-free shops along with Moldova’s commercial airport, was viewed by pollsters working for the FSB as something of a showman populist, but manipulable, the documents show. He’d won early success in 2015, when he was elected mayor of the Moldovan city of Orhei. But two years later, he was found guilty of looting $1 billion from the Moldovan banking system — a 2014 heist that left the Moldovan government with a budget deficit amounting to 8 percent of gross domestic product.
Shor remained mayor while he appealed the conviction but then left the country for Israel in 2019, denying the bank theft charges, which he described as politically motivated. He continued to run the party from exile and it came in third in the 2021 parliamentary elections, with 5.7 percent of the vote.
“For some, [Shor] is clearly allergic, an unacceptable figure. But for others, he is a real idol and leader,” according to an April 2021 report written by the strategists for the FSB.
Treasury in its statement noted that “Shor’s wife is the Russian pop singer Sara Lvovna Shor, who was decorated by [Russian President Vladimir] Putin as an honored artist of Russia.” She is known by the stage name Jasmin.
The Kremlin-hired political strategists had first traveled to Chisinau from Russia in March 2021 to work secretly with Shor’s party, the documents show. They took great efforts to make sure their presence was undiscovered, buying prepaid SIM cards for burner phones and keeping the addresses of the apartments they were renting hidden — even to members of Shor’s party, according to a note written by one of them that is part of the document trove.
Among the measures they recommended to the Shor party was to erase as much as possible “negative background,” presumably Shor’s past criminal conviction, and to attempt to clean up his image on the internet. In a chart that was part of the recommendations sent back to the FSB, the strategists proposed offering journalists “rewards” to delete articles “in extreme circumstances,” or to get “control over court decisions” if the Shor party instead chose to sue for defamation.
Shor said his party had used the services of a variety of “different international consultants” but that he was not aware of the March 2021 visit because he was not living in Moldova then.
Shor also received FSB assistance for another part of his business empire. Amid a conflict with the Moldovan authorities, the FSB closely coordinated a 2020 deal in which Shor’s controlling stake in the company running Chisinau’s strategically important airport was transferred to a powerful Russian billionaire, Andrei Goncharenko, the documents show. Goncharenko “has been instructed in everything,” said a senior FSB officer in one discussion about the deal, the documents show.
Shor said in the interview that he’d never owned a stake in the airport — and that he had stepped down as chairman of its board in summer 2019, when control of the company was, according to news reports, sold to Nathaniel Rothschild, a British businessman. But the FSB documents discussing the deal refer to the airport as still being “Shor’s asset” in January 2020, while senior Moldovan officials also said in interviews that it was controlled by Shor. A person familiar with the deal said Rothschild had acquired an option to buy the company but never completed the transaction. A spokesperson for Rothschild declined to comment.
In addition, two legal agreements, approved and forwarded by the FSB in August and October 2020, stated that Shor was to give his political support to Dodon, in return for Dodon’s backing for the development of the airport, as well as for the transfer “of 100 percent of the company ... to the ownership of representatives of Russian business.”
A representative for Goncharenko did not respond to requests for comment.
Shor said Goncharenko was a businessman he knew “personally” who “never followed any orders of the FSB” and was interested in the airport as an “attractive investment project.”
On the streets of Moldova’s capital, the financial machinations can seem remote to those struggling to pay their bills. For many demonstrators, regardless of the prosecutor’s allegations that some are being paid to protest, their concerns are real and pressing.
“People are coming out because we can’t afford to live,” said a pensioner, Zina. “Gas prices have gone up five times and pensions and wages are the same. Shor gave us presents on national holidays. And these guys in power have just shown us their fists.”
The Shor-backed protesters have turned to increasingly aggressive tactics in the past two weeks, and as Moldova’s energy crunch intensifies, alarm is growing in Chisinau and Western capitals.
The Russians are “doing all they can to turn the lights out,” a second Western official said. “They don’t need to do much more than that to destabilize the Moldovan government.” | 2022-10-28T07:23:06Z | www.washingtonpost.com | FSB works to undermine pro-Western government in Moldova - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/28/russia-fsb-moldova-manipulation/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/28/russia-fsb-moldova-manipulation/ |
In this photo provided by the Philippine Coast Guard, rescuers use boats to evacuate residents from flooded areas due to Tropical Storm Nalgae at Parang, Maguindanao province, southern Philippines on Friday Oct. 28, 2022. Floodwaters rapidly rose in many low-lying villages, forcing some villagers to climb to their roofs, where they were rescued by army troops, police and volunteers, officials said. (Philippine Coast Guard via AP) (Uncredited/Philippine Coast Guard)
COTABATO, Philippines — At least 13 people died and five others were missing in flash floods and landslides set off by torrential rains that swamped a southern Philippine province overnight, officials said Friday. | 2022-10-28T07:23:18Z | www.washingtonpost.com | At least 13 dead in floods, landslides in south Philippines - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/at-least-13-dead-in-floods-landslides-in-south-philippines/2022/10/28/65541f8a-5689-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/at-least-13-dead-in-floods-landslides-in-south-philippines/2022/10/28/65541f8a-5689-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html |
Texas ranks high for children left in vehicles who suffer heat-related illnesses.
FORT WORTH, Texas — Dr. Priya Bui is sounding the alarm for every driver with kids as passengers. The extreme heat outside can be dangerous to children left in vehicle.
As a HSC Health pediatrician, Bui fears the worst-case scenario.
"Losing the child. But other than that, you can have organ damage, right? So, you can have things that affect your kidney, or your heart, or your brain that can happen from severe heat exhaustion or heat stroke," Bui said. "It's just going to take minutes for a child to start to overheat."
Bui's warning comes just days after Fort Worth police responded to the 3500 block of North Littlejohn Avenue. On Sunday, officers found five children, ages 1 to 6, inside a vehicle asleep or passed out with the engine running without A/C.
It's something medics see far too often in our area.
RELATED: Kids in hot car calls in DFW significantly higher this year, officials say
John Hamilton works as a MedStar operations supervisor in Fort Worth.
"Since the first part of May, we've had 14 children left in vehicles," Hamilton said. "Luckily, the outcome hasn't been as tragic as it could be, but still, that's 14 kids too many."
Hamilton also stressed it's not just adults leaving children behind by accident in some cases. Children are sometimes naturally curious, and leaving your car keys in reach can lead to an incident.
"It's important also not to let children have access to the vehicle, even when your home, to be able to unlock it. About one-third of the fatalities have occurred because that child has been able to access a vehicle and just doesn't know to get back out of it," said Hamilton.
In the latest case, Fort Worth officers put the children in their air-conditioned squad cars before paramedics took them to the hospital. Police later arrested their 29-year-old father, identified as Jose Leal, on five counts of abandonment-endangerment.
Texas ranks number one in the U.S. for hot car deaths involving children, according MedStar. Last year, 23 kids died in hot vehicles -- two of them were Texas children.
Bui stresses anyone around children should know how to identify heat-related illnesses.
"They're going to start sweating profusely. They might be actually crying or trying to show that they're uncomfortable. But eventually, they're going to get really drowsy and sleepy," said Bui.
For more information on the dangers of hot cars for children, click here to visit MedStar's website.
Amid ongoing heat issues, one Texas prison recently reached 149 degrees, new study shows | 2022-08-11T00:47:27Z | www.wfaa.com | Fort Worth: Rise in reports of kids in hot cars | wfaa.com | https://www.wfaa.com/article/news/local/fort-worth-pediatrician-on-kids-in-hot-cars/287-0dc77aa3-4422-4975-8f2f-a84e3d761f1a | https://www.wfaa.com/article/news/local/fort-worth-pediatrician-on-kids-in-hot-cars/287-0dc77aa3-4422-4975-8f2f-a84e3d761f1a |
Firefighters and EMS personnel spent three days this week going through realistic scenarios
MCKINNEY, Texas — First responders ran through mass casualty training scenarios at the Collin College Public Safety Training Center in McKinney.
Firefighters and EMS personnel spent three days this week going through realistic scenarios that include active shooters, building collapse and hazardous materials.
"This training is designed to allow first responders and healthcare workers to experience the chaos and stress of large-scale incidents while working together to discover ways to improve the response in the future," read a statement from McKinney Fire.
"This is so much better than lecturing in the hall or reading a paper," said Keegan Bradley, McKinney Fire Medical Director.
In the scenario, there were close to 30 volunteers who played victims. Most of those volunteers are EMS students. Jackie Langford with Health Sciences and Emergency Services for Collin College was the simulation director in charge of putting prosthetics on the victims. The silicone prosthetics mixed with fake blood help create that near-real-life scenario.
"We wanna make sure everything looks as real as possible," said one volunteer, who helped apply the prosthetics.
This week's training is about helping prepare firefighters and EMS to respond in a mass triage situation.
The recurring number of active-shooter scenarios has forced first responders and schools to step up their response. In an active shooter situation, while law enforcement works to stop the killing, firefighters and EMS are tasked with stopping the dying.
The choices made and actions taken by first responders can decide, "who lives, who dies, and what resource do we have to help as many as we can," said Bradley. | 2022-08-11T02:27:42Z | www.wfaa.com | McKinney FD participates in mass casualty training | wfaa.com | https://www.wfaa.com/article/news/education/schools/mckinney-fd-participates-in-mass-casualty-training/287-ad47a6f1-0fb3-4316-b834-37dfa299e409 | https://www.wfaa.com/article/news/education/schools/mckinney-fd-participates-in-mass-casualty-training/287-ad47a6f1-0fb3-4316-b834-37dfa299e409 |
The pouches will now only be tested at Forest Meadow Junior High at the beginning of the semester per Superintendent Tabitha Branum.
RICHARDSON, Texas — The Richardson Independent School District is pumping the brakes on proposed 'locking cell phone pouches' for students to utilize throughout the day during the upcoming school year -- at least districtwide at secondary schools.
Superintendent Tabitha Branum originally wanted school board members to vote on implementing the pouches at middle and high school campuses at a meeting Thursday night.
But after a strong parent reaction, the vote was pulled from the agenda, and Branum announced that a small pilot program for the pouches would be done at Forest Meadow Junior High at the beginning of the school year.
Under the pulled proposal, students would have to put their phones in protective cases that would be locked throughout the school day. Students wouldn't be able to access their phones until the end of the day or in case of an emergency.
The action item says administrators think it's "necessary" to restrict cell phone access so there can be "an orderly learning environment on Richardson ISD secondary campuses."
According to the action item, Superintendent Tabitha Branum hoped to start the program at a price no higher than $401,000.
Per Branum, the district is spending $25,000 for the FMJH campus.
"One of the things we've heard from our educators -- especially our classroom educators -- is the real distraction that cell phones can be for our students," Branum told WFAA. "It can be a real barrier for them focusing on what they're meant to do in class, which is to keep their focus on their learning."
The superintendent also said the district does have a cell phone-free policy outside of lunch. But because of the stress teachers have endured during the pandemic, the district loosened enforcement of the policy.
Branum intends to enforce the policy more strongly this semester and compare discipline handed out at FMJH and other secondary schools to see if the pouches should expand.
"We will share that data publicly, and it will allow us to see how the implementation works and then collect data," Branum said. "At all other schools, turn the phones off, keep them in your backpacks except at lunch, and if we see it, we will take it."
Branum said many parents had an issue with the idea of a phone barrier in the way in case of some sort of emergency like an active shooter situation.
Other parents praised the idea of reducing screen time.
Some parents didn't like that they wouldn't be able to be in constant contact with their children.
"There is a convenience to be able to communicate with them on a schedule change of some kind or possibly family information getting to them," Branum said.
Click here to read the update from Branum. | 2022-08-11T02:27:52Z | www.wfaa.com | Richardson ISD backs off on 'locking pouches' for student phones | wfaa.com | https://www.wfaa.com/article/news/local/richardson-isd-about-face-locking-pouches-student-cell-phones-during-school-day/287-3b1d0505-aa59-4d60-9604-a87d0c1298d9 | https://www.wfaa.com/article/news/local/richardson-isd-about-face-locking-pouches-student-cell-phones-during-school-day/287-3b1d0505-aa59-4d60-9604-a87d0c1298d9 |
Are you ready for back to school?
TEXAS, USA — With back-to-school season in full swing, here is what you need to know about in North Texas.
When does school start for North Texas districts?
Depending on where you live in North Texas, it varies.
Here's a full list of districts and their start dates.
Where can my child get free school supplies?
Several school supply drives have come and gone, but there are a few left!
Check our list here for updates.
My child's district requires a clear backpack this year. Why?
Several school districts are implementing a clear or mesh backpack policy for the upcoming school year.
Districts have reassesses or upgraded their security efforts following the deadly May shooting in Uvalde, Texas.
Read about why Dallas ISD is one of many districts implementing this new policy.
Health Check: New breast cancer treatment, 'Back to School' advice | 2022-08-11T16:09:06Z | www.wfaa.com | Everything you need to know about back to school season in Texas | wfaa.com | https://www.wfaa.com/article/news/local/outreach/back-to-school/everything-you-need-to-know-about-back-to-school-in-dfw/287-bb056a73-bd37-4f76-ad7e-58d9adb9ff87 | https://www.wfaa.com/article/news/local/outreach/back-to-school/everything-you-need-to-know-about-back-to-school-in-dfw/287-bb056a73-bd37-4f76-ad7e-58d9adb9ff87 |
Cowboys Nation versus Stephen A. ... ring the the bell.
FRISCO, Texas — It's a sound all too familiar to Dallas Cowboys fans: Stephen A. Smith's laugh.
On Aug. 25, Cowboy Nation will get to hear it in person. ESPN announced Thursday its signature morning debate show First Take – featuring Stephen A. Smith and host Molly Qerim – will travel to The Star in Frisco for a show prior to the team’s first annual season kickoff event.
Smith and Qerim will be live from the First Take set at The Star and will be joined by Pro Football Hall of Famer and Cowboys legend Michael Irvin and Cowboys owner, president and general manager Jerry Jones.
Cowboys Nation versus Stephen A. ... ring the the bell. Jones thinks Cowboys fans are ready to duke it out with ESPN's marquee debater.
"I’m sure Cowboys Nation is going to smother Stephen A. in some Texas-sized hospitality," Jones said. "We can’t wait to show him how to kick off the 2022 Season … Cowboys style! He will see what The Star is all about. This is going to be about as much fun as he has had in a long, long while."
Doors will open to fans at 7:30 a.m. on Aug. 25. The security gate entrance is located at the south end of the Tostitos Championship Plaza. Here is a full campus map and event details. | 2022-08-11T16:09:30Z | www.wfaa.com | 'First Take' coming to Frisco for live show before Cowboys season | wfaa.com | https://www.wfaa.com/article/sports/nfl/cowboys/first-take-dallas-cowboys-show-the-star-frisco/287-783a07c3-05fc-4522-9e0f-8844f20db277 | https://www.wfaa.com/article/sports/nfl/cowboys/first-take-dallas-cowboys-show-the-star-frisco/287-783a07c3-05fc-4522-9e0f-8844f20db277 |
After an abysmal beginning to camp for the placekickers, the Dallas Cowboys brought back familiar face Brett Maher to add competition to the kicking battle.
Credit: Geoff Burke
A dejected Cowboys kicker Brett Maher after missing a game-tying field goal try in the final seconds against Washington. Credit: Geoff Burke-USA TODAY Sports
DALLAS — The Dallas Cowboys seem to enjoy living dangerously when it comes to building their roster.
Jerry Jones’ squad routinely goes into the offseason with a few glaring holes they address with less than perfect players from the second and third waves of free agency. Then, whichever need isn’t met successfully, capital is spent on improving the team from the scraps once they’ve evaluated the roster at training camp.
Sometimes this strategy comes back to bite Dallas.
A few days at Oxnard for practice and the Cowboys acknowledged that they had a need at linebacker and were fortunate enough to be able to bring in help when they signed LB Anthony Barr. The veteran Barr is a quality player that hadn’t found a home yet and the Cowboys got him on a lesser deal than other teams had offered.
The Cowboys haven’t been so lucky with the kicking position, however. It took less than two weeks into camp for the team to realize they didn’t have a good enough option at placekicker.
With a need that could no longer be ignored, Dallas finally addressed the poor early efforts from rookie undrafted free agent Jonathan Garibay and veteran Lirim Hajrullahu by releasing Garibay and bringing Brett Maher back to join the camp battle.
Confirming the @dallascowboys have signed kicker Brett Maher and waived rookie Jonathan Garibay.
The Cowboys worked out four kickers this morning and Maher was the choice.
Moving forward it’s Lirim Hajrallahu vs Maher in the #Cowboys kicking competition.#CowboysCamp2022
Maher is hardly a Pro Bowl kicker, but the Cowboys had to do something. It’ll be the former CFL standout’s second stint with the team after he surprisingly usurped mainstay Dan Bailey and kicked with the Cowboys for the 2018 and 2019 seasons.
In those two seasons, Maher made just 73.65% of his field goal attempts and missed one extra point. The latter is an improvement over kicker Greg Zuerlein from last season, but the field goal percentage from Maher was one of the worst in the league.
The positive news is that Maher kicked in eight games with the New Orleans Saints last season and saw improved results, making 16 of 18 attempts. Dallas, like the Saints, play half their games indoors, which is helpful for kickers looking to improve their accuracy.
Maher’s biggest positive is his leg strength. The former Nebraska Cornhusker made kicks of 62 and 63 yards when he was with the Cowboys and was 10 for 15 from 50+ yards during his two seasons with the team.
Feeling forced to intervene and sign a kicker just days away from their first preseason game, and as they prepare for an upcoming season, isn’t a good sign for Dallas. The team had all offseason to acquire a proven kicker, but they didn’t and now they’ve been left to scramble to bring back a kicker they replaced two seasons ago.
Maher getting a second stint with the Cowboys isn’t something anyone expected just a few weeks ago. Not a good sign, Maher wasn’t great with the team a few years ago.
With Garibay now released, the Cowboys have a new kicking competition between two unproven veteran kickers. Hajrullahu remains to duel with Maher; the duo will have the rest of training camp and the preseason to see who wins the job.
Dallas is hoping whoever claims the job becomes a consistent and dependable option as games in the NFL are usually close and often decided by a clutch kick.
The Cowboys have put themselves in a tough position, they currently don’t have a kicker they can feel good about as the season approaches. Ultimately, however, they have no one to blame but themselves.
Do you think the Cowboys are in good shape with Brett Maher back in the mix? Share your thoughts with Ben on Twitter @BenGrimaldi.
Dallas Cowboys head coach Mike McCarthy wants to avoid fights at training camp | 2022-08-11T18:55:13Z | www.wfaa.com | Dallas Cowboys bring back Brett Maher to join kicking competition | wfaa.com | https://www.wfaa.com/article/sports/nfl/cowboys/cowboys-attempt-solve-kicking-woes-brett-maher-reunion/287-44603835-436b-4bb4-86e0-8a704332f21c | https://www.wfaa.com/article/sports/nfl/cowboys/cowboys-attempt-solve-kicking-woes-brett-maher-reunion/287-44603835-436b-4bb4-86e0-8a704332f21c |
"We're doing our part, not only for our community, but for society as a whole," said Billy Rogers, who received his first dose of the monkeypox vaccine.
DALLAS — Abounding Prosperity and Hope Health and Wellness Center began distributing monkeypox vaccines to at-risk groups in South Dallas on Thursday, Aug. 11, and plans to continue as long as Dallas County Health can continue sharing its supplies.
"Well we wanted to ensure vaccine equity," said Kirk Myers-Hill with Abounding Prosperity.
The nonprofit serving communities of color and LGBTQ communities in Dallas, received an initial 300 doses of monkeypox vaccine from Dallas County Health.
"And so people need the options to be able to come and receive services where they are most comfortable, and where they already know they can get those resources," Tamara Stephney, COO of Abounding Prosperity said. "Being able to provide these resources to our community is very important for me personally, as well as professionally."
"We think that if any portion of the community is at risk then all the community definitely should be concerned," said Myers-Hill.
Of the 701 monkeypox cases recorded in Texas so far, the state health department also reports 10 are women.
"We're doing our part, not only for our community, but for society as a whole," said Billy Rogers, who received his first dose of the monkeypox vaccine at the drive-up clinic at Hope Health & Wellness Center at 1619 Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard.
"I think as not only an LGBTQ individual but an African American LGBTQ person in the community, it's my responsibility not only to protect myself but to protect others," said Rogers.
"Just because I don't want to even contract it or even like give it out to anyone else," said vaccine recipient Ryan Tatum.
"And by doing that," Rogers added, "by hopefully one day eradicating all these things, ultimately we're doing some good for the world."
Abounding Prosperity expects its initial supply of monkeypox vaccine to last about two weeks, after which they will seek more if demand continues.
Those wishing to receive the vaccine can go to the Abounding Prosperity website for more information and to pre-screen for eligibility. | 2022-08-11T23:46:11Z | www.wfaa.com | Monkeypox vaccines in Dallas: Clinic at Abounding Prosperity | wfaa.com | https://www.wfaa.com/article/news/health/monkeypox/monkeypox-vaccines-in-south-dallas/287-dadec514-7099-484f-801e-5ac4819a7e1d | https://www.wfaa.com/article/news/health/monkeypox/monkeypox-vaccines-in-south-dallas/287-dadec514-7099-484f-801e-5ac4819a7e1d |
Administrators say cellphone use has topped the list of concerns on campus. "It's become very combative."
RICHARDSON, Texas — On Thursday evening, the Richardson ISD board voted to update its outdated cellphone-free policy that was originally written in 2012.
At the same time, the district pressed the back button on other proposed districtwide plans. Every district across the country is having to deal with the distraction that is cellphone use in the classroom.
"It becomes very combative. The phones never really go away," said one teacher.
A pilot program will be installed at Forest Meadow Junior High, where students will receive pouches for their cellphones. The pouches will hold their phones and only teachers and administrators can unlock them for use.
Back in 2019, Duncanville was the first North Texas school to go cellphone-free and use the pouches.
"If it doesn't work, we're OK to say it doesn't work," said the principal of Forest Meadow Junior High.
The parent backlash prompted the district to scale down its plans for the pouch rollout. The district admitted Thursday to receiving hundreds of comments and questions from parents and other stakeholders.
Some parents told WFAA they want their children to have their phones nearby in case of an emergency. Other parents say the pilot program using pouches is too rushed, especially for a school like Forest Meadow, which is currently under heavy construction.
Where there is agreement is that cellphones are a distraction to learning.
Teachers went up to the podium at Thursday's school board meeting to say it created a difficult environment. Cellphones are already prohibited in class, but it forces teachers to constantly police.
"The students will not give you their phones and it's not as simple as 'put them in the box,'" said one teacher.
The pandemic has done enough to distract from learning. But administrators here say cellphones have topped the list of concerns on campus.
If the pilot program at Forest Meadow Junior High is successful, it will be taken under consideration for rollout districtwide. | 2022-08-12T03:57:35Z | www.wfaa.com | Richardson ISD staff says cellphones in class are top concern | wfaa.com | https://www.wfaa.com/article/news/local/richardson-isd-teachers-updated-cellphone-free-policy/287-30ca5f07-b3d5-4b56-ae0d-feb1bbf40684 | https://www.wfaa.com/article/news/local/richardson-isd-teachers-updated-cellphone-free-policy/287-30ca5f07-b3d5-4b56-ae0d-feb1bbf40684 |
Hannah sits down with the director and stars of Netflix's "Day Shift"
Pool cleaners, vampire slayings, and Snoop Dogg in a cowboy hat. Netflix's "day shift" starring Jamie Foxx and Dave Franco is like nothing you've ever seen.
Hannah sat down with the director and stars to talk about the film and why Foxx is so many other actors' favorite leading man.
Dayshift is streaming now on Netflix.com. | 2022-08-12T18:57:33Z | www.wfaa.com | Hannah sits down with the director and stars of Netflix's "Day Shift" | wfaa.com | https://www.wfaa.com/article/entertainment/television/programs/good-morning-texas/hannah-sits-down-with-the-director-and-stars-of-netflixs-day-shift/287-1a685e1a-75b1-4f18-8218-0a702c3a9803 | https://www.wfaa.com/article/entertainment/television/programs/good-morning-texas/hannah-sits-down-with-the-director-and-stars-of-netflixs-day-shift/287-1a685e1a-75b1-4f18-8218-0a702c3a9803 |
FC Dallas will host a number of promotions for its August matches, including "Nonprofit Night Presented by H-E-B."
FRISCO, Texas — FC Dallas finished its July slate strong with back-to-back wins after posting three ties and a loss to NYCFC, with fireworks and drone shows a plenty.
Entering August, the club is returning to Frisco for a homestand following a loss on the road to Seattle and a dramatic 1-1 draw to Portland. FC Dallas will host three of its next four matches, and like the July games, there are a number of promotions for fans to enjoy.
The club announced this week that for every match in August, fans will get a voucher for a free beer or soft drink. They're calling it "$25 tickets and first drink on us" since the tickets start as low as $25.
Each match has its specific promotions, as well. Here is a breakdown:
"Red Out" – FC Dallas vs. San Jose Earthquakes – Aug. 13
This match will serve as the first look at the club's newest addition, USMNT midfielder Sebastian Lletget. This match will also be a "red out" game, where fans are encouraged to wear red FC Dallas apparel. You can shop the FC Dallas fan shop online for everything you need to show you’re #DTID.
Dallas is also supporting DKMS, an organization focused on eliminating blood cancer by encouraging registration to be a bone marrow or stem cell donor. DKMS will be on-site swabbing potential donors and encouraging donor registration. All 2022 primary home jerseys will be on sale at Soccer 90 and the FC Dallas Fan Shop with a portion of the proceeds benefiting DKMS.
3 Points Wednesday – FC Dallas vs. Philadelphia Union – Aug. 17
For "3 Points Wednesday," fans can enjoy $3 beers and $1 hot dogs. FC Dallas hosts powerhouse Philadelphia Union, who sit in the No. 1 spot in the Eastern Conference.
Nonprofit Night Presented by H-E-B – FC Dallas vs. Real Salt Lake – Aug. 27
This match marks the first-ever Nonprofit Night. Throughout the night, FC Dallas will highlight organizations across North Texas who focus on improving our community in a variety of ways.
Guests can enjoy fireworks after the match courtesy of Vogel Alcove, a nonprofit that provides services for children and families experiencing homelessness in Dallas. The FC Dallas Foundation will host a silent auction featuring authentic memorabilia and exclusive experiences through the DASH Auction App. Proceeds from the auction benefit Vogel Alcove, who will attend the match and share information about their organization.
Other nonprofits currently scheduled to attend along with representatives available to provide information about their organization include:
My Possibilities - provides adults with Down Syndrome, Autism and other cognitive disabilities the chance to continue their education.
Special Olympics Texas - helps athletes with intellectual disabilities find the joy in sports.
National Breast Cancer Foundation - provides early detection screenings, including mammograms, breast health education, and a supportive community.
Boys & Girls Clubs of Collin County – enables young people to reach their full potential as productive, caring and responsible citizen.
For a complete list of organizations participating in Nonprofit Night, please visit FCDallas.com/NonprofitNight.
Tickets to watch FC Dallas’ five remaining regular season home matches can be purchased at FCDallasTickets.com. For the latest news and information regarding FC Dallas theme nights and promotional giveaways, please visit FCDallas.com/Events. | 2022-08-12T18:58:22Z | www.wfaa.com | FC Dallas announces August match promotions | wfaa.com | https://www.wfaa.com/article/sports/soccer/fc-dallas-tickets-august-promotions/287-f5415c42-8251-4cd6-9b78-6be89586841b | https://www.wfaa.com/article/sports/soccer/fc-dallas-tickets-august-promotions/287-f5415c42-8251-4cd6-9b78-6be89586841b |
Districts are offering a variety of incentives to fill open positions.
GARLAND, Texas — Several North Texas area schools are experiencing delays and reroutes as districts across the country grapple with a driver shortage.
Garland ISD has an entire Twitter page devoted to updating parents and families on late buses. Friday morning, it posted more than 40 times bout reroutes or delays.
Still, Garland mom Christine Miller told WFAA her child's bus has had delays that she hasn't seen posted online.
Miller drives her son to school because of the shortage but said she let the bus take him back home earlier in the week.
"6:15 is what time he made it to the bus stop," she told WFAA.
Another Garland mom, Ashley Martinez, said the late buses have made it challenging for her autistic son to keep with his routine.
"On the second day of school, my son wasn't picked up until 9 a.m.," Martinez said. "And then wasn't dropped off until after 5 p.m."
Garland ISD did not respond to requests for an interview, but Irving ISD Transportation Director Alejandro Mejia said in a zoom interview his district is doing everything possible ahead of Monday's start of school to keep up with the shortage.
Right now, 30% of Irving bus driver positions are open. The job pays $22.70 an hour.
It's possible your child's pick-up time will change, Mejia said, but added they still should get to school on time, as long as traffic cooperates.
"In the morning is not as dire because we can start routes earlier," he said.
After school, though, Mejia said your child should be prepared to wait up to an hour. If you can pick your child up, you should.
"If you can't, we understand no worries, we're trying all our best to make it happen. Again, we're not denying anyone transportation, we're doing what we can, except it might be a little late."
Mejia said his department is offering $1,000 bonuses for district employees who refer drivers and up to $750 worth of sign-on incentives. They've also taken up radio and digital ads to try to entice drivers. | 2022-08-12T22:43:35Z | www.wfaa.com | North Texas schools are grappling with a bus driver shortage | wfaa.com | https://www.wfaa.com/article/news/education/schools/north-texas-schools-are-grappling-with-a-bus-driver-shortage/287-1dffcb85-6e25-4a85-aae8-851f1d5ad1a8 | https://www.wfaa.com/article/news/education/schools/north-texas-schools-are-grappling-with-a-bus-driver-shortage/287-1dffcb85-6e25-4a85-aae8-851f1d5ad1a8 |
Zalatoris moves into the top 10 in the world for the first time and takes the No. 1 spot in the FedEx Cup.
Author: WFAA Sports, DOUG FERGUSON (AP Golf Writer)
Zalatoris grew up playing golf in the North Texas area. He moved to Plano as a kid and played junior golf with other pros like Masters champion Scottie Scheffler.
Zalatoris starred at Trinity Christian Academy and won the U.S. Junior Amateur Championship in 2014.
Meanwhile, No. 1 in the world stays with Scheffler, who missed the cut and spent Sunday playing Pine Valley for the first time.
Thomas wins 2nd PGA title in playoff after 7-shot rally
Full circle: Dallas natives Scheffler, Spieth and Zalatoris reunite in featured golf at AT&T Byron Nelson
Kids from the Momentous Institute spend a day with tour pros and their wives at the AT&T Byron Nelson | 2022-08-15T00:33:11Z | www.wfaa.com | North Texas golfer Will Zalatoris gets 1st PGA Tour win | wfaa.com | https://www.wfaa.com/article/sports/golf/plano-will-zalatoris-1st-pga-tour-win-playoff-memphis/287-a1827811-46b7-43a9-9efb-f754b4c8abf5 | https://www.wfaa.com/article/sports/golf/plano-will-zalatoris-1st-pga-tour-win-playoff-memphis/287-a1827811-46b7-43a9-9efb-f754b4c8abf5 |
The airport’s composting program started small in 2021. But it has “exponentially” grown in 2022.
Turn hauls away compostable food scraps from Lorena Garcia's kitchen.
FORT WORTH, Texas — Every passenger at DFW Airport generates, on average, one pound of trash.
The airport calculated its terminals have annually added about 32,000 tons of solid waste to North Texas landfills.
About a quarter of that waste used to be organic -- things like food scraps that are not really trash.
The airport launched a small pilot program in one terminal A restaurant in 2021.
RELATED: DFW Airport contributed more than 32,000 tons of waste to landfills every year. Now it's turning passengers’ food into fertilizer to help bring change
Turn, a Dallas-based composting company, trained the kitchen and wait staff at Lorena Garcia’s Tapas Y Cocina to put real trash into a regular trash can, but separate their food waste by scraping all of it into a green bucket.
That’s all the restaurant staff had to do.
Turn employees did all the rest – picking up the buckets daily, emptying them, transporting them to a facility, composting the contents and turning it into fertilizer for local landfills.
Once other kitchens in other restaurants saw how easy it was, the DFW Airport program took off.
“We’ve grown exponentially,” said Lisa Roark, Turn program manager. “We are now in 25 different restaurants in three terminals and we are acquiring more every day.”
DFW Airport says more than 100 tons of trash have been diverted from local landfills.
“I wish people could understand how big of a difference that is,” said Turn’s Carrie Bolton.
The North Central Texas Council of Governments says 10.8 million tons of waste went to local landfills in 2019.
Out of 24 regions in Texas, North Texas sent the most trash to landfills.
RELATED: No, recycling symbols on plastics do not mean an item can always be recycled
If that rate continues, NCTCOG estimates that local landfills will be full in 35 years.
“We can no longer be a society that takes. We’ve got to be a society that puts things back into the cycle again,” Roark said.
She admits that she wasn’t sure the composting program would catch on at the airport
“As a chef and as someone who speaks chef, I know how chefs are sometimes just in the mood for speed. We are not in the mood for composting and recycling and doing all that different stuff,” she said.
“But I couldn’t be more wrong. They were all about it.”
It’s a simple process that’s easy to get used to, Bolton said.
Restaurant staff members just have to remember to scrape their scraps – even meat, dairy, oil – into the green receptacles Turn puts in their kitchens.
The program has grown faster than the airport anticipated, according to Ken Buchanan, executive vice president of revenue management and customer experience at DFW Airport.
“We have a zero-waste goal by 2030,” Buchanan said, “and there’s no way we can achieve that goal without this element of it.”
DFW was the first airport in North America and the largest in the world to achieve carbon neutrality.
In 2020, the airport received a United Nations Global Climate Action Award for its renewable natural gas efforts and all of the airport’s electricity comes from wind.
Any new restaurant or concession that opens at the airport must commit to taking part in the composting program.
“Airports are huge footprints,” Buchanan admitted. “We want to do our part to preserve the planet.”
RELATED: VERIFY: How realistic is zero waste?
Roark said there’s a cost saving to composting that many chefs appreciate.
She offers these general tips about cutting down on food waste at home:
Don’t overbuy fruits and vegetables.
Make a list and stick to it.
Use the entire ingredient. For example, there’s no reason to peel a carrot, Roark says. Just wash it.
Finally, she suggests taking environmentally friendly practices one step further by not putting produce in the thin plastic bags supermarkets offer.
“Bananas are happy on their own,” she said.
DFW’s composting program should be operational in all five terminals by the end of the 2022. | 2022-08-15T03:09:11Z | www.wfaa.com | DFW Airport composting has kept tons of waste out of landfills | wfaa.com | https://www.wfaa.com/article/news/local/dfw-airport-composting-kept-100-tons-of-waste-out-of-local-landfills/287-3253a4de-9ec0-4533-b10c-bcfa495e9d89 | https://www.wfaa.com/article/news/local/dfw-airport-composting-kept-100-tons-of-waste-out-of-local-landfills/287-3253a4de-9ec0-4533-b10c-bcfa495e9d89 |
Brewing up second chances – BeKinder Coffee
After a successful 30-year career in IT, this Grapevine resident knew it was time to make a bigger impact in the world.
That's when BeKinder Coffee was born – A non-profit whose mission is to not only promote a compassionate community for refugees, but to help provide second chances for these families, one cup of coffee at a time.
For more information, go to BeKinderCoffeeUS.org. | 2022-08-15T17:57:43Z | www.wfaa.com | Brewing up second chances – BeKinder Coffee | wfaa.com | https://www.wfaa.com/article/entertainment/television/programs/good-morning-texas/brewing-up-second-chances-bekinder-coffee/287-8b1c8957-d510-4ff0-b534-397e6c84ae4d | https://www.wfaa.com/article/entertainment/television/programs/good-morning-texas/brewing-up-second-chances-bekinder-coffee/287-8b1c8957-d510-4ff0-b534-397e6c84ae4d |
Denton ISD said its finding substitutes for certain food, like turkey chili and cheese sauce.
DENTON, Texas — Inflation and supply chain and labor shortages are impacting school lunches at Denton ISD.
"Its probably something nationwide, not just Texas, or North Texas," said Liz Raftery, director of child nutrition for Denton ISD.
Raftery told WFAA food distributors and manufacturers are feeling the pinch.
"The increased fuel prices, limited delivery drivers, limited parts to repair trucks that aren't functioning, chemicals that go into packaging, it all plays a role," she said.
It doesn't help that lots of districts are after the safe food, she said. Her team's had to get creative.
The district's main bread distributer, for example, stopped delivering from Houston to Denton.
Her team had to find a local vendor.
The district can't get the turkey chili or cheese sauce for its famous nachos. Her team had to find substitutes.
"We're using a chicken taco meat and shredded cheese," Raftery said.
And those substitutes have to be specific, because the district has to meet nutrition standards set by the government.
"We will always have something to feed the kids, it might not be what's menu itemed that day," she said.
Instead of offering the typical 15-16 entrees for high school students, they've cut down to 10-12.
Raftrey said her team survived the entire pandemic without missing its marks for nutrition standards, and they expect to keep that trend up -- no matter the odds.
"Adapt and adjust," she said. | 2022-08-16T00:16:41Z | www.wfaa.com | Inflation, supply chain issues affecting Texas school lunches | wfaa.com | https://www.wfaa.com/article/news/education/schools/how-inflation-supply-chain-woes-impacting-school-lunches-texas/287-08674f3f-490b-4d0c-b69a-bb391af25b30 | https://www.wfaa.com/article/news/education/schools/how-inflation-supply-chain-woes-impacting-school-lunches-texas/287-08674f3f-490b-4d0c-b69a-bb391af25b30 |
The FBI raid at former President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago home has sparked a nationwide warning of violence.
FORT WORTH, Texas — Federal authorities are warning law enforcement officials and the public about the possibility of domestic terrorist acts across the United States.
It all stems from the federal investigation focusing on a residence of former President Donald Trump.
"I applaud them for putting out the bulletin," Daryl Johnson said.
Johnson is a domestic terrorism expert trained on radical hate groups he suspects will retaliate after a search warrant at the private resort home of Trump.
"This recent search down in Florida has definitely served as a catalyst to inspire people to conduct violent attacks," said Johnson.
A source confirmed to WFAA that the Department of Homeland Security and FBI officials warned of increased threats after the Mar-A-Lago search.
Last week, the FBI said a gunman died in a standoff after trying to enter the FBI's Cincinnati office.
WFAA confirmed security has been beefed up at the FBI and other federal offices in both Dallas and Fort Worth.
A statement from the FBI Dallas office includes concerns about violence and threats of violence to law enforcement, including FBI agents. They describe the threats as reprehensible and dangerous and urge if you see anything suspicious, report it immediately.
The bulletin makes mention of threats which involve placing dirty bombs at FBI headquarters and calls for civil war and armed rebellion.
Johnson explained why Texas could also be a target area.
"Law enforcement personnel in red states need to take this warning seriously because they have more people that subscribe to these antigovernment and racist hateful beliefs," said Johnson.
The former government employee wrote a book on political extremism called "Hateland." He now does consulting to agencies and corporations across the country.
Johnson considers safety everyone's job.
"We all have a role to fight domestic terrorism," Johnson said. | 2022-08-16T00:16:47Z | www.wfaa.com | FBI, Homeland Security warned about increase in threats toward law enforcement | wfaa.com | https://www.wfaa.com/article/news/local/fbi-homeland-security-warned-increase-threats-federal-authorities/287-bf65e942-7a66-4af5-b9ba-32241e51cfd8 | https://www.wfaa.com/article/news/local/fbi-homeland-security-warned-increase-threats-federal-authorities/287-bf65e942-7a66-4af5-b9ba-32241e51cfd8 |
The Cowboys duo took to the field to face off against Real Housewives stars.
DALLAS — If there are two things people need more of, it's football and Housewives.
DirecTV's latest ad campaign is featuring some familiar faces to get customers ready for football season.
Dallas Cowboys quarterback Dak Prescott and receiver CeeDee Lamb star in the new commercial alongside stars of the Real Housewives franchise: Teresa Giudice, Kyle Richards and Kenya Moore.
The commercial starts with a couple sitting in their home and watching TV while switching between football and a Real Housewives episode. And in a flash of light reminiscent of the Multiverse, the Housewives enter the football game with Prescott and Lamb.
Watch the commercial here:
The ad features tackles, stiff arms, celebrations and, of course, a table being flipped.
Noticeably, Prescott and Lamb aren't wearing Cowboys uniforms, but rather generic navy blue and white gear. It was all sparkles and pizzazz for the Housewives.
Prescott told People magazine he enjoyed shooting the commercial at SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles and meeting the reality TV stars. He also chose Kenya Moore as the Housewife most likely to have success on the football field.
The Cowboys open their 2022 regular season against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers on Sunday, Sept. 11.
Dallas Cowboys WR CeeDee Lamb Dominates Broncos Joint Practice | 2022-08-16T03:59:07Z | www.wfaa.com | Dak Prescott, CeeDee Lamb star in new ad with Real Housewives | wfaa.com | https://www.wfaa.com/article/sports/nfl/cowboys/new-directv-commercial-dak-prescott-ceedee-lamb-real-housewives/287-3609c384-4fda-4a86-b567-c9d88b832527 | https://www.wfaa.com/article/sports/nfl/cowboys/new-directv-commercial-dak-prescott-ceedee-lamb-real-housewives/287-3609c384-4fda-4a86-b567-c9d88b832527 |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.