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Sunak’s Tax Helps Consumers But Misses the Energy Mark
The UK government’s 25% windfall tax on oil and gas company profits, along with the accompanying investment allowance that will let them avoid most of it, will do little to address the country’s pressing energy needs.
Speaking in parliament on Thursday, Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak, didn’t dare utter the words “windfall tax” — something the opposition parties had been urging him to impose for months — referring to it instead as a special levy. It amounts to the same thing. The tax will remain in place until oil and gas prices return to “historically more normal levels,” although he gave no hint as to what those levels might be.
The grants to households that accompany the tax are undoubtedly welcome, and much needed by people facing another hefty increase in their fuel bills later this year.
To soften the blow for companies, he also announced an investment allowance that will permit them to offset 80% of the tax through new investment in the North Sea. But that won’t help future-proof the UK energy system.
Investment in new energy supplies typically have long lead-times. It doesn’t matter whether it’s North Sea oil and gas fields, micro nuclear power plants, or wind farms. We’re talking years, not months, before an investment idea translates into significant new supplies.
There are two things the country needs desperately ahead of more oil and gas production.
1. Storage capacity for natural gas
The UK has nowhere to store natural gas in the summer months to help meet peak winter demand. With gas a common fuel for home heating, demand is highly seasonal. Winter use is typically more than twice as high as during the summer.
Until five years ago, the UK stored gas for winter use in a depleted field in the North Sea, called Rough. Withdrawals from storage met about 10% of the UK’s gas demand in the winter of 2014 to 2015, with Rough accounting for about 70% of that.
But that facility was closed in 2017, when its owner, Centrica Plc, decided it was too expensive to repair technical faults that had plagued the site after more than three decades of operation. The decision was good for Centrica, less so for UK energy security.
The government at the time was unconcerned about the loss of the country’s only major storage site. The UK’s Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy saw no risk to the nation’s energy security amid rising production of liquified natural gas (LNG) in the US and Australia, among other increases in supply. That complacency now looks misplaced.
Successive governments since then have been unwilling to provide incentives for a replacement, leaving the UK exposed to the whims of spot prices. That’s fine when supplies are abundant, but not when they’re severely constrained, as they were last winter and may well be in the coming one.
In the past few weeks, the UK has agreed to import so much LNG that it has more than it can use — and nowhere to store it when it’s delivered. The UK’s gas price is now a third lower than continental Europe’s, as the market adjusts to the over-supply. Were Rough still open, or replaced with a new facility, the excess supply could be stored until it’s needed, as it is across Europe. Without it, next winter’s gas crisis will be partially self-inflicted.
2. Urgent action on energy efficiency
The support for new oil and gas investment also undermines the COP26 climate agreement reached in Glasgow just six months ago. The gathering, hosted by the UK, called on countries for the “phaseout of inefficient fossil fuel subsidies.”
Tackling energy waste through upgrading a poorly insulated building stock would do more to help households cut fuel bills than investing in more North Sea oil and gas. The impact would start to be felt much sooner and would last for much longer. Improved insulation and more efficient boilers, (or heat pumps once fuel taxes are revised to penalize carbon-heavy natural gas more than electricity that is increasingly carbon-free) would cut bills and reduce gas use for decades.
Meanwhile, oil and gas discoveries in the UK North Sea are getting smaller and the production from them is lasting for correspondingly shorter periods. Any benefit to security of supply will be fleeting.
The government could have set up an energy efficiency fund, with tax offsets for payments into it by the oil and gas industry, to provide grants and subsidies for building improvements. That would have been a far more beneficial approach than breaking the promises made just six months ago at COP 26.
• Russia Needs Cash More Than Europe Needs Its Gas: David Fickling
• Sunak’s Helicopter Drop Makes BOE’s Life Easier: Marcus Ashworth | 2022-05-29T07:19:47Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Sunak’s Tax Helps Consumers But Misses the Energy Mark - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/sunaks-tax-helps-consumers-but-misses-the-energy-mark/2022/05/29/63afc152-df15-11ec-bc35-a91d0a94923b_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/sunaks-tax-helps-consumers-but-misses-the-energy-mark/2022/05/29/63afc152-df15-11ec-bc35-a91d0a94923b_story.html |
“When a stranger resides with you in your land, do not molest him,” a credible authority tells the Israelites in Leviticus. “You shall treat the stranger who resides with you no differently than the natives born among you; for you too were once strangers in the land of Egypt.”
The tension God was referring to is timeless. We all may one day need to flee from injustice, tyranny, violence, hunger or other calamities. And then we’ll need help. In turn, even if we’re lucky enough (for now) to live in stability, we should offer asylum to those fleeing to us. And yet we often don’t.
For the first time ever, more than 100 million people worldwide have been “forcibly displaced,” in the jargon of the UNHCR, the refugee agency of the United Nations. Millions of Ukrainian women and children have fled from Russia’s war of aggression in just the past three months. Millions more — often less conspicuous in the Western media — have run from violence in places like Ethiopia, Burkina Faso, Myanmar, Afghanistan or the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Both the numbers and the suffering are about to get worse. Also owing to the Russian attack on Ukraine — a “bread basket” that now can’t export its wheat and other staples — a global food crisis is imminent. Most people in Western countries will feel it as a painful rise in prices. But those who are already hungry — in Africa, the Middle East and elsewhere — will face starvation.
Margaritis Schinas, the European Union’s commissioner in charge of migration, told Bloomberg that he’s expecting another refugee crisis. In this one, people will be coming in dinghies across the Mediterranean, rather than on trains through Ukraine and Poland. It’ll be “more messy,” Schinas reckons. As if all those other crises hadn’t been messy enough.
I’ve never been a refugee, but as a journalist, I’ve occasionally witnessed the human toll of migration. I picked grapes in California’s Central Valley with undocumented farm workers from south of the border to hear their stories. They’re the heirs to the “Okies” who once fled America’s Dust Bowl, as described so hauntingly by John Steinbeck in “The Grapes of Wrath.” Except that they’re not only desperate and poor but also alien and unwelcome.
In 2015-16, I covered Europe’s refugee crisis. The migrants at that time were largely Syrians fleeing from their own murderous tyrant. I remember the range of reactions in Europe as they arrived.
This spread between hospitality (xenia in ancient Greek), xenophobia (literally, fear of strangers) and all the nuances in between has greeted aliens everywhere and at all times. It’s what God was talking about in Leviticus.
In my experience, the “xenophobes” are sometimes racist or callous but more often just anxious. In Germany in 2015, for example, the backlash against migrants was worst in what used to be the communist East, which has also become the bastion of the populist far right. In a meme I heard often, these Easterners felt that German reunification had turned them into second-class citizens in their own country.
Now they were watching exotic-looking foreigners arriving by the busload and — as they chose to interpret the situation — “skipping the line.” The aliens, in this narrative, were threatening to demote the Eastern Germans to third-class citizenship, and depriving them of nebulous rights — perhaps welfare, attention or compassion — that should belong only to the native-born.
Part of human nature is to distinguish between in-groups and out-groups, and to show the ins more empathy than the outs. Even Benjamin Franklin, ordinarily an open-minded type, looked askance at German and other non-English immigrants, whom he considered “swarthy” and suspect.
That might explain the about-turn in Polish policies and attitudes between the 2015 crisis and this year’s. Back then, the refugees were dark-skinned Muslims, and Warsaw slammed its borders shut. Now they’re fellow Christians and Slavs, and Poland has warmly welcomed more than half of the 6.7 million Ukrainians who’ve fled abroad.
All these stories exist, and all are equally worth hearing. Then again, the exact same range of biographies exists for the native-born as for migrants. Ultimately, they’re just a reminder that we’re all — aliens and natives alike — human, as Leviticus understood.
All of us, since our common ancestors trudged out of the East African rift valley, descend from migrants. If we go back far enough, we all have refugees among our forebears. And all of us, if we’re not already displaced, can be sure to have descendants who will flee from something. We all were, are or will be natives and aliens somewhere, at some time.
There are no easy answers. Speaking for most Germans in 2015, the country’s president at the time, Joachim Gauck, expressed the dilemma well: “We want to help. We are big-hearted. But our means are finite.” It’ll be important to keep both parts of that sentiment in mind — the magnanimity and the limits. But when in doubt, we should heed Leviticus, and keep our hearts big. | 2022-05-29T07:19:53Z | www.washingtonpost.com | With 100 Million Refugees, the Migrant Crisis Has Barely Begun - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/with-100-million-refugees-the-migrantcrisis-hasbarely-begun/2022/05/29/c2cf2ec2-df1d-11ec-bc35-a91d0a94923b_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/with-100-million-refugees-the-migrantcrisis-hasbarely-begun/2022/05/29/c2cf2ec2-df1d-11ec-bc35-a91d0a94923b_story.html |
When I was operations officer on an Aegis guided-missile destroyer in the late 1980s, we were given a mission in the Arabian Gulf. The Iranians, amid the so-called Tanker War with Iraq, were trying to close off the vital Strait of Hormuz.
Ukraine supplies a significant portion of the world’s wheat (roughly 7% of global exports), sunflower oil and other critical agricultural products. Russia’s actions are not only illegal under international law but may well cause famine in the Middle East and North Africa — already unstable hotspots.
James Stavridis is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A retired U.S. Navy admiral, former supreme allied commander of NATO, and dean emeritus of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, he is vice chairman of global affairs at the Carlyle Group. | 2022-05-29T08:51:10Z | www.washingtonpost.com | How to Break Russia’s Blockade of Ukraine’s Black Sea Ports - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/how-to-break-russias-blockade-of-ukraines-black-sea-ports/2022/05/29/2cd240c2-df26-11ec-bc35-a91d0a94923b_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/how-to-break-russias-blockade-of-ukraines-black-sea-ports/2022/05/29/2cd240c2-df26-11ec-bc35-a91d0a94923b_story.html |
Analysis by Max Hastings | Bloomberg
“Russia,” predicted a British statesman, “will certainly rise again, perhaps very swiftly, as a great united empire determined to maintain the integrity of her dominions and to recover everything that has been taken away from her. While this process is going on Europe will be in a perpetual state of ferment.”
Those warning words were written not in the wake of the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, but in February 1919, by Winston Churchill, after the Russian Revolution and end of World War I.
When the Bolsheviks signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Germany in 1918, enabling their precarious regime to escape from the war, there were 30,000 Allied troops in the country, half British and others American, Canadian and French. They had originally been sent to guard stores shipped to aid Tsarist Russia’s war effort and to conduct training.
Churchill, then Britain’s secretary for war, wanted these men, plus 70,000 Czech troops bizarrely stranded in Siberia, to turn their efforts to aiding anti-Bolshevik Russian forces.
After World War I ended in the West on Nov. 11, he told Prime Minister David Lloyd George that his chosen policy, had the premier not vetoed it, would have been “peace with the German people, war on the Bolshevik tyranny.”
Churchill said the choices were either to allow the Russians “to murder each other without let or hindrance” or for the Allies to intervene “thoroughly, with large forces, abundantly supplied with mechanical contrivances.”
Churchill’s became the most powerful Western voice supporting the so-called White Russian cause in the nation’s civil war, which cost up to six million lives between 1917 and 1921. That fragment of history assumes a new relevance and indeed fascination today, as the West once more strives to thwart the ambitions of a brutal master of the Kremlin; as the world once more stands amazed by the incompetence and cruelty being displayed by a Russian army.
In most societies, leaders aspire to rule by securing respect. Russia, however, has always exalted fear. A British officer posted to St. Petersburg just before World War I was quizzed by a tsarist counterpart about the customs of his service. The Russian was shocked to be told that the British, while off duty, abandoned their uniforms and even their swords in favor of civilian clothes. “But people will not be afraid of you!” he exclaimed.
The writer Ivan Mazhivin, who had been a friend of Tolstoy’s, wrote about Russians’ behavior to each other in the Civil War.
On both sides bitterness has reached an extreme, inhuman scale. The Reds, once they have taken a [village], plunder everything they can, rape women regardless of their age … The Cossacks … whip Reds to death with metal ramrods, bury them in the ground up to their necks and then cut off the heads with their sabres, or castrate them and hang them in trees in their dozens.
Those stories are among a mass of chilling contemporary testimony in a new history of the 1917-21 Russian experience, written by British historian Antony Beevor, who is winning plaudits around the world. The catalogue of muddle, massacre, treachery and suffering in “Russia: Revolution and Civil War, 1917-1921” highlights realities about Russia that have been manifested through the ages.
While Churchill’s 1919 denunciation of what he called “the foul baboonery of Bolshevism” was intemperate, it was not unjust, given the record established by Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin and their cohorts. Yet his efforts to launch an anti-Bolshevik crusade seemed futile to many of his contemporaries, including US President Woodrow Wilson and Lloyd George.
Churchill’s posturing appears no more convincing to Beevor, who chronicles the futility of Allied forces against the “Bolos,” as American and British troops dubbed the Bolsheviks. Again and again, Western units scored local battlefield successes, only to find them nullified by the limitations of their White Russian allies.
It is extraordinarily difficult for foreigners to influence the fate of a nation as vast and culturally remote from us as is Russia. The chaos of that place, and those times, was almost indescribable.
By January 1919, the area of central Russia under Bolshevik control remained small, amid the vastness of the old empire. Siberia and Turkestan were dominated by the White Russians, their forces directed by their “supreme ruler,” Admiral Alexander Kolchak, from his capital in Omsk in southwestern Siberia. His regime was recognized by Britain and some other powers as the legitimate government of Russia.
A tsarist general, Anton Denikin, led a Cossack army in Caucasia and Crimea. A British-led force pushed south from Murmansk on the Arctic Ocean, with wild ambitions to link up with Kolchak. Ukrainians, Finns and Poles were in arms in the west. French troops occupied the Ukrainian coast. British forces, which had moved north from Persia and Greece, held the Baku-Batum railway in the Caucasus.
The result was widespread confusion. On July 4, 1919, a senior naval officer addressed the British Cabinet. The admiralty and the naval officers on the spot, he said, “were really in ignorance as to the exact position: were we, or were we not, at war with the Bolsheviks?”
Lloyd George responded that Britain was indeed in a state of hostility against Lenin and his followers, but “we had decided not to make war … we did not intend to put great armies into Russia.”
Unfortunately for the ever-bellicose Churchill, almost everybody else among the Western allies was sick to death of fighting after four years of slaughter. Above all, working men, conscripted to fight the Germans, were unwilling now to take up arms against Russian revolutionaries, with whom many sympathized.
In February 1919, Churchill circulated a note to all British military commanders, asking if their men would be willing to serve abroad. Yes, answered the generals — except against the Bolsheviks.
On July 7, there was a brief mutiny among British troops in northern Russia, in which three officers were killed and two wounded. There were similar disturbances on some warships of the Royal Navy in the Baltic.
Britain’s admirals nonetheless contrived to sustain through the summer of 1919 an energetic little naval campaign, in which ships were sunk on both sides, and three British officers were awarded Victoria Crosses for actions against the Bolshevik naval base at Kronstadt, near St. Petersburg.
Meanwhile, if the two rival Russian armies fought most of their battles with indifferent skill, each successively outbid the other in an auction of atrocities. White Russian general Mikhail Alekseyev wrote to his wife: “A civil war is always a cruel thing, especially so with a nation like ours.”
The belligerents shared a custom of forcing prisoners, before they were killed, to dig their own graves and remove their boots for the convenience of future users. Many men were savagely punished for shooting themselves in the fingers to escape further fighting. These quitters refined the technique for self-mutilation by firing through a loaf of bread, so that powder burns would not infect the wounds.
Naval officers of the British flotilla in the Caspian Sea became so inured to White executions that they joined in the jokes. They heard the leader of one firing party complain that the five spades he had been issued were insufficient for all the grave digging. The local White functionary, one Funtikov, was known thereafter to the British sailors as “five of spades.”
On the other side, the Bolshevik secret police, the Cheka, called themselves “the Sword and Flame of the Revolution,” idealizing ruthlessness, romanticizing cruelty. Felix Dzerzhinsky, their Robespierrian chief, issued his men black leather flying jackets that had been sent to Russia by the British to clothe the fledgling tsarist air force. The jackets were especially popular with these merciless killers because leather resisted the typhus-carrying lice that had become ubiquitous.
The writer Viktor Shklovsky compared the Bolsheviks to the Devil’s Apprentice, who in an old Russian folk tale boasted that he knew how to rejuvenate an old man. To restore his youth, he first needed to burn him up. The apprentice duly set the old man on fire, then was crestfallen to discover that he had no notion of how to revive him.
Ruined Britain was spending tens of millions to support the Whites. In March 1919, the decision was made to withdraw its forces from northern Russia — the Americans were already gone. Churchill lamented in July, “the whole episode was a very painful one … we were leaving a small government to fall to pieces … at the mercy of the Bolsheviks.” In October, the last British troops were withdrawn from Archangel.
Field Marshal Henry Wilson, one of Churchill’s few senior supporters who had initially favored backing the White Russians, wrote: “In no Allied country has there been a sufficient weight of public opinion to justify armed intervention against the Bolsheviks on a decisive scale.”
Once the foreign powers quit the struggle, it was only a matter of time before the revolutionaries hacked a path, mile by bloody mile, to secure control of their entire country. None of the armies engaged displayed much military genius, but the forces of Admiral Kolchak and General Denikin were quite unfit to govern.
Beevor writes: “All too often the Whites represented the worst examples of humanity” in their corruption, incompetence, hatreds and suspicions: “For ruthless inhumanity, however, the Bolsheviks were unbeatable.”
The Reds were led by men of impassioned ideological conviction, while the White leaders could offer no matching ideal. There was little about the tsarist regime that seemed worth fighting and dying to revive.
What are the messages for today from this ancient horror story? Scarcely anybody in the outside world sees Russian aggression against Ukraine as part of a civil war, but that is Russian President Vladimir Putin’s narrative.
He views Ukraine as much a rightful part of the Russian Federation as were Siberia or Turkestan in 1919. Thus he describes his onslaught there as a mere “special military operation.”
Putin sees the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s support for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy as no more legitimate than was Western aid to the anti-Bolsheviks. Unfortunately for the Kremlin, modern Ukraine is an incomparably more disciplined and coherent society than White Russia a century ago.
While no nation has clean hands in its wars — think Britain in its colonies, the US in Vietnam, France almost everywhere — Russia’s record of barbarism has been matched, but never surpassed. That cruelty and sadism remain institutionalized in Putin’s army.
Russia is such a vast fact that it is hard for other nations to influence its destinies. The Cold War experience showed that it can be contained; internal forces periodically cause it to change its ways. But Churchill, as most of his contemporaries agreed, was extraordinarily foolish amid the world’s moral and physical exhaustion after World War I to make himself the nemesis of Bolshevism.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson today has pretensions to a Churchillian role in this conflict. He even enlists some of the old lion’s rhetoric, speaking of “Ukraine’s finest hour.” Ukrainian courage and the might of the US, with modest British aid, may indeed enable Zelenskiy’s people to save most of their country from aggression.
Sad to say, however, there is no more prospect that the Western allies can contrive an absolute “victory” over Russia than there was century ago that they could achieve an anti-Bolshevik counterrevolution.
• Russia’s Beauty and Brutality Remain an Enigma to the West: Max Hastings | 2022-05-29T08:51:16Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Putin’s Ukraine War Is a Replay of Russia’s Atrocities of 1919 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/putins-ukraine-waris-a-replay-of-russias-atrocities-of-1919/2022/05/29/2d425416-df26-11ec-bc35-a91d0a94923b_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/putins-ukraine-waris-a-replay-of-russias-atrocities-of-1919/2022/05/29/2d425416-df26-11ec-bc35-a91d0a94923b_story.html |
U.N. human rights chief disappoints Uyghur advocates on visit to China
Michelle Bachelet, the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, attends a virtual meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Guangzhou on May 25. (AFP/Getty Images)
SHENZHEN, China — U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet ended a long-awaited trip to China with cautious criticism of the country’s crackdown in the Xinjiang region, balanced with praise for Chinese authorities, in what rights advocates called a propaganda win for Beijing.
In a news conference in Beijing on Saturday, Bachelet reiterated that her trip was “not an investigation.” She said she was unable to determine the scale of a Xinjiang reeducation and incarceration program directed at ethnic Uyghurs, saying high-profile official visits were not conducive to “discreet work of an investigative nature.”
Beijing has repeatedly denied accusations of committing cultural genocide against Muslim Uyghur residents in Xinjiang, where up to an estimated 2 million residents have been incarcerated, according to rights researchers.
Trove of damning Xinjiang police files leaked as U.N. rights chief visits China
“The High Commissioner’s remarks were too nonspecific and weak to match the gravity of the situation,” William Nee, advocacy coordinator at Chinese Human Rights Defenders, a D.C.-based nongovernmental organization, said on Twitter. “To a large extent, this is the sort of white washing that the human rights community was afraid would happen when the news of her visit was announced.”
Secretary of State Antony Blinken raised concerns on Saturday about China’s “efforts to restrict and manipulate her visit,” and he said Bachelet was unable to access individuals who were part of labor transfer programs from Xinjiang to other parts of the country.
“We are further troubled by reports that residents of Xinjiang were warned not to complain or speak openly about conditions in the region, that no insight was provided into the whereabouts of hundreds of missing Uyghurs,” Blinken said in a statement.
Julian Ku, a law professor at Hofstra University in New York, said Bachelet’s cautious remarks reflect the limited influence the United Nations has over China, with Bachelet trying to use praise to encourage Beijing to make some changes.
“If the U.N. came out and started attacking China, it would be unlikely to make China do anything. At least that’s their perspective,” he said.
Bachelet and Beijing agreed to start an annual senior strategic meeting and set up working groups to discuss human rights and minority rights issues. Ku said these kinds of dialogues have had limited results in influencing China’s policies in past years.
Chinese officials touted her trip as a success. China’s Foreign Ministry released a readout of Vice Foreign Minister Ma Zhaoxu’s media briefing on Saturday, in which he said Bachelet had gotten to see the “real Xinjiang.”
“Certain Western countries, out of ulterior motives, went to great lengths to disrupt and undercut the High Commissioner’s visit, their plot didn’t succeed,” the ministry’s readout said.
On the second day of her mission to China to look into human rights violations in Xinjiang, Bachelet posed for photos with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, who gave her a book by the nation’s leader, “Excerpts from Xi Jinping on Respecting and Protecting Human Rights,” and said he hoped the trip would “help enhance understanding … and clarify misinformation.”
Bachelet spoke with Chinese President Xi Jinping by video conference on Wednesday, stating afterward that it was an opportunity to “discuss directly human rights issues and concerns in China and the world.”
Beijing has previously said that such a trip would not constitute an investigation into rights abuse claims, which it calls “the lie of the century.”
Ku said that part of the disappointment among rights activists came from heightened expectations that after years of negotiating the trip, Bachelet would have gotten more access.
“If she’d gone five years ago, people would not be as upset,” he said.
Lily Kuo in Taipei and Cate Cadell in Washington contributed to this report. | 2022-05-29T08:51:34Z | www.washingtonpost.com | U.N. rights chief Michelle Bachelet ends China visit with cautious Xinjiang criticism - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/05/29/china-bachelet-un-xinjiang-rights-visit/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/05/29/china-bachelet-un-xinjiang-rights-visit/ |
Carlos Alcaraz plays a forehand return during a victory over Sebastian Korda. (Christophe Archambault/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images)
PARIS — With the score knotted in the fifth set of a French Open slugfest, 19-year-old Carlos Alcaraz was on a dead run, sprinting from one corner of the court to the other, chasing overhead slams blasted by a veteran opponent.
Each thunderstruck ball that Alcaraz managed to fire back felt like a mini-miracle in what seemed to be a hopeless attempt to keep the point alive — one overhead, another and another — until Albert Ramos-Vinolas plowed a backhand into the net, handing the youngster the pivotal service break.
Alcaraz thrust both arms to the sky as the crowd on Court Simonne-Mathieu erupted in cheers. Looking on from his box, coach Juan Carlos Ferrero never changed his expression. He simply put an index finger to each temple as if to say, “Keep your head in the game.”
Even without looking, his charge did precisely that, serving out that 4-hour-34-minute match to advance to the third round.
For all of Alcaraz’s grit and power, what best explains how he has sped up the timetable of his heralded arrival as the sport’s next superstar is his uncommonly level head. For that, Ferrero, the 2003 French Open champion and a former world No. 1, deserves considerable credit.
Nicknamed “El Mosquito” during his 15-year career for his slight stature, speed and persistence, the 160-pound Ferrero was known for outsize courage on the court and uncommon humility off it. These are the qualities he has sought to instill in Alcaraz, who started training at his tennis academy in Spain at 15.
“He made the player that I am right now,” Alcaraz said of Ferrero after turning Friday’s widely anticipated third-round match against American Sebastian Korda into a 6-4, 6-4, 6-2 romp. “[He gave me] the intensity I have to [have] during the two, three hours to be able to play in the Grand Slams or in these matches against the best players in the world — [to] keep focusing in every tournament, in every practice that I have.”
Since the 2022 season began, Alcaraz raced up the rankings to a career-high No. 6, calling to mind the teenage heroics of Rafael Nadal, his childhood idol and a fellow Spaniard, nearly two decades ago.
In February, he won his first 500-level tournament on the men’s pro tour, the Rio Open. In April, he won his first Masters 1000-level title — one rung down from the Grand Slams — at the Miami Open and received a congratulatory call from King Felipe VI of Spain.
Three weeks later, he vaulted into the top 10 after winning the Barcelona Open, which included an upset of then-fifth-ranked Stefanos Tsitsipas. Then came his Madrid Open tour de force, in which he achieved something no player has: beating Nadal, regarded as the greatest clay-court player in history, and top-ranked Djokovic back-to-back on clay. He toppled third-ranked Alexander Zverev to win the title.
Alcaraz’s next goal is winning a Grand Slam title. He is halfway there, into the fourth round at Roland Garros. But he faces a tough second week, placed in the stacked half of the draw that includes Djokovic, the defending champion, and Nadal, the tournament’s 13-time champion.
If he wins two more times to reach the semifinals, Alcaraz almost certainly will face one or the other, with Djokovic and Nadal on track to meet for the 59th time in their careers in the quarterfinals.
The eyes of the tennis world, no doubt, will be on that match and its implications for Djokovic’s quest to tie Nadal’s record 21 Grand Slam titles. But if Alcaraz takes a giant step in his evolution by winning his first Grand Slam here, he would relegate the Nadal-Djokovic narrative to subtext.
“I feel ready to compete against them in every single tournament, in every single surface,” Alcaraz said after beating the pair in Madrid. “[But] in a Grand Slam, it’s completely different … when you have to play the best-of-five sets.”
Comparisons with Nadal are easy to draw.
Like Nadal, Alcaraz was reared in a small village in Spain: El Palmar in Murcia. His father was director of a local tennis academy, where Carlos learned to play.
At 15, he went to train at the academy Ferrero owns, where instruction is rooted in the values that defined his career: sacrifice, humility and respect.
Like Nadal, Alcaraz remains close to his family — many of whom were in Miami this spring and joined him on court afterward to celebrate his first Masters 1000 victory. And in Alcaraz’s comments, there are echoes of Nadal’s approach to tennis.
“To play to win … is my essence,” he recently said. “[I] fight till the very last ball.”
Still, he insists he feels no pressure from the comparisons.
“I know that there will never be another like Rafa in history,” Alcaraz recently said. “I am Carlos.”
The foundation of Alcaraz’s game, like that of Nadal’s, is his powerful forehand.
There are metrics that convey every aspect of its effectiveness. Forehand winners can be tallied. The forehand’s velocity can be computed, its court-placement plotted and its spin computer-simulated. But that cannot fully convey what makes Alcaraz such a handful for opponents.
A compact 6-foot-1 and 159 pounds, he is a terrific mover and can change direction on a dime. He’s strong enough to blast winners when knocked out of position. He has a full repertoire of shots — backhand slices, crisp volleys, lobs and devilish drop shots — and the creativity to use them all.
And he has the courage to use the least expected stroke, even if a high-risk shot, at critical moments in a match.
“Juan Carlos tells me that in the tough moments, you have to play aggressive,” Alcaraz said after winning the 2021 Next Gen ATP Finals.
Through three rounds at the French Open, former players have fawned over Alcaraz’s range and inventiveness. Former No. 1 Mats Wilander, a three-time French Open champion, exulted on Eurosport over his slice backhand on clay. Former British No. 1 Tim Henman delighted in a serve-and-volley change-up.
Analyst Mary Carrillo marvels at his drop-shot mastery, which cleverly follows a forehand wallop that knocks the opponent on his heels.
“You might know it could come,” Carrillo said, “but you also have to prepare for the furnace blast that is his forehand.”
But the voice Alcaraz hears in his head is the counsel of Ferrero.
“I’m aggressive all the time,” he said after steamrolling Korda. “Doesn’t matter if I am losing, winning — close moment or not. I keep my style the whole match.” | 2022-05-29T09:39:05Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Carlos Alcaraz has the French Open on notice - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/05/29/carlos-alcaraz-ferrero-french-open/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/05/29/carlos-alcaraz-ferrero-french-open/ |
With tents outside county office, Fairfax reviews pledge to end homelessness
Joan McDonald moves items near her tent at a homeless encampment in Reston this week. (Craig Hudson for The Washington Post)
In 2008, Fairfax County launched an ambitious “Plan to Prevent and End Homelessness,” with the goal of ending homelessness in the Northern Virginia suburb within 10 years.
While homelessness is down by more than a third since that deadline was set, tent encampments in the woods, including one a short walk from the satellite country government center in Reston, show the goal of reducing the number to zero is still far from reach.
The county Board of Supervisors recently ordered a review of the Fairfax homelessness-prevention efforts, joining other localities in the region that have been struggling with a problem that, while diminishing, has become more visible during the coronavirus pandemic.
Some supervisors expressed frustration over the limited progress after several hundred people returned to the streets earlier this spring, prompted by the closure of seasonal hypothermia shelters that operate between December and April, and the end of a pandemic program in March that housed the homeless inside hotels.
“Some things never change and that is very, very troubling,” Supervisor Penelope Gross (D-Mason) said Tuesday before the board approved a motion for the review.
Nearly 1,200 people in Fairfax are considered to be homeless, according to a spot count conducted in January. That is about 35 percent lower than the homeless population count in the county in 2008.
But, after a spike in homelessness in 2020, there are 204 more homeless people in Fairfax now than there were in 2018, according to a report on homelessness in the region published earlier this month by the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments.
Some use their cars are their beds in this wealthy Virginia suburb
With an estimated 282 adults sleeping in the streets, while others stay in emergency shelters or some other form of temporary housing, county officials are searching for ways to add more shelter beds and housing options in Fairfax.
There are six county-owned emergency shelters in Fairfax operated by local nonprofits with a total of 510 beds in a mix of space set aside for individual adults or entire families. Some facilities have a waitlist of several hundred people to get inside.
There are also 670 beds available inside supportive housing complexes that offer mental health counseling, job training, financial literacy and other services, in addition to a place to sleep, also with long waitlists. Other programs offer emergency rental and utility payments and access to affordable child care to people in danger of losing their homes.
The Board of Supervisors directed county staff to search for sites where more supportive housing could be developed. The county will also investigate building more emergency shelters in commercial and industrial areas of Fairfax, a more viable option after the pandemic forced some businesses to shut down.
Sarah Selvaraj D’Souza, executive director of Reston Strong, said her community group has been lobbying for that alternative. The organization, originally formed in 2020 to provide aid to those suffering from the pandemic, has helped dozens of homeless people who have been living in tents in the Reston area.
She pointed out several large commercial sites around the community that would make good candidates for temporary housing. A Best Buy store recently shut down and is vacant. A shuttered Inova Hospital rehabilitation center for the elderly has been vacant since 2014, used as a place to sleep by some homeless residents until, in February, they were forced to leave the facility, which is boarded up and scheduled to be demolished. “We have plenty of space here,” she said.
In April, Reston Strong sought to bring more urgency to the issue by helping people who were forced to leave a nearby hypothermia shelter after it shut down for the season to set up tents outside the Fairfax county North Governmental Center, home to the office of Supervisor Walter Alcorn (D-Hunter Mill) and a county police station.
Many of those people had previously been staying inside area hotels through the county Quarantine, Protection, Isolation and Decompression Program, launched in 2020 as a way to guard against the spread of the coronavirus.
But that temporary program ended in March, in part because coronavirus vaccinations are now widely available in Fairfax but also because area nonprofits struggled to keep it staffed and hotel rooms were harder to find after the tourism industry rebounded in the area.
“We don’t want people to be living in tents. That is absolutely not what we are advocating for,” Selvaraj D’Souza said. “But what options did they have?”
All but two of those tents are now gone after the “Neighbors in Tents” campaign, involving food and water donations to the tent dwellers, garnered some publicity. The tent dwellers moved to a nearby wooded area.
But the message resonated with county officials. Alcorn created a community task force whose mission will be to craft a master plan for the Reston area that will include more permanent supportive housing and upgrades to the Embry Rucker emergency shelter.
How is the pledge from Mayor Bowser to end homelessness going?
“We do need more shelter beds,” Alcorn said during an interview, calling it “a moral obligation” to provide as many solutions as possible to people without homes. “We are short.”
Another obstacle has been the inability of local nonprofits and religious organizations that operate homelessness-prevention programs to maintain staff and volunteers, a problem related to stress and lower pay than what one might earn in the private sector that has been made worse by concerns about coronavirus infection, county officials said.
“Turnover is typically quite high among the staff at the shelters,” said Thomas Barnett, deputy director of the Office to Prevent and End Homelessness. “That creates challenges, in creating stability and high quality services.”
Maura Williams, vice president of housing and community services at the Cornerstones nonprofit organization, said it was particularly difficult to keep staff working under the county hotel program. Cornerstones had operated one of the six hotels used for that program, serving about 90 people, with the understanding that it would be for three months. Then the program was extended several times.
“It was great for the program, but you lose staff when that happens because they had an understanding that it was going to end on a certain date,” Williams said. “During the pandemic, we were in a constant state of hiring. I don’t think we were ever able to stop and say, ‘Okay. We are fully staffed.’”
Jeffrey C. McKay (D-At large), chair of the county board, said the local homeless problem could be a lot worse after thousands of people lost jobs during the pandemic in a region where affordable housing is hard to come by.
That shows that many of the homelessness-prevention programs in the county have been working, he said. But, as some people get off the streets, others become newly homeless, making it “feel like you are kind of on a treadmill,” he added.
The review of the county homelessness-prevention plan is meant to discover “what is working with regularity?” he said. “What is a waste of resources? What is something another jurisdiction is doing that’s a best practice that we need to try to experiment with here?”
Outside her tent in the woods near the government center in Reston, Joan McDonald said she just wants a place she and her unemployed friend can afford on the $24 per hour salary she makes as a bus driver.
McDonald, 48, has been homeless since 2016, after her brother asked her to leave his home in Springfield to make room for their ailing parents. She and her friend, who became homeless after her husband left, have been in their tent in Reston since February.
Subsidized apartments they have been offered are still too expensive at around $1,500 a month, when they factor in other expenses, McDonald said. “It hurts,” she said, sitting at a picnic table in her bus driver uniform after just finishing a shift.
Covid closed downtown D.C. businesses. Many reopened — in the suburbs.
Rep. Bob Good gets nod for 2nd term in Va. GOP convention; Cao also wins | 2022-05-29T10:18:18Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Homeless problem in Fairfax County gets review as some sleep in tents - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/05/29/homelessness-northern-virginia-fairfax/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/05/29/homelessness-northern-virginia-fairfax/ |
“Nothing Special,” filmed just before he died, is the comedian’s final Netflix offering
Norm Macdonald performs in Las Vegas in 2011. (Ethan Miller/Getty Images)
“Lojo, I want to shoot it tonight,” he said.
“Oh, boy. Really?” she said.
“Lojo” is Lori Jo Hoekstra, his best friend, neighbor — they lived in the same condo complex in Los Angeles — and producing partner for more than two decades. In 2013, after doctors diagnosed Macdonald, she temporarily moved with him to Arizona as he disappeared from public view for four months to undergo his first stem cell transplant. This time, the procedure would take place closer to home. But it would also make it hard for Macdonald to stick to his original plan for his next Netflix stand-up special.
He was stage-ready and planning to tape a pair of performances in Los Angeles. Then the coronavirus pandemic hit, shuttering entertainment venues across the nation. At almost the same time, Macdonald’s monthly visit to the hospital revealed that the original cancer, multiple myeloma, had metastasized into myelodysplastic syndrome, which can often lead to acute leukemia. The diagnosis left Macdonald and Hoekstra spinning and unsure of the next steps. Except for one thing: Whatever happened, Macdonald wanted to make sure his material was shown.
And it will be. “Nothing Special,” which he named before he died in September at 61, of complications from cancer, begins airing Monday on Netflix. It includes footage of a group of friends and admirers — David Letterman, Dave Chapelle, Molly Shannon, Conan O’Brien, David Spade, Adam Sandler — discussing the comedian on camera after watching his final creation together.
Norm Macdonald was Tolstoy in sweatpants. Even when he texted you in the middle of the night.
“I felt this kind of joy that Norm’s back, to be honest with you,” O’Brien said in an interview about the experience. “I felt like he’s here with us. Isn’t this a nice gift to get to be with Norm some more.”
People like to say there was nobody like Norm Macdonald, and they say that because it’s true. He worked in a business run by dealmakers and compromisers and yet could never commit to doing anything less than fully his way. His pattern was to have no pattern. In 1997, when he was anchor of “Weekend Update” on “Saturday Night Live,” a top NBC executive told him to stop telling jokes about former football star O.J. Simpson, who had been acquitted in a high-profile murder trial. Macdonald told more jokes, until he was fired. A decade later, he arrived at a profane roast of comedian Bob Saget with a set of corny, G-rated Dad jokes that were so terrible, they were perfect. His appearances on late night TV were legendary, as were his tweetathons.
Macdonald’s commitment to his craft extended to his personal life. He never explained his reasoning, but those closest to him think he kept his illness secret because he believed it would be bad for his comedy. Audiences would view him differently. Booking agents and TV producers might pause before giving him gigs. In a culture soaked in the confessional, Macdonald could have profited from the sympathy and inevitable publicity that would come from talking about his cancer battle. Instead, the only people he told were Hoekstra, manager Marc Gurvitz and his immediate family, including his older brother, Neil; mother, Ferne; and adult son, Dylan.
‘I wasn’t sure’
Hoekstra may have rolled her eyes or groaned when Macdonald told her he wanted to film that night before his transplant. This wasn’t the first time Macdonald threw out an idea that struck her as difficult or even irrational. But Hoekstra, as organized and meticulous as Macdonald was proudly shambolic, usually just shook off her initial skepticism and did her job, which was to make Macdonald’s ideas happened.
“I wasn’t sure which cameras we were going to use or where it would be shot,” she says now. “At first, I think we had him set up sitting on a chair like a little far away. And then we decided to move, for lighting and just to get closer. That’s why we shot it where we did.”
“Hello, everybody,” Macdonald said as the camera rolled. “Norm Macdonald. And this is my comedy special. That’s right.”
For Hoekstra, working on the special in the wake of Macdonald’s death was a distraction. Now, after handing in the final cut, she struggles with how to talk about it.
She wrestles with whether the celebrity panel takes away from Macdonald’s performance. She also isn’t sure what to share of the comedian’s life. Macdonald didn’t want anything about his illness to get out, but there are things Hoekstra does want people to know about what he went through.
The rounds of chemotherapy in 2013 led to neuropathy that left him with constant pain in his feet, so bad that he described it as walking on shards of glass or through fire. It’s why Macdonald, who loved to play tennis and golf, went through long bouts of inactivity. It’s also why he wasn’t always just being flaky when he bailed on social commitments.
“He pretended, ‘I’m a fat slob and I’m here eating fried chicken,’ during his [YouTube talk show], but it was complete bull----,” says his brother, Neil, a journalist with the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. “He was doing it to come up with a reason for having put on weight.”
Hoekstra says Macdonald’s focus remained on comedy, often at the expense of all else. She saw him do hundreds of shows over the years without repeating the same material in the same order. If he seemed dysfunctional in so many other areas of life — whether losing his hotel keys or forgetting how to sign on to his email — it’s because of how much attention he gave to his work. It’s how, the night before a stem cell transplant, Macdonald was able to reel off almost an hour of material without looking at a single note.
“Nothing was important to him except for his stand-up,” she says. “Obviously, he had serious things in his life he was also dealing with, meaning the illness. But professionally and in life, it was all about the comedy.”
Bare by necessity
“Nothing Special” is unlike anything you’ve seen from Macdonald or, really, any stand-up. It has more aesthetically in common with an Instagram Live than the slick specials generally rolled out by Netflix. It’s also a strange sensation to watch a stand-up comedian do his entire routine without an audience. Drew Michael did this for his 2018 HBO special, but that was as stylized as an Absolut Vodka. “Nothing Special” is bare by necessity.
“The form is different,” Letterman says in the post-performance chat. “It’s not, strictly speaking, stand-up. It’s something else.”
Neil Macdonald says he worries about how the special will be received — not for Macdonald, but for Hoekstra, whose devotion to his younger brother has left his family in “awe.”
“You know, audiences can be merciless,” he said. “Norm didn’t give a f--- if he bombed. But she does.”
Hoekstra and Macdonald had a friendship that ran deeper than many marriages. After meeting at SNL, where she was a writer’s assistant, Macdonald recruited her to be part of the “Weekend Update” team with him and veteran writer Jim Downey. When Macdonald was fired from SNL, she followed him to Los Angeles to work on sitcoms and then a series of projects, from his stand-up specials to his sports show for Comedy Central and his 2018 Netflix talk show, “Norm Macdonald Has a Show.”
“She became Norm’s sort of gal Friday and manager,” says Downey, the longtime SNL writer. “He just couldn’t have done it without her.”
“She was, by far, his most trusted sounding board on material, what to wear for a special,” says comedian Josh Gardner, who first worked with Hoekstra and Macdonald at SNL in the 1990s. “They really were kind of a left hand, right hand of a piano player.”
‘Speaking of secretive’
In June 2020, Neil Macdonald had flown in from Canada to donate blood for his brother’s transplant. At first, things went well. Macdonald seemed to gain weight and strength; he punched out a rough screenplay for a movie adaptation of his critically acclaimed, best-selling comic novel, “Based on a True Story: A Memoir.” He began to book stand-up gigs. Then, in early 2021, doctors told him he needed another stem cell transplant. Neil donated again, and, in March 2021, Macdonald, checking in as always under his pseudonym, Stan Hooper, underwent the procedure.
“Do you want to open for me for a private gig in Puerto Rico,” he wrote. “Nov. 5, baby.”
“Speaking of secretive,” says comedian Colin Quinn, “he booked a gig with me in August to do some casinos and we texted each other. ‘Hey, I can’t wait to do the gig. Yeah, me neither.’ ”
“I would have loved to have just filmed him and just interviewed him and not about anything personal, because he didn’t like that,” says Quinn, who replaced Macdonald as “Weekend Update” anchor. “When you watch little segments with him, he’s just one of those guys you want to hear talk.”
Voice-over from the hospital
In July, Macdonald went in for what would normally be an outpatient round of chemotherapy. But because of the pandemic, the doctors wanted him to stay overnight. That’s when he somehow got an infection. He would not leave the City of Hope again, spending his last six weeks there.
He never talked of dying. He thought he would recover. Late in July, Macdonald did a voice-over for Seth MacFarlane’s show “The Orville” while at the hospital — not that anybody on the other side knew. Hoekstra found a private room and turned off the beeping monitors and hospital intercom so that nobody could tell where he was Zooming from.
No one else knew. It was left to Hoekstra, after Macdonald’s death, to tell Gurvitz and Netflix. Everyone had the same initial concern: How does Norm look? Nobody wanted to see a gaunt cancer patient out of breath, trying to tell jokes. But that’s not the Macdonald on “Nothing Special.”
“He looks fantastic,” O’Brien says. “The way it’s shot, it really features his secret weapon, those eyes and those dimples. And his inner light is beaming as strongly as it ever did. I mean, it just didn’t look like a man who was diminished in any way.”
Earlier this month, O’Brien agreed to MC a private celebration of Macdonald at the Fonda Theatre in Los Angeles. About 250 people were in the room, including Dylan, Neil, Hoekstra, Bill Murray, Bob Odenkirk, Kevin Nealon and Judd Apatow.
O’Brien called Macdonald “the most completely original person I have ever met. He didn’t look like anyone else, talk like anyone else or follow many of the basic principles of comedy. He lived in his own strange world populated by hobos, French Canadians, cardsharps, trappers, a pig with a wooden leg, farmers, hooligans and, for reasons no one will ever understand, Frank Stallone.”
As he wound up his tribute, O’Brien looked out at the crowd and talked wistfully of how much he was going to miss seeing Macdonald do what nobody else could.
“Selfishly, I don’t feel badly for Norm,” he said. “I feel badly for all of us.” | 2022-05-29T10:22:39Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Norm Macdonald's 'Nothing Special,' filmed just before he died, is the comedian’s final Netflix offering - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/05/29/norm-macdonald-nothing-special-netflix/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/05/29/norm-macdonald-nothing-special-netflix/ |
This is the most important standardized test administered in America
Expert shows NAEP’s periodic samplings provide so much data it’s easy to misuse
Chester E. Finn Jr., known as Checker, is 77. His first contact with the National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as our nation’s report card, goes way back to 1969. That was when he received an office visitor who wanted to discuss NAEP, pronounced “nape.”
Finn was 25. He had a desk in the Old Executive Office Building in Washington. He had graduated from college four years before with a degree in history. He also had a master’s degree in social studies teaching, an indication of how early he acquired his lifelong obsession with schools in America. He has done enough since to be called our nation’s education expert.
In his latest book, “Assessing the Nation’s Report Card: Challenges and Choices for NAEP,” Finn provides a much-needed appreciation of those federally funded-and-managed exams that periodically sample the progress of about 5,000 children per state. He thinks NAEP is the most important testing program in the country but worries it could be blown away by the ideological winds rattling schoolhouse windows these days.
NAEP is an old but solid anchor in any debate over whether our schools are going to hell. Senior citizens I know often take a pessimistic view. They tend to remember their school days fondly and overlook the fact that schools then weren’t teaching as much to as many different kids, particularly those with disabilities, as they do now.
Students’ grades are up but their test scores aren’t, new data show
The most recent NAEP summary of reading progress indicates that, over the long term, we are not falling back: “The percentage of fourth-grade students performing at or above NAEP Proficient in 2019 was higher in comparison to a decade ago, as well as to 1998 and 1992. The percentage of eighth-graders performing at or above NAEP Proficient in 2019 was not significantly different from a decade ago or from 1998, but was higher in comparison to 1992.”
I suspect Finn, a careful optimist, may mention NAEP data when he runs into feverish pessimists at parties. He first went deep into the realities of federal support for education when his graduate school mentor, Daniel P. Moynihan, became a key adviser to President Richard M. Nixon and took Finn with him to Washington.
That visitor who told Finn about NAEP was the executive director of the Education Commission of the States. He wanted the well-placed kid to know the project needed more money. Finn went on to get an Ed.D. in educational policy and become a much-quoted sage as professor of education and public policy at Vanderbilt University, U.S. assistant secretary of education, senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, president of the nonprofit Thomas B. Fordham Foundation in Washington and several other assignments.
This is his 24th book. It is full of bureaucratic history and would be a heavy slog except that Finn is a gifted writer who spotlights the most interesting stuff, like the recurring battle over NAEP’s long-term trend assessment. Some people don’t like measuring today’s schools the same way we did in 1992. Finn disagrees. Having some legitimate way to compare our schools to the past “is NAEP’s single most valuable function and solemn responsibility,” he said.
Looking back at old data “is certain to raise concerns as curricular emphases, education reform priorities, and testing technologies evolve over time,” he said. “How informative are assessment results in 2025, say, if they’re based on what was being taught in American schools at the turn of the century? … On the other hand, how valuable are 2025 results on a measure like NAEP if they cannot be compared with previous results? Is achievement improving or not, and for which kids?’
The common mistake Betsy DeVos made about NAEP scores
He quotes Education Week reporter Stephen Sawchuk pointing out that “the exam’s technical properties make it difficult to use NAEP data to prove cause-and-effect claims about specific policies or instructional interventions,” even though distinguished experts use the results that way all the time. It is not uncommon to see enraged debaters hurling NAEP data at each other.
Not everyone likes government officials pointing out achievement gaps between different ethnicities, Finn said, “at least not unless it’s accompanied by causal explanations and — more important — remedies for the situation.” NAEP people consider that beyond their instructions. NAEP results can illuminate knowledge and skills in certain subjects that groups of students might have, Finn said, but “they’re not good at gauging creativity, motivation, grit, research prowess, or one’s ability to work with others.”
Even worse, legislators and regulators keep messing with vital data. The correlation between academic achievement and socioeconomic status as measured by the percentage of students eligible for lunch subsidies has been a favorite topic of NAEP consumers like me. Finn informs us that “beginning in 2010 … and nationally implemented in 2015, the ‘community eligibility’ feature enables high-poverty schools to supply free meals to all their pupils regardless of individual poverty status.”
There are NAEP exams in reading, math, science, writing, arts and civics.
Politicians and other special interests will still misrepresent the results. But as we try to comprehend our schools’ progress, there is no better measure than that obscure testing project Finn first heard about 53 years ago. | 2022-05-29T10:22:51Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The NAEP is still a standardized test we should rely on - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/05/29/naep-chester-finn-report-card/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/05/29/naep-chester-finn-report-card/ |
Rescuers brought them from South Korea to Colorado, where the bears frolic, roam and are fattening up
One of the 22 moon bears rescued from a South Korean bear bile farm enjoys some time in the woods in April for the first time. (Courtesy of The Wild Animal Sanctuary)
The 22 Asiatic black bears had spent their entire lives locked in small metal cages at a South Korean breeding farm. There, their gallbladders and bile were harvested and marketed as cures for everything from sore throats to cancer — and, more recently, as a coronavirus treatment.
The bears’ feet had never touched grass or dirt, and they were fed dog food instead of the produce, grains and fruit that they needed for proper nutrition.
“They lived in the most horrific conditions you can imagine,” said Pat Craig, founder and executive director of the Wild Animal Sanctuary in southeastern Colorado.
In mid-March, Craig’s nonprofit organization rescued the shaggy bears — nicknamed “moon bears” for the yellow crescent-shaped markings on their chests. It brought them to Colorado, where they are free to frolic, roam and fatten themselves up.
“To see them finally free and playing in grass for the first time was really rewarding,” said Craig, 62. He has taken in unwanted and abused bears, lions, tigers and wolves at the sanctuary since 1980, and he added a 9,700-acre refuge four years ago.
“You can tell the bears are happy now,” he said. “They’re able to explore 243 forested [fenced-in] acres, play in the water and act like normal bears.”
Through a collaboration with the Korean Animal Welfare Association in Seoul, he said, his nonprofit used about $200,000 in public and private donations to charter a jet this spring and rescue the 22 moon bears.
“We had planned to do it sooner, then the pandemic hit and the country was shut off,” he said. “We were anxious to get them out of there.”
Craig has identified many more in need of rescue. The bears weigh 150 to 200 pounds and are about half the size of moon bears in the wild because of years of malnutrition.
“There are upward of 200 captive black bears still in South Korea, and I’d love to save every one of them,” he said.
South Korea announced in January that by 2026 it would finally put an end to bear bile farming and bile extraction — a practice in many Asian countries that has drawn worldwide outrage and scrutiny, Craig said.
“The bears are put in coffin-like cages so they can’t move, then a stent is put in through their gall bladders to collect their bile,” he said.
“These bears can’t roll, they can’t move, they can’t shift, and they’re barely fed enough to keep them alive,” Craig said. “They have no stimulation, and they’re never able to experience nature. It’s every bit as appalling and torturous as it sounds.”
Bears often develop infections from the extractions and die, he said, noting that their teeth also can become infected. Long-term-health problems like arthritis are common, because of their cramped enclosures.
Although bile farming is on its way out in South Korea, several hundred bears are still being held in intolerable conditions, he added.
“Now that the bile cages are gone, they’ve been moved to steel rebar cages that are suspended from the ground so their urine and feces will fall downward,” he said. “Their feet don’t even touch the ground.”
Members of the Korean Animal Welfare Association are paying farmers to feed the bears and keep them alive until they can be flown out of the country by wildlife rescue groups, Craig said, adding that he was contacted by the group two years ago to help.
“We’d love to get them all out, but it takes money and time,” he said. “We could only fit 22 cages on the flight we chartered.”
South Korean volunteers loaded the caged bears onto the plane, then Craig and several employees met the flight in Los Angeles. They transferred the bears onto trucks and drove nonstop to the refuge, located about 30 miles from Springfield, Colo.
At the refuge, the bears were kept in temporary enclosures with private dens for about six weeks to help them get used to new sounds and smells and allow them to become familiar with their keepers, Craig said. Then in April, they were released in stages into their rugged, forested habitat.
A team of veterinarians is observing them to ensure that their adjustment to nature goes smoothly, he said.
The refuge’s head veterinarian, Joyce Thompson, said the bears came to the sanctuary with many ailments, including long-term malnutrition.
“I suspect that some of them may have orthopedic issues as they grow older,” she said, adding that the bears range in age from 6 to 12 years.
One of the rescued bears is blind, another has hip arthritis, and a third is missing a front paw and a back paw, she said. Those bears will be transferred to the group’s smaller sanctuary near Denver for special care.
“For the most part, the bears are all now doing well and are enjoying their new habitat,” Thompson said. “Before, they were climbing cages. Now they’re climbing trees.”
“We’re allowing them to be their natural bear selves as much as possible,” she said. “They’re not on display here — they just get do whatever they want to do. If they want to, they can go swimming. Or they can sleep all day in the shade. It’s up to them.”
Each bear consumes about 10 to 15 pounds of fresh produce, grains and meat daily, Craig said, noting that fresh berries, raw eggs and salmon are a big hit.
“A deli donated some lasagna to us once, and they really enjoyed that,” he said. “We place plenty of food throughout the habitat, so there’s never any reason for them to fight over it.”
Craig started his animal sanctuary with a single jaguar at age 19 and said he takes special joy in watching large carnivores explore natural surroundings, finally free after years of abuse.
“I grew up on a farm and have always loved animals,” he said. “When I found out there were big cats and bears that were overbred by breeders and unwanted by zoos around the world, I decided to make it my life’s work to rescue as many as I could.”
He said he fenced off his family’s farm outside Boulder, Colo., to begin with, then gradually received enough donations to buy a larger space.
Eighty-five employees and 160 volunteers now care for about 700 lions, tigers and bears at two facilities in Colorado and a sanctuary in Boyd, Tex., Craig said, adding that many of the animals spent most of their lives in circuses or locked up in cages.
“We’ve even taken in a few camels, kangaroos and ostriches,” he said. “But mostly, we focus on large carnivores. They’re expensive to feed and dangerous to take care of, and it’s harder to find places that will take them in.”
Now that the sanctuary’s newest residents are rolling around in the dirt and exploring fragrant woods for the first time, Craig said he hopes to rescue more moon bears soon.
“They’re beautiful animals, and they deserve to be free and enjoy life,” he said. “I’d love to help even more of them to enjoy that feeling of wild grass under their feet for the first time.” | 2022-05-29T10:22:58Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Colorado sanctuary rescued 22 moon bears from South Korea - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/05/28/moon-bears-rescued-colorado-sanctuary/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/05/28/moon-bears-rescued-colorado-sanctuary/ |
FILE - British jockey Lester Piggott rides Free Guest, in Newbury, England, Oct. 26, 1985. English jockey great Lester Piggott has died at the age of 86, it was announced on Sunday, May 29, 2022. He won the English Derby nine times in his haul of victories in horse racing’s top events and will be remembered for being one of the greatest jockeys of all time. Piggott’s death was confirmed to Britain’s PA news agency by horseracing trainer William Haggas, who is married to Piggott’s daughter Maureen. (PA via AP, FIle) (Uncredited/PA) | 2022-05-29T10:23:10Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Lester Piggott, one of the great English jockeys, dies at 86 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/lester-piggott-one-of-the-great-english-jockeys-dies-at-86/2022/05/29/9895a3de-df36-11ec-ae64-6b23e5155b62_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/lester-piggott-one-of-the-great-english-jockeys-dies-at-86/2022/05/29/9895a3de-df36-11ec-ae64-6b23e5155b62_story.html |
Colombians vote for president in tense, potentially historic election
Colombian presidential candidate Gustavo Petro and his running mate, Francia Márquez, attend a campaign meeting in Cali on May 19. (Carolina Navas/For The Washington Post)
BOGOTÁ, Colombia — Colombians head to the polls on Sunday to vote in the first round of an uncertain presidential election that could deliver a historic repudiation of the status quo.
A frustrated and struggling young portion of the electorate is backing Gustavo Petro, a senator and former guerrilla trying to become the first leftist president in the country’s history. His rise has been fueled by widespread discontent with the outgoing term-limited administration of President Iván Duque, who critics say has done little to improve the security or economic challenges in the country during his four years in office. Petro, 62, has led in polls for months, but is unlikely to win a majority of votes in the first round, meaning he would face a rival in a runoff on June 19.
For much of the campaign, it appeared that Petro would head to a second round with Federico Gutiérrez, a center-right former mayor of Medellín who has sought to capture the votes of the political establishment. But recent polls have shown a late surge for outsider candidate Rodolfo Hernández, a brash, 77-year-old civil engineer and businessman with a populist anticorruption message that has gained a following on TikTok.
The stage could be set for a second round between two anti-establishment candidates, a contest unheard of in a country historically led by the political elite. Concern is growing, meanwhile, that losing candidates will question the legitimacy of the election results.
Colombia has seen increasing violence from armed criminal groups more than five years after it signed historic peace accords with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. Election observers say it’s been the most volatile election cycle in a dozen years; they’ve recorded 581 acts of violence against political and social leaders in the pre-electoral period. Weeks before the vote, the Clan del Golfo cartel shut down much of the rural north of the country in retaliation for the extradition of their leader to the United States. Recent assassination threats against Petro and his running mate, Francia Márquez, led the campaigns to tighten security.
Two dozen members of U.S. Congress urged the Biden administration to convey the country’s support for free and fair elections in Colombia, a key U.S. ally in the region. "As the first round of voting approaches,” they wrote, “these shared democratic values have come increasingly under threat.”
The vote could prove a sharp rebuke of the politically conservative establishment that has governed Colombia for more than two centuries. It comes amid a wave of discontent in a region still recovering from the economic assault of the pandemic as it faces soaring inflation and widening inequality.
“All of this has been undermining the patience of the people,” said Alberto Vergara, a political scientist at the University of the Pacific in Peru.
In Peru, a surge in poverty helped propel Marxist rural schoolteacher and political neophyte Pedro Castillo last year to the presidency. In Chile, the region’s free-market model, voters this year chose 36-year-old former student activist Gabriel Boric. And in Brazil, Latin America’s largest country, leftist former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva leads polls to unseat President Jair Bolsonaro in October.
“There’s a desire everywhere to castigate those who are in power,” Vergara said.
This is especially true in Colombia, one of the most unequal countries in Latin America. More than half the population is experiencing food insecurity, 40 percent are living in poverty and 78 percent said in a recent survey that their country was moving in the wrong direction.
“Everything is more difficult, more expensive. Supplies, food … it’s an exaggeration,” said Adriana Gaviria, a 33-year-old plant shop owner in a market in the city of Cali. “We’re tired of the right. We have to try with the left. Something has to change.”
For decades, elections here focused on a core issue: War. But this year, security is further down the list of voters’ priorities, according to Silvia Otero, a political scientist at Colombia’s University del Rosario. Many voters have more immediate concerns: The economy, inequality, corruption.
“Gustavo Petro is the one that realized Colombians wanted change,” she said, and he has been the candidate positioning issues into the national debate. “He talks about pensions? Now suddenly everybody is an expert in pensions.”
Petro promises to transform an unequal society through redistributive policies such as universal free higher education and a minimum wage for single mothers. He says he would raise taxes on the 4,000 wealthiest Colombians. He proposes ending new oil exploration and moving the country toward renewable energy. He envisions a country — and a “progressive axis” in the region — built on industrialization, not on extracting natural resources. “Latin America needs a new agenda,” he told The Washington Post.
His candidacy has generated panic among Colombia’s conservative political and financial establishment. Some warn a Petro presidency would strain relations with the United States. Others say he won’t be able to keep his promises with a divided legislature.
Gutiérrez, his main rival for most of the campaign, says Petro’s policies would turn Colombia into a broken socialist state akin to neighboring Venezuela. Known here as “Fico,” Gutiérrez, 47, promises “a country in order and with opportunities.” He has tried to distance himself from the unpopular Duque administration in part by suggesting proposals that hew closer to center.
“Where there is no state there is no legality,” he told The Post. “But the state does not only mean the presence of more police or more troops. … It comes through education, through opportunities.”
Gutiérrez said he would not recognize Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro — the United States doesn’t, either — but he would support reopening the land border between the two countries for commerce and traffic. He said he would be open to negotiating with the ELN, the country’s largest remaining leftist guerrilla group, if they showed good-faith gestures toward peace.
Business administrator Dora Murcia, 49, is a supporter.
“We need someone with a firm hand,” she said at a packed Gutiérrez rally just outside of Bogotá, “but a person with good national and international relations.”
Others are less interested in his policies than in voting against Petro. “Colombia can’t be governed by Communism,” one Gutiérrez supporter said.
Hernández, meanwhile, offers an alternative that appeals to both the anti-Petro and anti-establishment vote. He’s known by some as “the engineer from Santander” and by others as the “old guy from TikTok,” a popular former mayor of the city of Bucaramanga who reached national fame in 2018 when he was captured on video slapping a city councilman in the face. He was temporarily suspended for the assault.
As mayor, he managed to root out some key sources of corruption in the city. Otero, who is from Bucaramanga, said Hernández proposes a “multi-class alliance. He wants to govern for the poor but with the support of the private actors.”
Hernández rejected the right-wing label but embraced support from conservative voters. Asked by The Post about comparisons to former president Donald Trump, he laughed. He acknowledged that they share a tendency to be “direct.”
Hernández predicted he would win because his fervent base knows he is “the only one who is capable of removing the thieves from power.” He then went on to describe his effect on supporters as “messianic,” and compared them to the “brainwashed” hijackers of Sept. 11, 2001, who destroyed the twin towers.
Asked if likening his supporters to terrorists was problematic, he rejected the premise. “What I’m comparing is that after you get into that state, you don’t change your position. You don’t change it.” | 2022-05-29T10:23:22Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Colombia elections: Voters head to polls demanding change - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/05/29/colombia-election-petro-gutierrez-hernandez/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/05/29/colombia-election-petro-gutierrez-hernandez/ |
On its 100th birthday, the Lincoln Memorial still beckons a nation divided
Members of the November Project, a public exercise group, run up and down all 87 steps at the Lincoln Memorial as the sun rises on May 18. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)
William Wan
Jessica Contrera
For a century, an American icon carved from 175 tons of white marble has presided over the nation’s capital, beckoning thousands of visitors each day up his steps and into his hallowed chamber.
The Lincoln Memorial is by far the city’s most popular monument, attracting about 8 million people in a normal year. But what draws so many from every corner of the country and the world is as complicated as the slain president that the building immortalizes.
They come to learn, to give thanks, to protest, to be inspired, to propose, to eat lunch, to walk dogs, to peddle T-shirts, to snap selfies, to launch school trips, to shoot movie scenes, to share a kiss, to have a nightcap, to give speeches, to ask for votes, to pray for change, to mourn America’s greatest sin and remember its greatest ideals, to hope that the union Abraham Lincoln died to preserve will endure.
On May 30, a nation nearly as polarized as it was in Lincoln’s day will mark the 100th anniversary of the memorial’s dedication. And though he doesn’t appear to have aged much through the decades (kept youthful by a rigid skin-care routine of dusting, brushing and pressure washing), the centenarian has borne witness to history countless times.
[The Lincoln Memorial rose from the mud of the Potomac 100 years ago]
On the steps in front of him, Marian Anderson sang for the nation in 1939, and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. shared his dream in 1963. Beneath the 16th president’s steadfast gaze, African Americans, Native Americans, liberals, conservatives, independents, theists, atheists, hippies, veterans, anti-vaxxers, comedians, Juggalos and hundreds of other groups have gathered to demonstrate. On Jan. 6, 2021, he caught glimpses in the distance of insurrectionists storming the U.S. Capitol.
It was at the Lincoln that Jimmy Stewart’s Mr. Smith had an epiphany, that Forrest Gump reunited with the woman he loved, that the bachelors from “Wedding Crashers” finished a bottle of champagne, that Lisa from “The Simpsons” sought wisdom.
History doesn’t happen at the memorial every day, but something compelling or strange or funny or sad certainly does. In honor of the anniversary, Washington Post journalists chronicled one of those days, from sunup to sundown.
National Park Service employees clean and dust around the Lincoln Memorial early on the morning of May 18. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)
Dozens of people in athletic shirts and Spandex shorts raced up and down the memorial’s steps as six workers in yellow vests powered up their leaf blowers. The scent of gasoline and exhaust permeated the early-morning air.
“Please, can you just move to the other side?” one of the workers asked the runners. “Just need a minute to clean.”
The members of the November Project — fitness devotees who meet at the memorial every Wednesday not to check out the president’s somber visage but to climb what they call “Lincoln logs” — made way for the cleaning crew.
The workers descended the steps in a line, their leaf blowers sending a plastic water bottle flying onto the lawn below. When they reached the landing, they turned around and returned to the top.
Members of the November Project meet at the memorial every Wednesday to climb what they call “Lincoln logs.” (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)
A puff of dust flew into a scrum of teenage girls from Georgetown Visitation Preparatory School taking selfies between the columns. They’d arrived at dawn wearing pleated green skirts, white sneakers and T-shirts from the colleges they’d be attending in the fall: Tulane. Syracuse. Wake Forest.
“I don’t see N.C. State,” observed Roy Williams Jr., a horse-mounted officer with the U.S. Park Police.
Now the girls, the runners and the cleaners were joined by Marines out on a jog and an NBC journalist conducting an interview with a congressional candidate beneath the shade of an elm.
Behind them, through the wide marble columns that hadn’t yet warmed in the afternoon heat, the roar of the leaf blowers was quieter.
Timothy Boyd, 52, stood below Lincoln’s massive legs and hoisted a 40-foot long pole topped by a soft bristle brush into the air. It resembled a giant toilet bowl cleaner.
Lincoln would be getting a steam bath the next day — but first, the preservationist needed to do something about the dust and bird poop. Boyd ran the brush down the slope of Lincoln’s nose and along the curve of his forehead.
By then, the president’s brief moment in the morning light had nearly passed. The sun was rising, the crowds were growing. A new day was underway.
Retirement’s rewards
A couple takes in the statue of Abraham Lincoln as the morning light starts to shine on May 18. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)
Just steps from Lincoln, a couple from California sat at the top of the memorial. As they watched the crowds pass, Marlin Klatte, 68, and his wife Joyce Klatte, 70 — both newly retired and trying to figure out a different rhythm to their life — reminded each other how much had changed since the first time Marlin visited the memorial 15 years ago from their home in Simi Valley.
He was working as a propulsion engineer for NASA, and his visit to the memorial was rushed — wedged between business meetings.
“It’s so different now,” Marlin said. “You never get to savor it and just take it all in.”
Joyce rubbed his back affectionately.
They talked about the Washington marches and protests they’d seen on television over the decades and about the marches and clashes over the past year. About the ups and downs of the nation and the ups and downs in their own life.
It was good to have the time to think about it all in Lincoln’s presence.
Punching slavery
Students from the Potomac School participate in a scavenger hunt devised by their history teachers. (Michael Robinson Chavez/The Washington Post)
Inside the memorial, dozens of seventh-graders from the Potomac School rushed to finish a scavenger hunt devised by their history teachers.
Clutching a clipboard and their four-page assignment, three girls from the private school in Northern Virginia carefully counted the steps from the Reflecting Pool to Lincoln’s statue.
“Eighty-seven,” Taylor Shen, 13, concluded. “Wait, why’s that significant?”
“Ooooh, four score and seven years,” said her friend Grayson Crittenberger, also 13, jotting it down.
They wrote down the number of columns: “36, which symbolizes the states there were at the time” of Lincoln’s death on April 15,1865.
They went to the wall inscribed with the Gettysburg Address and picked out three phrases particularly meaningful to them. Then they moved onto the man himself.
The girls just stood for a while, staring at the giant figure seated before them. The assignment said to list six things they noticed about Lincoln’s likeness.
“I dunno, he looks pretty serious?” said Chiara Mizzo.
The Lincoln Memorial, a place of protests, tourists, famous movie scenes and more, attracts about 8 million visitors in a normal year. (Michael Robinson Chavez/The Washington Post)
“He looks like he’s in charge, like he knows he’s the man,” Taylor replied. “And he’s wearing formal attire. That’s something, right?”
“One of his hands looks like it’s curling into a fist, like he’s about to punch slavery in the mouth,” Chiara said, giggling.
Grayson studied the expression on his face and suddenly recalled something she’d heard on another field trip.
“The reason he’s squinting is he’s, like, looking forward into the future, the future of the nation.”
“Whoa!" the other two girls exclaimed, as they scribbled it down. "Good one!”
Emory Springs, a sixth-grader at Benjamin Tasker Middle School in Bowie, Md., recites words from Abraham Lincoln's "House Divided" speech. (Michael Robinson Chavez/The Washington Post)
The lectern had been set up by National Park Service rangers so school kids from the Washington region could deliver historical speeches. But as soon as Sephora Grey spotted it, the 24-year-old Georgetown Law Center graduate, clad in her black-and-purple cap and gown, commandeered it for a photo op.
Grey, who mentors younger students and has a podcast where she interviews successful African American women in law, can envision herself “giving speeches to hundreds of thousands of people, like many before have done here.”
At 11 a.m., a ranger clicked on the microphone.
Then Emory Springs, 12, a sixth-grader at Benjamin Tasker Middle School in Bowie, Md., approached.
“A house divided against itself cannot stand,” she declared, her voice rolling down the steps to the Reflecting Pool. “I believe that this government cannot endure permanently half-slave and half-free.”
It was Lincoln’s powerful “House Divided” speech, delivered in 1858 during his unsuccessful bid for the Senate. His opponent, Stephen A. Douglas, wanted to stick with the status quo, each state choosing its slaveholding status. Lincoln prophesied boldly — and correctly — this was no longer possible.
“I do not expect the Union to be dissolved,” Emory continued. "I do not expect the house to fall. But I do expect it will cease to be divided.”
She was polished in a royal blue blazer and long neat braids. And she was already ambitious, with plans to go to UCLA and become a psychiatrist to “help people with mental struggles.” But she was also nervous, not just because she had to go first, but also because she was delivering a Lincoln speech at the Lincoln Memorial.
“I kind of felt like he was watching over me when I was presenting,” she said later, “because he was right behind me.”
The fun rangers
A park ranger stands in front of the Lincoln Memorial, which receives thousands of visitors each day. (Michael Robinson Chavez/The Washington Post)
First things first: You are not to touch Mr. Lincoln.
Admire or equivocate, behold in reverie or with suspicion. Sit on the steps, if you must, and follow his marble gaze toward the troubled heart of American democracy. But don’t touch, don’t pat, don’t rub his feet for luck — and most certainly don’t do what a visitor now proposed to Park Service ranger David Smithey.
“I want to sit in his lap,” she said.
“You do not want to go to the D.C. jail,” Smithey, 50, replied with a tight smile.
Lauren DeVore, his co-worker, stared at him from beneath the broad brim of her hat.
“You speaking from experience?” she asked.
This is life for park rangers on the Mall. In the argot of the Park Service, they are interpretive rangers — or, as they like to put it, the fun rangers, not the gun rangers.
They would rather be explaining the historical minutiae of Ford’s Theatre or the World War II Memorial than deterring would-be Lincoln Memorial alpinists. During the noon hour, they were in their element, handing out maps and junior ranger badges beneath a green tent below the memorial. There was even a miniature statue of the seated Lincoln, for anyone particularly obsessed with touching his likeness.
For the memorial’s centennial, the rangers were trying to tell people about some of the civil rights history attached to the site. Smithey was particularly animated in discussing Anderson, the Black contralto who performed to an audience of 75,000 at the memorial in 1939 after the Daughters of the American Revolution refused to let her sing in Constitution Hall.
[‘She sang with her eyes closed’: The concert at the Lincoln Memorial that changed America]
“Are these free?” one man asked, holding up a laminated card with Anderson’s photo on it.
A volunteer with the Old Glory Honor Flight organization photographs a group of Vietnam veterans as they visit the Lincoln Memorial. (Michael Robinson Chavez/The Washington Post)
“Oh, no,” Smithey said.
DeVore, 34, hailed a crowd of Old Glory Honor Flight veterans as they swept past the tent toward the memorial. Among them was Jim Bricco, 75, from Wisconsin.
“I’ve been here before,” Bricco said. “In 1968.”
Back then, Bricco was serving in the Old Guard at Arlington National Cemetery. The memorial, of course, was there, but in his telling, the rangers were not. Nobody stopped Bricco as he climbed up Lincoln’s gangly stone legs.
The young serviceman did not sit in Lincoln’s lap. But he did dangle for a while on his knee.
Skateboard skeptic
George Washington graduates Bryce Lawson, left, and roommate Sam Linder pose for pictures at the Lincoln Memorial. (Astrid Riecken for The Washington Post)
It was the warmest point of the day when Bryce Lawson and Sam Linder rolled up on colorful big-wheeled skateboards wearing business suits.
The newly minted alumni of George Washington University had visited Lincoln’s hallowed lair often throughout college, and they referred to the Mall as GW’s “backyard.”
On this day, the roommates were there to take graduation portraits, propping their skateboards behind the memorial’s pillars.
Like many African Americans born long after the civil rights era, Lawson doesn’t necessarily revere Lincoln as a hero. Still, the 22-year-old from Atlanta acknowledged that many Black people, especially older ones, put him on a pedestal for a reason.
“Out of the presidents, even my grandparents will say ‘He’s the one.’ He’s the one who invokes freedom,” said Lawson, as he stood at the back of the memorial in a black suit and crisp white shirt, the red and white stole of his Black fraternity, Kappa Alpha Psi, draped across his broad shoulders.
But his own view of the role the president played during the Civil War and in ending slavery is more critical.
"Lincoln was in no way a prophet or a savior,” he said.
And yet Lincoln’s command of the Mall — a space that has been the stage for key moments in the long march toward Black freedom — is singular, Lawson and Linder agreed.
Tourists can read the many inscriptions on the walls while visiting the memorial. (Astrid Riecken for The Washington Post)
Linder, who is White and from Newton Mass., recalls his grandparents sharing what it was like to be present in 1963 as King thundered his “I Have A Dream" speech from the memorial’s steps.
“They told me that the outpouring of love and happiness was incredible,” Linder said. He credits Lincoln with “putting us on a path ... but there is still a lot more we need to do before there is equality for everyone.”
The photos all taken, the friends took a fleeting last look at Lincoln in his shaded majesty. Then they mounted their skateboards and zoomed away.
Visitors gather on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, where Martin Luther King delivered his "I Have A Dream" speech in 1963. (Bonnie Jo Mount/The Washington Post)
“Don’t let dehydration ruin your vacation!”
Troy Shells was shouting the pitch over and over from the base of the memorial, where he stood next to two coolers brimming with Gatorades, sodas and bottles of water.
The deal: Two dollars for a bottle of water. Four bucks for a Coke or a Gatorade.
But most people weren’t buying. Maybe it was the arrival of clouds and cooling temperatures. Or the fact that the prices reflected quite the markup.
Shells, a 19-year-old from Northeast D.C., said he and a few friends hawk drinks at the Lincoln and around the Mall almost every day in the summer.
On a good day, he claimed he could sell several hundred dollars of drinks. On a bad day, he said, police officers hassle them about needing permission.
“How are you doing today, sir?” he asked one man.
“Fine,” said the man, who darted off.
“Ice cold drinks you guys!” he said to one group of students.
They ignored him.
An elderly woman negotiated three bottles of water for three dollars.
“Thank you, sweetheart,” she told Shells.
He smiled. Staring up at Lincoln every day, he said, can be inspiring.
He wants to start his own business some day. “I want to make money," he said. “Be my own boss.”
By 5 p.m., with rain drops falling, Shells cut his prices in half. “Happy hour!” he declared.
Wedding sprint
Karen De Waal and Christaan De Waal "take it all in" with a photo at the Lincoln Memorial on their wedding day. (Bonnie Jo Mount/The Washington Post)
There was just 20 minutes until Karen De Waal and her husband of one hour, Christiaan, were supposed to arrive at their reception. Most of their marriage thus far had been spent stuck in traffic. But there was one photo worth hurtling out of the limo.
In a Princess Diana-replica tiara, a bedazzled wedding gown and three-inch heels, Karen started sprinting.
“We have to see Lincoln!” she called.
On this day exactly two years before, she had been sitting on a bench in Judiciary Square, alone, when she noticed a man smiling at her. It was May 2020, and she’d been desperate to get out of her apartment. She didn’t plan on introducing herself to a total stranger.
But here she was, saying hi.
Soon they were walking the Mall together, learning the basics of each other’s lives: Christiaan was 38 and worked for the Dutch Embassy. Karen was 41 and worked for Homeland Security. Lincoln was 98 and watching them from a distance.
His monument was everything Karen loved about Washington: The grandeur! The history! She’d just moved back to D.C. after four years abroad. Four years in which her fantasy of a whirlwind international romance never materialized. She’d all but given up on dating, and then the pandemic had settled it for her. She was just going to be one of those people who didn’t find love.
But here she was, giving Christiaan her number.
Their first walk led to another, just as friends. Then came a date at Gravelly Point. A widening of their covid bubbles. A binge watching of “The Crown.”
He was a “go with the flow” guy. Her every moment was scheduled on Outlook.
She was a minimalist who avoided carbs. His kitchen was overflowing with gadgets, especially the ones for making pasta.
But here she was, devouring his lasagna.
Here he was, practicing being on time.
And when she surprised him on Christmas morning with a ring from Tiffany’s, he bought her one to match.
Now they were at the top of the famous steps, catching their breath between the columns.
“Why don’t you just take moment,” their photographer suggested. “Take it all in.”
Karen grabbed Christiaan’s hand. They turned toward each other. The pandemic still wasn’t over. A war had started with no end in sight. America felt nearly as divided as in Lincoln’s era.
But here they were, together.
“Let’s do it baby,” Karen said. The camera clicked.
There are no nights off for the Great Emancipator, when he is most regal. (Bonnie Jo Mount/The Washington Post)
The golden hour had arrived, and with it, hundreds of celebrating graduates. But few had made their way to the back side of Lincoln’s cathedral, a haven of serenity on the edge of the Mall’s chaos.
Here on the western wall, a space frequented mostly by locals, three young women popped the cork on a bottle of sparkling rosé, a couple passed a joint back and forth and two friends sharing carrot cake peered into the blanket of purple clouds depriving them of a sunset.
Nearby, Araceli Ciriaco, a 22-year-old au pair, wrote in her journal. She’d moved to D.C. from Argentina just two months ago, but she looked like someone who had been coming to the Lincoln for years. Phoebe Bridgers played on her headphones as she sipped mate, a loose-leaf tea from her homeland.
Ciriaco knew nothing about the man whose statue stood in the building behind her, but she appreciated the respite he offered on her nights off.
Aubrielle Cuccuini and Sara Salinas toast to their upcoming graduation from American University's College of Law on the back side of the Lincoln Memorial, a space frequented mostly by locals. (Bonnie Jo Mount/The Washington Post)
Lincoln, of course, never got a night off, and that was especially true on this one. Like a tide reaching its peak, darkness brought with it hordes of school groups, running, pointing, posing. No one could blame them, though. The Great Emancipator is at his most regal at night, when the lights flicker on and a pair of deep, dark shadows settle upon his eyes.
It was just then that Jamal Alexis arrived, wading through the throng with two of his friends.
Alexis, 32, thought he’d never see this place in person. He’s from Houston but had been working on an oil rig in Delaware. On their last day up north, the men took an impromptu trip to D.C., and there was nothing Alexis wanted to see more than Lincoln.
Alexis, who is Black, knew that such a moment with his friends, who are White, might not have been possible without the man behind him.
“This is me giving my thanks to him,” Alexis said, and when he was done, he headed down the stairs, passing through a new crowd headed up, toward the glow beyond the columns.
Story editing by Lynda Robinson. Photo editing by Mark Miller. Copy editing by Thomas Heleba. Design and development by Talia Trackim.
Lizzie Johnson is an enterprise reporter at The Washington Post and the author of "Paradise: One Town's Struggle to Survive an American Wildfire." Twitter Twitter
By William Wan
William Wan is an enterprise reporter focused on narrative and high-impact stories at The Washington Post. He often writes about mental health and people on society's margin. He previously served as a national health reporter during the pandemic, China correspondent, roving U.S. national correspondent, foreign policy reporter and religion reporter. Twitter Twitter
Gillian Brockell is a staff writer for The Washington Post's history blog, Retropolis. She has been at The Post since 2013 and previously worked as a video editor. Twitter Twitter
Peter Jamison is a reporter for The Washington Post's local enterprise team. Twitter Twitter
By Sydney Trent
Sydney Trent has been a journalist at The Washington Post since 1999. Most recently, she was Senior Editor/Social Issues, supervising award-winning coverage of religion, gender, poverty and other topics. In this role, she ran coverage of the 2013 inauguration of Barack Obama and Pope Francis' U.S. papal visit in 2015. Twitter Twitter
Ian Shapira is a features writer on the local enterprise team. Twitter Twitter
By Jessica Contrera
Jessica Contrera is a reporter on The Washington Post's local enterprise team. She writes about people whose lives are being transformed by the major events and issues in the news. Twitter Twitter
John Woodrow Cox is an enterprise reporter at The Washington Post. He is the author of Children Under Fire: An American Crisis and was a finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize in feature writing. Twitter Twitter | 2022-05-29T11:06:13Z | www.washingtonpost.com | After 100 years, Lincoln Memorial still beckons a nation divided - Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/interactive/2022/lincoln-memorial-100th-anniversary/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/interactive/2022/lincoln-memorial-100th-anniversary/ |
Fifty years ago, the nation was gripped by media coverage of Nixon’s crimes — and there was no Fox News to tell it to look away.
Richard M. Nixon waves goodbye while departing the White House on Aug. 9, 1974 after resigning the presidency over the Watergate scandal. (Chick Harrity/AP)
You’ll be hearing a lot about Watergate in the next several weeks, as the 50th anniversary of the infamous June 17, 1972, burglary at the Democratic National Committee headquarters approaches. There will be documentaries, cable-news debates, the finale of that Julia Roberts miniseries (“Gaslit”) based on the popular Watergate podcast (“Slow Burn”). I’ll be moderating a panel discussion at the Library of Congress on the anniversary itself — and you can certainly count on a few retrospectives in this very newspaper.
The scandal has great resonance at The Washington Post, which won a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 1973 for its intrepid reporting and the courage it took to publish it. And it has particular meaning for me because, like many others of my generation, I was first drawn into journalism by the televised Senate hearings in 1973, and was enthralled by the 1976 movie “All the President’s Men,” based on the book by Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.
“The national newspapers mattered in a way that is unimaginable to us today, and even the regional newspapers were incredibly strong,” Garrett Graff, author of “Watergate: A New History,” told me last week. I have been immersed in his nearly 800-page history — a “remarkably rich narrative,” former Post executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr. called it in a review — that sets out to retell the entire story.
A 7-hour gap in Trump’s calls evokes a missing spot on Nixon’s tapes
Graff depicts Watergate not as a singular event but as the entire mind-set of the Nixon presidency — “a shaggy umbrella of a dozen distinct scandals,” as he told me. By the time the break-in captured the attention of the most Americans, they were essentially “walking into the second or third act of a play.”
Americans read this coverage in their local papers; many cities still had two or more dailies at that point. Later, they were riveted by the proceedings of the Senate Watergate Committee, whose hearings were aired live on the three big television networks during the summer of 1973. Graff reports that the average American household watched 30 hours of the hearings, which were also rebroadcast at night by PBS. (“The best thing that has happened to public television since ‘Sesame Street,’” one Los Angeles Times TV critic noted.)
Still, “we forget how close Nixon came to surviving Watergate,” Graff told me. “Even at the end of the hearings, there was no guarantee that Nixon was out of office.”
What changed that? The increasing public awareness of the president’s wrongdoing and the coverup. “The sheer accumulation of the lies,” he said, “at a time when the idea that a president could lie to America was unthinkable.”
Flash-forward to today. The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection will hold hearings beginning early next month, some of which will be televised during prime-time hours. Rep. Jamie Raskin, the Maryland Democrat who is a prominent member, predicts the revelations will “blow the roof off the House” — offering evidence, he promises, of an organized coup attempt involving Trump, his closest allies and the supporters who attacked the Capitol as they tried to overturn the 2020 presidential election results.
Our media environment is far more fractured, and news organizations are far less trusted.
And in part, we can blame the rise of a right-wing media system. At its heart is Fox News, which was founded in 1996, nearly a quarter century after the break-in, with a purported mission to provide a “fair and balanced” counterpoint to the mainstream media. Of course, that message often manifested in relentless and damaging criticism of its news rivals. Meanwhile, Fox and company have served as a highly effective laundry service for Trump’s lies. With that network’s help, his tens of thousands of false or misleading claims have found fertile ground among his fervent supporters — oblivious to the skillful reporting elsewhere that has called out and debunked those lies.
As Graff sees it, the growth of right-wing media has enabled many Republican members of Congress to turn a blind eye to the malfeasance of Team Trump. Not so during the Watergate investigation; after all, it was Sen. Howard Baker, the Tennessee Republican, who posed the immortal question, “What did the President know and when did he know it?” Even the stalwart conservative Sen. Barry Goldwater of Arizona was among those who, at the end, managed to convince Nixon that he must resign.
Not everything was good about the media world of the 1970s. It was almost entirely white and male, barely open to other views or voices. This was long before the democratizing effect of the Internet, which has elevated the ideas of people of color, women and other marginalized groups.
Richard M. Nixon’s presidency would have survived. | 2022-05-29T11:45:26Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Why the press will never have another Watergate moment - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/media/2022/05/29/media-watergate-50-trump-journalism-fox/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/media/2022/05/29/media-watergate-50-trump-journalism-fox/ |
The shortage of specialists is driving many to try alternative methods. What the science says about their effectiveness.
By Andrea Atkins
The meditation room at Glenstone, a private contemporary art museum in Potomac, Md. (Goran Kosanovic for The Washington Post)
In mid-2021, a crisis with her husband prompted Lillie Marshall, 40, of Boston to look for a couples’ therapist. Although she contacted more than 40 practitioners, she could not find one to counsel them. She was in “utter misery,” she said, and tried to ease her mental anguish with daily walks, meditation, writing, drawing and reiki.
As more people seek counseling, pandemic-stressed Americans are discovering that it’s not easy to find a therapist.
“The pandemic exploded the demand for therapy,” said Seth Arkush, a New Jersey psychotherapist who runs a multi-city center that integrates alternative therapies into its mental health services. “People are on waiting lists. I have no availability for new clients because all my therapists are booked. So, I’m hiring new therapists.”
That’s not surprising given reports that 280 million people worldwide are suffering from depression.
In 2020, as the pandemic took hold, nearly a third of Americans showed signs of clinical depression or anxiety or both. That's not normal
If you are waiting to connect with a therapist, what can you do in the meantime?
“You can do what a therapist would probably tell you to do anyway: Mindfulness practices,” said Arkush, referring to a form of meditation that gets people to focus on the here and now without being judgmental. “You’re not going to gain any great understanding of what is causing your feelings — that’s what a therapist does. But you’ll increase your ability to cope.”
What does science say about mindfulness and other alternative practices? There seems to be good evidence that some can help; for others, not so much. James Lake, founding member and former chair of the American Psychiatric Association’s caucus on complementary and alternative medicine, said these techniques are most effective for people suffering “mild to moderate” mental health symptoms.
Here’s a run-through of what research so far has shown.
Its benefits for improving mood and mental health symptoms have been cited in many studies. It is considered particularly helpful in managing anxiety and for those experiencing depression.
Exercise boosts the brain — and mental health
“In a nutshell, there is no better pill for mental health than exercise,” said Eli Puterman, associate professor of physical activity and health at the University of British Columbia. “Exercise increases endorphins, serotonin, endocannabinoids, and brain-derived neurotrophic factor [BDNF] that each provide a different neurological and mental benefit. For example, endocannabinoid increases have been linked to calmer mood states, endorphins and serotonin to elevated mood, and BDNF to better plasticity and memory formation. In combination, they likely create a better mood and cognitive state to tackle everyday stressors and major life events.”
It doesn’t have to be a lot of exercise, either, said Jennifer Heisz, author of “Move the Body, Heal the Mind: Overcome Anxiety, Depression, and Dementia and Improve Focus, Creativity, and Sleep,” and director of the NeuroFit Lab at McMaster University in Canada.
“Our research shows that three 30-minute bouts of moderate exercise is enough to prevent stress-induced depression,” Heisz says, adding that the effects last for more than an hour after the exercise ends. Whether you walk, do yoga or ride your bike, you feel better, Heisz said, because the body releases Neuropeptide Y after moderate to light exercise, and “it protects the brain from trauma.”
You don’t have to go all out, either. Another study by Heisz shows moderate exercisers fared best.
Meditation, deep breathing
These related techniques offer a simple way to address symptoms, Arkush said. It’s not a do-it-once-and-feel-better practice, however, and effectiveness will depend on what you’re experiencing — depression, anxiety or some other condition.
A meta-analysis showed that regular meditation slightly reduces depressive symptoms. Yet another study showed that a sustained practice of deep breathing could reduce the release of the stress hormone cortisol, which means that you may be able to better manage anxious situations.
How does meditation compare to other “relaxation techniques?” A 2019 meta-analysis concluded that meditation may be more effective than other relaxation methods for anxiety treatment. Over time, meditation can reduce the size of the amygdala, the area of the brain activated by fear and stress, which could lead to improved mental health.
“Deep breathing is so calming because it activates the vagus nerve, which sends a message to the brain that it is time to rest and de-stress,” Heisz said. “The science is really strong about that.”
Trauma informed yoga
Designed for people who’ve experienced trauma, trauma informed yoga (TIY) aims to restore a sense of control to those who’ve lost theirs. “Trauma is stored in the body, and trauma is all about loss of voice, choice, agency and power, coupled with terror,” Arkush said.
In traditional yoga, the teacher determines the poses, breathing, rest and pace, said Molly Boeder Harris, founder of the Breathe Network (TheBreatheNetwork.org), a group that works with survivors of sexual trauma. “In trauma informed yoga, the teacher lets students know that they are in control of their experience and will offer much more flexibility — giving you choices about what poses you want to do, how deep into them you want to go and getting consent when it comes to being touched.”
While some studies have shown improvement in depressive symptoms for those who have practiced TIY, randomized control trials haven’t proved its benefits. A recent meta analysis failed to support the method’s effectiveness, but the research is still emerging, said Matthew Vasquez, associate professor of social work at the University of Northern Iowa and one of the study’s co-authors.
“For whatever reasons, the studies looked at 12 weeks of TIY,” Vasquez said. “We need studies that look at what happens after six months or 12 months.”
Why ‘trauma-informed’ care is spreading from the therapist’s office to yoga classes and tattoo parlors
Vasquez added that by itself, TIY will not resolve trauma for those who have experienced it. “That’s not really the purpose. The purpose is reacquainting yourself with your body in a safe way.” he said.
Writing about your deepest feelings can be effective for people with depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, obsessive thoughts and other conditions, said James W. Pennebaker, Regents centennial professor of liberal arts at the University of Texas at Austin and author of several books, including “Writing to Heal: A Guided Journal for Recovering From Trauma & Emotional Upheval.”
“Writing helps to organize experiences, to understand them and to get through them in a sense,” he said. “The research on this is voluminous — there have been well over 2,000 papers on expressive writing.”
If people write about an upsetting experience even a few times, Pennebaker said, “it helps reduce ruminations, allows people to sleep and to clear their mind.”
Practicing gratitude
Focusing on your blessings can offer mental health benefits for some people, said Joel Wong, professor of counseling psychology at the Indiana University School of Education.
In a study by Wong, people experiencing anxiety or depression were divided into three groups: one received therapy only, a second got therapy plus three sessions writing about their thoughts and feelings about stressful experiences, and the third got therapy plus three opportunities to write letters of gratitude to people who had made a difference in their lives.
Three months later, those who had written gratitude letters experienced the greatest mental health gains.
I was an unhappy person. Here’s how I started peeling away my layers of anger.
“Gratitude displaces the negative emotions that we have,” Wong said. “When you turn your attention to those who have blessed you, it unshackles the toxic emotions we sometimes get mired in.” If you can’t write a full-blown letter of gratitude to someone who helped you, Wong said, “a shorter note or text — just two or three sentences — can be meaningful.” Even writing two or three things you’re grateful for each day in a journal can help, he says.
While Wong’s study is small, and not definitive, some other small studies have shown promising results. But counting your blessings may not work for everyone — or for very long.
“There’s evidence that gratitude intervention can have an impact on symptoms of depression and anxiety, but the effects are usually small,” said Laurie Santos, Yale University psychology professor.
As marijuana becomes more accessible across the country, many are turning to CBD products to relieve mental health symptoms. But a recent Lancet study found “scarce” evidence to back the practice. CBD, derived from the cannabis plant but without THC, the psychoactive ingredient that causes people to feel “high,” did not reduce anxiety, depression, PTSD or mental health symptoms, according to the study.
Is the hype about CBD, or cannabidiol, real?
Thersilla Oberbarnscheidt, an assistant professor of psychiatry at the University Pittsburgh Western Psychiatric Hospital with a PhD in neuroscience, who did an extensive literature review on the subject, said she found “the claim that [CBD] is actually good for anxiety is based on subjective reports and public opinion and not yet based on scientific evidence.”
She said that because CBD products are in a murky regulatory place, consumers cannot be sure of what they are getting and at what dose. “I can’t say it absolutely doesn’t work, but to make the statement that it’s therapeutic, we need more research studies showing it,” Oberbarnscheidt said.
Inserting small needles in the scalp or along the ears shows “moderate evidence” for alleviating mental health symptoms, said Lake, but he doesn’t rate it as a top-tier approach to addressing depression, anxiety or other symptoms. There are few studies that endorse acupuncture for that: NIH’s National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH) said that acupuncture can help manage physical pain in certain cases, but that not enough evidence exists to show it can help with depression.
“There is not a lot of scientific evidence for the use of acupuncture as a sole treatment for depression,” said Sharon Jennings-Rojas, chair of the Department of Acupuncture and Herbal Medicine at the Maryland University of Integrative Health. But it might be worth trying while waiting for a therapist to fit you in; she added, however, that acupuncture “does not in any way” replace psychiatric treatment.
Reiki practitioners say they move energy through the body: Barely touching their subjects, reiki masters are said to “channel energy” to the recipient, which supposedly allows them to take what their body needs for healing, according to a description by the NCCIH.
As for science — there is not much. According to the NCCIH, most studies of reiki have not been “high quality” and have produced inconsistent results. And some researchers argue that further tests on reiki would be a waste of time because it is pseudoscience.
Reiki goes mainstream: Spiritual touch practice now commonplace in hospitals
Still, some researchers said it might work as an alternative therapy just as a placebo that may help some who believe it will.
“The way I see it is that the placebo effect is a powerful thing,” said Emily Anhalt, clinical psychologist and co-founder of Coa, a gym for mental health in San Francisco and New York. “Perhaps there’s something to be said for another human caring for you, being present for you. If that alone is helpful to you, then great.”
These techniques are most effective for people suffering “mild to moderate” mental health symptoms, California psychiatrist James Lake said. But if you cannot function at work or school, or if your relationship is suffering, or you are thinking about killing yourself or hurting someone else, then seek help at an emergency room, Lake said. | 2022-05-29T11:54:09Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Will exercise, meditation or reiki help if you can’t find a therapist? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/05/29/alternative-therapies-mental-health/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/05/29/alternative-therapies-mental-health/ |
The original Lincoln memorial stands forgotten in D.C.'s Judiciary Square
By Jason Emerson
The original Lincoln Monument, seen from City Hall. (Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division)
People from across the country came to the Mall last weekend for an early celebration of the centennial of the Lincoln Memorial, which turns 100 on Monday. Barely more than two miles away, the original Lincoln memorial stood lonely and ignored in Judiciary Square.
That monument, erected in 1868, is the oldest surviving public statue of Abraham Lincoln in the United States. Many consider it the best likeness of the Great Emancipator ever made in marble. The statue’s history is a story of survival: removed twice, renovated twice, damaged multiple times, abandoned for two years and replaced after a president’s intervention — yet still it stands, the tribute of the residents of the capital city to its fallen president.
“The statue forms a personal testimonial of those who knew and loved Lincoln and contains more sentiment than any other statue in the city of Washington,” said U.S. Rep. Edward J. King of Illinois in 1920, as he and others fought to restore the statue to its place in front of the D.C. courthouse after its removal the year before.
“It is a better likeness of Lincoln than anything in plaster, stone, marble, or bronze that I have ever seen, and I have seen about all that have ever been made,” artist Freeman Thorp said in 1921. “Some have been made that unquestionably are great works of art, but the best of them are not accurate likenesses of him. This one is to those who, like myself, knew Lincoln, pleasing to look at because it is accurately modeled, and in its simple truth is in keeping with the unassuming man we loved.”
As reporter George Kennedy stated in 1953, “The stone figure in front of the courthouse is a bit of the real Lincoln.”
The birth of a monument
Just nine days after Lincoln’s death on April 15, 1865, the Washington city council introduced a resolution to create a committee to “devise measures for the erection of a monument in the City of Washington to the memory of the late President Lincoln.” The resolution was approved, and the Lincoln National Monument Association (NLMA) was formed to carry out the task.
As implied by the association’s name, the monument was to be national and grandiose in scope, paid for by donations from U.S. citizens. Similar associations popped up in cities and states across the country, however, and the NLMA’s fundraising effort fell far short of its goals, with almost all the donations coming from D.C. residents. One of the few donations from outside Washington was an $1,800 contribution from John T. Ford, the former owner of Ford’s Theatre, where Lincoln had been shot.
Ultimately, the NLMA raised just $7,000. So the plan changed from a national monument to a local one from D.C. residents. The size and scope were scaled down, and artists were encouraged to submit proposals.
The committee selected a proposal by D.C. sculptor and marble worker Lot Flannery. Flannery was actually in the audience at Ford’s Theatre the night Lincoln was shot. (He was also called to be a juror in the trial of Lincoln assassination conspirator John H. Surratt in June 1867, but he told the court he had already formed an opinion of the case, so he was dismissed.)
Flannery’s design for the Lincoln Monument was for a 36-foot-high memorial made of white Italian marble, with an eight-foot statue of the president on a four-foot pedestal atop an 18-foot column upon a six-foot octagonal base, all surrounded by an iron railing. The statue represented Lincoln standing, as though giving a speech, with his right arm slightly extended and his index finger pointing, while the left hand rests on a fasces (a bundle of sticks bound with a ribbon of stars, a Roman symbol of leadership).
“We have conversed with those who knew Mr. Lincoln best, both of this city and of Springfield, and they are unanimous in the opinion that Mr. Flannery’s statue is the most faithful likeness of our martyred President ever produced by an artist’s chisel,” the National Republican newspaper declared.
The location selected for the monument was in front of the Washington City Hall (today the District of Columbia Court of Appeals), at the intersection of 4½ Street NW and Indiana and Louisiana avenues. It placed the Great Emancipator in front of a building that was once a slave market and, for 90 days in 1862, the site where city enslavers could request compensation for freeing their enslaved people, as directed under the city abolition law signed by Lincoln that April.
“To be seen by generations long to come”
Exactly three years after Lincoln’s assassination, on April 15, 1868, an estimated 20,000 people gathered in front of the city hall to witness the monument’s dedication. All federal and municipal offices were closed, as were city schools, and flags flew at half-mast, while cannons boomed every half-hour. According to newspaper reports, people filled the streets, rooftops, windows and even treetops. Thousands of the city’s Black residents, mostly formerly enslaved, also showed up to honor Lincoln (although they had to stand behind the monument and the speakers’ platform).
The platform held 400 dignitaries. President Andrew Johnson presided, but no members of the House or Senate were present, since they were required to attend Johnson’s impeachment trial.
After a parade to city hall, the event started with a prayer and music from the 12th infantry band. The main speaker was Benjamin Brown French, commissioner of public buildings under Lincoln.
Statue of Mary McLeod Bethune, civil rights pioneer, coming to U.S. Capitol
“Here it stands, as it were, in the plaza of the city; and here it will stand, we hope, to be seen by generations long to come,” French said.
Johnson pulled a cord to uncover the statue. Every head tilted upward to see the life-size image of Lincoln more than 30 feet in the air, and “vociferous cheers” came from the crowd.
When asked later why he put Lincoln’s statue upon an 18-foot pedestal, Flannery told the Baltimore Sun, “I resolved and did place it so high that no assassin’s hand could ever again strike him down.”
Removal, return and rededication
For 51 years, this statue stood in front of the old city hall. It was the second public statue of Lincoln in the United States; the first, made of bronze, was erected in San Francisco in 1867 and destroyed by the Great Fire in 1906.
But in late 1919, the city courthouse and grounds were set to be remodeled, and the U.S. Fine Arts Commission recommended the Lincoln Monument be taken down.
Col. Clarence S. Ridley, director of the Office of Public Buildings and Grounds, told The Washington Post that the statue “interferes with the architectural beauty of the courthouse on account of its position and general design,” and that it was “out of alignment” with the plans for improving the courthouse, namely because it was too tall and it was not in line with the center of the courthouse building.
The plan was to dismantle the monument and move the pieces to the government propagating gardens south of the Washington Monument, where they would stay until “otherwise disposed of.” Some ideas of where to move the statue included the ruins of Fort Stevens, where Lincoln came under fire during the Civil War, the campus of Howard University and Nancy Hanks Lincoln Park in Indiana.
Reports of the statue’s impending removal caused barely a stir in Washington. But once the monument was actually taken down over the course of a month, a firestorm of public vitriol quickly led to congressional hearings.
Haiti paid reparations to enslavers. So did Washington, D.C., under Lincoln.
During the hearings in April 1920, it was revealed that the monument, once removed, was not placed in the government propagating gardens, but was unceremoniously discarded in the courthouse basement.
The next year, newly inaugurated President Warren G. Harding said that he favored restoring the statue in front of the courthouse. Artist Freeman Thorp gave the sentiment further impetus when he found the displaced monument — not in the courthouse basement, but lying outdoors, roughly crated, by the banks of the Tidal Basin behind the old bureau of engraving.
Finally, in October 1923, Flannery’s statue, cleaned of three years of weathering, was re-erected on the concrete plaza at the foot of the southern entrance to the courthouse — just a few feet north of its original location. (Unfortunately, it was damaged on its way there: One of Lincoln’s coat lapels broke off.)
Shortly after its return, Associate Justice Wendell Phillips Stafford of the Supreme Court of the District of Columbia, whose courtroom overlooked the monument, wrote a poem titled “The Courthouse Lincoln Speaks”:
Well, here I am once more in my old place,
I’m rather glad; I like old things—
Old clothes to wear, old neighbors and old books,
And truth and justice, oldest things of all.
A rededication ceremony for the Lincoln Monument, with an oration by Harding, was scheduled for April 15, 1923. This date is engraved on the monument itself, although incorrect. The event was moved to June 21, 1923, because a new marble pedestal was not yet completed, but for unknown reasons, no ceremony ever occurred. The monument was simply put back in place.
For the next 86 years, Lincoln stood vigil in front of the courthouse. In 1929, he lost some fingers from his right hand to the vibrations of heavy traffic around him. Years later, he lost more fingers to multiple acts of vandalism. Ultimately, the entire right hand fell off and had to be reconstructed. (Today, if you look closely, you can see the hand is a bit too large compared to the rest of the statue.)
In 2006, the Lincoln Monument was put in storage again due to renovations to the courthouse behind it. It was replaced and rededicated on Feb. 15, 2009 — exactly 141 years after it was originally installed.
While today the Lincoln Memorial is the grandest and best-known monument to Lincoln, Flannery’s Lincoln statue in Judiciary Square is arguably more notable as a likeness and for the sentiment with which it was created.
As the National Republican wrote after the 1868 dedication ceremony: “All who visit Washington from our own and foreign lands, may now have the opportunity to look upon the accurately defined lineaments of that great man who served his country in that hour of extremest peril. … Let all who love their country, who venerate a pure life, noble purposes, and heroic deeds, go to the front of our City Hall and gaze upon the beautiful monument upon apex of which stands the marble statue of Abraham Lincoln.”
Jason Emerson is a Lincoln historian and freelance writer. Visit his website at JasonEmerson.com. | 2022-05-29T11:54:15Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The original Lincoln memorial stands forgotten in D.C.'s Judiciary Square - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2022/05/29/original-lincoln-monument-judiciary-square/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2022/05/29/original-lincoln-monument-judiciary-square/ |
Uvalde schools have a safety plan. The shooting showed its limits.
Children run to safety after escaping from a window during a mass shooting at Robb Elementary School where a gunman killed nineteen children and two adults in Uvalde, Texas, on May 24. (Pete Luna/Uvalde Leader-News)
Students and teachers in Uvalde were no strangers to lockdowns. The city is just an hour from the U.S.-Mexico border and, according to a teacher, the schools often went into lockdown when authorities were pursuing someone who had fled custody. They had plenty of practice.
Then there was the school system’s security plan. It was multifaceted, addressing everything from student mental health to the possibility of registered sex offenders coming to campus. The district had its own small police force — unusual for a school system of this size — in addition to armed guards. According to the plan, it also hired a private company that provides gun- and drug-sniffing dogs.
Nearly every school in America has prepared for a shooting, with more than 96 percent of public schools holding active-shooter drills. But the deadly massacre in Uvalde — and other school shootings — shows there are limits to that preparedness. A pricey, multilayered security plan can be undone by something as small as an open door and a school police force can fail to prevent a worst-case scenario.
Some public health experts have concluded that the best way to stop school shootings is to keep guns — and semiautomatic rifles like the one Salvador Ramos had — out of the hands of people intent on killing schoolchildren. But because lawmakers have been reluctant to pass restrictions, it has been left up to schools — and the teachers and children inside them — to figure out how to defend themselves against gunmen who may be more heavily armed than local police officers.
Texas Department of Public Safety Director Steven McCraw offered a more detailed timeline of events in a news conference Friday. leading to questions about why the police waited an hour to breach the classroom doors while desperate students called 911. But it also shed some light on how the school’s security systems failed to stop Ramos, a high school dropout who had purchased the guns not long after his 18th birthday.
According to McCraw, video surveillance shows a teacher propping open an exterior door at 11:27 a.m. May 24. That was right around the time Ramos had crashed a truck into a nearby ditch, and then emerged shooting at bystanders. The teacher then went to their classroom to retrieve a cellphone and at 11:30, though it’s not clear from where, they called 911. Within two minutes, Ramos was firing at the school building, and a school police officer had arrived on the scene.
McCraw did not say what happened to the teacher, but at 11:33 a.m. Ramos had slipped into the school building through the propped open doors. He traveled down a hallway, where he found the classrooms of Irma Garcia and Eva Mireles, a pair of teachers who often co-taught and had adjacent classrooms connected by a bathroom. According to 11-year-old student Miah Cerrillo, who shared her harrowing account with CNN, one teacher went to lock the door but it was too late — the gunman was already there. He said “good night,” and shot her, Miah said.
Ramos was able to pass through both sets of doors despite the district’s security protocol, which calls for schools to lock all exterior doors, and to keep classroom doors closed and locked “at all times.” And even though an officer was on scene by the time he entered the building, lapses by law enforcement meant the gunman was able to lock himself in the classroom for an hour before anyone breached the doors.
School security experts say it’s important to have multilayered approaches to preventing school shooting deaths because no single approach is foolproof.
According to the Uvalde school system’s security plan, it did have such a system that included school counselors, social workers and special “threat assessment teams” intended to evaluate students who appear to be a threat to themselves or others. It’s not clear if Ramos, who had no record of mental illness, had been on the school’s radar.
In the aftermath of a 2018 school shooting in Santa Fe, Tex., that killed 10, state lawmakers passed a raft of laws intended to prevent the kind of bloodshed that unfolded at Robb Elementary School. State records show Uvalde benefited from a $69,000 grant in 2020 to update its security. The district had also doubled its spending on security in the 2019-2020 school year, spending $445,000, though budget documents did not detail how the money was spent.
A school spokeswoman did not respond to a request for comment on the school’s security plan.
After the shooting, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) sought to blame the Uvalde shooting on the fact that the exterior door was unlocked, and argued schools should have only a single entrance — a proposal immediately shot down as impractical by many school officials.
“You want to talk about how we could have prevented the horror that played out across the street?” Cruz said Wednesday in Uvalde. “Look, the killer entered here the same way the killer entered in Santa Fe: through a back door, an unlocked back door.”
Kenneth S. Trump, president of National School Safety and Security Services, said when he does a security assessment at a school, he often finds exterior doors are unlocked. It’s a slip-up that is widespread but also almost never has serious consequences. And when it comes to classroom doors, it can be impractical to keep them closed, with students filtering in and out all day, he said.
“One of the most common complaints we have from the administrators who hire us and bring us in is that they struggle within their own environment to deal with people who are propping open doors,” Trump said.
But it can be a simple but effective tool in minimizing the harm a school shooter can inflict. In school shootings where the killing is indiscriminate, Trump said shooters have in many cases passed by classrooms that were closed and locked.
In the fall of 2017, an elementary school in rural Northern California locked down when staff heard gunshots. A man with an AR-15-style rifle shot through doors and unsuccessfully attempted to open several classroom doors. He was thwarted, and left the school before killing himself. Still, Superintendent Richard Fitzpatrick called for “sensible gun control.”
“We are largely powerless from determined shooters with high-capacity, high-velocity, semi- automatic assault rifles,” he said in a 2018 survey on school shootings by The Washington Post.
Securing school buildings and classrooms does little good for students in courtyards or outside of schools, and it does not help when the threat comes from the inside — from students who arrive at school with guns. It also leaves students in hallways stranded. And in some schools, classroom doors don’t have locks, or need to be left open to cool down rooms that don’t have air conditioning. According to federal data, about 40 percent of schools did not have locks on classroom doors in the 2019-2020 school year.
Jagdish Khubchandani, a public health professor at New Mexico State University, published a paper in 2019 with a colleague that reviewed research on efforts to prevent school shootings. Their survey “failed to find any programs or practices with evidence indicating that they reduced such firearm violence.”
Experts cast doubt on high-tech efforts to stop school shooters
Khubchandani said without meaningful gun control, the cycle of violence, horror and spending on security is unlikely to change.
“This will be never-ending cycle of resource consumption by schools that will have more and more physical engineering because you have more guns than people now,” Khubchandani said. “Where does it end?” | 2022-05-29T11:54:21Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Uvalde school district's security plan ultimately failed to stop shooter - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/05/29/uvalde-school-safety-plan/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/05/29/uvalde-school-safety-plan/ |
Rising water from Hurricane Harvey pushed thousands of people to rooftops or higher ground in Houston on Aug 27, 2017. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has forecast that the coming hurricane season will see 14 to 21 named storms — and three to six Category 3 or above. This would be yet another in a series of abnormal seasons.
Scientists are only just coming to grips with the monster storm seasons of the recent past. The 2020 one brought a record 30 named storms to the North Atlantic, including 12 that hit the United States, causing some $40 billion in damage. A recent study published in the journal Nature Communications finds that climate change made these storms far worse than they would have been without human-caused global warming.
Predicting climate change’s effects on hurricanes has long been controversial. It is unclear, for example, just how rising world temperatures might alter the frequency of these battering storms, a fact that deniers of climate change often cite in their effort to play down its risks. But there is increasingly little doubt that human-caused warming is heating ocean-surface temperatures, which fuel big storms. The result appears to be stronger hurricanes.
Researchers from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Pennsylvania State University and Stony Brook University examined the entire 2020 season, during which human-caused warming increased average North Atlantic sea-surface temperatures by 0.6 degrees Celsius. They mapped out how the hurricane season would have proceeded without climate change and compared it to what happened. The three-hour extreme rainfall rate was 11 percent higher than it would have been absent climate change, they found, and the three-day extreme rainfall accumulation total was 8 percent higher. In other words, the storms dumped more water, and faster.
The study’s authors noted that their results are just one indication that climate change is worsening hurricane strength in a variety of ways. For example, wind speed might also be increasing, they suggested. But just more and more rapid rainfall is enough for concern, as anyone in New Orleans in 2005 or Houston in 2017 could tell you.
No government program or international accord will stop hurricanes from worsening. Humans have already pumped so many greenhouse gas emissions into the air and the world economy is still so dependent on fossil fuels that further warming is inevitable. The task is twofold. First, governments must try to prevent a bad situation from becoming even worse by forcing long-term cuts in polluting fuels, in the hope that warming can be kept under 1.5 degrees Celsius — or at least not too far over that threshold.
Congress must act on major climate legislation. In the meantime, governments must prepare for the impacts that are already in the pipeline. Coastal communities must invest in flood resilient infrastructure that they never needed before. Some will have to make tough choices about what is worth saving and what they will surrender to rising seas and floodwaters. Other areas of the country will need new strategies to cope with vicious storms, droughts and wildfires. Humanity cannot afford to dawdle. | 2022-05-29T11:54:27Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Another monster hurricane season looms as we dawdle on climate change - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/05/29/another-monster-hurricane-season-looms-we-dawdle-climate-change/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/05/29/another-monster-hurricane-season-looms-we-dawdle-climate-change/ |
Distinguished persons of the week: The true pro-life warriors
Fred Guttenberg, whose daughter was killed in the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, speaks during a meeting with Senate Democrats at the U.S. Capitol in March 2018. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
When Americans endure another preventable, horrific mass murder, their hearts turn to the latest victims and their loved ones as well as any survivors whose lives will be irreparably changed. But they should be equally attentive to the families and friends of previous gun violence, who must relive the trauma with each new incident.
In the past few weeks, these individuals have exhibited emotional courage and awe-inspiring resilience. They stand in stark contrast with the spinelessness of politicians who dare not take on the gun lobby to protect innocent lives.
The unimaginable pain of regularly reexperiencing their grief makes their gun safety activism all the more extraordinary. They channel their losses into advocating for reasonable gun reforms through groups such as Moms Demand Action, Gun Owners for Safety (founded by gun victim and former Arizona Democratic representative Gabby Giffords) and Everytown for Gun Safety. Some, such as Rep. Lucy McBath (D-Ga.), run for office to fight for responsible legislation. They serve as witnesses to our collective failure to stem the preventable slaughter of fellow Americans. They remind voters they have agency and a responsibility to protect the vulnerable; they are not passive observers to a political system in the grip of gun fetishizers.
The anguish one hears in the voice of Fred Guttenberg, father of a student murdered at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., in 2018 and now a gun safety activist, should shame those who cynically predict no end to the slaughter. If he and others who have experienced horrific loss can continue to advocate and educate on behalf of victims and future victims, certainly snide pundits, cynical politicians and emotionally exhausted voters can refrain from telling us that “nothing will change.”
“I did not sleep last night," Guttenberg said during a CBS News interview on Wednesday. “So, I am angry. I am sad. I feel broken for all of the families who have lived with gun violence and for families that now join them. I have had enough.”
He went on to denounce politicians such as Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R), who have served the gun lobby at the expense of children’s lives. “They should be fired. They should resign. They made choices that put this country and that state in this place.”
In an interview with MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace, Guttenberg declared, “They . . . f---ing failed our kids again, okay? I’m done. I’ve had it.” He added: “I’m going to listen to that governor of Texas talk about why he pushed . . . for laws in Texas that made it easier for the guns to be had by those who want to kill? How many more times? I don’t — I mean, I’m sorry. I’m speechless. I don’t know what to say.”
There is plenty Americans can say. We can denounce politicians’ moronic suggestions to limit school entry points (not guns) and arm teachers (when police cannot manage to do their jobs competently). We can refuse to countenance the “pro-life” description for people unwilling to put up with the minor inconvenience of universal background checks to diminish the chances of future deaths. We can implore fellow voters to kick out of office the moral cowards who run from reporters or, worse, appear at the NRA’s convention in Texas before the dead children in Uvalde are buried.
To the expanding community of grieving survivors and courageous gun safety advocates, we can say, we hear you, we grieve with you and we promise to do more. | 2022-05-29T11:54:34Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Gun reform activists are the true pro-life activists - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/05/29/distinguished-persons-gun-violence-control-reform-texas-shooting/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/05/29/distinguished-persons-gun-violence-control-reform-texas-shooting/ |
A video recording of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott plays during the National Rifle Association annual convention in Houston on Friday. (Brandon Bell/Getty Images)
Ten days after the Feb. 14, 2018, mass shooting that left 14 students and three staff members dead at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) happened to be in Washington for an annual governors meeting and, like pretty much everyone else in the country, was trying to find some cause for hope.
“The shooting of kids in school — I just think that oftentimes in life there’s some event that is a catalyst to change, and I think this will be a catalyst to change,” Abbott told my colleague Dan Balz and me. “I really do feel that there will be changes and improvements in the way we address this issue going forward.”
Three months before the governor spoke with us that day, in Abbott’s own state, a gunman with a AR-15-style rifle had gone into a Baptist church during Sunday worship in the rural town of Sutherland Springs and fired 700 rounds in 11 minutes, killing 26 people. Still three months in the future was the day that eight students and two teachers would be killed by gunfire at Santa Fe High School near Houston. The alleged shooter, a 17-year-old reported to have used a shotgun and pistol legally owned by his father, was later found mentally incompetent to stand trial.
Now, following the horrific slaughter last week of 19 children and two teachers in yet another Texas town, Abbott once again speaks of lessons learned and changes coming. “Do we expect laws to come out of this devastating crime?” he said Friday, three days after the carnage at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde. “The answer is absolutely yes.”
But it is hard to believe that much will be different this time, especially in my home state of Texas. Officials are talking about the things they usually do: “hardening” schools, improving mental-health care, more vigorous law enforcement. All of that would help, but it’s not enough.
Abbott noted the Uvalde school shooter had a “mental health challenge” and added, “We as a state, we as a society, need to do a better job with mental health.” He said pretty much the same during our interview in 2018, declaring: “It’s time to tackle the tough solution and that is mental health.” But four years later, with Abbott in his eighth year as governor, Texas ranks behind all 50 states and the District of Columbia in access to mental health services, according to the advocacy group Mental Health America.
As for “hardening” schools through such measures as restricting the number of entranceways and installing bulletproof doors and glass — a case often made by those who want to deflect the conversation away from tighter gun laws — Texas has already done that. Or at least, it has claimed to, with a 2019 school safety law that allocated $100 million to those purposes. As the Texas Tribune noted, the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District received a $69,000 grant through that law to enhance the physical security of its schools.
The Tribune, quoting an expert, noted “the majority of public schools in the United States already implement the security measures most often promoted by public officials, including locked doors to the outside and in classrooms, active-shooter plans and security cameras.” Even so, there were lapses in Uvalde — an exit door propped open by a teacher, law enforcement’s failure to quickly rush the classroom where the gunman was — that showed how security protocols and systems can be undermined by human error.
It is also fair to question how committed Texas really is to these ideas, which arise as talking points every time a shooting tragedy occurs. The Lone Star State has long ranked near the bottom of the nation when it comes to how much it spends on public schools, and it is no more generous when it comes to the dollars it would take to turn them into the kind of fortresses that many conservatives claim they should be. Kevin Brown, executive director of the Texas Association of School Administrators, told me the state allotment of funds for school security is a mere $9.72 per student annually. And in recent years, Texas voters have become increasingly resistant to bond measures, which would be needed to fund extensive physical improvements to school buildings.
Pretty much off the table, politically speaking, is doing much of anything about guns. After the Santa Fe school shootings, Abbott asked the Texas legislature to “study the possibility” of a “red flag” law allowing courts to order the seizure of guns from people deemed an imminent threat. When state lawmakers balked at even looking at the possibility, Abbott backed down.
More difficult still would be making it harder for an 18-year-old in Texas to buy assault rifles — as the Uvalde shooter did just days after his birthday.
After the 2018 Parkland massacre, a place once known as the “Gunshine State” quickly enacted new firearms restrictions, including raising the age at which one may be purchased to 21. But Abbott said that Texas is different from Florida. The future governor was given his first .22-caliber rifle when he was 12 or 13, he recalled, and grew up in an area where high-schoolers typically drove around with gun racks in their pickup trucks. “It’s part of the culture in Texas. Kids get shotguns as gifts at Christmastime to go hunting or for their birthday or whatever,” he said. “I don’t see that changing in Texas.”
Having grown up myself in a gun-owning extended family in Texas, I don’t either — at least, no time soon. As children, my own sons shot at targets under the careful eye of my uncle. But there is a vast difference between the rite-of-passage experience in which a youngster gets his own rifle to go deer hunting with his granddad and the purchase of a weapon of war by a troubled teen. Surely there must come a day when even Texans can recognize that.
The country will inevitably move on as Uvalde fades from the daily news, until there is another Uvalde or Parkland or Sutherland Springs. Then, we will once again hear politicians promising how, this time, things will change. The truth is, there will never be a single cure to the sickness of gun violence in this country. Which is why it is long past time for leaders like Greg Abbott to stop repeating the same tired tropes and start taking action on multiple fronts at once. | 2022-05-29T11:54:46Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Abbott vows change after a school shooting. We’ve heard that before. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/05/29/greg-abbott-uvalde-texas-school-shooting-vows-change-again/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/05/29/greg-abbott-uvalde-texas-school-shooting-vows-change-again/ |
This Memorial Day, remember the young lives cut short
A soldier of the 3rd U.S. Infantry Regiment places flags on headstones ahead of Memorial Day at Arlington National Cemetery on May 26. (Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)
A prominent journalist of the World War II era complained once about the frequent use of the word “boys” when speaking of U.S. troops in the field. After what they’d been through, he said, they were not just a bunch of kids out on an adventure. In fact, the average age of those who died in the Second World War was about 27, and their numbers did include a good many youths. But the term was meant more as an expression of affection and solidarity — “our boys in uniform” — than as a description. It also reflected the poignant truth of their untimely deaths: much too young.
This element of vulnerability, fear and helplessness is hard to express in a Memorial Day speech or remembrance. Nothing can quite convey the devastation of those who knew and loved “the fallen,” a euphemism that ennobles their sacrifice but also fails to capture the awfulness of violent death.
The words that are perhaps most suited for Memorial Day were written 78 years ago by the war correspondent Ernie Pyle, whose name became known in just about every American household during World War II. He described in simple, powerful prose the lives and deaths of the soldiers he accompanied through some of the worst fighting, with a special feel for the enlisted infantry.
Pyle’s account of the death of a beloved young Army captain named Henry T. Waskow during the fighting in Italy was first carried by the old Washington Daily News. He described the scene as bodies of the American dead were brought down from a hill on the backs of mules: “The Italian mule-skinners were afraid to walk beside dead men, so Americans had to lead the mules down that night.” As the grim work proceeded, the bodies being laid out alongside a low stone wall, one of the soldiers said quietly, “This one is Captain Waskow.”
“The unburdened mules moved off to their olive orchard,” Pyle wrote. “The men in the road seemed reluctant to leave. They stood around, and gradually one by one I could sense them moving close to Capt. Waskow’s body. Not so much to look, I think, as to say something in finality to him, and to themselves.”
A soldier “squatted down, and he reached down and took the dead hand, and he sat there for a full five minutes, holding the dead hand in his own and looking intently into the dead face, and he never uttered a sound all the time he sat there.”
“And finally he put the hand down, and then reached up and gently straightened the points of the captain’s shirt collar, and then he sort of rearranged the tattered edges of his uniform around the wound. And then he got up and walked away down the road in the moonlight, all alone.”
The story of Capt. Waskow’s death became an instant classic in the United States and has been reprinted many times over the years. It does not deserve to become a neglected classic now, not when it is only a few keystrokes away and when young people continue to be deprived of their lives and their futures — by neglect, greed, orchestrated hatreds or delusional aggressions — in places from Ukraine to Uvalde, Tex. | 2022-05-29T11:54:49Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | This Memorial Day, remember the young lives cut short - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/05/29/this-memorial-day-remember-young-lives-cut-short/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/05/29/this-memorial-day-remember-young-lives-cut-short/ |
Truth emerges about Chinese repression of Uyghurs — no thanks to the U.N.
Michelle Bachelet, high commissioner for human rights at the United Nations, attends a virtual meeting with China President Xi Jinping on May 25. (AFP/Getty Images)
A consortium of U.S., European and Japanese media organizations has published an extraordinary cache of leaked photographs and documents from inside China’s vast system of “reeducation” internment centers, making plain beyond any doubt that millions of Muslim Uhygurs — including children and elderly people — have been oppressed since Beijing launched its program, officially labeled genocide by the United States, in 2017. The Xinjiang Police Files, as the cache is known, prove that, in a single Xinjiang county, 22,762 residents, more than 12 percent of the adult population, were interned in a camp or prison during 2017 and 2018. The files include the text of a speech in which the official in charge of the crackdown mentions President Xi Jinping’s detailed knowledge of the repression, and his orders to continue it. This devastating material, especially the images of clearly bewildered, even tearful, detainees, "blows apart the Chinese propaganda veneer,” as Adrian Zenz, a scholar at the U.S.-based Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation who received, authenticated and collated the material, told the BBC.
Yet Beijing insists on its coverup, with the Chinese Embassy in Washington declaring, in response to the Xinjiang Police Files revelations, that the critics are disseminating “lies and disinformation.” Which brings us to the just-completed six-day visit to China by Michelle Bachelet, the former president of Chile and current U.N. high commissioner for human rights. Billed as the first such trip to China by an occupant of her office since 2005, it comes roughly three years since Ms. Bachelet first proposed a fact-finding mission related to the Uhygurs and six months since her office announced it was about to release a highly critical report on their plight. That report has still not been published, however. The timing of her visit, permission for which Beijing announced in March, creates an appearance that the document was withheld in return for access to China for Ms. Bachelet.
If so, it wasn’t worth it. It’s absurd on its face to suppose that Ms. Bachelet could conduct any sort of serious inquiry while being guided through what the Chinese foreign ministry itself has described as a “closed loop” of contacts, ostensibly necessitated by the covid-19 pandemic. What was highly foreseeable were attempts by Beijing to exploit a distinguished U.N. envoy’s presence for propaganda purposes. Mr. Xi lectured the visitor in their one meeting — on Wednesday, via video link. “There is no need for ‘preachers’ to boss around other countries, still less should they politicize the issue, practice double standards or use it as an excuse to interfere in other countries’ internal affairs,” he told her. Adding injury to this insult, the official Xinhua News Agency reported that Ms. Bachelet had told Mr. Xi that she “admire[d]” China’s efforts to protect human rights, an apparent fabrication that Ms. Bachelet was obliged to deny hours later.
The State Department labeled Ms. Bachelet’s trip “a mistake,” which is an understatement. Heavily influenced by China, a permanent member of the Security Council, the U.N. is poorly positioned to hold the communist dictatorship accountable. That takes people such as the courageous — and necessarily anonymous — whistleblower in China who leaked the Xinjiang Police Files, and like Mr. Zenz, who made sure that they would be available for all the world to see. | 2022-05-29T11:54:55Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Truth emerges about Chinese repression of Uyghurs — no thanks to the U.N. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/05/29/truth-emerges-about-chinese-repression-uyghurs-no-thanks-un/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/05/29/truth-emerges-about-chinese-repression-uyghurs-no-thanks-un/ |
Britain's Prince William salutes during his inspection of the Household Division as he participates in the Colonel's Review at the Horse Guards Parade Ground in London, May 28, 2022. (Neil Hall/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock)
LONDON — There were 1,500 soldiers, 350 horses and 7,000 guests.
In a sea of bright red military uniforms, including bearskin caps, Prince William, on horseback, inspected the Irish Guard, an Irish infantry regiment that is part of the British army.
While the display of pomp and pageantry unfolding in London on Saturday was extensive, it was just a 90-minute rehearsal.
The rehearsal — led by William, the eldest grandson of Queen Elizabeth II and second in line to the British throne, from atop a black horse named George — was staged just a few days before Thursday’s ceremony, known as “Trooping the Colour.” It’s held annually to mark the queen’s official birthday, which is in June, but this year it also kick-starts a string of events celebrating her Platinum Jubilee, marking 70 years on the throne.
The 96-year-old monarch usually takes the salute at the ceremony, but it remains unclear how involved the queen will be this year. Other royals including heir to the throne Prince Charles and his eldest son William have stepped in to help support the queen at various events this year as she struggles with her mobility amid public concerns about her health.
If the queen passes these ceremonial duties to another royal family member Thursday, it will be the first time in her reign she has done so, the Sunday Times reported.
William has also served as colonel of the Irish Guards since 2011. While soldiers from the regiment guard the royal family and its palaces, they are also deployed all over the world.
“Keep in mind that the Guards are still first and foremost fighting soldiers,” the regiment tweeted last week. “We have the capability of being dual role Soldiers and must be operationally ready at all times.” | 2022-05-29T12:24:39Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Prince William rehearses 'Trooping the Colour' before queen's Platinum Jubilee - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/05/29/prince-william-trooping-colour-rehearsal-queen-jubilee/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/05/29/prince-william-trooping-colour-rehearsal-queen-jubilee/ |
After another massacre, one gunmaker maintains a familiar silence
Weapons made by Georgia-based Daniel Defense have turned up repeatedly in the arsenals of the nation’s mass shooters
Marty and Cindy Daniel of Daniel Defense on the cover of a local magazine in Pooler, Ga. The Uvalde, Tex., gunman used a weapon manufactured by Daniel Defense. (Pooler Magazine)
Marty Daniel, founder of gunmaker Daniel Defense, didn’t offer an apology after four of his company’s firearms turned up in the arsenal used by a gunman to kill 58 people on the Las Vegas Strip in 2017. The company sent out a statement offering, “Our deepest thoughts and prayers.”
And Daniel hasn’t apologized since a Daniel Defense DDM4 rifle was used to kill 19 children and two adults on Tuesday in Uvalde, Tex. The company again offered “our thoughts and our prayers.”
But four years ago, Daniel, 59, admitted he’d gone too far.
In the wake of a different mass shooting at the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Tex., where 26 people died, Daniel had backed a federal bill to strengthen the nation’s firearms background check system. The gunman in that tragedy had a record of domestic violence, which should have stopped him from buying his guns, including a Ruger semiautomatic rifle. But the charges hadn’t been logged in the correct database, so Congress passed a bill to fix the problem and then-President Donald Trump signed it into law.
Customers of Daniel Defense were outraged. They saw the bill as a Trojan horse for gun control. So Daniel backed down. In a Facebook post, he wrote that he could “no longer in good conscience put my support behind” the bill. And he vowed not to give an inch in the future.
“I stand with you and I am ready to continue to fight for our rights,” he said.
The U.S. firearms industry has long been buffeted by the nation’s polarizing debate over guns, alternately toasted and reviled, its leaders regarded as titans of industry or social pariahs. But Daniel, who built his family-owned company in Black Creek, Ga., from nothing into at Top 25 firearms manufacturer, is accustomed to being celebrated for the business he created.
Georgia’s governor cut the yellow ribbon when a new Daniel Defense firearms factory opened in 2018. Daniel and his wife regularly hand out checks totaling millions of dollars in donations. His company’s name stands in big, bold letters atop the scoreboard at a new football stadium at the community center in Pooler, Ga., outside Savannah.
Meanwhile, the U.S. gun industry — unique for its massive production of weapons for both military and civilian markets — is coming off its best years in history. Gunmakers sold an estimated 19.9 million firearms in 2021, second only to the 22.8 million sold in 2020, according to the research group Small Arms Analytics and Forecasting.
While some see guns as symbols of an inalienable constitutional right, others blame the gun industry for tens of thousands of violent deaths each year — homicides and suicides, family disputes turned deadly and horrific massacres at schools. The industry “exists right on the edge of morality, especially in the United States,” said Jurgen Brauer, an economist with Small Arms Analytics.
Ryan Busse, a former executive with the gunmaker Kimber, sees parallels with another industry.
“I think there are a lot of similarities with the opioid industry,” said Busse, who wrote a book about his decision to leave what he saw as a radicalized gun industry.
Opioid pharmaceutical manufacturers, once hailed for producing a breakthrough painkiller, are now widely assailed for contributing to what authorities describe as an epidemic of addiction and overdose deaths.
This divide in how Americans view guns can be seen in the actions of other gunmakers, including the nation’s largest firearms manufacturer, Smith & Wesson. The Uvalde gunman bought a Smith & Wesson M&P15, an AR-15-style rifle, in the days before his rampage, along with the Daniel Defense rifle.
Smith & Wesson has been around for 170 years and today is publicly traded, with a market cap of about $690 million. Its stock price rose more than 8 percent in the days after the Uvalde shooting.
The company plans to move by next year from its longtime headquarters in Springfield, Mass. — the heart of “Gun Valley,” named for its historic role in American firearms production — to Maryville, Tenn. Company leaders blamed new gun laws in Massachusetts and credited Tennessee’s “support for the 2nd Amendment.”
The gun industry has been shifting south for years. Brauer said academic studies have found that cheaper labor and tax benefits were often the most important factors in these relocation decisions.
But, he said, he wouldn’t discount the importance of culture. A gunmaker’s employees “might feel a little bit less shunned on Sunday morning” in the South.
In Massachusetts, Smith & Wesson faced local protests outside its headquarters after the 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Fla., that killed 17 people. The gunman used a Smith & Wesson M&P15.
In Tennessee, by contrast, Gov. Bill Lee (R) late last year appointed an ammunition industry executive to the state board of education. Jordan Mollenhour owns Lucky Gunner, an online ammo store, which has been sued for supplying bullets to the gunmen in both the 2014 Aurora, Colo., movie theater shooting — 12 dead — and a 2018 school shooting in Santa Fe, Tex., that left 10 dead.
Mollenhour said in a statement about the Uvalde shooting that there are “millions of armed and law-abiding Americans who would have defended those innocent children if given the opportunity" and that he and his company “proudly serve many of those Americans as our customers and we will continue praying for the families of Uvalde.”
In 2012, a mass shooting did cause a company’s owners to reconsider. Just days after 20 children and six adults were shot to death at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Conn., private equity firm Cerberus Capital Management said it wanted to unload what was then the nation’s largest gun company, Remington, and its holding company, Freedom Group.
The gunman in Sandy Hook used a Remington Bushmaster AR-15-style rifle.
Cerberus’s pension fund investors wanted nothing to do with the gunmaker. But the private equity company struggled to find a buyer. In 2018, after several failed attempts at a sale, what was by then known as Remington Outdoor Co. filed for bankruptcy.
But the Bushmaster name lives on. The trademark was snatched up by another firearms manufacturer, Crotalus Holdings of Carson City, Nev., in a bankruptcy sale.
Earlier this month a gunman used a Bushmaster AR-15-style rifle to kill 10 people at a supermarket in Buffalo.
Sandy Hook families announce $73 million settlement with Remington Arms in landmark agreement
None of this slowed gun sales. But there have been changes.
In the last decade, the nation has shifted from a land of rifles to the home of handguns. Fewer people are hunting. More people are buying firearms for protection. Sales of long guns peaked in December 2012, at the time of the Sandy Hook massacre, according to federal data.
Over the last three years, about 60 percent of the firearms sold were handguns and about 40 percent were long guns, according to Brauer.
At the same time, AR-15-style rifles have grown increasingly popular. U.S. gunmakers produced 1.5 million of them in 2017, twice the number made a decade earlier, according to a 2019 report from the National Shooting Sports Foundation, a trade group that refers to the firearms as modern sporting rifles.
AR-15-style rifles have allowed many gun companies to thrive — especially newer and smaller companies like Daniel Defense. Those AR-15-style weapons also drive the gun control debate. With its menacing appearance and military legacy, the semiautomatic rifle frequently features in mass shootings — from Sandy Hook to Parkland to Uvalde.
“There’s this intimidation factor with it, a prove-your-manhood thing, that is borne around the AR-15,” said Busse, the former gun company executive.
Few companies made this kind of rifle before the mid-2000s. There wasn’t much of a market until the nation’s assault weapons ban expired in 2004. Now, more than 500 firms make AR-15-style rifles. And they all sell basically the same gun, Busse said.
“What do you do to stand out? You market. You give it a name, you use more incendiary actions to draw attention,” Busse said.
“That’s what Daniel Defense did,” he continued. “That’s how the AR-15 drove their business.”
Daniel Defense — like many firearms companies — has leaned into warlike imagery to sell its guns. “Manufacturing freedom” was one of its slogans. “More bite!” reads a 2016 ad for a new rifle called the DD5.
An online ad for Daniel Defense that ran a week before the Uvalde shooting showed a young boy holding an AR-15-like rifle on his lap, along with the caption: “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it.” That’s a reference to a Bible proverb.
Today, the company is known for making solid, pricey firearms, especially AR-15-style rifles. Some of its guns cost twice what other manufacturers charge. The DDM4 model implicated in the Uvalde attack starts at $1,870. It comes in seven colors.
The rifle is one of 19 designed by Daniel Defense “to protect your family and home,” according to the company’s website. It looks like something a soldier or SWAT team member might carry.
Daniel Defense produced more than 52,000 firearms in 2020, according to the latest data from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. The company sells to militaries and ordinary people. It has a financing program to help people make purchases on a monthly installment plan.
Busse said he watched with horror as the gun industry chased AR-15-style rifle sales. Companies were no longer emphasizing hunting or skeet shooting. They leaned into intimidation and fear. “Tactical” was popular. People wanted a certain image. “Couch commandos,” Busse calls them.
And the AR-15 captured that image perfectly.
Busse said he felt the pressure to push semiautomatic rifles as vice president of sales at Kimber. The firm is known for its pistols. “I fought it at every turn,” he said.
Daniel Defense did not respond to requests for comment. It did issue a statement about the Uvalde shooting, noting that the firm was “deeply saddened by the tragic events” and pledging to cooperate with authorities.
The origins of Daniel Defense are a story that Marty Daniel seems to enjoy telling. He often brings up in interviews how he struggled to graduate from Georgia Southern University’s engineering school. (Today, he sits on the school’s corporate advisory committee, alongside executives from an airline and a railroad.)
He began his career selling home windows, then moved into overhead doors and fireplaces. He played golf. He was introduced to sport shooting. He loved it. He came up with some ideas to improve the M16 rifle. He made prototypes.
In 2001, he founded Daniel Defense and quickly landed a U.S. military contract to produce a rifle part. He sold off his other businesses to focus on guns.
By 2017, his company was growing so fast that Marty Daniel was looking for a new factory.
It was a heady time. One of his rifles had just been named Gun of the Year by Friends of the NRA. He had signed a deal for Daniel Defense to be featured on the hood of a NASCAR racecar. He was still being applauded for his efforts to get a Daniel Defense TV ad played during the 2014 Super Bowl despite NFL rules that prohibit ads for guns or ammunition.
Daniel sat down with Forbes Magazine for an interview about his success as an entrepreneur, and noted how sales had boomed after the Sandy Hook shooting. He batted away a question about “common-sense” gun control measures such as age limits for purchases and bans on large ammunition magazines.
“Terms like ‘common sense’ come from people whose only goal is to take our guns away,” he said.
At the same time, his business was suffering. The entire industry was mired in the “Trump Slump.” Companies were saddled with huge inventories built up in anticipation of a Democratic president who was expected to seek new gun-control measures. Daniel Defense fired about one-third of its 300 workers that year, according to an industry report.
Still, it opened a new, 300,000-square-foot factory the next year. Then-Gov. Nathan Deal (R) attended the grand opening. The Georgia Manufacturing Alliance showed up for a tour of the state-of-the-art facility.
The factory’s address: 101 War Fighter Way.
Business boomed. And Marty and his wife, Cindy Daniel, shared their wealth.
The couple has donated more than $510,000 to federal political campaigns in the last two years — all of it to Republicans, according to Federal Election Commission data. The Daniels also run Assets for Christ, a foundation intended to help churches renovate or build new facilities.
These days, Cindy Daniel travels across Georgia handing out checks for tens of thousands of dollars to support sport shooting teams at schools.
One week before the Uvalde shooting, Cindy Daniel dropped off a check for $28,148.39 to support the sports shooting team at Benedictine Military School, a Catholic military high school in Savannah, not far from the Daniel Defense factory. She posed for a picture with students and staff.
While some past donations were from the NRA Foundation, this money came from the Double D Foundation — a nonprofit created by Cindy Daniel in 2020. The group seeks to boost the number of people involved in shooting sports.
Cindy Daniel, who also serves as an executive at Daniel Defense, says on her foundation’s website that she thinks “anti-gunners” are misinformed. Most have never seen a gun, she argues, or understand why someone would want one.
“Most know very little about the history of the Second Amendment and wonder why it’s still part of our Constitution,” she wrote.
Busse, who left the gun industry, recalled how gun company executives would react to a mass shooting.
“The first thing you do is hope your gun wasn’t used,” he said. “And if your gun was used, you would try to rationalize it. We did everything legal, right? What else could we have done?”
“But,” he said, “mostly you just hope it wasn’t yours.” | 2022-05-29T13:25:36Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Daniel Defense made Uvalde shooter's weapon - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/05/29/uvalde-rifle-gunmaker-morality/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/05/29/uvalde-rifle-gunmaker-morality/ |
At first glance, the acute shortage of baby formula seems like an advertisement for breast-feeding. If only women did what came naturally, the thinking might go, maybe there wouldn’t be a problem at all.
This argument would draw on evidence that multinational corporations like Nestle did much to persuade women to give up breast-feeding in favor of formula. Their 20th-century marketing campaigns ended in consumer boycotts and public disgrace for the formula makers and contributed to the deaths of infants.
But this shameful episode obscures an earlier, more complicated history. The business of nursing and sustaining newborns has long been far more vexed than advocates of either breast-feeding or formula-feeding would have us believe.
In a perfect world, babies would be breast-fed. The health benefits of human breast milk are well documented. But not all babies or mothers find breast-feeding simple to master. Yes, it’s natural. Nonetheless, parents have pursued alternatives for thousands of years.
In some cases, breast-feeding didn’t come naturally. In ancient times, as now, some infants failed to latch, leaving desperate parents scrambling. In other cases, mothers came out of childbirth with their health compromised as they recovered from infections like puerperal fever, which often suppressed milk production.
Before the advent of modern medicine, a staggering number of women died in childbirth. Conservative estimates suggest that 1 out of every 40 births ended in the death of the mother in antiquity, a figure that largely held constant through the 18th century. Absent an alternative source of nourishment, the baby would perish as well.
One solution, which dated back to the domestication of animals, involved feeding infants milk from cows, horses, sheep, goats and even pigs. Sometimes, parents put the baby at the animal’s teat; more often, they poured the milk into clay containers, often designed to resemble an animal, that allowed infants to sip the substitute.
But the milk of other animals proved a poor proxy for human breast milk, particularly in the first months of life. A superior choice was another nursing mother, better known as a wet nurse. These women might hail from the same family. More often, they were strangers or servants paid for their service.
In the Roman Empire, for example, elaborate business contracts governed this lifesaving act, along with advice literature designed to guide parents on hiring the ideal wet nurse (described as a young, celibate, not-too-attractive Greek woman). Unfortunately, it could be difficult to find a good wet nurse. Many worked for slave traders who rescued infants (girls, mostly) abandoned on trash piles, selling them once they had come of age.
Wet nurses also worked for elite mothers who didn’t want to breast-feed their babies. Some feared that doing so would ruin their beauty; others sought to resume their pre-pregnancy social lives. Whatever the reason, the practice of hiring women of lesser social status to nourish babies became commonplace in western societies into the medieval and early modern eras.
The practice provoked unease. Some supposed medical experts speculated that the traits of the wet nurse might be communicated to the baby through some kind of milk magic. The early 17th-century French obstetrician Jacques Guillemeau was typical of a new generation of wet-nurse skeptics. He worried most about the effect that red-headed wet nurses — you know, fiery temperament and all — might have on babies.
Not that animal milk was considered risk-free. In what may be the first book on pediatrics published in the English-speaking world, Thomas Phaire confidently claimed in 1545, “If children be fed the milk of sheep, then their hair will be soft as that of a lamb, but if they be fed the milk of the goat, the hair will be course.” Far better, perhaps, to roll the dice on a redhead.
Well into the 19th century, elite women continued to rely on wet nurses — slaves, in some cases — while doctors and nurses running orphanages turned to them to keep their charges alive. As the industrial revolution gathered steam, working-class women also began relying on wet nurses so that they could work for wages in factories.
But the growing reliance on wet nurses went hand in hand with increased stigma. As one Chicago pediatrician complained, wet nurses demanded a “price above rubies and they made the family pay for it in submission to their whims, accessions to their demands, and forbearance with their bad habits.”
The most obvious alternative — germ-laden animal milks — had evident pitfalls. But this became far less of an issue after health reformers launched clean-milk campaigns that made pasteurized cow’s milk available to mothers in cities. By the end of the 19th century, pasteurized cow’s milk effectively supplanted wet nurses, paving the way for the adoption of formula.
In other words, contrary to a nostalgic view of the past, plenty of women had already given up breast-feeding a couple of centuries ago, either by choice or necessity. Formula didn’t destroy breast-feeding so much as capitalize on trends already underway. Recent archaeological research has lent credence to this point.
The new formula makers included the German chemist Justus von Liebeg, who marketed a concoction in the late 1860s that combined cow’s milk with flour and potassium bicarbonate. Henri Nestle introduced his Farine Lactee around the same time. Much like modern formula, this powdered blend of cow’s milk, malt, sugar and other ingredients could be mixed with water.
Over the course of the 20th century, formula makers increasingly marketed their wares as comparable to breast milk, if not actually superior. They worked closely with the medical profession to lend legitimacy to this spurious claim. But this was a gradual development, one that would take many years to come to fruition. By the time the backlash began — the La Leche League was founded in 1956 — formula makers had become a convenient villain in a compelling, but not wholly accurate, morality tale.
One potentially controversial modern alternative to formula would be to bring back some version of wet nursing. This isn’t as outlandish as it might seem. In the US, breast-milk banking has gained adherents, though it’s largely meant for at-risk infants. But the prospect of largely white, upper-middle-class mothers outsourcing breast-feeding to poorer women is apt to run afoul of contemporary sensibilities.
In the short term, then, formula will remain the best bet for many women, if only supply chains would cooperate.
• How Can the US Fix Its Baby Formula Crisis: Sarah Green Carmichael
• US Should Follow the EU Model for Baby Formula: Amanda Little
• Short of Baby Formula? Blame Bad Policy and Red Tape: Bloomberg Editorial Board | 2022-05-29T13:25:43Z | www.washingtonpost.com | How History Blazed the Trail to Baby Formula - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/how-history-blazed-thetrail-to-baby-formula/2022/05/29/169eff64-df50-11ec-ae64-6b23e5155b62_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/how-history-blazed-thetrail-to-baby-formula/2022/05/29/169eff64-df50-11ec-ae64-6b23e5155b62_story.html |
HOUSTON, TX - MAY 27: A gun control advocate holds a sign across from the National Rifle Association Annual Meeting during a protest at the George R. Brown Convention Center, on May 27, 2022 in Houston, Texas. The NRA kicked off its annual convention in Houston on Friday, days after 19 students and two teachers died in a shooting in Uvalde, Texas. (Photo by Eric Thayer/Getty Images) (Photographer: Eric Thayer/Getty Images North America)
This is precisely the “Only outlaws will have guns” scenario that worries even non-fanatical gun owners. They acknowledge that, in principle, a gun-free America would be safer than the current gun-filled America. But they look at cities such as Philadelphia, where gun violence set a record in 2021, and with good reason don’t want to bring that model to the exurbs and small towns where they live.
That’s because officers continued to stop people — people committing crimes — and then frisk them. After the deaths of Michael Brown and George Floyd, progressive thinking turned to the idea that aggressive enforcement of laws against “low-level” or “non-violent” crimes such as shoplifting, turnstile-jumping or pot-smoking was a mistake. But while it is of course true that fare evasion is a minor crime, these low-level offenses can be a way to enforce gun laws.
And as liberals sporadically realize, when lots of people carry guns around, it’s very dangerous. In a city soaked with guns, gang disputes lead to bleed-outs rather than bruises. A bullet is much more likely than a knife to strike an innocent bystander. And a young man living in a dangerous neighborhood faces a basic cost-benefit calculus: Is the risk of arrest for carrying a weapon illegally greater than the risk of finding himself unarmed?
Years of steady application of this principle helped push many US cities into a much safer equilibrium. Now that equilibrium has been disrupted by the dual shocks of Covid and reduced enforcement. Returning to a better equilibrium will be costly in terms of money and human suffering. But it will also have real benefits in terms of reduced gun violence.
Fulminating at congressional inaction in the face of spree killers may be satisfying and even necessary. But it is unlikely to persuade them to change the law. Continuing to insist on new rules while shying away from enforcing existing ones, meanwhile, burns credibility with conservative voters, who see a left that’s eager to penalize their hobby and reluctant to punish criminals.
• Why America Doesn’t Know How to Stop School Shootings: Julianna Goldman | 2022-05-29T13:25:49Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The Flaw in the Progressive Stance on Guns - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/the-flaw-in-the-progressive-stance-on-guns/2022/05/29/162edf0e-df50-11ec-ae64-6b23e5155b62_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/the-flaw-in-the-progressive-stance-on-guns/2022/05/29/162edf0e-df50-11ec-ae64-6b23e5155b62_story.html |
Preserving documents that tell Washington County's story
By Tamela Baker | AP
HAGERSTOWN, Md. — Most of us would likely assume that Hagerstown grew outward from an original group of lots around the Square that were first plotted by Jonathan Hager when he founded the town in the 1760s.
After nearly two years in the hands of an expert document conservator, the plat and other documents — including a rare copy of Gen. Robert E. Lee’s proclamation to Marylanders in the days preceding the Battle of Antietam — are finally home with the Washington County Historical Society.
“My best guess is the plat plan was generated in the early 1800s,” said society President Bill Maharay. “It descended through the Hager family; it’s on vellum, and it shows the development of Hagerstown through various growth patterns.
“The original layout of the town was basically the first east and west blocks of Washington Street, Potomac Street and Franklin, that was it,” he said.
“And it’s not done in an orderly fashion,” Maharay said. “What I find most interesting is the water source for the town was the stream that starts up over by where the post office is. It’s now all underground, but it shows that stream pattern. And then the area on North Potomac where it rises up past Franklin was called the ‘healthy’ part of town because of sanitation.”
But the plat clearly predates Hagerstown’s “Hub City” status.
Society officials aren’t sure how it became part of its collection, but knew this piece of Hagerstown history had to be preserved.
It came from what Maharay calls the “Seibert collection,” saved over the years by the Seibert family of Clear Spring.
When a family member who had inherited the collection asked if the society were interested in the materials, “needless to say, I said, ‘Absolutely!’” Maharay recalled. “And among the items that the family had saved was the Lee proclamation.
“As best as I can determine, the Museum of the Confederacy (in Richmond) has a copy; the Maryland Historical Society has a copy,” Maharay said.
“Janice came and saw all the items and explained the very intense process that she does, and we were so impressed with her,” said historical society Executive Director Robyn Sumner.
But conserving the documents has been an expensive — and lengthy — proposition, Maharay and Sumner said. Sumner said the society had a $10,000 contract with Ellis for the work, but hadn’t seen the final bill.
It’s filled with work tables, computers, some pretty serious high-tech magnifiers and a huge antique paper trimmer that she uses to cut materials for protective coverings. Shelves along the walls are filled with materials to preserve various kinds of papers without harming them.
It’s meticulous work. She’s had the Hagerstown plat, for example, for nearly two years.
When Maharay and Sumner arrived recently to pick up the documents, Ellis explained how to handle and store them — and why. It can be a bit technical, but the bottom line is clean hands, a gentle touch and protective folders.
“Everything that you take off has potential for DNA analysis,” she said. “It’s a new technology that they’re just starting to use now.”
So all that … stuff … could tell who in Hagerstown’s early history had handled the plat?
“All of this surface dirt that just looks like dirt not only is really valuable to people who are doing research on animal husbandry (the vellum is likely made from sheepskin), … but also, it’s gotten so sophisticated now that they can pick up the DNA of the users,” Ellis said.
Ellis told The Herald-Mail she’d always had a love of art, and interests in craft and sciences. Her career has allowed her to combine all of that while salvaging valuable historical items.
“You have to know a little about the history of the object, obviously, a little about the material science — what made it fail in the first place? And you want your repairs to be sympathetic with the original, but you don’t want it to set it up for a second failure,” she said.
“So you don’t do it the same way the original craftsman did it, because that failed … it’s a lot of problem-solving, but with the eye of an artist and the hand of an artist, and hopefully the mind of a historian and scientist.”
And when she’s working on one of these documents, does she ever want to just go research the story behind it?
“YES! Oh yes, oh yes. Yeah. I mean, that’s part of the joy of it,” Ellis said. “And sometimes we find things that the curators didn’t even know, which is really lovely.”
A project that particularly affected her, she said, was a request from a woman who brought her documents so tightly folded the owner couldn’t tell open them to find out what they were.
As Ellis worked with the documents, she discovered they were the manumission papers — documents granting legal freedom — for the owner’s enslaved ancestor.
“When you see how much information they can find in this beaten-up original thing, it makes you think three and four times about what you change (in order to preserve them). And sometimes, clients want it to look new. And it’s like, you don’t want it to look new, you know, you don’t want to dress your grandmother to look like Lady Gaga. You want your grandmother to look like your grandmother.”
One of the items conserved for the Washington County Historical Society is a rare copy of Gen. Robert E. Lee’s proclamation to the residents of Maryland at the beginning of the Maryland Campaign in September 1862, which culminated in the Battle of Antietam. Here’s what Lee told them: | 2022-05-29T13:26:07Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Preserving documents that tell Washington County's story - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/preserving-documents-that-tell-washington-countys-story/2022/05/29/874e946e-df4f-11ec-ae64-6b23e5155b62_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/preserving-documents-that-tell-washington-countys-story/2022/05/29/874e946e-df4f-11ec-ae64-6b23e5155b62_story.html |
By Esteban Parra | AP
ODESSA, Del. — He’s graced the pages of newspapers. Been spotlighted on local TV stations. The internet has also shared the story of how Ritz the cat reunited with his owner after 16 years of wandering anomalously through Delaware.
But the limelight hasn’t fazed the gray tabby, who since being found about a month ago as a vet prepared to put him down, spends most of his time testing furniture to sleep on at the Odessa-area home of Duncan and Caroline Clark.
“I don’t think he cares,” Caroline Clark said of the reporters who’ve visited Ritz. “He sleeps most of the day.”
A CBS news crew recently stopped by to do a feature on the feline.
News of Ritz’s reunion with his original owner, Jason McKenry, was first shared on Delaware Online/The News Journal in April.
The two parted ways in June 2006 when Ritz ran out an open door and vanished. It’s believed the cat, then about 2 years old, hitched a ride on a neighbor’s pickup, jumping out on Route 1, near Route 40.
But recently, the cat showed up injured, including a bone protruding from his right hind leg.
Russell and her father took the kitty to Lums Pond Animal Hospital, where it looked like the feline would be euthanized. But when a microchip was found in the cat, it resulted in the vets locating McKenry.
“It’s astonishing,” he told Delaware Online/The News Journal.
A follow-up visit to the vets found no need to amputate Ritz’s leg – despite the protruding bone.
“He will just continue to get around as he has been,” Clark said. “Doc was impressed by how friendly and docile he is. He doesn’t seem to be in pain. He will live out his life as a disabled, happy cat.”
The first days at the Clarks’, Ritz spent a lot of it sleeping on a cat bed. But since then, he’s found other options.
“He has tested out every upholstered chair in our house and has picked his favorite,” Clark said. “An old rocking chair that belonged to my mother! It makes me happy that I didn’t send it to Goodwill!”
He’s eating and gaining weight and purred for the first time, she said.
Ritz hasn’t been allowed to leave, other than to use the Clarks’ screened porch where he goes only if someone is in it.
“He won’t go out by himself,” she said. “I think he says, ‘Been there. Done that. I’m happy here.’” | 2022-05-29T13:26:31Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Cat reunited with owner after 16 years makes national news - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/cat-reunited-with-owner-after-16-years-makes-national-news/2022/05/29/804cf278-df4f-11ec-ae64-6b23e5155b62_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/cat-reunited-with-owner-after-16-years-makes-national-news/2022/05/29/804cf278-df4f-11ec-ae64-6b23e5155b62_story.html |
Flowers, candles and signs are left at a memorial for victims of the Robb Elementary School shooting in Uvalde, Tex. (Marco Bello/Reuters)
Memorial Day was first celebrated as Decoration Day, three years after the end of the Civil War, to honor Union soldiers. Unfortunately, the divisions of that long-ago time continue to hinder national progress — most tragically in our paralysis when confronted by unbridled gun violence.
This Memorial Day weekend, we will — and should — honor our war dead. But we do so under a cloud of mourning for the 19 children and two teachers gunned down last week in Uvalde, Tex. We should consider whether the country for which so many have honorably given their lives is doomed to stand alone among peer nations for the criminal stupidity of our firearms statutes.
Britain, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and Norway all tightened their gun laws after searing national tragedies. As a result, Max Fisher reported in the New York Times, mass shootings became rarer in those nations, as did homicides and suicides.
We don’t act because the Republican Party, with precious few dissenters, has become a wholly owned subsidiary of the gun lobby and because the U.S. Senate, with a filibuster rule that gives veto power to the minority, vastly overrepresents rural states.
Ruth Marcus: Why do we let children buy firearms?
The upshot? Majority rule is foiled on such broadly popular measures as universal background checks and bans on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines. And the Supreme Court, shaped in recent years by presidents who lost the popular vote, seems poised to make the task of legislating even harder.
These facts are important because there is far too much loose talk about “politicians” or “governing elites” failing our society on guns. No, there are very specific actors who choose their political interests and an absurd reading of the Second Amendment over the lives of children.
But today’s gun politics did not come from nowhere. The Civil War ended 157 years ago, yet the alignments that led up to and defined that conflict are still very much alive in our politics.
Look first at simple measures. In the Giffords Law Center’s list of the 20 states with the toughest gun laws, only Virginia, which tightened its statutes recently, was part of the old Confederacy. Among the 20 states with the lowest rates of gun deaths, Virginia was again the only one that left the Union after Abraham Lincoln was elected. (It’s worth noting that the two parties have, in a broad sense, switched sides. All the states that backed Lincoln in 1860 supported Barack Obama in 2008.)
Tellingly, the data on gun laws and death rates overlap. The two states with the lowest rates of gun deaths, Hawaii and Massachusetts, are among those with the toughest gun measures. The two with the highest gun death rates, Mississippi and Louisiana, were ranked among those with the weakest firearms legislation.
But the influence of the struggles over slavery and secession goes deeper. As the historian Heather Cox Richardson argued in her 2020 book “How the South Won the Civil War,” the North may have prevailed militarily but not, in the long run, politically.
The triumph of Southern-inflected conservatism came first with the dismantling of Reconstruction in 1877, leading to the Jim Crow era of white supremacy. The Southern political ethic was also reflected in the West, she argues, with the rise of the myth of the cowboy and the rugged (White and male) individualism he embodied. Today’s coalition against sensible gun laws is largely an alliance between the South and the non-coastal West.
The battle over the Supreme Court and the meaning of the Constitution also has echoes in Civil War-era clashes. In his 2021 “The Crooked Path to Abolition: Abraham Lincoln and the Antislavery Constitution,” historian James Oakes traced the radical differences in how anti-slavery forces in the North and defenders of slavery in the South read the nation’s founding document.
Charles Lane: Do teens really have a Second Amendment right to buy assault rifles?
The South insisted that the Constitution endorsed slavery while the North argued that the Founders (by, among other things, never explicitly mentioning slavery and insisting on referring to slaves as “persons”) envisioned freedom as the national rule and merely tolerated a temporary exception for the Southern states.
Those who now call themselves “originalists” and claim to be the true arbiters of what the Founders intended — on guns and everything else — willfully ignore the political brawls throughout our history over the meaning and spirit of the words put on paper in 1787.
It is maddening and heartbreaking that our country is so deeply mired in the past that we are incapable of regulating weapons whose ferocity our Founders couldn’t have imagined. The fight for sane gun laws is, first, about the innocent lives extinguished by the failure of our politics. But it is also about moving, at last, into a more humane future. | 2022-05-29T13:26:37Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Gun debate paralysis stretches back to the Civil War - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/05/29/our-gun-debate-paralysis-stretches-back-to-civil-war/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/05/29/our-gun-debate-paralysis-stretches-back-to-civil-war/ |
Skywatch: June presents a pleasing planetary parade
By Blaine P. Friedlander Jr.
Wake early in May’s waning days and all of June to find planets strolling across our morning heavens.
Look to the east and south in the predawn hours to find this pleasant planetary parade. In fact, check out the close companions Mars and Jupiter in the east at about 4 a.m. Monday (May 30). Today, May 29, was their official conjunction, but no worries — you can spot them tomorrow before sunrise. While both planets still appear close from our earthly perspective, they begin to separate this week.
In fact, gazing from east to south – before the sunrise washes them from the sky – you can see the planets Venus (the second planet from the sun), Mars (fourth), Jupiter (fifth) and Saturn (sixth) – in their proper planetary order. Technically, Mercury (closest to the sun) will be there in early June, but it may be hard to see the speedy planet until mid-June, as it hugs the horizon at dawn.
The ringed Saturn leads the planetary lineup as it rises in the east after 1 a.m. now and will be high in the southeastern sky at about 5 a.m. This +0.6 magnitude planet (bright), according to the U.S. Naval Observatory, seems to be squeezed between the constellations Capricornus and Aquarius.
The large Jupiter and Mars rise concurrently just before 3 a.m. now, loitering in the vicinity of the constellation Pisces. Both will be higher in the east-southeast around 4:30 a.m. Of the two, Jupiter is -2.3 magnitude, very bright, while the reddish Mars is more dim at +0.7 magnitude, but it is becoming brighter as the year moves along. On subsequent mornings, you’ll begin to see a noticeable separation between those planets.
Venus, at -3.9 magnitude, remains incredibly bright, according to the observatory, as it rises now at around 4 a.m. in the eastern heavens. You will see the magnificent, vivid planet climbing higher above the horizon later in that hour.
By mid-June, you may be able to find the fleet Mercury at about 4:45 a.m. on June 18, for example, joining its planetary pals, as it follows Venus. It’s +0.6 magnitude on June 15 and a slightly brighter +0.2 magnitude on June 20, according to the observatory.
The summer solstice – the official first day of astronomical summer – arrives June 21 at 5:14 a.m., according to the observatory, but please note that on the days surrounding the solstice, we get the most sunlight. From June 18 through June 23, Washington will enjoy 14 hours and 54 minutes of captivating sun. Just don’t forget the sunscreen.
Down-to-Earth Events
* June 7 – “Black Holes at Work,” an online discussion with astronomer Andrew Fabian, professor at the University of Cambridge and winner of the 2020 Kavli Prize in physics, will speak to journalist Frank Sesno of George Washington University’s School of Media and Public Affairs. The talk is hosted by Carnegie Science, 4 p.m. To register in advance, visit carnegiescience.edu and then click “events.”
* June 12 – “Supermassive Black Holes at the Center of M87 and Milky Way Galaxies,” an online lecture by Razieh Emami, a fellow at the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. It is hosted by the Northern Virginia Astronomy Club. 7:30 p.m. For viewing details visit novac.com.
* June 17 – “Supermassive Black Holes at the Centers of Galaxies,” a lecture by astrophysicist Shobita Satyapal, a professor at George Mason University. Her lecture is hosted by PSW Science, formerly the Philosophical Society of Washington, and it will be presented at 8 p.m. at the John Wesley Powell Auditorium, Cosmos Club, 2170 Florida Ave. NW. Also, the lecture will be held online concurrently; go the group’s website as the event date approaches: pswscience.org.
* June 29 – “Earth, Exoplanets and Everything in Between,” a lecture by astrophysicist Knicole Colón of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. She is the deputy project scientist for exoplanet science at the James Webb Space Telescope. Her lecture will be presented live and online concurrently at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian. 8 p.m. For details and to register, visit airandspace.si.edu/events. (Note to readers: The National Air and Space Museum is undergoing renovations this summer.)
Blaine Friedlander can be reached at SkyWatchPost@gmail.com. | 2022-05-29T13:27:03Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Skywatch: June presents a pleasing planetary parade - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2022/05/29/skywatch-june-mars-jupiter-venus/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2022/05/29/skywatch-june-mars-jupiter-venus/ |
A DHC-6 Twin Otter of the kind seen here in Simikot, Nepal, on Dec. 1, 2021, has gone missing shortly after taking off from Pokhara, in central Nepal. (Madhu Thapa/Via Reuters)
A plane carrying 22 people went missing over Nepal on Sunday, and local authorities said bad weather was hampering search-and-rescue efforts.
The aircraft, a DHC-6 Twin Otter operated by the private airline Tara Air, went missing shortly after taking off from Pokhara, in central Nepal, at 9:55 a.m. local time on Sunday, according to the Indian Embassy in Kathmandu.
The plane was headed for Jomsom, near Nepal’s border with Tibet.
Tara Air told Reuters that the plane was carrying four Indian nationals, two German nationals and 16 Nepali nationals, of whom three were crew members. Tara Air could not immediately be reached for comment.
A spokesperson for the Nepali army said around 2 p.m. local time that military personnel and helicopters were “trying to locate [the] plane,” which was thought to be “in and around Lete,” about 22 miles south of Jomsom.
But the Civil Aviation Authority of Nepal said in a news release Sunday that at least one search helicopter returned to Jomsom “due to bad weather without locating the plane,” according to Reuters.
“Helicopters are ready to take off for search from Kathmandu, Pokhara and Jomsom once weather conditions improve,” aviation authorities said. “Army and police search teams have left towards the site.”
The plane had not yet been found as of 6 p.m. local time, according to the army spokesperson, who said that “we are trying to reach the place where locals have allegedly seen something burning,” in what he called a “relentless” search-and-rescue operation.
The International Civil Aviation Organization, a United Nations agency, found that Nepal scored below the global average in investigating accidents during a 2017 audit of the country’s civil aviation industry. Nepali airlines are banned from flying in the airspace of the European Union because of “a lack of safety oversight by the aviation authorities” there. | 2022-05-29T13:27:15Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Plane goes missing in Nepal with 22 on board - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/05/29/nepal-plane-missing-tara-air/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/05/29/nepal-plane-missing-tara-air/ |
How I overcome jealousy in my polyamorous relationship
Perspective by Book Karnjanakit
For most of my life, I have not felt jealous in romantic relationships. But when I became polyamorous, I felt jealous for the first time, and it made me feel insecure and scared. I was so ashamed and disappointed in myself for not being the “calm and cool” person I’d always been. But through some hard work, I’ve come to understand that jealousy is just a feeling, and it does not make me less of who I am. | 2022-05-29T14:35:20Z | www.washingtonpost.com | How I overcome jealousy in my polyamorous relationship - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/05/29/how-i-overcome-jealousy-my-polyamorous-relationship/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/05/29/how-i-overcome-jealousy-my-polyamorous-relationship/ |
‘This shouldn’t happen in Uvalde’: As Biden flies in, town takes stock
Residents who believed they were safe from American turmoil find themselves — and a nation — confronting reality
Ayanna Solis, 17, of San Antonio, left, and Kiana Cota, 22, at a memorial on May 27 on the town square in Uvalde, Tex., where 21 people were fatally shot at Robb Elementary School on Tuesday. (Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post)
UVALDE, Tex. — Those who spend their lives in this remote town in the rolling scrublands of South Texas say there is something here they could never find elsewhere.
But since Tuesday, when one of Uvalde’s own killed 21 people — including 19 children — at Robb Elementary School, its residents have been forced to consider that they may not have known each other as well as they thought. The town they once called a haven from the pathologies of American life has found itself, and a nation seemingly inured to gun violence, on the brink of despair.
The most powerful sign yet of that wrenching transformation was the expected arrival on Sunday of President Biden, who was headed to Uvalde to comfort the families of the dead and wounded. But his presence also would confirm that the town was something its residents never expected it to be: The site of the worst school shooting since the 2012 massacre in Newtown, Conn. Uvalde is a place no longer known for its village closeness but for nearly two dozen white crosses erected to honor the dead.
Biden’s appearance capped a week of jolting intrusions into the rhythms of daily life here, as residents have confronted not only the slaughter of children and their teachers but subsequent questions about whether some of those lives could have been saved by more prompt attempts to bring down the 18-year-old gunman. Uvalde’s residents, most of them Mexican American, have watched television news broadcasters describe their travails in French and Japanese and politicians resurrect familiar arguments about gun control. And they have watched their own understanding of their community begin to dissolve.
“It’s a wonderful place. We care for each other,” Joe Ruiz, pastor of Templo Cristiano church, said during an interview in his office at the Pentecostal church this week. But no sooner had Ruiz begun his stock defense of Uvalde’s communitarian spirit than he faltered, and looked at his desk.
“I thought we cared for each other,” he said, shaking his head. “This shouldn’t happen in Uvalde.”
Long before Tuesday, reality interfered with some visions of Uvalde as a pastoral idyll. The city has struggled with gangs active in the region’s busy methamphetamine trade. The railroad tracks that run through town are watched by Border Patrol agents waiting for those who have crossed into Texas illegally.
Like some others in town, Jessie Morales said that when he heard someone had crashed a truck outside Robb Elementary on Tuesday, he assumed it was a “bailout,” a maneuver in which human smugglers drive a vehicle as far and as fast as they can when pursued by law enforcement, then abruptly stop to flee on foot.
It was only later that Morales — a 32-year-old whose 8-year-old daughter, Aaliyah, attends Robb — would learn the truck was driven by Salvador Ramos, who minutes after crashing it entered the school, where he was eventually killed by a Border Patrol agent.
Morales’s daughter wasn’t injured. He can’t say the same about his sense of the hometown to which he returned after a stint in the larger border city of Del Rio, thinking it would be a good place to raise his children.
“This is a quiet little town,” he said on Friday night while paying his respects at a memorial on the town square. “Everybody’s family here. Everybody knows everybody. And for something like this to happen —”
“I don’t know, man.”
On Sunday, Biden is expected to stop at a memorial outside Robb Elementary School, bringing the retinue of the world’s most powerful leader to a quiet grid of streets overhung with pecan trees and roamed by quarrelsome chickens. Rosa Chavez has lived half a block away from the school for 35 years, and was cooking calabaza con pollo on Tuesday when gunfire began to resound.
“Muy pacifico,” she insisted. Very peaceful.
“We all know each other,” she said. “It’s a peaceful, pretty town.”
Aracely, her dark hair held in a topknot by a pink band, poked at a white mound of tortilla dough on the kitchen table. She was bored, and that boredom would not be relieved by the president’s visit. Her grandmother was no longer letting her play outside.
Dora Terrazas, who lives down the road from Chavez, had what she has come to realize was an especially close encounter with Uvalde’s dark side about two months ago. Terrazas, a 70-year-old auto inspector, has spent her entire life in Uvalde and was accustomed to doing favors for people. She naturally agreed when a friend asked her to give a ride to his girlfriend’s son.
“I asked him what his name was,” Terrazas said. “He said his name was Salvador.”
Reflecting on the word’s meaning in Spanish — savior — she told him his mother had given him a good name. Then she asked if he went to church.
“I said, ‘You should, the way things are now,’” Terrazas recalled.
He said nothing. The silence lasted for the remainder of their 10-minute car ride. Then they reached their destination: the home of Salvador Ramos’s grandmother, whom he would shoot eight weeks later, just before he entered the school with a rifle.
After he leaves the elementary school, Biden is scheduled to attend Mass at Sacred Heart, Uvalde’s only Catholic church, a center of gravity for a way of life that now seems hopelessly disrupted. The priest, Eduardo Morales — better known as Father Eddie — has shared in his parishioners’ shock, weeping with families he has tried to comfort.
The men and women who worship at Sacred Heart have much to be angry about. But the priest cautions his parishioners that their anger must not turn to hatred. There will be a day, he believes — after the president has come and gone, and after the children’s funerals he will soon be overseeing, day after day and sometimes twice a day — when Uvalde can again be a place where people find a sense of togetherness that eludes them elsewhere.
“I hope we’ll be able to say it still is like that,” he said, “that this is home.”
Sarah L. Voisin and Tim Craig contributed to this report. | 2022-05-29T14:53:11Z | www.washingtonpost.com | As Biden visits Uvalde, a town reels from the school shooting deaths of 21 people, including 19 children. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/05/29/uvalde-shooting-biden/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/05/29/uvalde-shooting-biden/ |
Despite the war in Ukraine, Biden understands China matters most
President Biden listens as he meets virtually with Chinese President Xi Jinping from the White House on Nov. 15, 2021. (Susan Walsh/AP)
President Barack Obama operated under the mistaken assumption that China wanted to be a responsible member of the international community. President Donald Trump — with his nasty, xenophobic rhetoric, indifference toward human rights, alienation of democratic allies and counterproductive tariff wars — left the United States in a weaker position against China.
President Biden has taken a different tack: tougher than Obama’s and smarter than Trump’s. There’s growing evidence that this approach is paying off.
When Biden entered office, he — like his predecessors — promised to focus on the Indo-Pacific region. His withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan was largely to facilitate that refocus. But like other presidents, he faced a world full of challenges, including an ongoing pandemic, worldwide economic setbacks and Russia’s aggressive war against Ukraine.
Fortunately, Biden’s foreign policy remains devoted to democratic alliances and revived diplomacy. The result has been a sea change in China policy, as he and Secretary of State Antony Blinken made clear during the president’s trip to Asia.
Biden’s remarks at a joint news conference with Japan’s prime minister last Monday stirred discussion that the United States was migrating away from its strategic ambiguity about Taiwan. "Yes,” Biden replied when asked if he would defend Taiwan if it were attacked by China. “That’s the commitment we made.” He then clarified, “We agree with the one-China policy. We signed on to it, and all the attendant agreements made from there, but the idea that it can be taken by force … is just not appropriate.”
Had Biden omitted the initial “yes,” his response likely would not have raised eyebrows. Blinken later recited the traditional formula on U.S. policy toward Taiwan: “The United States remains committed to our one-China policy,” he said. He added that “we oppose any unilateral changes to the status quo from either side; we do not support Taiwan independence; and we expect cross-strait differences to be resolved by peaceful means.” Nevertheless, as is often the case with Biden’s foreign policy remarks (most plainly on Russia), his telltale bluntness was welcome.
On Thursday, Blinken reiterated the degree to which this administration takes the multifaceted threats from China seriously. “China is the only country with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to do it,” he said. “Beijing’s vision would move us away from the universal values that have sustained so much of the world’s progress over the past 75 years.” Blinken added that “this is one of the most complex and consequential relationships of any that we have in the world today.”
More so than previous administrations, the Biden team has linked domestic economic policy (from infrastructure to supply chains to chip manufacturing) to the need to bolster the U.S. economy against China. With a bill designed to make U.S. tech production more competitive against China’s making its way through conference committee, Biden might claim a significant legislative victory.
Equally important would be revamping the U.S. immigration system. While, as Blinken said, “we’re lucky when the best global talent not only studies here but stays here,” the United States could be strategic in expanding visas both for students and for tech workers. America could also bolster democracy at home (e.g., pass voting rights reform) to demonstrate the inferiority of China’s authoritarian system and effectively denounce its human rights violations. As Blinken remarked, “Our task is to prove once again that democracy can meet urgent challenges, create opportunity, advance human dignity; that the future belongs to those who believe in freedom and that all countries will be free to chart their own paths without coercion.”
The Biden administration deserves credit for making good on its pledge to revive democratic alliances and use them as force multipliers in confronting China. It developed a new agreement with Australia and Britain to provide Australia with nuclear submarines. It also elevated the “Quad” — an informal group of nations that includes Australia, India, Japan and the United States — and enhanced the ASEAN alliance. Beyond national security, the administration has maximized the United States’ leverage by acting in concert with allies on climate change and trade. (While not directly applicable to Asia, the success in revitalizing NATO has not gone unnoticed in Beijing.)
Several points warrant emphasis when assessing the challenges that China poses. For starters, the administration’s policy is a work in progress. As a senior State Department official previewed in a call on Thursday, near-term announcements are expected that will refine U.S. tariffs and support for Taiwan’s national security. The administration seems determined to pursue a policy that is more robust, realistic and diplomatically adept than its predecessors.
Second, the senior State Department official conceded that regarding Ukraine, China’s conduct has been “mixed.” The official stressed that the administration has not seen China extend military aid or help Russia avoid sanctions. Nevertheless, China continues to defend Russia rhetorically and excuse its war crimes.
Finally, China’s failure to match the West in developing effective coronavirus vaccines, resulting in continued shutdowns and an anemic recovery, should dispel the notion that it has some inherent advantage over the West. To the contrary, newfound collaboration among Western democracies and a swiftly revived U.S. economy offer evidence that free societies retain substantial advantages over closed ones. The challenge remains in harnessing that collective strength against a nation that still relies on intellectual property theft, military intimidation and state propaganda to compete with the West. | 2022-05-29T14:53:23Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Biden's muscular China policy improves on his predecessors - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/05/29/china-policy-biden-blinken-asia-trip-despite-war-ukraine-china-matters-most/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/05/29/china-policy-biden-blinken-asia-trip-despite-war-ukraine-china-matters-most/ |
Chaos among fans attempting to enter the Stade de France caused the start of the Champions League final to be delayed by more than 30 minutes. (Christophe Ena/Associated Press)
UEFA says it will review security issues after a chaotic scene preceded the Champions League final between Real Madrid and Liverpool on Saturday. The start of the match, which was played at Stade de France near Paris, was delayed for 36 minutes, and some Liverpool fans were tear-gassed and prevented from entering the stadium.
A large number of seats remained empty just before kickoff for the crown jewel event of European soccer, which Real Madrid won, 1-0. Fans attempted to scale gates and French police warned them in a tweet “not to force entry” into the stadium.
“The attempts of intrusion and fraud by thousands of English fans have complicated the work of stewards and police forces but will not tarnish this victory,” Amélie Oudéa-Castéra, the French minister of sports and the Olympic and Paralympic Games, tweeted Saturday evening. “Violence has no place in the stadiums.”
Gerald Darmanin, France’s Interior and Sports minister, blamed “British 'supporters’” for the chaos, tweeting that “thousands of British ‘supporters’, without tickets or [with] counterfeit ones, have forced entry and sometimes assaulted the stewards.”
Liverpool issued a statement saying the club was “hugely disappointed at the stadium entry issues and breakdown of the security perimeter that Liverpool fans faced this evening at Stade de France.”
“This is the greatest match in European football and supporters should not have to experience the scenes we have witnessed tonight,” its statement continued. “We have officially requested a formal investigation into the causes of these unacceptable issues.”
After the game, UEFA, the governing body of European football, announced that it would review the pregame incidents with the French police and the French Football Federation. “The turnstiles at the Liverpool end became blocked by thousands of fans who had purchased fake tickets which did not work in the turnstiles” in the run-up to the match, creating a buildup of fans seeking entry.
“As numbers outside the stadium continued to build up after kick off,” the statement read, “the police dispersed them with tear gas and forced them away from the stadium.”
A spokesperson for the Paris Police Prefecture said (via CNN) that “people without tickets forced the barriers and tried to get inside the stadium to watch the match. These attempts created crowd movements.”
Real Madrid fans, including Spain’s King Felipe VI and tennis star Rafael Nadal (who plays Sunday in the French Open), were seated roughly an hour before kickoff as Liverpool fans, including players’ families, were unable to enter.
“I couldn’t speak to my family yet, but I know the families had real struggles to get into the stadium,” Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp told reporters shortly after the game. “I heard a few things that were not good, it was obviously pretty tricky out there but I don’t know more about it.”
Liverpool defender Andy Robertson called the organization of the match “a shambles” after a friend to whom he had given a ticket was denied entry into the stadium. “One of my mates got told it was a fake which I assure you it wasn’t,” he told BBC Sport. “To be honest people were just making it up at times and panicking,” he continued. “Tear gas getting thrown at people was unacceptable.
Robertson pointed out that the final had been moved from St. Petersburg to Paris after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and wondered whether “preparations were not as good as maybe they should have been but I am sure in the coming days an inquest will go into that.”
UK sports minister Nigel Huddleston tweeted Sunday, “We are very concerned about the upsetting scenes around the Stade de France last night and shall be working with the appropriate authorities to find out what happened and why.”
Merseyside Police, which had officers working the game as observers and advisers, issued a statement Sunday in which assistant chief constable Chris Green stated that it would work with Liverpool FC, UEFA and the UK Football Policing Unit “to pass on the observations of our officers who attended the game and took part in the prematch meetings with the relevant authorities.” It added that “the majority of fans behaved in an exemplary manner, arriving at turnstiles early and queuing as directed.” | 2022-05-29T15:49:13Z | www.washingtonpost.com | UEFA to review pregame chaos at Champions League final - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/05/29/champions-league-final-chaos/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/05/29/champions-league-final-chaos/ |
Agatha grows to hurricane, poses dangerous flood threat to Mexico
There’s a chance the storm’s remnants will regenerate in the Gulf of Mexico this week
The National Hurricane Center's forecast for Agatha. (NOAA/NHC) (NOAA/NHC)
Hurricane warnings are in effect in Mexico’s Oaxaca state, where a rapidly strengthening Hurricane Agatha is expected to make landfall Monday near the town of Mazunte.
The National Hurricane Center is warning that the storm could bring “dangerous” coastal flooding and “life-threatening hurricane-force winds” near where it makes landfall. It also cautions that “life-threatening flash flooding and mudslides” are possible as the storm crosses southern Mexico, with mountainous terrain likely to see up to 20 inches of rain.
Agatha is the first named storm in either the eastern Pacific or the Atlantic basins in 2022, heralding an impending uptick in tropical storm activity through the summer.
There’s also a chance that the intensifying storm could become problematic in the Gulf of Mexico. Forecasters at the U.S. National Hurricane Center in Miami estimate a 30 percent shot of eventual redevelopment.
Agatha became a hurricane at 8 a.m. Eastern time Sunday. A hurricane warning is in effect between Salina Cruz and Lagunas de Chacahua, Mexico, with hurricane watches and tropical storm warnings spanning stretches of the coastline on either side.
At 11 a.m., the Hurricane Center declared that the storm was “rapidly strengthening,” its peak winds up to 85 mph.
Agatha was located about 200 miles off the coastline of Puerto Angel, Mexico, on Sunday morning, where conditions are favorable for the storm to strengthen further. The storm is churning over warm water — helping to fuel the storm — and there’s an absence of hostile upper-level winds, according to the Hurricane Center.
The Hurricane Center is forecasting that the storm will make landfall Monday night with maximum sustained winds of 110 mph — or as a high-end Category 2 hurricane. The most intense winds will affect a small region of the coastline east of the center when the storm comes ashore, where severe damage is possible.
Tropical-storm-force winds, capable of causing more minor damage, could begin along the coast in the hurricane warning zone late Sunday night or early Monday morning. Tropical-storm-force winds expand about 80 miles from the storm’s center.
Agatha will also generate a substantial ocean surge, or storm-driven rise in water above normally dry land, that can inundate coastal communities. The largest surge is expected near and just east of where the storm makes landfall. Large and destructive waves will accompany the surge.
More concerning for areas inland, particularly in the higher terrain, will be heavy rainfall. A widespread 10 to 16 inches of rain is forecast for Oaxaca, with localized amounts to 20 inches in the high terrain. That could trigger mudslides and flash flooding, potentially isolating more rural communities. A general 5 to 10 inches with a few 15-inch totals is probable in the state of Chipas.
According to Philip Klotzbach, a hurricane researcher at Colorado State University, Agatha is the earliest hurricane in the eastern Pacific since 2015. Andres also reached hurricane strength on May 29 of that year.
Agatha is likely to become just the third eastern Pacific hurricane to make landfall during May on record. If it crosses the coast with maximum sustained winds of at least 100 mph (the current forecast is for 110 mph winds), it would become the strongest storm to strike land so early in the season from the eastern Pacific, wrote Jeff Masters, a meteorologist and hurricane specialist for Yale Climate Connections.
In the event that Agatha strikes Mexico as a Category 3 major hurricane, it would be a first for May.
Possible gulf redevelopment
It’s highly likely that Agatha will decay rapidly upon moving inland away from its oceanic heat source early this week. It will unload the majority of its moisture, no longer fueled by heating from below. By Tuesday, it will be a shell of its former self.
Thereafter, the storm’s remnant spin could meander across Mexico and emerge in the gulf, somewhere in the Bay of Campeche, toward the mid- or latter portions of this week. The National Hurricane Center estimates a 30 percent chance of redevelopment as broad low pressure again gathers.
Water temperatures are sufficiently mild to support organization of the low pressure; whether it is able to consolidate and organize is more a question for upper-atmospheric winds, which could initially be hostile for development. They may relax some into Thursday and Friday, potentially allowing a small window of opportunity.
Residents along the Gulf Coast should monitor this system.
Convention dictates that, if the central vortex of Agatha remains intact when it reaches the Gulf of Mexico, the storm would retain its name. This has happened before — Hurricane Otto crossed from the Caribbean across Costa Rica and Nicaragua before emerging over the Pacific as a tropical storm in November 2016. It made landfall as a Category 3 but kept its name even after entering a new ocean basin.
If the vortex is to dissipate and a new low-pressure system is to develop from Agatha’s remnants, it would be called Alex and become the first named storm of the Atlantic hurricane season.
Hurricane season officially begins June 1 in the Atlantic, and long-range forecasters are sounding the alarm about an anticipated seventh-straight above-average hurricane season. | 2022-05-29T16:06:37Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Hurricane Agatha poses dangerous flood threat to Mexico - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2022/05/29/hurricane-agatha-mexico-gulf/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2022/05/29/hurricane-agatha-mexico-gulf/ |
For Memorial Day, telling the stories behind the gravestones
Flags stand at the headstones of U.S. military personnel buried at Arlington National Cemetery on Thursday. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
The simplest facts of James Gerald LaMarre Jr.’s life and death are etched in his gravestone at Arlington National Cemetery: born on May 2, 1921; died on Feb. 2, 1945; a staff sergeant in the U.S. Army from Virginia who served with the 18th Infantry.
It’s enough to convey that LaMarre gave his life in service to a worthy cause, but Don Milne wants you to know even more about the 23-year-old.
It’s a gargantuan task. More than 421,000 Americans died in the conflict and Milne wants to gather all their stories by Sept. 2, 2025, the 80th anniversary of the war’s end. He’s broken it into manageable chunks, relying on volunteers around the world to scour genealogical sites to gather information and craft the text.
“I have about 400 volunteers regularly contributing stories,” said Milne, who retired as the financial literacy manager at a bank and lives in Louisville “In order to reach our target we’re going to need between 2,000 and 3,000 people doing one story a week.”
Milne hopes to find more people willing to “give up one night of Netflix and instead of watching ‘Tiger King’ do a story about somebody who gave their life for our country.”
Kathy Harmon of Saint Thomas Township, Pa., is one such volunteer. So far, she’s researched the lives of more than 300 World War II dead, including that of Sgt. LaMarre.
“I have a passion for genealogy,” said Harmon, 65, who has traced her own family back to the 1700s. The World War II project has made her think about history in a different way.
“When I first started doing this, the young ages of most of them really hit me,” she said. “My oldest grandson is 18. I thought, ‘Wow, these guys that gave their lives were that age.’ ”
“Everyone does it a little differently,” he said. “It’s like a version of leaving flowers on a grave. There are no rules for what’s appropriate. Some are fancy. Some are simple.”
All are fairly short, about 500 words. The stories are saved to the Fold3.com database and can be accessed by entering the person’s name via the FindAGrave.com app. Milne hopes it will someday be possible to scan a gravestone with your phone and pull up the story.
Stories Behind the Stars — the name comes from the gold stars given to grieving families — has already catalogued the 2,341 Americans who died in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the 2,502 Americans killed on D-Day. Milne’s current focus is on creating stories for all the World War II dead buried at Arlington National Cemetery, about 8,000 men and women. He hopes to have most of that completed by the Fourth of July.
“What reason do they have to?” he asked. “They might go in and see names on gravestones. They can’t do much more than that. Once people know this is available — especially in sections rich with World War II fallen, like Section 34 — they can walk from grave to grave to grave and read each person’s story. It makes the experience much richer and much more engaging.”
Jeff Joyce, 61, an Air Force veteran from Manassas, is another volunteer. He also volunteers with the group Wreaths Across America and the Honor Flight program that brings veterans to Washington.
“There’s a phrase: You die twice,” Joyce said. “You die when you physically die, then you die a second time when no one remembers your name. Part of this process is trying to remind myself and others that this person had a life — a family — and they deserve to be remembered, like I would like to be remembered.” | 2022-05-29T16:24:02Z | www.washingtonpost.com | More than 421,000 Americans died in World War II. This project aims to compile their stories. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/05/29/world-war-ii-dead-stories/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/05/29/world-war-ii-dead-stories/ |
The community is grieving the loss of 19 students and two teachers in a shooting at Robb Elementary School last week
President Biden and First Lady Jill Biden on May 29 visited grieving families in the Uvalde, Tex. community after an elementary school mass shooting. (Video: The Washington Post)
UVALDE, Tex. — President Biden and first lady Jill Biden arrived in this small city of 16,000 on Sunday, as the president shares in the immense grief weighing on the residents, families and officials trying to come to terms with another senseless mass shooting in America.
The visit is the second by Biden in less than two weeks taking him to the epicenter of a mass shooting to comfort families of victims in private and meet with first responders. On May 17, the president and the first lady traveled to Buffalo to grieve with the families of 10 Black people killed at a Tops grocery store by a gunman apparently motivated by racist ideologies.
The Bidens first visited the memorial site at Robb Elementary School, where the 19 children and two teachers were killed on Tuesday. The Bidens carried a bouquet of white roses, which the First Lady laid on the ground near white crosses representing each of the shooting victims. They then linked arms and stared somberly at the flowers and other tributes had placed at the memorial.
The Bidens plan to spend most of the afternoon meeting with victims’ families and survivors of the shooting at Uvalde County Event Center, and meet separately with first responders later in the day, the White House said.
90 minutes of terror: shattered trust after the slow police response
The first couple is also scheduled to attend Mass at Sacred Heart, Uvalde’s only Catholic church. The priest, Eduardo Morales, known as Father Eddie, has tried to comfort the grieving families.
Biden does not plan to make formal remarks, and it’s unclear whether he will directly address the questions or anger apparent as details of the slow law enforcement response during the massacre have emerged. Authorities say officers didn’t breach the classroom and kill the gunman — whom they identified as 18-year-old Salvador Ramos — until more than an hour after he entered the school.
The president’s visit marks the beginning of other official remembrances stretching for nearly two weeks. The first viewing and prayer services will be on Monday for 10-year-old Amerie Jo Garza ahead of her funeral on Tuesday. Other services for the other 20 victims will be held in a steady stream at least until June 8.
Wang reported from Washington. | 2022-05-29T16:29:00Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Biden visits Uvalde - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/05/29/uvalde-biden-visit/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/05/29/uvalde-biden-visit/ |
By Neil Meyer
President Biden pays his respects at a memorial outside Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Tex., on Sunday. (Dario Lopez-Mills/AP)
Neil Meyer, a retired lawyer, is a fifth-generation Texan. He now lives in Bethesda.
I was born in Uvalde, Tex., lived there recently and love its complex history and people. Like most, I’ve been struggling under the weight of grief to understand the violence that left 19 children, two teachers and a young killer dead last week. But I’m not surprised.
First, you would be challenged to find a more heavily armed place in the United States than Uvalde. It’s a town where the love of guns overwhelms any notion of common-sense regulations, and the minority White ruling class places its right-wing Republican ideology above the safety of its most vulnerable citizens — its impoverished and its children, most of whom are Hispanic.
Second, at news of the shooting, I was struck to hear the words “Robb Elementary” because I knew of its centrality to the struggle in Uvalde over the past half-century to desegregate its schools. Robb sits in the city’s southwest quadrant. So I knew the victims of the shooting would largely be Hispanic. They have been locked into that school for decades.
In Uvalde, simply put, everything north of Highway 90 is primarily White Republican, and everything south is mostly Hispanic Democrat. The city has about 15,000 residents; more than 80 percent identify as Hispanic or Latino.
Most of Uvalde’s political leadership and the heads of the largest employers are White. At the center of town on the courthouse grounds, you’ll find a monument to Jefferson Davis, the Confederate president — installed when the Ku Klux Klan dominated Uvalde politics. (Some of us tried to get the monument removed after the murder of George Floyd, but that’s a story for another day.)
When I heard reports about the shooter, a young Latino, I winced at the reflexive disclaimer that he wasn’t an “illegal immigrant.” It wasn’t surprising to learn that he was bullied for a speech impediment, may have come from a broken family struggling with drug use and had experienced problems in school. Drug use plagues the city, and the courts struggle under the weight of young people’s encounters with the legal system. About 1 in 3 Uvalde children live in poverty.
The killer allegedly bought his guns at the Oasis Outback, a popular lunch spot for wealthier Uvaldeans, known for its large buffet, hunting supplies and gun shop. On most days you’ll also see groups of Border Patrol agents and local law enforcement there. It’s a monthly meeting place for groups such as the Uvalde County Republican Women, whose Facebook page includes posts decrying “the border invasion.”
The Oasis reflects the establishment’s deep cultural reverence for guns, hunting and the Wild West mythology. I wasn’t surprised that an 18-year-old could walk in and easily buy tactical weapons without anyone being concerned.
I wasn’t surprised to see the Republican panel of politicians at a news conference the day after the shooting, almost all White and in top positions of power in the community and the state, taking the lead. In Uvalde, the custodians of order — the chief of police, the sheriff, the head of the school district police — are Hispanic, but here they were largely silent. Unsurprisingly, they now bear the primary blame for the disastrous response at the school.
Finally, I wasn’t surprised to see victims being flown to San Antonio for treatment. The Uvalde hospital was converted in recent years to a critical access facility, limiting its number of beds. The hospital benefited financially, but many residents seeking health care must now travel to distant locations. The negative impact on a community with high rates of poverty — families who can’t afford this burden — is obvious.
President Biden and the first lady visited Uvalde on Sunday to offer comfort to the families of victims at Robb. But Uvalde and other towns like it need more than comfort — we need to know that American leaders will take the overdue steps necessary to keep these communities safe.
Let’s start with banning assault weapons and limiting young people’s access to firearms. The freedom to own weapons that facilitate mass murder is less important than the safety of our children, they’re not needed for hunting, and they don’t need to be sold to 18-year-olds. Most Americans and many Texans agree, despite the rhetoric of Republican leaders.
Let’s also recognize that Uvalde has a sufficiently large law enforcement presence, between the police department, the sheriff’s office, the Texas Department of Public Safety, the Texas Rangers, Customs and Border Protection and the FBI. We won’t succeed in creating “hardened targets” by arming teachers and other civilians.
Finally, the social conditions that gave birth to deadly violence and the killer’s mental condition can be addressed through our support of community organizations, health-care systems and schools — by supplying resources and legal avenues to identify and deal with emerging threats such as the one posed by this young man.
The deaths at Robb Elementary were predictable and avoidable. Uvalde, the state of Texas and the United States of America failed the children and teachers who died there. We owe it to their memory and to current and future generations to avoid yet another, similar tragedy. | 2022-05-29T18:00:19Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | I’m from Uvalde. I’m not surprised this happened. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/05/29/uvalde-shooting-warning-signs-racism-poverty-guns/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/05/29/uvalde-shooting-warning-signs-racism-poverty-guns/ |
Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut at the Capitol on May 26. He was in office when the Sandy Hook school shooting in his state happened in 2012. (J. Scott Applewhite/AP)
It’s difficult for Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) to express too much hope that this time, after yet another mass shooting in the country, things will be different when it comes to Congress passing legislation to address gun violence.
Murphy was in office in 2012 when a gunman killed 20 students and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in his home state. And he was in Congress on Tuesday when a gunman opened fire at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Tex., killing 19 students and two teachers, the deadliest school shooting since Sandy Hook.
In response to mass shootings in Buffalo and Uvalde, Tex., state and federal lawmakers on May 29 discussed the future of gun laws. (Video: The Washington Post)
“But there are more Republicans interested in talking about finding a path forward this time than I have ever seen since Sandy Hook,” Murphy said on ABC’s “This Week.”
“And while in the end I may end up being heartbroken, I am at the table in a more significant way right now with Republicans and Democrats than ever before — certainly with many more Republicans willing to talk right now than were willing to talk after Sandy Hook,” he said.
The day after the shooting, Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) begged his GOP colleagues to consider a bill that would strengthen background checks on those seeking to buy guns.
“To my Republican colleagues, imagine if it happened to you. Imagine if this was your kid or your grandkid. How would you feel?” Schumer said Wednesday.
Schumer called on just 10 Republicans “to stand before history and yell stop!” He then acknowledged the “reality” that most would not. The Senate went into recess without taking any votes on gun legislation.
But on Thursday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) deputized Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) to negotiate with Democrats on gun legislation. Those bipartisan conversations — which have continued throughout the holiday weekend, even though the Senate is in recess — have been “encouraging,” Murphy said.
“These are serious negotiations, and we are going to continue to meet through early next week to try to find some common ground,” Murphy said, before adding that a ban on assault weapons and universal background checks might not be realistic, even though he wholeheartedly supports them.
MURPHY: “I don't want to overstate my optimism…I've been Charlie Brown’ed enough times to know that up until now, the football has been pulled out from under me every single time. Maybe this time is different. And I'm going to work like heck to try to get that agreement.” pic.twitter.com/2eRTTlKJTS
“But what we’re talking about is not insignificant,” he added. “We’re talking about red-flag laws. We’re talking about strengthening and expanding the background check system, if not universal background checks. We’re talking about safe storage.”
That would “just show that progress is possible and that the sky doesn’t fall for Republicans if they support some of these common-sense measures,” Murphy said.
NRA-endorsed Rep. Chris Jacobs (R-N.Y.) broke with the GOP last week and said he now would support an assault weapons ban, magazine capacity limits, raising the age to be able to purchase guns from 18 to 21, and other gun restrictions. The recent shootings in Buffalo and in Uvalde forced him to reevaluate his position on guns, Jacobs told the Buffalo News.
Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.), whose NRA rating went from an “A” to an “F” after he called for a ban on bump stocks following a mass shooting at a Las Vegas music festival, on Sunday blasted the NRA as a “grifting scam.”
Kinzinger said raising the age for gun purchases to 21 years old is “a no-brainer,” and said he was open to regulations or even a ban on AR-15s. On Saturday in Buffalo, Vice President Harris called for a ban on assault weapons.
“I think if there’s a way to maybe when it comes to ARs, you know, if there’s a special license you need to own one,” Kinzinger said. “I’m definitely ready to engage in that conversation. And maybe that ultimately includes not selling them anymore. That’s fine, because to me, again, I’m focused on saving life now.”
Presiding over a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Wednesday, Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) called for a vote on background check legislation after the Senate returns from its Memorial Day recess.
“We should vote,” he said. “That’s why we were elected.”
On CNN’s “State of the Union” Sunday, Durbin said he was not certain the Uvalde tragedy would move enough Republicans to show “political courage in a very tough situation.”
“I can’t say for certain, but I can tell you, I sense a different feeling among my colleagues after Uvalde,” Durbin said. “Of course, 10 years ago, it was Sandy Hook, and Parkland, and so many other instances.”
He added that the stories coming out of Uvalde could compel lawmakers “to picture your own children or grandchildren captives of this madman as he’s killing them off one by one in that school, and realize, it is time for us to do something.”
Mike DeBonis and Steven Zeitchik contributed to this report. | 2022-05-29T18:00:25Z | www.washingtonpost.com | ‘Progress is possible’ on gun legislation after Uvalde shooting - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/05/29/uvalde-gun-legislation/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/05/29/uvalde-gun-legislation/ |
D.C. police arrest a Southeast resident on a murder charge
D.C. police have charged a 40-year-old man from Southeast with fatally stabbing another man early Sunday morning.
Officers were dispatched at 4:11 a.m. to the 4000 block of Fourth Street SE after a report of an attack, police said. There, they found Kenneth Sills, 42, inside a home with an apparent stab wound.
Sills was taken to a local hospital, were he was pronounced dead.
Tyrone Graham, also of Southeast, has been charged with second-degree murder while armed. | 2022-05-29T18:25:55Z | www.washingtonpost.com | D.C. police arrest a Southeast resident on a murder charge - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/05/29/dc-police-crime/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/05/29/dc-police-crime/ |
How the U.N. became a tool of China’s genocide denial propaganda
Chinese President Xi Jinping holds a virtual meeting with Michelle Bachelet, the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, during her visit to Guangzhou, China, on May 25. (OHCHR handout/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock)
Before U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet made her long-awaited tip to China last week, the Biden administration and the human rights community urged her not to let Beijing turn the visit into a propaganda win for the Chinese Communist Party. But Bachelet ignored those warnings. Her trip ended up helping China deny its genocide against Uyghur Muslims and other repressive policies, harming the cause of human rights accountability in the process.
On Saturday, Bachelet completed her six-day trip to China, the first in 17 years by someone with her title, with a statement to the media that summed up a visit many observers view as a tragic failure. As Human Rights Watch U.N. director Louis Charbonneau rightly observed, she grotesquely praised China’s “tremendous achievements” in human rights by pointing to poverty alleviation — which is exactly how Beijing defines human rights these days. The United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which Bachelet is supposed to be following, calls for a higher standard.
After a two-day visit to the Xinjiang region, Bachelet failed to clearly condemn the government’s campaign of repression there, which the Uyghur community and two successive U.S. administrations have said amounts to genocide. She acquiesced to Beijing’s framing of the issue there as “counterterrorism and radicalization.” She also reported without skepticism that Chinese officials in Xinjiang claim to have closed the “reeducation centers” where an estimated 2 million innocent people have been imprisoned.
“She has failed her mandate,” Dolkun Isa, the president of World Uyghur Congress, said Saturday. “The Uyghur community deserves accountability more than ever.”
Perhaps Bachelet was too busy hobnobbing with Chinese officials to notice that a huge cache of leaked documents from the Xinjiang police files were released last week. They show the faces of thousands of prisoners thrown into the camps for such “crimes” as traveling abroad, studying Islam or growing a beard. Critics say that Bachelet allowed the Chinese authorities to stage-manage her trip so thoroughly that Beijing will be able to use it to deflect responsibility for its atrocities.
“Nothing that we’ve seen from the high commissioner’s trip to China dispels our worry that this will be used as a massive propaganda victory for the Chinese government,” Charbonneau told me in an interview. “Bachelet needs to work to put an end to, and not enable, the perception that the U.N. is letting China get away with massive abuses at no cost.”
There were public and private efforts to warn Bachelet this would happen. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and U.N. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield went so far as to raise formal concerns about Bachelet’s trip with U.N. Secretary General António Guterres himself, administration sources told me.
Blinken, Thomas-Greenfield and several other U.S. officials also raised concerns directly with Bachelet and her staff, urging them not to back down from their initial demand for access to Xinjiang and the prison facilities there. The Biden team coordinated these messages with other Western governments. The result of those diplomatic conversations was a strong statement in the May 14 Group of Seven foreign ministers’ communique, which called on Chinese authorities to allow “immediate, meaningful and unfettered access to Xinjiang and Tibet for independent observers, including the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.”
On Saturday, Blinken released a statement criticizing Beijing for restricting Bachelet’s movements so thoroughly that it was impossible for her to conduct a complete and independent assessment of human rights in China, “including in Xinjiang, where genocide and crimes against humanity are ongoing.”
There were plenty of other signs Bachelet was heading into a debacle. Chinese authorities compelled her advance team to quarantine for 21 days upon arriving in Beijing, relegating their meetings during that time to video calls. Bachelet was not allowed to travel with any media, just her Chinese government handlers. She later claimed that her meetings in Xinjiang were “unsupervised,” without acknowledging that even her nongovernment interlocutors were handpicked by the authorities and were likely heavily pressured and surveilled.
After Bachelet held a virtual meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping on Wednesday, the Chinese government claimed that she had expressed “admiration” for China’s progress on human rights. China’s propaganda machine blasted this claim around the world before Bachelet’s office finally issued a statement saying she was misquoted.
Meanwhile, Bachelet’s long-awaited report on China’s human rights abuses in Xinjiang is still missing in action. Charbonneau said she should release it now and speak the truth about the Chinese government’s crimes against humanity in Xinjiang and its other massive human rights abuses. “Anything less would be an insult to the victims,” he said.
Bachelet’s trip was not just a missed opportunity to speak truth about China’s atrocities. She has undermined her credibility and the overall credibility of the U.N. system on human rights. Beijing has compromised yet another part of the U.N. system, said Christopher Walker, vice president at the National Endowment for Democracy.
“The dynamics surrounding the U.N. human rights commissioner’s visit are part of the larger pattern in which Beijing, through manipulation and intimidation, seeks to shape behaviors and norms in line with authoritarian preferences,” he said in an interview.
Leaders in Beijing are now surely more confident than ever they can commit mass atrocities without fearing significant costs imposed by the international community. When the history books are written about the world’s failure to stop the Uyghur genocide, Bachelet’s trip will go down as one of many shameful episodes. | 2022-05-29T18:43:20Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | How the U.N. became a tool of China’s genocide denial propaganda - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/05/29/michelle-bachelet-trip-china-xinjiang-uyghur-fails-genocide-accountability/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/05/29/michelle-bachelet-trip-china-xinjiang-uyghur-fails-genocide-accountability/ |
Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R). (Robb Hill for The Washington Post)
The May 24 editorial “Virginia’s hard lesson” seemingly ignored the May 20 Metro article “Report knocks student performance.” The editorial was impressed that the report presented by Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) and his education team was “chock-full of data,” but it ignored the news article that stated a Post analysis of the report “suggests the use of data is misleading.” The Metro article also quoted National Assessment of Educational Progress officials as calling the comparisons made in the report that criticize Virginia’s public-school performance not “appropriate.”
That student achievement suffered during the pandemic when schools were closed is not news. Nor is the continued need to close the achievement gap among racial and ethnic groups. Both can be accomplished with public support for our teachers and our public schools. The meaningful reform for which the editorial called should not include siphoning money away from the public schools to go to charter schools, which seems to be the goal of many.
Kenneth R. Plum, Reston
The writer, a Democrat, represents Fairfax in the Virginia House of Delegates. | 2022-05-29T19:31:18Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Virginia schools need improvement, but not less cash - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/05/29/virginia-schools-need-improvement-not-less-cash/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/05/29/virginia-schools-need-improvement-not-less-cash/ |
When Catholics make law
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) speaks during her weekly news conference in Washington on May 19. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
Mary Eberstadt’s May 24 Tuesday Opinion essay, “Catholics ‘personally opposed’ to abortion? A fallacy.,” was long on conservative Catholic talking points and short on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) responsibility as a member of the House of Representatives. The speaker’s role is not to preach Catholic theology but to uphold the Constitution. A key constitutional provision, under much attack from the right, is the separation of church and state.
The theological conclusion of Catholic doctrine that life begins at conception makes perfect sense: It’s the safest bet. Life could begin with first breath, at conception or at some point in between medically termed “viability.” Theologically, life begins when soul and flesh are united, and no human can say definitively when that point is. Constitutionally, the First Amendment bans laws based on an interpretation of theology. List me as pro-life and anti-criminalization.
Further, the pope has recommended that the church’s pastoral role not be linked to politics, as Archbishop Salvatore J. Cordileone has done. Perhaps many Catholic clergy today, and apparently Ms. Eberstadt, should consider why, in their minds, Pope Francis’s guidance is much more optional than that of Benedict XVI or John Paul II. The politicization of the Catholic Church in the United States will do to it what the polarization of politics does to the nation itself: create dangerous division.
John E. Valliere, Lake Frederick, Va.
Though I believe Archbishop Salvatore J. Cordileone has the right to deny Communion to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), Mary Eberstadt should think again about demanding that Catholics in public office take positions that are congruent with Catholic dogma. (Why not sharia?) The suspicion that the leaked draft Supreme Court decision is based on the application of Catholic belief to the interpretation of the Constitution is the cause of much of the loss of confidence in the court’s juridical independence.
Ms. Eberstadt wrote, “Public figures who want simultaneously the political benefits of ‘choice’ and the personal consolations of being Catholic might have to decide once more which of these two masters they will serve.” Not to worry, Ms. Eberstadt, the voters will decide for them.
Frank Arsenault, Annapolis
Whatever House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) believes about abortion, a great number of Catholic men and women agree that Roe v. Wade shouldn’t be overruled and that it is for the woman to make her own choices on reproductive health. But it is only the Democratic politicians who are pro-choice who are vilified. Though Catholics need to inform their consciences with the teachings of the church, the teaching on abortion is not an article of faith. Few things are, actually. Ultimately, it is the individual Catholic who must, guided by church teaching, decide.
Conservative leaders, such as the archbishop, are effectively “cafeteria Catholics,” picking and choosing which moral issues they want to emphasize. What about the Catholic Church’s teachings on war, nuclear weapons and the death penalty? How about the church’s social teachings? These teachings are publicly ignored and often derided by conservative politicians without a peep from bishops.
We aren’t a theocracy. The rights of non-Catholics, indeed nonbelievers, must be respected and protected — even by Catholic politicians. Democrats such as Ms. Pelosi aren’t claiming to speak for all women, but they do speak up for the right of women to self-determination, to make their own decisions about their bodies and their families; that is, to use their intelligence and to exercise their own judgment on this topic.
Church rule over public policy ended in 1789.
William A. Brown, Austin | 2022-05-29T19:31:25Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | When Catholics make law - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/05/29/when-catholics-make-law/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/05/29/when-catholics-make-law/ |
After Sergio Perez wins rainy Monaco Grand Prix, Ferrari lodges protest
A jubilant Red Bull crew celebrates Sergio Perez's Monaco Grand Prix victory. (Christian Bruna/POOL/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)
Sergio Perez won his first Formula 1 race of the season and the third of his career in a chaotic Monaco Grand Prix that included a rain delay, a costly mistake by the Ferrari team and a scary crash in which Mick Schumacher escaped injury when he crashed into a wall, splitting the rear portion of his car in two.
“I’m very, very happy,” Perez, a 32-year-old driver from Mexico, said in a postrace TV interview, mentioning Pedro Rodriguez, the Mexican Grand Prix winner who was killed during a race in 1971. Perez’s helmet paid tribute to Rodriguez, and he was emotional during the playing of Mexico’s national anthem at overtaking him as the country’s most successful F1 racer. “I’m sure up there [in heaven], he is super proud of what we have achieved.”
Ferrari’s Carlos Sainz finished second and Max Verstappen, Perez’s Red Bull teammate, finished third in the race, which was delayed 65 minutes by rain.
Ferrari lodged a protest afterward, claiming that Perez and Verstappen failed to obey pit-lane exit rules after a pit stop, according to a statement from race stewards.
Drivers must keep to the right of the solid yellow line at the pit exit and stay to the right until the line ends after turn one. “We believe there was a clear breach of the regulations by the two Red Bulls going on the yellow line exiting the pits,” Ferrari team boss Mattia Binotto told Sky Sports. Christian Horner of Red Bull said (via Reuters) “all the footage we’ve seen we’ve been content with.”
Verstappen lost control of his car on the slick pavement and swerved toward the yellow line at the pit exit, but on the TV feed it was not clear whether he had crossed it. There was no footage of Perez, although stewards noted it during the race. Neither incident was investigated during the race.
Schumacher lost control of his car on the wet pavement, crashing heavily at Turn 15. He was able to exit the car on his own and spoke with a safety marshal as he walked off the track.
Perez’s victory left Charles Leclerc, Sainz’s Ferrari teammate and the pole winner, fuming because Ferrari called for him to pit twice in three laps. That enabled Perez to take a lead that he never relinquished one week after the Red Bull team denied him a chance to race for the win in the Spanish Grand Prix. Perez’s teammate Verstappen won, with Perez second after being ordered to cede the lead when Leclerc dropped out of that race because of engine failure. The team promised he’d be in position to win and followed through Sunday.
Leclerc was left frustrated and furious, screaming when he was told to pit for a second tire change at the same time as Sainz, his Ferrari teammate, on Lap 22. Although his engineer yelled to “stay out” when he realized the error, it was too late and Leclerc was fourth when he returned to the track.
“No words, no words,” Leclerc told the team over the radio. “We cannot do that.”
Leclerc finished off the podium in fourth place on his home circuit. Verstappen extended his lead in the overall points standings, leading Leclerc by nine points. Leclerc has two wins this season, Verstappen and Perez have combined for five, with Red Bull and Ferrari winning all seven races. | 2022-05-29T19:31:31Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Sergio Perez wins Monaco Grand Prix - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/05/29/sergio-perez-wins-monaco-grand-prix/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/05/29/sergio-perez-wins-monaco-grand-prix/ |
Our military members need access to all health care
The Pentagon in April 2017. (NIck Kirkpatrick/The Washington Post)
Though Allison Gill was correct in her May 19 op-ed, “Overturning Roe would be disastrous for the U.S. military,” that the Military Justice Improvement and Increasing Prevention Act was not passed last year, last year’s National Defense Authorization Act included my bipartisan provision to remove cases of sexual assault, murder, stalking, kidnapping, domestic violence and other special victim offenses from the chain of command. These provisions achieved the most historic and sweeping military justice reforms since the creation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice in 1950 and will ensure that prosecutorial decisions will be made by an independent military attorney outside of the victim’s and assailant’s chain of command. Independent special trial counsels will be under civilian control, reporting to the secretaries of the Army, Air Force and Navy.
I agree with Ms. Gill wholeheartedly that the lack of protections for service members when it comes to access to abortion would be inhumane. And it won’t stop at abortion. As a member of the House Armed Services Committee and chair of the military personnel subcommittee, I have tried for years to expand access to contraception for our service members and their dependents. They deserve the same access to prescriptions and health-care services as those available to civilians through the Affordable Care Act. If we can ask women to put their lives on the line in defense of country, there is no logical or ethical reason they should not benefit from the same rights enjoyed by those they serve to protect. As Ms. Gill so eloquently noted, we must find a way to ensure they have the freedom to decide.
Jackie Speier, Washington
The writer, a Democrat, represents California’s 14th Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives. | 2022-05-29T19:53:04Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Our military members need access to all health care - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/05/29/our-military-members-need-access-all-health-care/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/05/29/our-military-members-need-access-all-health-care/ |
Maryland men’s lacrosse has unfinished business in this year’s title game
Maryland fans cheer during the Terps' win over Princeton in the men’s lacrosse semifinal on Saturday. But the team's mission is not complete yet. (John McDonnell/The Washington Post)
EAST HARTFORD, Conn. — The Maryland men’s lacrosse team left things unfinished a year ago on Memorial Day.
The top-seeded Terrapins finally have the chance to craft a different ending in their latest national title game appearance against seventh-seeded Cornell (14-4).
Maryland has won 34 of its last 35 games, with the lone loss coming in last year’s final. The then-undefeated Terps dropped a 17-16 decision to Virginia, denying them a year-end victory lap.
Once again, Maryland has a chance to close a year as the sport’s first undefeated champion since Virginia in 2006.
“With this group, knowing how far they got, with so many guys back, they were driven to get to Monday, for sure,” said Maryland Coach John Tillman, whose program is playing in its seventh national title game since 2011.
The Terps (17-0) have rarely faced serious challenges since the start of the season in early February. They have trailed in only four games, and have won by less than four goals just once.
It is a team largely defined by a ruthless efficiency coupled with a metronomic sense that nothing has really been accomplished.
Now that the final day of the season is near, perhaps that will change at Rentschler Field — the same site as last year’s loss to Virginia.
“I think we’re all very excited for the actual opportunity that we have to play tomorrow,” goalie Logan McNaney said on Sunday. “It’s another day to have together, and we’re going to cherish that.”
To complete the job this year, Maryland will have to contend with a program with which it shares a remarkable number of ties.
Tillman is a Cornell alum, as is graduate transfer Jonathan Donville. The midfielder has 30 goals and 22 assists in his lone year at Maryland after playing parts of three seasons for the Big Red before the pandemic cut short his junior year in 2020 and eliminated his senior year in 2021.
There is a long history between the schools in the NCAA tournament, with Cornell winning a pair of national title games in 1971 and 1976 and Maryland claiming the last two postseason meetings — in the 2014 first round and the 2018 quarterfinals.
But the closest connection is also the most poignant. Richie Moran was a 1960 Maryland graduate who went on to coach at Cornell for 29 years. He led the Big Red to its only three NCAA titles, in 1971, 1976 and 1977.
The patriarch of the Cornell program died April 25.
“It’s crazy how coach passes and then the two teams he was most aligned with, his alma mater and a place he called home for so long, they’re playing for a national championship,” Tillman said. “It’s the craziest thing. Coach was very successful and had a great way of impacting people positively. Maybe there’s still some mojo in the works. I know he’s looking down proud. He impacted so many of us.”
While Maryland’s title game appearance is not particularly surprising, the Big Red were largely overlooked in the preseason because of an untested roster and its absence of nearly two years.
Cornell won 10 of its first 11 games, then endured a midseason bobble with lopsided home losses to Army and Brown. The Big Red righted things this month, and its 17-10 rout of Rutgers in the semifinals came by a larger margin than Maryland’s 13-8 defeat of Princeton on Saturday.
At age 28, Connor Buczek is the youngest head coach to take a team to the national title game, and he’s done so in his first season. While the Big Red has played well this month, it is well aware of the deep, experienced — and motivated — opponent in front of it.
“Maryland’s a fantastic team; they do so much well,” Buczek said. “Obviously, they’ve been a handful for every team they’ve played this year. It’s certainly going to take a monumental effort on our part.”
Regardless of Monday’s outcome, Cornell’s legacy this season is secure. The Big Red reached the semifinals for the first time since 2013 and the title game for the first time since 2009, and it did so despite a lengthy on-field layoff as a program.
Maryland will be remembered far more for what happens Monday than the previous 17 games combined. It had muted celebrations when it won the Big Ten tournament and when it advanced to the Final Four.
The opportunity to close things out when they matter the most arrives Monday.
“I don’t feel like it’s a complete failure if we don’t win,” Tillman said. “Sure, there’s going to be disappointment, because that was one of the things you were hoping to do. But we’ve accomplished a lot so far. I think the guys would like to finish it off the right way, but that’s a really good Cornell team that’s standing on the way.” | 2022-05-29T20:01:41Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Maryland to play Cornell in NCAA men's lacrosse championship - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/05/29/maryland-cornell-mens-lacrosse-championship/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/05/29/maryland-cornell-mens-lacrosse-championship/ |
Marcus Ericsson wins Indianapolis 500 in an electric finish
Marcus Ericsson celebrates Sunday's win in Indianapolis. (Michael Conroy/AP)
Scott Dixon, who has led more Indianapolis 500 laps than any other driver, was cruising toward his second career victory in the 106th running of the race Sunday afternoon when he drew a speeding penalty on pit row. That mistake, compounded by a Jimmie Johnson crash, set up a four-lap shootout.
Marcus Ericsson held off Pato O’Ward in that shootout, with Tony Kanaan finishing third.
“I couldn’t believe it. You can never take any thing for granted,” the 31-year-old Ericsson told NBC. “... It was hard to refocus, but I knew the car was amazing. I had to do everything there at the end to keep [O’Ward and Kanaan] behind.”
After Dixon’s miscue, those three, along with Marco Andretti and Alex Palou, were in the running — as was Johnson, the seven-time NASCAR Cup Series champion running in his first Indy 500. But Ericsson, a Swede whose helmet paid tribute to late Swedish driver Ronnie Peterson, took control with 10 laps to go, opening a big lead over O’Ward and Kanaan.
Johnson, Ericsson’s Chip Ganassi Racing teammate, briefly took the lead for a lap with 13 to go, but a crash into the fence on Turn 2 ended his race with six laps left. That brought out a red flag that stopped the race to allow Johnson’s debris to be cleaned up and set up a shootout — the last thing Ericsson wanted to see — with four laps left.
“They’d better be ready. I wouldn’t want to be the leader of the restart,” Kanaan told NBC from his car as he awaited the shootout. “I’m exactly where I want to be.”
But Ericsson held off O’Ward’s challenge and won the race for the first time. | 2022-05-29T20:27:48Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Marcus Ericsson wins Indianapolis 500 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/05/29/marcus-ericsson-indy-500/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/05/29/marcus-ericsson-indy-500/ |
The Severna Park boys pose with the trophy after winning the Maryland 4A outdoor track and field title Saturday. (Severna Park athletics)
After winning the Maryland 4A championship in the grueling 800 meters Saturday, all Severna Park’s Jack DeBaugh wanted was a snack and something to drink.
But as the senior rejoined his teammates at the Falcons’ station at the Prince George’s Sports and Learning Complex in Landover, he received a boost of energy from another source. He learned that, with his win, the Falcons had clinched the first outdoor state title in program history.
“It was such an awesome experience,” said DeBaugh, who finished in 1 minute 55.94 seconds. “I usually try to tune out the point-counting and just focus on the race ahead, but when I came back and heard that we’d clinched it with, like, four events to go, my body was just overtaken with a feeling I’ve never felt before — like, we really did it.”
Coming into the meet, Severna Park was brimming with confidence. Outside of being the projected boys’ winner according to the pre-meet heat sheets, most of the team already had championship experience; the Falcons claimed cross-country and indoor track titles earlier in the school year.
But the state outdoor meet presented another variable: The first session, scheduled for Friday, was postponed by inclement weather. As a result, teams in 3A and 4A participated in preliminary heats in the morning and then returned for the finals later in the day.
“Not much changes from a physical standpoint because everyone is having to adjust and deal with the same condensed schedule, but the mental standpoint is where meets like Saturday’s can be won or lost,” Severna Park Coach Josh Alcombright said. “So I just reminded them in an email Friday night that being really focused was going to be the key. Accepting that the day was going to be long can be a huge advantage for us before we even stepped off the bus.”
DeBaugh’s victories in the 400 and 800 and as part of the 4x800 relay played a major role in Severna Park (87 points) beating Old Mill (59) and Northwest (43). On the girls’ side, Urbana (102 points) beat out Blake (90.5) and C.H. Flowers (66.2) for the 4A title.
In the 3A girls’ competition, Howard ran away with the win, scoring 104 points to double the next-best team and repeat as champions. (The Lions won in 4A last year.) Senior Nimrit Ahuja played a crucial role, winning the 800 and 1,600 and running on the Lions’ victorious 4x800 squad.
The Northern boys scored 57 points to edge Huntingtown (55) and Howard (52) for the 3A title — their first state championship since a dominant stretch in which the Patriots won in 1980, 1982 and 1983.
In Class 2A, the Oakland Mills boys (168 points) dominated and the girls (88.5) edged runner-up Hereford (82). The boys were the 3A champs a year ago and now have 15 state titles. | 2022-05-29T21:03:01Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Severna Park completes triple crown, winning first outdoor state title - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/05/29/severna-park-completes-triple-crown-winning-first-outdoor-state-title/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/05/29/severna-park-completes-triple-crown-winning-first-outdoor-state-title/ |
WASHINGTON, DC — MAY 29: The US flag is seen at the African American Civil War Memorial in Washington, D.C., May 29, 2022, where the Buffalo Soldiers, who are African American motorcyclists from across the country, who came to the memorial to honor of people of color who paid the ultimate price for freedom in this country. (Astrid Riecken for The Washington Post)
The 8-year-old had waited all week to hear the roar of Buffalo Thunder on Sunday morning, and when hundreds of the motorcycles finally arrived in the nation’s capital, his eyes opened wide.
Valentine, 91, an Army veteran and retired D.C. police officer, was thrilled with the return of the ride, which he said is much more about community than motorcycling. After two years of protests for racial justice and a pandemic that has highlighted racial health disparities, Valentine said he hoped the parade would bring attention to the contributions that troops of color have made both at war and in their communities.
“We ride motorcycles a lot,” Jeff “Shorty Airborne” Freeland, the Maryland charter’s president said. “But community service is what we do.”
Mason Monroe, chairman of the Buffalo Soldiers of Maryland Foundation, said they didn’t expect as many participants this year because of covid-19, which meant the event was likely to yield less than half the $20,000 it did during a normal pre-pandemic ride. The foundation relies on individual and corporate donations year-round, and members participate in other functions to raise funds to help majority Black communities in D.C. and Prince George’s County.
On Sunday, about 400 Buffalo Thunder riders from across the country, many from as far as away as Florida and Idaho, rode from a Landover, Md., church parking lot to the African American Civil War Memorial at U Street, passing waving crowds along the 14-mile route.
Hassell said the event was a history lesson for her grandkids. Dressed in a Civil War costume, reenacting a schoolteacher of the era, she walked with Karter and Krista around the statue of Black uniformed armed servicemen as they read some of the more than 200,000 names engraved at the African American Civil War Memorial. | 2022-05-29T22:20:56Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Buffalo Soldiers memorial day ride returns after pandemic - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/05/29/buffalo-soldiers-memorial-day-honor/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/05/29/buffalo-soldiers-memorial-day-honor/ |
Memorial Day Parade returns to D.C. with ‘Top Gun’ Tuskegee Airman
Once slighted, an African American crack pilot is set to lead this year’s parade
James H. Harvey III, a member of the Tuskegee Airmen, will be the grand marshal of 2022 Memorial Day Parade in D.C. (U.S. Air Force) ( and U.S. Air Force/U.S. Air Force)
First Lt. James H. Harvey III was a crack pilot with the 332nd Fighter Group, the famed African American Tuskegee Airmen.
He had flown a host of American fighter planes, including an F-47 and F-51, though he was never in combat during World War II. Then, he and three buddies were selected to fly in the first “Top Gun” style gunnery competition hosted by the Air Force.
It was May 1949, outside Las Vegas. He was 25. And his team was piloting the old F-47 against teams in the propeller class flying newer F-51s and the even newer F-82s. The competition was intense. One F-82 crashed, killing the two men aboard.
Harvey’s team won the propeller competition and reportedly scored the most overall points, but didn’t get the credit for over four decades, the Air Force says.
On Monday, Harvey, now 98, is scheduled to be the grand marshal in Washington’s Memorial Day Parade, which returns in full to Constitution Avenue after a hiatus of two years because of the pandemic. Harvey said he was looking forward to the event, which pays tribute to members of the armed forces who have given their lives in service to the country on the nation’s traditional day of remembrance.
“What does the grand marshal do?” Harvey joked in a recent telephone interview.
Informed that he probably would sit in a car and wave, he laughed. “I thought … that too,” he said. “But I had some doubt in my mind.”
The honor comes with the debut last week of the new aircraft action movie, “Top Gun: Maverick,” a sequel to the 1986 film about the Navy’s fighter weapons school, which was established in 1969.
The parade will feature, among other things, the U.S. Army band Pershing’s Own. It begins at 2 p.m. and goes along Constitution Avenue from Seventh Street to 17th Street.
“We are really proud to be back, after all we’ve gone through, as a city and country, and everything we’re still going through,” said Tim Holbert, senior vice president of the American Veterans Center, which puts on the parade. “We just really need shared events like this where we can all come together.
“This is one that we’re especially proud of. There are so many events and businesses and organizations that are gone from three years ago and aren’t coming back.”
The last live parade on Constitution Avenue was held in 2019.
It was a festive event that celebrated, among others, the African American women veterans of the Army’s 6888 Central Postal Directory — the “Six Triple Eight” — which sorted through warehouses in Britain filled with mail for soldiers in World War II.
The next year, because of the coronavirus pandemic, the parade was canceled at the last minute along with numerous other spring festivities in Washington.
The parade was also not held live in 2021, although a diminished version was staged for TV on the Mall with no crowds present.
But with the recent easing of the pandemic and many of its restrictions, organizers decided to hold the parade live again this year.
“The fact that we were able to bring the parade back, live on Constitution Avenue with the crowds, with the veterans … makes it” special this year, Holbert said.
Organizers said they are particularly excited to welcome Harvey, who retired from the Air Force as a lieutenant colonel and traveled from his home in Colorado to participate.
In 1949, the Air Force held the first gunnery competition at what was then Las Vegas Air Force Base, now Nellis Air Force Base. The best pilots in the Air Force were invited.
The competition consisted of aerial gunnery at 12,000 feet and 20,000 feet, skip bombing, rocket firing, panel strafing and dive bombing, according to the Air Force.
Harvey was then stationed at Lockbourne Air Force Base, near Columbus, Ohio. His team included Capt. Alva Temple, 1st Lt. Harry Stewart and 1st Lt. Halbert Alexander.
“Benjamin O. Davis Jr. was our Wing Commander and his departing remark to us was, ‘If you don’t win, don’t come home,’” Harvey told a Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum website. “He was joking, of course.”
“Our competing pilots laughed at us when we landed at Las Vegas Air Force Base because we were Black and we were flying the P-47,” the dated World War II fighter later known as the F-47, Harvey said. “We were the only active unit in the United States Air Force flying P-47 aircraft.”
“It was a nice airplane,” Harvey said in an interview. “It was big, and it was very heavy; weighed 4,000 pounds just sitting on the ground.”
“Thanks to the combined effort of everyone, we won the weapons meet,” he told the museum.
But the annual almanac published by the Air Force Association for many years listed the winner of the 1949 competition as “unknown,” he said. Finally, in 1993, the commander of the 332nd Fighter Group got the outfit listed as a 1949 winner, Harvey said.
And in January, the Air Force unveiled a plaque at Nellis Air Force Base that honors the men of the 332nd for their achievement at the competition:
Top Team Honors
USAF Fighter Gunnery Meet … | 2022-05-29T22:21:02Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Memorial Day parade returns with 'Top Gun' Tuskegee Airman - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/05/29/tuskegee-memorial-parade-pilot-top-gun/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/05/29/tuskegee-memorial-parade-pilot-top-gun/ |
Pelosi’s husband accused of DUI
By — Amy B Wang
1 killed, 7 injured in shooting at festival
Authorities said one person was killed and seven were injured in a shooting early Sunday at an outdoor festival in eastern Oklahoma, with a witness describing frantic people running for cover.
Two juveniles were among those shot at the Memorial Day event in Taft, about 10 miles southeast of Tulsa, the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation said in a statement.
The agency provided no details including the conditions of those injured. The Muskogee County Sheriff’s Office referred the AP to the OSBI. A spokeswoman has not responded to calls.
In another instance of gun violence over the Memorial Day weekend, six people were wounded during an exchange of gunfire in a downtown Chattanooga, Tenn., business district, police said.
Several victims were taken to a hospital and two of the injuries were life threatening, Eames said. The ages of the victims were not immediately released, but most were believed to be teenagers and young adults.
Pelosi's husband accused of DUI
Napa County records show Paul Pelosi, 82, was arrested at 11:44 p.m. Saturday and booked about 4 a.m. Sunday on one count of driving under the influence and one count of driving with a blood alcohol content level of 0.08 or higher.
Both counts are misdemeanor charges, and his bail was set at $5,000, records show. The arrest was first reported by TMZ.
The Napa County Police Department did not respond to a request for comment.
A representative for Nancy Pelosi’s office said the speaker was not in California during the incident. “The Speaker will not be commenting on this private matter which occurred while she was on the East Coast,” Pelosi spokesman Drew Hammill said in a statement.
— Amy B Wang
Third suspect arrested in Sacramento shooting: Police have arrested a third suspect in connection with a gang shootout in downtown Sacramento last month that left six dead and 12 wounded, authorities said. Mtula Payton was arrested in Las Vegas on Saturday, officials said. Authorities had identified three suspects — Payton and rival gang members Smiley Martin and his brother Dandrae Martin — in connection with the barrage of bullets unleashed into a crowded street just as patrons were leaving downtown bars in the early hours of April 3. Three men and three women were killed. Payton was already wanted on multiple felony warrants, including domestic violence and gun charges, according to authorities.
Five dead in Ga. boat collision: Searchers recovered the bodies of three missing boaters Sunday after two vessels collided on a Georgia river, bringing the crash's death toll to five people. One of the surviving boaters was charged with boating under the influence. Two people were found dead shortly after the Saturday collision on the Wilmington River near Savannah, authorities said. One of the boats had six people aboard and the other carried three people, the U.S. Coast Guard said in a statement. At least four people were taken to hospitals, authorities said. | 2022-05-29T22:33:59Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Pelosi’s husband accused of DUI - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/pelosis-husband-accused-of-dui/2022/05/29/4e6ca62c-de2d-11ec-a744-f4da26d516e8_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/pelosis-husband-accused-of-dui/2022/05/29/4e6ca62c-de2d-11ec-a744-f4da26d516e8_story.html |
Israeli nationalists march in show of force
Thousands of Israeli nationalists, some chanting “Death to Arabs,” paraded through the heart of the main Palestinian thoroughfare in Jerusalem’s Old City on Sunday, in a show of force that risked setting off a new wave of violence in the tense city.
The crowds, overwhelmingly young Orthodox Jewish men, were celebrating Jerusalem Day — an Israeli holiday that marks the capture of the Old City in the 1967 Mideast war. Palestinians see the event, which passes through the heart of the Muslim Quarter, as a provocation. Last year, the parade helped trigger an 11-day war with militants from the Gaza Strip.
Israel said it deployed thousands of police and security forces for the event, and scuffles between Jewish and Palestinian groups erupted inside the Old City before the parade began.
As the march got underway, Orthodox Jewish youths gathered outside Damascus Gate, waving flags, singing religious and nationalistic songs, and shouting “the Jewish nation lives” before entering the Muslim Quarter. One large group chanted “Death to Arabs” and “Let your village burn down” before descending into the Old City.
The march came at a time of heightened tensions. Israeli police have in recent months repeatedly confronted stone-throwing Palestinian demonstrators in a contested hilltop compound revered by both Jews and Muslims, often firing rubber bullets and stun grenades.
At the same time, 19 Israelis have been killed by Palestinian attackers in Israel and the occupied West Bank in recent weeks, while more than 35 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli military operations in the occupied West Bank.
Non-Europeans lead ranks of new cardinals
Pope Francis named 21 new cardinals on Sunday, most of them from continents other than Europe — which has dominated Catholic hierarchy for most of the church’s history — and further putting his mark on the group of people who might someday elect the next pontiff.
Among those tapped by the pontiff to receive the red hat will be two prelates from India and one each from Ghana, Nigeria, Singapore, East Timor, Paraguay and Brazil, in keeping with Francis’s determination to have church leaders reflect the global face of the Catholic Church.
With church growth largely stagnant or at best sluggish in much of Europe and North America, the Vatican has been attentive to its flock in developing countries, including in Africa, where the number of faithful has been growing in recent decades. Only one new cardinal was named from the United States: Robert Walter McElroy, bishop of San Diego.
This is the eighth batch of cardinals that Francis has named since becoming pontiff in 2013. A sizable majority of those eligible to vote in a conclave were appointed by him, increasing the likelihood that they will pick as his successor someone who shares his papacy’s priorities, including attention to those living on the margins and to the environment.
25 missing after cargo boat sinks in Indonesia: Rescuers in Indonesia were searching for 25 people who were missing after a cargo boat sank in the Makassar Strait in South Sulawesi province, officials said. Forty-two people were on the boat when it sank in bad weather last week, according to the head of the provincial search and rescue agency. Seventeen people were later rescued. The vessel was initially said to be a passenger ferry, but authorities later clarified it was a cargo boat carrying construction materials.
Court sentences ex-presidential candidate to 15 years in Egypt: An Egyptian court sentenced former presidential candidate Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh and several prominent figures from the banned Muslim Brotherhood to lengthy jail terms on accusations that include plotting to overthrow the state. Aboul Fotouh, who is in his early 70s and according to his family suffers from several medical conditions, was sentenced to 15 years in prison, subject to appeal, the court said. He was arrested in February 2018 after giving interviews sharply critical of President Abdel Fatah al-Sissi . Authorities accuse the Brotherhood of promoting militancy and subversion, accusations it strongly denies.
Peru's president under criminal investigation: The attorney general's office in Peru said it was including President Pedro Castillo in an investigation into alleged crimes, including influence peddling, collusion and "criminal organization." The investigation targets former minister of transport and communications Juan Silva and six legislators from the opposition party. The prosecutor's office began working on the case more than three weeks ago to determine whether there was an alleged "criminal network" in the Transport Ministry to award public contracts. According to statements by a collaborator and business executive linked to the government, Castillo would have had knowledge of such a network. | 2022-05-29T22:34:05Z | www.washingtonpost.com | World Digest: May 29, 2022 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/world-digest-may-29-2022/2022/05/29/8c8a7c62-df50-11ec-9611-6f35e4fddfc3_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/world-digest-may-29-2022/2022/05/29/8c8a7c62-df50-11ec-9611-6f35e4fddfc3_story.html |
Atlanta Braves’ Marcell Ozuna, left, slap hands with third base coach Ron Washington after hitting a solo home run in the first inning of a baseball game against the Miami Marlins, Sunday, May 29, 2022, in Atlanta. (AP Photo/Hakim Wright Sr.) (Harkim Wright Sr./FR171311 AP)
CHICAGO — Jake Burger atoned for a costly error with a game-ending RBI single in the 12th inning, and the banged-up Chicago White Sox topped the Chicago Cubs in a wild finale to the season series between the crosstown rivals.
Danny Mendick opened the White Sox’s 12th as the automatic runner andadvanced on Andrew Vaughn’s grounder to second against Robert Gsellman (0-2). Burger then drove Gsellman’s next pitch into left for the winning hit.
ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — Taylor Walls and Ji-man Choi homered for Tampa Bay’s only hits, and the team scored two runs in the seventh inning on four walks and a hit batter in a 4-2 win over New York. | 2022-05-29T22:34:48Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Braves load up on extra-base hits in win over Marlins - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/mlb/braves-load-up-on-extra-base-hits-in-win-over-marlins/2022/05/29/03978164-df93-11ec-ae64-6b23e5155b62_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/mlb/braves-load-up-on-extra-base-hits-in-win-over-marlins/2022/05/29/03978164-df93-11ec-ae64-6b23e5155b62_story.html |
Rafael Nadal needed five sets to get past Felix Auger-Aliassime. (Dylan Martinez/Reuters)
PARIS — It took every shot in Rafael Nadal’s repertoire, total conviction and considerable “suffering,” as the Spaniard put it, to reach the French Open quarterfinals.
What Nadal will have left for Tuesday’s highly anticipated clash with top-ranked Novak Djokovic — the 59th meeting of their rivalry, with implications for tennis history at stake — is unclear after Nadal needed nearly 4½ hours Sunday to subdue Felix Auger-Aliassime, a challenger nearly 15 years younger.
Nadal, who turns 36 on Friday, sounded bleak after his 3-6, 6-3, 6-2, 3-6, 6-3 victory on Court Philippe-Chatrier, where he has won 13 of his men’s record 21 Grand Slam titles.
“I [am] going to fight for it,” he said. “Two weeks and a half ago … I don’t know if I would be able to be here. So just enjoying the fact that I am here for one more year. And, being honest, every match that I play here, I don’t know if [it’s] going to be my last match here in Roland Garros in my tennis career, no? That’s my situation now.”
Nadal didn’t cite the rib he cracked during a tournament in March and made only passing reference to “a tough process” with his foot, alluding to chronic pain in his surgically repaired left one. At this stage in his hard-slugging career, the injuries and ailments are baggage he carries that he didn’t have in 2005, when he won his first French Open title just days after his 19th birthday.
Djokovic, who secured his quarterfinal berth earlier Sunday in half the time by breezing past Diego Schwartzman, 6-1, 6-3, 6-3, is on a mission to equal Nadal’s tally of majors here at Roland Garros, where he is the defending champion, and surpass it at Wimbledon next month. He has yet to concede a set in the first four rounds.
Asked after his victory about the prospect of facing Nadal for a spot in the semifinals, Djokovic called it “a huge challenge and probably the biggest one that you can have here in Roland Garros.”
“I’m glad that I didn’t spend too much time on the court myself up to quarterfinals,” Djokovic said, “knowing that ... playing [Nadal] in Roland Garros is always a physical battle.”
The Djokovic-Nadal clash is the match so many tennis fans have looked forward to at this year’s French Open — albeit not so early in the tournament — because of its many layers of significance.
The victor’s next challenge could prove equally daunting: a potential semifinal against Carlos Alcaraz, the Spanish teen who beat Nadal and Djokovic in succession to win the recent Madrid Open on clay. The sixth-seeded Alcaraz routed Karen Khachanov, 6-1, 6-4, 6-4, on Sunday to reach the quarterfinals, where he’ll face third-seeded Alexander Zverev.
They haven’t competed at the same Grand Slam since. Nadal missed the 2021 U.S. Open to undergo foot surgery. Djokovic missed the 2022 Australian Open after being deported following a failed legal challenge over his coronavirus vaccination status.
Sunday’s matches took place on a cool, overcast afternoon as the city slowly woke after Saturday night’s UEFA Champions League final at Stade de France. Nadal, a lifelong Real Madrid fan, was among the luminaries on hand — a rare diversion on the night before a Grand Slam match — and he exited, he said, before the postmatch revelry because it was time for bed.
The 6-foot-4 Auger-Aliassime, 21, was superior at the outset, breaking Nadal’s serve early and committing far fewer errors to claim the opening set. After leveling at one set apiece, Nadal rounded into form in the third set, pummeling Auger-Aliassime with forehand blasts again and again.
But the ninth-seeded Auger-Aliassime, who was seeking his fourth consecutive Grand Slam quarterfinal appearance, weathered the Spaniard’s best. He hung with the hard-hitting Nadal on extended baseline rallies. He produced huge serves time and again to fend off 16 of the 22 break points he faced. And he kept his composure as the momentum shifted back and forth.
In April 2021, Toni Nadal joined Auger-Aliassime’s coaching staff with an understanding that he would not coach him against his nephew. That circumstance arrived for the first time Sunday — on Nadal’s favorite stage, with his opportunity to claim a 22nd Grand Slam title and a record-extending 14th French Open in the balance.
Toni Nadal’s solution — he explained Friday, when his nephew and young charge advanced to their fourth-round collision — was to sit in neither player’s box. Instead, he looked on from a “neutral” seat in the front row, taking neither side yet impossible to miss — at least until the contest headed into the fifth set. At that point, he later explained to a French broadcaster, he could take no more and had to leave to watch the conclusion on television.
Nadal’s fitness has been in question from the tournament’s outset, but he has sidestepped direct questions about it. He gave no hint of any limitations deep into the fifth set, ripping a forehand winner down the line, in a full slide, to set up what proved to be the key break point. | 2022-05-29T23:00:05Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Rafael Nadal, Novak Djokovic will meet at French Open - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/05/29/rafael-nadal-novak-djokovic-french-open-quarterfinals/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/05/29/rafael-nadal-novak-djokovic-french-open-quarterfinals/ |
Ronnie Hawkins and his wife, Wanda, at the Canadian Music Industry Awards in Toronto in 2007. (Frank Gunn/AP)
Ronnie Hawkins, a brash rockabilly star from Arkansas who became a patron of the Canadian music scene after moving north and recruiting a handful of local musicians later known as the Band, died May 29. He was 87.
His wife, Wanda Hawkins, confirmed his death to Canadian news organizations, citing an unspecified illness.
Born just two days after Elvis Presley, the musician known as “the Hawk” — he also called himself “The King of Rockabilly” and “Mr. Dynamo” — had minor hits in the 1950s with “Mary Lou” and “Odessa” and ran a club in Fayetteville, Ark., where acts included such early rock stars as Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis and Conway Twitty.
“Hawkins is the only man I ever heard who can make a nice sexy song like ‘My Gal Is Red Hot’ sound sordid,” Greil Marcus wrote in his acclaimed book about music and American culture, “Mystery Train,” adding that the Hawk was alleged to “know more back roads, backrooms and backsides than any man from Newark to Mexicali.”
Mr. Hawkins didn’t have the musical gifts of Presley or Perkins, but he did have ambition and an eye for talent.
He first performed in Canada in the late ’50s and realized he would stand out more in a country where homegrown rock still barely existed. Canadian musicians had often moved to the United States to advance their careers, but Mr. Hawkins was the rare American to try the reverse.
With drummer and fellow Arkansan Levon Helm, he put together a Canadian backing group that included guitarist-songwriter Robbie Robertson, keyboardists Garth Hudson and Richard Manuel and bassist Rick Danko. They became the Hawks, educated in the Hawkins school of rock.
Robertson and friends backed Mr. Hawkins from 1961 to 1963, putting on raucous shows across Canada and recording a howling cover of Bo Diddley’s “Who Do You Love” that became one of Mr. Hawkins’s signature songs.
But Mr. Hawkins wasn’t selling many records and the Hawks outgrew their leader. They hooked up with Bob Dylan in the mid-’60s and by the end of the decade were superstars on their own who had renamed themselves the Band.
Mr. Hawkins, meanwhile, settled in Peterborough, Ontario, and had a handful of Top 40 singles there, including “Bluebirds Over the Mountain” and “Down in the Alley.”
He admittedly didn’t keep up with the latest sounds — he was horrified the first time he heard Canadian Neil Young — but in the late 1960s he befriended John Lennon and his wife, Yoko Ono. They stayed with Mr. Hawkins and his wife, Wanda, and three children while they were visiting Canada.
“At that particular time, I thought I was doin’ them a favor,” he later told the National Post. “I thought the Beatles were an English group that got lucky. I didn’t know a lot about their music. I thought Yoko’s was [silly]. To this day, I have never heard a Beatle album. For 10 billion dollars, I couldn’t name one song on ‘Abbey Road.’ I have never in my life picked up a Beatle album, and listened to it. Never. But John was so powerful. I liked him. He wasn’t one of those hotshots, you know.”
Mr. Hawkins also kept in touch with the Band and was among the guests in 1976 for the all-star, farewell concert that was the basis for Martin Scorsese’s documentary “The Last Waltz.”
Besides “The Last Waltz,” Mr. Hawkins also appeared in Dylan’s film “Renaldo and Clara,” the big-budget fiasco “Heaven’s Gate” and “Hello Mary Lou.” A 2007 documentary about him, “Still Alive and Kickin,’ ” was narrated by Dan Aykroyd and featured a cameo from another famous Arkansan, Bill Clinton.
Mr. Hawkins’s albums included “Ronnie Hawkins,” “The Hawk” and “Can’t Stop Rockin,’” a 2001 release notable for Helm and Robertson appearing on the same song, “Blue Moon in My Sign.” Helm and Robertson were no longer speaking, having fallen out after “The Last Waltz,” and recorded their contributions in separate studios.
Over time, Mr. Hawkins mentored numerous young Canadian musicians who went on to successful careers, including guitarist Pat Travers and future Janis Joplin guitarist John Till.
Mr. Hawkins was born Jan. 10, 1935, in Huntsville, Ark. He formed his first band as a student at the University of Arkansas.
He received several honorary awards from his adopted country, and, in 2013, was named a member of the Order of Canada for “his contributions to the development of the music industry in Canada, as a rock-and-roll musician, and for his support of charitable causes.”
A complete list of survivors could not be confirmed. | 2022-05-29T23:34:54Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Ronnie Hawkins, U.S. rocker who found fame in Canada, dies at 87 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/05/29/rocker-ronnie-hawkins-dies/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/05/29/rocker-ronnie-hawkins-dies/ |
With light winds after Friday’s tornadoes, Sunday proves to be calm after the storm
On Sunday, the air seemed to possess a certain stillness, probably appropriate for this weekend. It contrasted with Friday, when two tornadoes touched down in the area, according to the National Weather Service.
They snapped and uprooted trees and damaged houses. One followed a quarter-mile path in the Olney area of Montgomery County in Maryland, with winds of about 80 mph, the Weather Service said.
The other tornado, packing winds of up to 90 mph, tracked along a four-mile path from Charlotte Hall in St. Mary’s County to Benedict in Charles County, the Weather Service said.
Neither tornado — one which was confirmed Saturday and the other Sunday — caused any injuries, the Weather Service said.
By contrast, Sunday’s winds seemed sedated. Through 5 p.m., the average wind speed was 4.1 mph, according to the Weather Service. If maintained through day’s end, that would make Sunday the calmest day this month. The strongest wind was 10 mph and the peak gust was 13 mph.
But no breeze seemed necessary for comfort Sunday, with its high temperature of only 82 degrees — two above average for the date — and humidity that seemed barely discernible. | 2022-05-30T02:37:40Z | www.washingtonpost.com | With light winds after Friday’s tornadoes, Sunday proves to be calm after the storm - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/two-tornadoes-struck-washington-area-on-friday/2022/05/29/ee00da8c-dfae-11ec-9611-6f35e4fddfc3_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/two-tornadoes-struck-washington-area-on-friday/2022/05/29/ee00da8c-dfae-11ec-9611-6f35e4fddfc3_story.html |
Jayson Tatum will lead the Boston Celtics against Stephen Curry and the Golden State Warriors in the NBA Finals. (Michael Dwyer/AP)
After six weeks of intense playoff action, the 2022 NBA Finals matchup is finally set, and two of the league’s oldest franchises will vie for the Larry O’Brien Trophy.
The Golden State Warriors (53-29) will host the Boston Celtics (51-31) in Game 1 of the Finals at San Francisco’s Chase Center on Thursday, and there are weighty stakes on both sides. While Stephen Curry and company are seeking their fourth title since 2015, Jayson Tatum is eying the Celtics’ 18th championship, which would move them one past the Los Angeles Lakers for the all-time record.
While the Warriors, who were then located in Philadelphia, and the Celtics both joined the Basketball Association of America (which later merged with the NBL to become the NBA) in 1946, they haven’t squared off in the Finals since 1964. That year, Hall of Fame center Bill Russell led the Celtics past his rival Wilt Chamberlain’s San Francisco Warriors in five games.
Persistence has paid off for both the Warriors and Celtics. Two years ago, Golden State finished with the NBA’s worst record following Kevin Durant’s free-agency departure and long-term injuries to Stephen Curry and Klay Thompson. The Warriors bounced back by cruising through the West with a 12-4 postseason run, knocking off the Denver Nuggets, Memphis Grizzlies and Dallas Mavericks.
Golden State enters the Finals with the top-ranked offense in the playoffs, while Boston boasted the NBA’s No. 1 defense in the regular season.
The Finals will also feature a coaching showdown between Golden State’s Steve Kerr and Boston’s Ime Udoka, both of whom served as assistants under Greg Popovich for USA Basketball’s gold-medal winning team at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.
What’s the NBA Finals schedule
Is there a new Larry O’Brien trophy?
What does the playoff bracket look like?
What happened in the play-in tournament? | 2022-05-30T03:25:32Z | www.washingtonpost.com | NBA Finals schedule and results - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/05/29/nba-finals/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/05/29/nba-finals/ |
Ask Amy: I want to apologize to my ex-wife for our decades-old divorce
Stacey remarried (happily) and, after many years in the wilderness, we are able to attend family activities and engage in cordial conversation.
Regretful: You say that you and your ex now have a cordial relationship, and so a note from you wouldn’t necessarily create a problem for her.
Sample thoughts you might use: “Over time, I’ve come to understand how immature and selfish I was.” “You absolutely deserved better, and I appreciate that you seem to have found a far better partner than I was to you.” “Thank you for raising our children so well.” “I am so sorry for the pain I caused you and the kids.”
You might want to end your note with this thought: “I don't need any acknowledgment from you, but I hope you receive this in the spirit I intend it — as a sincere apology.”
I can’t help feeling like she’s phasing me out of her life and doesn’t want to be in a relationship with me anymore. When I ask her if there’s anything wrong between us, she says everything is fine.
Worried: This change in your relationship may be related to “Iris’s” decision to stop drinking.
Appalled: I was surprised to learn that there is a robust market in this material.
©2022 by Amy Dickinson. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency. | 2022-05-30T04:35:29Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Ask Amy: I want to apologize to my ex-wife for our decades-old divorce - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/05/30/ask-amy-divorce-apologize-ex-wife/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/05/30/ask-amy-divorce-apologize-ex-wife/ |
Carolyn Hax: Boyfriend’s side hustle? Selling partner’s meds to his friend.
Carolyn Hax is away. The following is from Feb. 8, 2008.
Dear Carolyn: I found out that my boyfriend has been selling my prescribed anti-anxiety medication (sedatives) to a friend of his. Not many pills, but a few. I hate this friend, so on top of feeling ripped off, I don’t want to do anything that would benefit him. I found out, however, by snooping through my boyfriend’s text messages. So, yes, I am aware we have trust issues; neither of us trusts the other enough. We’ve had a lot of counseling and are working on it, but it’s slow going. What should I do? And, please don’t go too far down the road about how it’s illegal. We’re not talking about narcotics here; Claritin was a prescription drug a couple of years ago.
— Snoopy the Impromptu Drug Dealer
Snoopy the Impromptu Drug Dealer: This is good. If I slap my forehead numb, it’s like homemade Botox.
Normally it's difficult to help people solve a problem when I'm told not to mention the problem. Fortunately, with your situation, I can just mosey on down and pick the next problem in line.
You are rationalizing the fact that your boyfriend is stealing something that you rely on for your health — not to save his dying mother, mind you, or feed his family, but for profit. Wow. I'll give you credit — most people try to rationalize away the little stuff, but you didn't shrink from a challenge.
I appreciate that you've invested a lot of time and hard work in this guy, and that accepting he's a thief means discarding it all. But you're trying to spin his atrocious behavior into something … I don't know, non-atrocious. (A complete waste of time, by the way, if I haven't made my leanings clear.) And, you're trying to pass off the hated but irrelevant friend as part of the problem.
Instead, why don't you spin dumping the boyfriend as follows: getting your soul back.
You've tried to make counseling work on someone who equates “decency” with “lost income.” Now try it on someone who deserves your attention: a certain text-snooping, self-loathing provider of pills and excuses. Surely you want more out of life.
Hi, Carolyn: I was in a relationship with a controller/abuser, and I finally got out about four months ago. How can you tell the difference between “just not ready for” and “just not into” someone? I’ve started seeing a wonderful woman … very laid back, attractive, successful. But I feel very “blah” about things, like sometimes I’d rather just be alone, and when I am alone I don’t even think about her at all. I certainly don’t want to hurt her, but it raises the question of whether I’m not into her, or it’s just my emotional state right now.
Baltimore: And your question raises the question, what do you have to lose by being honest?
Granted, you don’t want to throw around such universally hurtful observations as, “When I’m alone I don’t even think about you.” However, your circumstances are plainly sympathetic: You’ve been badly hurt and barely had time to mend (and might have a touch of depression).
You’re also admitting you need time alone to someone who, presumably, you’d be otherwise eager to see. If you mean it like you say it, a wonderful person will get it. The truth is unerring that way. | 2022-05-30T04:35:35Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Carolyn Hax: Boyfriend's side hustle? Selling his partner's meds - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/05/30/carolyn-hax-boyfriend-sells-partners-meds/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/05/30/carolyn-hax-boyfriend-sells-partners-meds/ |
Nepal officials find wreckage of plane that had been carrying 22
A Tara Air DHC-6 Twin Otter, tail number 9N-AET, in seen in Simikot, Nepal, in December 2021. (Madhu Thapa/Via Reuters)
Search-and-rescue officials in Nepal have located the crash site of a plane carrying 22 people that went missing Sunday.
An army spokesman posted a photo of the crash site on Twitter on Monday. It showed the shattered plane on a mountainside strewn with debris, including what appeared to be a wing of the plane displaying the Tara Air flight number 9NAET in green lettering.
The spokesman, Brig. Gen. Narayan Silwal, said in a tweet that the plane crashed in the Mustang district close to the mountain town of Jomsom, where the aircraft was heading before the crash.
A local police inspector and a guide have already reached the site, Silwal said. Other rescue team members from different agencies are trying to reach the site, he said.
The aircraft, a DHC-6-300 Twin Otter operated by the private airline Tara Air, went missing shortly after taking off from Pokhara, in central Nepal, at 9:55 a.m. Sunday, according to the Indian Embassy in Kathmandu.
Jomsom, the plane’s destination, is near Nepal’s border with Tibet. The flight time was supposed to be 20 minutes.
Tara Air told Reuters that the plane was carrying four Indian nationals, two Germans and 16 Nepalis, of whom three were crew members.
The International Civil Aviation Organization, a United Nations agency, audited Nepal’s civil aviation industry in 2017 and found that the country scored below the global average in investigating accidents. Nepali airlines are banned from flying in the airspace of the European Union because of “a lack of safety oversight by the aviation authorities” there. | 2022-05-30T04:39:30Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Crash site of Tara Air plane found in Nepal mountains - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/05/30/nepal-crash-tara-air-plane/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/05/30/nepal-crash-tara-air-plane/ |
FILE - Thai policemen stand in front of packages of methamphetamines on display during a press conference at Narcotics Suppression Bureau in Bangkok, Thailand on July 15, 2019. Police said they seized 459 kilograms (1,012 pounds) of crystal methamphetamine that they suspect originated from neighboring Myanmar. The number of methamphetamine tablets seized in East and Southeast Asia exceeded a billion last year for the first time, highlighting the scale of illegal drug production and trafficking in the region and the challenges of fighting it, the U.N. said Monday, May 30, 2022. (AP Photo/File) (Uncredited/AP) | 2022-05-30T04:39:55Z | www.washingtonpost.com | 1B meth pills: East, SE Asia drug industry hits ominous peak - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/1b-meth-pills-east-se-asia-drug-industry-hits-ominous-peak/2022/05/30/30dff598-dfcf-11ec-ae64-6b23e5155b62_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/1b-meth-pills-east-se-asia-drug-industry-hits-ominous-peak/2022/05/30/30dff598-dfcf-11ec-ae64-6b23e5155b62_story.html |
By weathering the Heat, the young Celtics show how much they’ve grown
Updated May 30, 2022 at 12:30 a.m. EDT|Published May 29, 2022 at 11:51 p.m. EDT
Heat center Bam Adebayo congratulates Celtics forward Jayson Tatum on Sunday night. (Lynne Sladky/AP)
MIAMI — At times, they made it look ugly. Bad shot attempts, wild drives ending in offensive fouls, a game that could be admired only by defensive enthusiasts — that’s how Jayson Tatum, Jaylen Brown and the rest of the Boston Celtics played and prevailed in Game 7 of the Eastern Conference finals.
Tatum and Brown were born in the 1990s, and maybe they have an affinity for that era of basketball. By throwing their bodies around, they mucked up the game to the point that not even the defensive-minded Miami Heat could survive. They held their breath when Jimmy Butler showed all his chutzpah and tried to win the game on his own. Ultimately, his last shot clanked off the rim — like a ton of shots on this night. A short while later, the Celtics would spill onto Miami’s home floor in celebration of their 100-96 win and their trip to the NBA Finals, where they will face the Golden State Warriors.
It wasn’t pretty, with Tatum needing 21 shots to score a team-best 26 points and Brown adding 24 but also four turnovers. But all Boston will see is beauty in the process.
The growth of Tatum and Brown mirrors that of other young teams that have advanced to the Finals. The 2012 Oklahoma City Thunder had a baby-faced Russell Westbrook, Kevin Durant and James Harden, whose humble beard at the time didn’t require its own Zip code. The 1995 Orlando Magic had 23-year-old Penny Hardaway in his second year and 22-year-old Shaquille O’Neal in his third. And for the pre-modern game, the 1977 Portland Trail Blazers had 10 players who were 25 or younger. Those Blazers still reign as the youngest team to win an NBA title.
On June 23, 2016, when the Celtics selected Brown with the No. 3 pick, many of those in TD Garden attending a draft party booed and then let Wyc Grousbeck, one of the team’s governors, have it when he came out to say a few words.
“Fourteen years, that’s probably the worst [reaction] I’ve gotten,” he said that night, according to ESPN.
Maybe Celtics fans were holding out for Dragan Bender — the player who was drafted next but hasn’t appeared in an NBA game since 2020. Brown was an all-star in 2021.
Fultz’s challenges, which have been well documented, eventually led him out of Philadelphia. Tatum has ascended to first-team all-NBA status.
There are other factors behind Boston’s rise to the top of the East. When Ainge stepped away last year, coach Brad Stevens moved into the president’s office. He brought in Ime Udoka, a basketball lifer who’s unafraid of coaching and calling out his stars, as he did after Game 1 of this series.
“It was our veterans, Jayson and Jaylen, who let it get away from us,” he said.
Then there’s Marcus Smart, the longest-tenured Celtic, who has grown in his role as a defensive and emotional leader. In Game 7, his scoring proved just as critical as his perimeter defense. Robert Williams III, the lob-catching and paint-protecting big man, has dealt with knee issues that have limited him throughout the playoffs. But when he is healthy, he’s the one who elevates Boston’s physical defense into elite territory. Even without Williams, the Celtics can depend on Al Horford or tweener Grant Williams; both are capable of taking on tricky defensive assignments.
“Damn it, Jax!” Maxwell hollered, shaking his head.
Whatever anxiety and unease the fan base felt Friday, it didn’t stop many of them from invading FTX Arena two nights later. While the Heat encourages its fans to wear white in the playoffs, on Sunday, like blades of grass, Celtics fans dotted the stands.
And whatever letdown the players felt, they had to leave it in Boston. On Sunday, Udoka called off the usual morning shoot-around and made it optional for players to get up shots — all in hopes of having extra energy and fresh legs. Although the Celtics eschewed routine, coming into Game 7, Udoka felt their confidence remained as high as if they had been here before — because they have.
“Confident as usual but understanding what works for us and what doesn’t. So that’s been the theme throughout the playoffs, throughout the season, and it doesn’t change because it’s a Game 7,” Udoka said. “We faced two elimination games in the last series.”
In the first quarter Sunday, the Celtics made Game 6 look like a distant memory. Their celebrated defense showed up with signature plays, such as Horford stealing P.J. Tucker’s pass on Miami’s second possession and feeding Brown for a fast-break layup. Later, Horford stuffed Max Strus on a dunk attempt, which led to Grant Williams’s bucket on the other end for a 22-9 lead.
From there, Boston opened a 15-point advantage and Miami needed help — or, better yet, a Herro.
Tyler Herro, who won the sixth man of the year award, had not played in the previous three games because of a strain in his left groin. The Heat spent the first two games without him struggling to find offensive rhythm but had no such problem in Game 6 because Butler transformed into the human embodiment of the “Fine, I’ll do it myself” meme. Thanos — disguised as Butler — went off for a playoff career high of 47 points and willed the Heat to this moment. It set up a fitting conclusion to a lopsided yet evenly matched series between the East’s best teams.
“It’s all hands on deck,” Coach Erik Spoelstra said before the game in explaining the decision behind Herro’s return. “He passed his testing with the trainers. He’s really been working diligently the last few days.”
Herro didn’t make an impact. He entered in the second quarter, missed his first three-point attempt and finished his run scoreless in seven minutes. Butler did find help in teammates Bam Adebayo and Kyle Lowry, but Miami played from behind most of the night, and when it mattered most, he was left carrying all the weight.
Early in the fourth quarter, with less than 11 minutes to play, Butler cut the Celtics’ lead to 82-79. But the momentum ended there; Miami went scoreless over the next four minutes. During that stretch, Tatum made a pair of free throws then set up Grant Williams cutting to the rim. Tatum knocked down a midrange jumper, then hit a three in front of courtside fans.
Then the Celtics needed defense — and luck — to survive a late Heat surge. When Butler missed a pull-up three that would have given Miami the lead with 16.6 seconds remaining, Brown grabbed the rebound.
“When he shot that, I was like, ‘Man, what the hell?’ ” Brown said. “But he missed. We get the rebound and move on.”
“These guys, I seen JB come in the league, take steps, take levels. I seen JT the same thing. I seen Smart grow,” Horford said. “For me, it’s just special to be with them and be able to help them and be a part of this.” | 2022-05-30T04:40:19Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Celtics grow up, beat Heat and head to NBA Finals - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/05/29/boston-celtics-nba-finals/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/05/29/boston-celtics-nba-finals/ |
The Biden administration’s declaration that Paul Rusesabagina has been “wrongfully detained” in Rwanda is a welcome departure from nearly three decades of American indulgence of Paul Kagame, the country’s autocratic president. This sets a useful precedent for other countries that have until now turned a blind eye to Kagame’s dictatorial drift.
Rusesabagina, whose role in saving more than 1,000 lives during the 1994 Rwandan genocide was the subject of the film “Hotel Rwanda,” was arrested in Kigali in 2020 after what his lawyers and family described as a rendition operation in which he was picked up in Dubai. He had been an outspoken critic of the Kagame regime. Following what human-rights groups denounced as a “show trial,” Rusesabagina was sentenced last fall to 25 years in prison on terrorism charges.
The US says it hasn’t taken a position on whether Rusesabagina, recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2005, is innocent or guilty. But according to a State Department spokesperson, “The determination took into account the totality of the circumstances, notably the lack of fair trial guarantees during his trial.” Responsibility for the case now falls on President Biden’s special envoy for hostage affairs rather than the consular staff at the US Embassy in Kigali.
In addition to raising the political profile of the Rusesabagina case, the reassignment will draw renewed international attention to other examples of the Kagame government’s silencing of its critics. International human-rights groups say Rwanda’s intelligence network has abducted and assassinated Kagame’s enemies at home and abroad and jailed people for speaking out. The government denies the allegations.
In the past, the US has ignored rights groups’ criticism of Kagame on the grounds that he was instrumental in ending the bloody civil war that killed more than 800,000 Rwandans. His defenders in Washington have argued, speciously, that his iron-fisted rule was necessary to keep a lid on ethnic hatreds. But the Biden administration is signaling that Kagame’s free pass has expired and that his actions will be examined more closely.
This scrutiny comes at an especially awkward moment for Kagame, who is preparing to host the biennial Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting next month. This gathering of representatives from 54 countries was meant to be an opportunity for Kagame to flex Rwanda’s soft power as an exception to the political instability and economic decline in East Africa — and to show off his international stature.
He has been waiting for this moment since 2007; that year, after a diplomatic spat with France, Rwanda applied for membership in the Commonwealth, which is made up mainly of former British colonies. (Rwanda was in turns a German and Belgian colony before allying itself with France after independence.)
Since then, Kagame has worked to strengthen Kigali’s ties to London, the most controversial manifestation of which is Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s plan to send asylum seekers who cross the English Channel to Rwanda. Tens of thousands of people make the journey across the channel every year. Despite concerns that offshoring them to Rwanda contravenes international law as well as warnings about Rwanda’s treatment of refugees from elsewhere, British authorities are expected to send the first batch to Kigali any day now.
Kagame may have been hoping the headlines over the arrival of the asylum seekers will have been forgotten by the time his British guests turn up for the Commonwealth summit: As well as Johnson, Britain will be represented by the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall. But with the Biden administration’s announcement about Rusesabagina, it is inevitable that journalists will press Charles and Camilla on their views about their host’s treatment of those who cross him.
Johnson would be wise to preempt any embarrassment, for himself as much as for the royals, by issuing a statement echoing American concerns about the fairness of Rusesabagina’s treatment. He would do better still by calling for Rusesabagina to be treated humanely — his family says he suffered a stroke in prison — and be given a second, more transparent trial.
With the US having withdrawn Kagame’s free pass, the British government shouldn’t allow him to ride out this controversy.
Boris Johnson Nicks a Big Idea From Labour to Save Himself: Therese Raphael
A Civil Servant Was Never Going to Bring Boris Johnson Down: Martin Ivens
Voters Must End Boris Johnson’s Antics: Pankaj Mishra | 2022-05-30T06:11:05Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Rwanda Deserves UK Censure Over Handling of ‘Hotel Rwanda’ Hero - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/rwanda-deserves-uk-censure-over-handlingof-hotel-rwandahero/2022/05/30/330582aa-dfd6-11ec-ae64-6b23e5155b62_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/rwanda-deserves-uk-censure-over-handlingof-hotel-rwandahero/2022/05/30/330582aa-dfd6-11ec-ae64-6b23e5155b62_story.html |
A bomb shelter in the village of Kutuzivka. (Wojciech Grzedzinski for The Washington Post)
KUTUZIVKA, Ukraine — The day Russian military forces began pouring into Ukraine, residents in this village close to the border hurried into the basement of a municipal building to escape rockets and heavy artillery fire.
“It was constant shelling,” said Nadezhda Ryzhkova, 76, a widow who tried to ride out the fighting in her apartment for a few days before fleeing with a neighbor to the municipal building’s basement.
Within days, Russian soldiers and separatist fighters from Russian-occupied Donetsk overran the village, which is swaddled in forest less than 15 miles from the border north of Kharkiv. At the edge of the village lie acres and acres of farmland tilled into rich black earth.
As days turned to weeks in the municipal building’s basement — and with most villagers either too frightened or too disgusted to speak with the Russian soldiers outside — a single person emerged as their intermediary.
Nadiya Antonova, the council secretary of Vilkhivka, a slightly larger village nearby, took charge, several villagers said. She spoke with Russian soldiers, relayed their instructions and oversaw some of the day-to-day affairs concerning everyone hunkered down in the basement of what had been a kindergarten and a medical clinic.
“We tried to do everything together. We tried to cook together, get firewood and water,” said Yuri Lieus, 45, a car mechanic who helped fix the basement to make it more inhabitable. “And everything else was decided by [Nadiya] Antonova.”
Regional government officials now say Antonova’s intercession had a darker side. The Kharkiv Regional Prosecutor’s Office, in a statement posted online earlier this month, said Antonova and another regional official are suspected of committing treason.
A spokeswoman for the prosecutor’s office declined to comment further while the case was under investigation. If convicted, Antonova could face 15 years to life in prison. Efforts to reach her to determine whether she is represented by an attorney were not successful.
The villagers who lived through at least two months of terror in the municipal building’s basement offer a glimpse at the way Ukrainians have often come together to help one another in a time of war. But their story also shows how some may have been helping Russian forces in a country where regions — and sometimes families — have divided loyalties between Moscow and Kyiv.
Before Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an invasion on Feb. 24, fewer than 1,200 people lived in the village, which boasted a massive farm that supplies Kharkiv with milk and other dairy products.
As Russian forces swarmed toward Kyiv, as many as 170 villagers, including 40 children as young as 3 months old, sheltered in the municipal building’s basement until the village was liberated at the end of April, Gen. Valeriy Zaluzhniy, Ukraine’s commander in chief, said in a Telegram post.
At first, the basement was icy and damp, with nothing to sit on except tiny chairs taken from the kindergarten’s classroom. Beds were brought down from the medical clinic to make people more comfortable. An outhouse around the corner served as a communal privy.
Villagers installed a potbelly stove to warm the room, though the wood smoke had to be vented through a hole knocked through the foundation wall and the basement entrance leading up the stairs to the building’s front door.
They also worked together to reinforce a corner of the foundation that had partially crumbled after a glancing blow from a Russian shell. They used steel rebar and bits of metal fencing to shore up the wall but still feared that the foundation might collapse.
As Ukrainian forces battled to take back the village, another artillery round struck, this time on the municipal building’s roof, sending a shudder throughout the structure.
“It’s not stable even now,” Lieus said, viewing the damage with a flashlight.
Meanwhile, the Russian occupation followed a familiar pattern. Soldiers commandeered municipal buildings and people’s homes, using them as living quarters or firing positions and often trashing them before departing. They rounded up villagers for head counts, warned them to shut off their phones and imposed a nighttime curfew from 6 p.m. to 7 a.m. And they ordered everyone to wear a white armband, like the ones worn by Russian military forces.
“We tried not to talk to them,” Lieus said, holding his hand over his heart. “We were afraid.”
But the villagers were otherwise free to come and go at their own risk, except during curfew. Ryzhkova went back and forth between the basement and her apartment until someone told her, only half joking, that if she went out again risking her life, she might not be let back in.
“I only went home to my four babies — my cats — to feed them,” she said through an interpreter. “They waited for me at the window, and when they saw me coming their ears pricked up.”
Kharkiv, a city of poets, becomes a battleground
When Ukrainian forces battled their way back in, Russian forces broke and ran. They shed uniforms and donned civilian clothes, sometimes dropping ammunition magazines on the ground in their haste to flee, Lieus said. They left several civilian cars marked with “Z’s,” the letter that Russia has used to brand its forces in the war, and they left destruction.
One of the village’s longest streets, School Street, winding past homes and a small beer and kvass stand, was cratered from bombs and littered with shrapnel. Heaps of glass ringed the school itself. The spent casing of a rocket found near the school carried a blunt message: “For Ogoltsa” — words of revenge and a nickname scrawled by the soldier who fired it on behalf of a fallen comrade. At the other end of the village lay the body of a Russian soldier, face down in the grass where he fell.
“They left nothing but ruins around here — ruins,” said Nadezhda Boiko, 81, as the thump of outgoing Ukrainian artillery fire mixed with the thunder of Russian artillery far off toward the border. “Every house has been flattened, shelled or burned to the ground.”
Periodic shelling also threatened the road that runs past the village from Kharkiv’s outskirts to Stary Saltiv, closer to the front lines. Military vehicles, including civilian vehicles filled with soldiers, sped along the rough two-lane stretch of road that was already littered with the charred and rusted wreckage of a column that was destroyed in the early days of the war. On Saturday, the area was shelled again, Ukrainian military officials reported.
By the third week of May, Ukrainian forces had retaken 24 villages, including Kutuzivka. Yet even with Ukrainian forces in control, at least a dozen villagers continued to shelter in the municipal building’s basement, with many wondering what would come next — and whether the allegations of treachery against Antonova were true.
Oleh Synegubov, the Kharkiv region’s governor, said Antonova collaborated with a commanding Russian officer, whose call sign was “Knight,” and helped identify Ukrainian military veterans and law enforcement officers in the village. She also pointed out the homes with hunting rifles or other firearms and carried out the Russians’ order for everyone to wear a white armband, Synegubov said in a Telegram posting.
“None of those who volunteered to cooperate with the occupiers will escape punishment,” Synegubov wrote. “Neither the law nor the Ukrainian people will forgive traitors!” | 2022-05-30T06:11:48Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Villagers near Donbas emerge from basement - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/05/30/ukraine-village-kharkiv-russia-occupation/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/05/30/ukraine-village-kharkiv-russia-occupation/ |
MIAMI — Jayson Tatum scored 26 points, Jaylen Brown and Marcus Smart each added 24 and the Boston Celtics held off a frantic rally in the final seconds to beat the Miami Heat 100-96 Sunday night to reach the NBA Finals for the first time since 2010.
INDIANAPOLIS — Marcus Ericsson had to leave Formula One to become a global superstar — a goal achieved when the Swedish driver won the Indianapolis 500.
CONCORD, N.C. — Denny Hamlin held off Joe Gibbs Racing teammate Kyle Busch in overtime on Sunday night to win the longest — and perhaps wildest — Coca-Cola 600 in history.
MONACO — Red Bull driver Sergio Perez held on to win Sunday’s rain-marred and chaotic Monaco Grand Prix.
CINCINNATI — San Francisco Giants manager Gabe Kapler, who has been avoiding the field during the national anthem as a protest following last week’s school shooting in Texas, said he may suspend that decision Monday in recognition of Memorial Day.
LAS VEGAS — Eun-Hee Ji won the LPGA Match-Play on Sunday for a spot next week in the U.S. Women’s Open, beating Ayaka Furue 3 and 2 at Shadow Creek.
NEW YORK — Gervonta Davis regained his knockout power and retained his lightweight title after stopping Rolando Romero in the sixth round Saturday.
SOCCER — Ralf Rangnick will not take up his role as a consultant at Manchester United, the Premier League club said Sunday, because of the demands of his new job as Austria coach. | 2022-05-30T07:42:39Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Weekend Sports in Brief - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/weekend-sports-in-brief/2022/05/30/f86eec72-dfe8-11ec-ae64-6b23e5155b62_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/weekend-sports-in-brief/2022/05/30/f86eec72-dfe8-11ec-ae64-6b23e5155b62_story.html |
Richard Small, right, a retired high school teacher and a member of the National Rifle Association, receives paper work from Charlotte police officer Garry Rogers after handing over his AR-15 outside the Charlotte Police Department on May 28 in Charlotte, Tex. (Joshua Lott/The Washington Post)
UVALDE, Tex. — For years, even as mass shootings swept the country, Richard Small bristled at any talk of tighter gun restrictions, viewing it as nothing more than politically driven finger-pointing that would do little to stop the violence while infringing on his rights as a gun owner.
After the massacre, Small and his wife, Marina, drove nearly 90 minutes from their ranch in Charlotte, a tiny town south of San Antonio, to pay their respects in Uvalde. He stood on the edge of the city’s town square where 21 crosses, for the 19 fourth-graders and two teachers killed in the shooting, have become the epicenter of the city’s anguish. Somehow tears didn’t feel enough.
Guns have long been an inextricable part of Texas culture — tightly woven into small towns like Uvalde, a predominantly Latino community of about 16,000 about an hour north of the U.S. border with Mexico. Here, children are raised to hunt and shoot from a young age, and many residents — including family members of the victims — say they own guns for their own protection. It is an affinity that cuts across the partisan lines that typically define the gun debate in other parts of the country.
“Why do you even need guns like that?” the woman asked. But, she said, others in her family did not agree with her position, even after Tuesday’s massacre.
Felix and Kimberly Rubio, whose daughter Lexi was killed in the attack, called for more restrictive gun laws, including a ban on AR-15 rifles — even as Felix, a deputy with the Uvalde County Sheriff’s office, told ABC News that his position would likely put him at odds with his law enforcement colleagues.
“With all of the problems we have right now with the immigrants crossing over, you don’t know how many fast-speed chases go through here … we need them for our protection,” said Flores, whose grandson was at Robb Elementary when the shooting began but escaped uninjured. “All of them coming in, they are coming in as illegals, they can have guns. And what are we supposed to do? Throw rocks at them?”
That sentiment has not been shared by Texas leaders. At a news conference in Uvalde on Friday, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) brushed aside the idea of supporting expanded background checks for firearms purchases.
“Look at what happened in the Santa Fe shooting,” Abbott said, referring an attack at a high school south of Houston in 2018 in which eight students and two teachers were slain. “A background check had no relevancy whatsoever because the killer took the gun from his parents. Look at what happened at the [church] shooting in Sutherland Springs, there was a background check that was done. It was done in a flawed way that allowed the killer to get a gun.”
Reiterating comments he made after those earlier shootings, Abbott suggested focusing instead mental health services. “Maybe we are focusing our attention on the wrong thing,” Abbott said, referring to the debate over gun control. (In a video played that day at the NRA convention in Houston, he more forcefully rejected calls for new gun laws, saying that existing ones elsewhere “have not stopped madmen from carrying out evil acts.”)
Abbott’s comments in Uvalde drew outrage from state Sen. Roland Gutierrez, a Democrat whose district stretches from San Antonio to Uvalde. Gutierrez stood up and began shouting at the governor, urging him to convene a special session to address gun violence.
“This isn’t the time when we are out killing squirrels anymore,” Gutierrez said. “Times and technology have changed. These kids are buying AR-15s. … If [Abbott] wanted to show any fortitude whatsoever, change the age to 21 [or] 24.”
Outside Robb Elementary, where he was trying to catch a glimpse of President Biden on Sunday, Edgar Sanchez said his daughter was a fourth-grader at the school but left early that day, a decision that might have saved her life but has left her traumatized. Sanchez said he hopes Biden pushes for tougher gun-control measures — even if that means giving up his own AR-15.
“Honestly, I have one,” Sanchez said, explaining that he had purchased the weapon to keep himself and his family safe. “If they told me the kids would be safer if I got rid of it, I would. … I’ve never shot that assault rifle.”
In a town that many residents have described as “heavily armed” and in a state where it is common to see guns openly worn, many appeared to have left their weapons at home in recent days — visiting unarmed the makeshift memorials and attending church services that have popped up across town to honor the dead. That was a contrast to the aftermath of the 2017 attack in Sutherland Springs, when men carrying rifles showed up to the scene to push back on talk of gun-control measures.
“I felt disassociated with it. … It seemed like those were on planet Mars,” Small said. “It’s not going to happen here. It’s not going to happen here. And then it did.”
Small recalled how, under the tighter gun ownership rules of the past, he had had to fill out extensive paperwork to buy the weapon and go through checks — “much more than this 18-year-old kid did.”
Even now, Small said, he would never support a ban on guns — as he fears some Democrats might want. But he said Republicans like Abbott should embrace some new regulations that would require training for and make it tougher to buy highly destructive weapons.
“This is enough,” Small said. “We’ve got to control this thing. I’m not ever going to say, ‘All guns need to be picked up or all that.’ But the regulations need some serious work. And I just wish that Democrats and Republicans could find some sort of middle ground here. … Because I’m just so tired of it.”
Since Tuesday, Small said, he could barely talk about the shooting without thinking of his own weapon. Why did he even own it, he increasingly wondered. It wasn’t practical. He couldn’t hunt with it. “Really it’s for warfare,” he said. “And I just keep thinking, ‘Why do I have this?’”
So on Saturday night, he called the local police chief, a friend, and drove down to the station. He didn’t want to sell the gun — fearful of where it might end up. Turning it over to the police seemed to be the best option — though he acknowledged that it might put him in conflict with friends, other NRA members and gun-rights supporters who might not understand why he was doing what he was doing.
“But I can’t have this on my conscience,” he said. “We can’t keep with the status quo.”
Tim Craig and Peter Jamison contributed from Uvalde, Tex. | 2022-05-30T10:45:01Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Texas's romance with guns tested by Uvalde school shooting - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/05/30/uvalde-shooting-guns/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/05/30/uvalde-shooting-guns/ |
Retiree considers selling townhouse, buying larger single-level home
Given how fast home prices have risen over the past five years, a lot of readers wonder whether they’ve been priced out of moving altogether. (Brian A. Jackson/iStock)
Q: I retired in 2020. My long-term plan was to move to a single-level home. I’ve delayed it because of the coronavirus pandemic, but I hope to make the move this summer.
I own a two-bedroom, one-and-a-half-bath townhouse, which I would sell. I am single and want to buy a three-bedroom, two-bath home so I have more space.
I’m trying to figure out how much I can afford to spend. Can you recommend a good website or calculator? I would like to have a good idea how the numbers work before I contact a real estate agent or mortgage lender.
I love your column and recently read Ilyce’s book, “100 Questions Every First-Time Home Buyer Should Ask.” Even though I’m not a first-timer, it was very helpful and interesting. Thank you.
A: Thanks for the kind words about Ilyce’s book. In it, she walks readers through a formula that helps you calculate how much money you can spend to buy a home.
But let’s go through the numbers here, because many home buyers are in the same position you are. According to a Redfin report, home buyers everywhere need significantly more income to qualify for a mortgage. That’s particularly true in the Sun Belt, where home buyers in Tampa, Phoenix and Las Vegas need 40 percent more income than last year to afford a typical mortgage payment.
That’s a problem for many seniors who seek a sunny retirement but are living on a fixed or limited income. Whether they want to upsize in retirement to have more space or are looking to move closer to family or friends, affordability is always the issue. Given how fast home prices have risen over the past five years, a lot of readers wonder whether they’ve been priced out of moving altogether.
More Matters: Seniors want to move on, but ‘stuck’ in home after not qualifying for new mortgage
We’re going to make some assumptions about what you can spend. Since you’re already a homeowner, we’re going to assume that you have at least some equity in your townhouse. That should help make your next purchase more affordable. We’re also going to assume that as a retiree, you’re on a fixed income. Whatever you spend, make sure it’s affordable given your current financial situation.
First, how much income do you have? As a retiree, you probably have Social Security income. Do you also have a pension? Is there any annuity or investment income? Do you have a part-time or full-time job that you intend to keep? Do you have anybody in your household who can contribute any regular income?
Next, what sort of debt do you currently carry? Do you have a mortgage or credit card debt? Do you have student loan debt (for yourself or your children or grandchildren)?
What are your ongoing expenses? What health-care costs do you regularly pay outside of your Medicare check? What about food, utilities, WiFi, cable, transportation, travel or entertainment?
Once you have a good handle on your income, debt and expenses, you’ve got the essential pieces of your budget. Now, you need to know what your credit score is, since that will drive the interest rate on your loan.
If you can buy a new property without a mortgage, you’ll be stronger financially. If you need a mortgage, you’ll have to qualify just like any other buyer. A lender will allow you to spend up to 36 percent of your gross monthly income on your total debt. So, if you receive $60,000 in annual income (including Social Security and a part-time job), that’s $5,000 per month. You should be able to spend 36 percent of $5,000, or $1,800 on your mortgage, real estate taxes and insurance plus any other debt you carry.
Remember, just because a lender will allow you to spend $1,800 per month on your total debt doesn’t mean you should. That number may be too much for you to comfortably shoulder with other expenses you’ll have going forward.
The trouble is that the $1,800 per month won’t go as far as it did even five years ago, since home prices have skyrocketed and interest rates have doubled since early 2021.
More Matters: What to consider when retiring and refinancing your home
All Internet search engines offer links to mortgage calculators that you can try. If you put “mortgage calculator” into Chrome, for example, it will offer you almost 2 million links as well as its own, with “monthly payment” or “purchase budget” tabs.
The Chrome calculator we tried gave this result: a $300,000, 30-year mortgage at 5.75 percent will require a monthly payment of $1,802, including $400 in taxes and fees. The calculator allows you to add your state and credit score range to give you a more accurate estimate of costs.
You should try several online calculators. Understand that these calculators are optimized with backlinks to mortgage companies and are designed to generate revenue for the websites or browsers. That doesn’t mean you won’t get a good or fair deal. But you have to be wary and shop around.
Be sure to speak with a few different lenders (including a national bank, a local bank, a credit union, an online lender and a mortgage broker) to get a better idea of what you can afford and what sort of loan they’d approve based on your income and credit history. If you need a referral, talk with your real estate agent or attorney. | 2022-05-30T10:45:08Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Retiree considers selling townhouse, buying larger single-level home - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/05/30/retiree-considers-selling-townhouse-buying-larger-single-level-home/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/05/30/retiree-considers-selling-townhouse-buying-larger-single-level-home/ |
Studio in prime Adams Morgan location lists for $255,000
Built in 1927, the Schuyler Arms condominium building offers a prime location within walking distance of shops, restaurants and nightlife in Adams Morgan, Dupont Circle and Woodley Park. (Sean Shanahan)
When you want the access to nightlife, restaurants and shops that come with living in Adams Morgan but prefer a slightly quieter neighborhood vibe, you may want to consider the section closer to Kalorama Triangle east of Connecticut Avenue.
While Kalorama is known for its multimillion-dollar single-family homes, high-end rowhouses and expensive condos, there are options near it in Adams Morgan that fit the budget of a first-time home buyer or someone looking for a pied-à-terre in the city.
Adams Morgan one-bedroom condo lists below $400,000
For example, the studio condo in the Schuyler Arms building at 1954 Columbia Rd. NW #707 is priced at $255,000. That’s well below the median sales price for a home in D.C., which was $699,000 in April, according to Bright MLS. Monthly condo fees are $321 and annual property taxes are $1,807.
The condo fee includes heat, gas, water, trash, sewer, building maintenance, management services, snow removal, insurance and reserve funds. Building amenities include a laundry room and extra storage in the lower level, concierge services and an elevator. The Schuyler Arms also has a roof deck with expansive city views and seating. The condo is pet friendly.
Built in 1927, the Schuyler Arms offers a prime location within walking distance of shops, restaurants and nightlife in Adams Morgan, Dupont Circle and Woodley Park. The building doesn’t have parking, but residents can walk to the Woodley Park and Dupont Circle Metro stations. A Capital Bikeshare dock is located across the street from the condo. The neighborhood has a 98 out of 100 walk score, which means the community is walkable for running errands. The transit score is 75 out of 100, and the bike score is 82 out of 100.
The 425-square-foot studio on the seventh floor has wood floors, a ceiling fan, window unit air conditioning, gas heat and gas cooking. The galley-style kitchen has white appliances including a built-in microwave, a dishwasher, garbage disposal, gas stove and refrigerator.
For more information, contact real estate agent Maxwell Rabin with TTR Sotheby’s International Realty at 202-669-7406. | 2022-05-30T10:45:14Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Studio in prime Adams Morgan location lists for $255,000 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/05/30/studio-prime-adams-morgan-location-lists-255000/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/05/30/studio-prime-adams-morgan-location-lists-255000/ |
Analysis by Emma Ashford | Bloomberg
“This is a historic moment which we must seize,” said Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg. “You are our closest partners, and your membership in NATO will increase our shared security.” It seems likely that their applications will be swiftly approved, and NATO will soon grow to a 32 member states.
Yet in the rush to give Putin a black eye by embracing Finland and Sweden, US and NATO leaders may be failing to consider the potential costs of inducting two more countries into what, after all, is intended to be a collective defense organization.
There are only two clear-cut benefits to bringing in the two Nordic nations. The first is symbolic: providing a clear demonstration of European and democratic solidarity against Russian aggression in Eastern Europe. The second is technical: Admitting Finland and Sweden would better align the membership of NATO with that of the EU, avoiding the unlikely but problematic scenario in which an EU member state is subject to aggression but is not covered by NATO’s Article 5 mutual-defense pact.
In every other respect, however, the question of Finnish and Swedish membership is more complicated and worrisome. Consider overall European defense capacity.
Yes, Finland and Sweden have highly advanced economies. They could be net contributors to NATO’s technological capabilities through national champions like Ericsson AB and Nokia Oyj. They are also more capable militarily than some other European states — particularly Finland, which has maintained conscription into the post-Cold War period and has a relatively wide range of military competencies, including the continent’s largest artillery force.
Yet from the point of view of existing NATO members — and particularly the US — it’s still not necessarily a net win. Finland and Sweden have long focused their militaries on defending their own territories, raising doubts about their value in contributing to a common defense, which is at the heart of NATO’s charter.
And while both nations have pledged to increase their military spending and ability to bolster Europe’s broader defenses, it is also possible that they would not. Instead, they may free-ride on America’s military strength — and its nuclear umbrella — as so many European states have done for years. According to the International Monetary Fund, neither country comes close to meeting the NATO goal of spending 2% of GDP on defense.
History suggests the most likely outcome is two more states adding to America’s defense burden at a time when Washington should be pivoting to Asia.
There are grab bag of other reasons for caution, including the usual concerns about expanding the alliance to an ever-more unwieldy set of member states. It doesn’t take a genius to predict that 32 nations will be even harder to manage than 30. Before its Ukraine moment, NATO was struggling to maintain the peace between Greece and Turkey, few nations were meeting the 2% spending goal, and President Emmanuel Macron of France had drawn headlines for suggesting the alliance was experiencing “brain death.”
At the same time, it’s not clear that Finland and Sweden are at increased risk unless they are allowed NATO membership. They have long relied on their neutral status and domestic defense capacity to prevent crises. Refusing to admit them to NATO is not hanging them out to dry, but simply retaining a workable status quo.
• NATO Needs to Seal the Deal with Sweden and Finland Fast: Andreas Kluth
Emma Ashford is a senior fellow at the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security at the Atlantic Council. She is author of the upcoming “Oil, the State, and War: The Foreign Policies of Petrostates.” | 2022-05-30T10:45:26Z | www.washingtonpost.com | NATO Should Think Twice Before Accepting Finland and Sweden - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/nato-should-think-twice-before-accepting-finland-and-sweden/2022/05/30/b412ee2a-dff7-11ec-ae64-6b23e5155b62_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/nato-should-think-twice-before-accepting-finland-and-sweden/2022/05/30/b412ee2a-dff7-11ec-ae64-6b23e5155b62_story.html |
Want to regulate social media? The First Amendment may stand in the way.
A law signed by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, restricting social media companies from what some right-wing politicians see as censorship, was partly struck down by a federal appeals court. (Marta Lavandier/AP)
Texas, Florida and other Republican-led states are passing laws that prohibit tech companies from “censoring” users — laws that Republican leaders say are meant to protect their constituents’ rights to free speech.
In the view of the tech companies, however, it’s those Republican lawmakers who are actually censoring. And the victims are not the everyday users of their social networks, but the companies themselves.
As tech-interest groups fight regulations in court battles across the country, they are advancing arguments that cast their content moderation decisions and even their ranking algorithms — the software that decides which posts each user sees when they open the app or website — as a form of expression in its own right. And they’re calling on the First Amendment, which protects American citizens and companies alike from government restraints on speech, to keep states’ hands off.
From Texas to Florida to Ohio to the U.S. Supreme Court, the nation’s judges and justices are wrestling with gnarly new questions about just what constitutes free speech, and whose rights are really at stake when lawmakers try to regulate social media feeds. Hanging in the balance are not only efforts by the right to impose political neutrality on Silicon Valley giants, but efforts by the left and center to require greater transparency and to hold them accountable for amplifying speech that may be harmful or illegal.
“The First Amendment is to some degree up for grabs,” says Genevieve Lakier, a University of Chicago law professor and senior visiting research scholar at the Knight First Amendment Institute. “These old principles are being pushed and pulled and reimagined in light of changing technological conditions and changing political alignments.”
The legal battles have their roots in controversies over social media’s ever-growing role in shaping political discourse. As platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and even TikTok have become influential forums for politicians, activists and the media, they’ve been criticized — often, though not exclusively, by the left — for fanning misinformation, bigotry, and division.
In response, those platforms have developed increasingly sophisticated systems — combining automation with human oversight — to detect and remove posts that violate their rules. In some cases, they’ve also adjusted their feed-ranking and recommendation algorithms to try to avoid highlighting content that could be problematic. But those moves have their own critics, especially on the right.
On May 11, a federal appeals court stunned the legal establishment by allowing Texas to move forward with a law that bans large Internet sites from “censoring” — whether by removing or algorithmically demoting — users’ posts based on their viewpoint. While the 5th Circuit Court didn’t explain its decision, the ruling seemed to support Texas Republicans’ argument that individual users’ right to be heard on social media platforms could trump tech companies’ right to decide which posts to display.
Tech companies quickly appealed to the Supreme Court, asking it to put the law back on hold while the lawsuit unfolds in a lower court. Justice Samuel Alito is expected to issue a ruling on that request in the coming days. While that ruling won’t resolve the case, it will be closely watched as a signal of how the broader debate is likely to play out in cases across the country.
Meanwhile, on May 23, another federal appeals court took a very different stand on Florida’s social media law, which is similar in spirit to Texas’s but differs in the details. In that case, the 11th Circuit upheld a lower court’s decision to suspend large swaths of the Florida law, on the grounds that tech companies’ algorithms and content moderation decisions amount to “constitutionally protected expressive activity.”
That ruling was broadly in keeping with decades of legal precedent holding that the best way to protect free speech is for governments to stay out of it. But it was noteworthy in affirming that social media sites’ “curation” of content is itself a form of protected speech.
It was also nuanced. While the appeals court judges found that many of the Florida law’s provisions were likely to be unconstitutional, they reinstated portions of the law that require tech companies to disclose certain types of information relevant to their content moderation processes.
For instance, they found that Florida requiring social media platforms to spell out their content moderation standards, show users the view counts on their posts, and give suspended users access to their data might be permissible. Those provisions will now take effect while a lower court continues to hear the case. But the court rejected a provision that would have required platforms to articulate to users their reasoning for suppressing any given post, ruling that it would be too burdensome.
Importantly, it also swatted away a provision requiring platforms to offer their users the ability to opt out of algorithmic ranking and see every post in their feed in chronological order. That decision, again, was on First Amendment grounds, suggesting platforms have a constitutional right to algorithms and even “shadow banning” — a colloquial term for hiding posts from certain users or making them harder to find, often without the user knowing about it.
Mary Anne Franks, a University of Miami law professor and author of the book “The Cult of the Constitution,” is a critic of what’s sometimes called “First Amendment absolutism” — the idea that the government can almost never interfere with even the most abhorrent speech. She argues there should be room for reforms that allow tech companies to be held responsible when they host or promote certain types of harmful content.
Yet Franks believes the 11th Circuit was correct to find much of the Florida law unconstitutional. Requiring social media platforms to offer a chronological feed, she said, would be analogous to requiring bookstores to arrange every book in chronological order in their storefront window — a violation of their right to decide which works to highlight.
That opinion could have implications not only for attempts by the right to restrict content moderation, but also for bipartisan and progressive proposals to promote more and better content moderation. Those include a bevy of bills that surfaced or gained momentum after the Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen called attention to how that company’s algorithms prioritized engagement and profits over social responsibility.
Some of those bills would remove the liability shield that Internet platforms enjoy under Section 230 of the Communications Decency act if their algorithms play a role in amplifying certain categories of speech. Others would require social media sites to offer “transparent” alternatives to their default recommendation algorithms. Still others would require them to submit their ranking algorithms to researchers or even the Federal Trade Commission.
Based on the recent federal court opinions, most, if not all, would likely prompt lawsuits from tech groups alleging that they violate the First Amendment. Exactly where courts will draw the line remains to be seen.
“What the 11th Circuit opinion does is start from the presumption that algorithmic ranking and recommendation and amplification is part of the First Amendment-protected conduct or speech that a platform engages in,” said Emma Llanso, director of the Free Expression Project at the nonprofit Center for Democracy and Technology, which receives funding from tech companies as well as some tech critics. “And so any regulation of that aspect of what platforms do will potentially face the same First Amendment scrutiny.”
Lawmakers’ latest idea to fix Facebook: Regulate the algorithm
That doesn’t mean regulating social media algorithms is impossible, Llanso said. But it sets a “very high bar” for the government to show a compelling interest in doing so, and to avoid making any such regulations overly burdensome.
In the wake of the recent court opinions, the kinds of regulations that would seem to have the best chance of surviving judicial scrutiny are those that focus on transparency, Llanso and other experts agreed. For instance, a bipartisan bill in Congress that would require large platforms to share data with approved researchers might stand a solid chance of surviving the level of scrutiny that the 11th Circuit applied.
But they cautioned that the big, underlying legal questions remain open for now, especially after the 5th and 11th circuits took such different stands on the Texas and Florida laws.
At the core of the debate is whether it’s only the tech companies’ speech rights that are at issue when the government attempts to regulate them, or whether some of those tech companies now have such power over individuals’ speech that the speech rights of users should come into play.
Historically, conservative thinkers held that “the best way to protect users’ speech rights is to give a lot of speech rights to platforms,” Lakier said, while some on the left worried that individuals’ speech rights were being given short shift. Now, a new breed of Trump-aligned Republicans has taken up the view that individuals may need speech protections from corporations, not just the government. Those include Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, and Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.
“It’s a live question,” Lakier said. While she believes the Texas and Florida laws go too far in restricting platforms, she added, “I will say as a progressive, I’m quite sympathetic to this turn to users’ speech rights. I think we should be thinking about that a lot more than we have in the past.”
Cat Zakrzewski and Cristiano Lima contributed to this report. | 2022-05-30T10:46:20Z | www.washingtonpost.com | First Amendment may stand in way of regulating social media companies - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/05/30/first-amendment-social-media-regulation/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/05/30/first-amendment-social-media-regulation/ |
Monday briefing: Biden’s visit to Uvalde; rising coronavirus cases; NBA Finals schedule; possible meteor shower; and more
The Bidens visited Uvalde, the site of the Texas school shooting, yesterday.
The president and first lady met with grieving families of the 19 children and two teachers who were killed in a massacre last week.
Also yesterday: The Justice Department announced it will review the police response to the shooting, which was catastrophically slow.
What else to know: The 18-year-old gunman, eventually killed by law enforcement, had a history of threatening young women online.
Russian troops are closing in on a key city in eastern Ukraine.
The latest: All “critical infrastructure” in the industrial hub Severodonetsk has been destroyed, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said yesterday, and most buildings are damaged.
Why it matters: If Russia takes the city, it would occupy nearly all of Ukraine’s easternmost Luhansk region. Its forces have been making slow but steady progress in the east, and Ukrainian troops said the situation is dire.
Coronavirus cases are five times higher this Memorial Day than last year.
The numbers: The U.S. is recording more than 100,000 infections a day, and more than half the population is living in areas with medium or high covid-19 levels.
What’s driving this? The most transmissible versions of the virus yet. Experts are bracing for holiday gatherings to fuel a further bump in cases.
At least 16 people have been found dead after a plane crash in Nepal.
What happened? The plane, carrying 22 people, went missing shortly after takeoff from Pokhara yesterday. Authorities said it struck a mountainside at 14,500 feet.
Who was on board? The airline, Tara Air, said it was carrying four Indian nationals, two Germans and 13 Nepalis, along with three crew members. There is little hope anyone survived.
The NBA Finals are set.
Last night: The Boston Celtics beat the Miami Heat 100-96 in Game 7 of the last playoff series, powered by young stars Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown.
What’s next? They face the Golden State Warriors on Thursday at 9 p.m. Eastern time for Game 1 of the Finals. This will be Boston’s first Finals since 2010.
There could be a spectacular “meteor storm” tonight.
What’s that? An outburst of up to 1,000 shooting stars per hour. However, it might not happen — a big clump of comet debris will need to line up just right with Earth’s path.
How can I watch? If it happens, astronomers think it will be around 1 a.m. Eastern time. To see it, you’ll need a broad view of the night sky away from any bright lights.
The Lincoln Memorial turns 100 years old today.
The monument honoring President Abraham Lincoln, which sits at the end of the National Mall in Washington, D.C., was dedicated on May 30, 1922, in front of 50,000 people.
It’s the most popular monument in the nation’s capital — where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963 — a symbol of courage, inspiration and hope in times of grief.
And now … Norm Macdonald filmed one last comedy special just before he died: “Nothing Special” begins streaming on Netflix today. | 2022-05-30T10:46:27Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The 7 things you need to know for Monday, May 30 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/the-seven/2022/05/30/what-to-know-for-may-30/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/the-seven/2022/05/30/what-to-know-for-may-30/ |
Biden pushes police reform — but there is only so much he can do
President Biden signs an executive order to advance effective, accountable policing and strengthen public safety, during a ceremony at the White House on May 25. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
Acknowledging that “progress can be slow and frustrating,” President Biden last week signed a long-anticipated executive order aimed at reforming the criminal justice system — a full two years since a Minneapolis police officer murdered George Floyd by kneeling on his neck for more than nine minutes. Even as he signed the order, Mr. Biden admitted it was insufficient. It directly affects only 100,000 federal law enforcement officers. Most policing occurs on the state and local level; only Congress or state and local leaders can overhaul law enforcement on a larger scale. The president’s action is as much a reflection of how much more the nation must do than what has already been accomplished.
This is not to say that Mr. Biden’s order is useless. It restores Obama administration restrictions on the transfer of military equipment to police departments, with exceptions for gear needed for “disaster-related emergencies; active shooter scenarios; hostage or search and rescue operations; and anti-terrorism efforts.” It mandates body cameras for all federal officers, restricts choke holds and curtails no-knock warrants. It sets narrow limits on when force is permitted and requires officers to intervene to stop excessive force and to render medical aid.
Part of the point is to set high standards that local police departments might adopt voluntarily. But the order also envisions the Justice Department providing more oversight of local police through “pattern or practice” investigations, which the Trump administration had put on ice. And it requires more information to be reported on police misconduct and use of force, including the creation of a new database to which all federal agencies must contribute. Simply getting reliable numbers on policing in the United States has long been a challenge, in part because local departments have failed to report to an FBI use of force database. The order directs federal authorities to help local agencies report their numbers.
It is unclear how much extra participation this would yield, just as it is unknown whether local departments will adopt Mr. Biden’s new federal policing standards without more of a nudge. But the president’s powers are limited. Members of Congress struggled to agree on a bill that would have done much more, and talks collapsed last September.
“There’s a concern that the reckoning on race inspired two years ago is beginning to fade,” Mr. Biden said. His executive order cannot be the last word. Criminal justice reform is often attacked as anti-police. Done smartly, it helps good police officers, who get more trust from the communities they are sworn to protect and who are no longer harmed by association with bad cops who desecrate their profession. More importantly, reform can curb the extent to which Americans of color feel threatened by those who wield deadly policing powers. The only acceptable choice is for the nation’s leaders — from the local level to the federal one — to keep trying. | 2022-05-30T11:19:51Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Biden pushes police reform — but there is only so much he can do - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/05/29/biden-police-reform-options-limited/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/05/29/biden-police-reform-options-limited/ |
Children couldn’t even learn during the pandemic without being surveilled
Students in a New York City classroom on Sept. 27, 2021. (Michael Loccisano/Getty Images)
The coronavirus flung 1.6 billion children and young adults around the world out of the classroom and into the realm of digital learning — which, for the advertising industry, meant 1.6 billion new sources of sensitive data.
A new report from Human Rights Watch reveals the startling extent to which the educational tools students used during the pandemic collected and shared their information: The analysis of 164 apps and websites recommended by school districts here and governments elsewhere discovered that almost 90 percent of the products vacuumed up students’ activities, locations and even sometimes their keystrokes, passing this trove of knowledge on to firms that exploit them for profit. Many of these privacy violations were invisible; many were also impossible to avoid for any kid who wanted, amid the outbreak of a deadly disease, to continue going to school. The 146 products that sold or granted access to data did so to 196 third-party companies; to whom or to how many those third-party companies then passed along the data is unknown.
These findings show how the globe has settled on a default position of constant surveillance. The harm this status quo causes varies: Most grievously, the detailed picture that this data allows brokers to develop could, for example, aid an abuser or trafficker in tracking down a victim; more mundane is the annoyance of being followed by the image of a pair of shoes an advertising algorithm has decided you can be enticed into buying. The lack of restrictions in the United States and many other places on the gathering, processing and selling of personal information means that companies rarely have to distinguish between these uses, or protect customers against the worst of them. And even when it comes to the mildest of outcomes, it’s worth asking the question: Is it necessary, and is it right, to amass this data on children when they and their parents do not expect it and have no ability to prevent it?
The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act already has special restrictions on data collected from young children, which the companies implicated in last week’s report say they haven’t violated. The Federal Trade Commission voted this month on a policy statement to enforce the law more vigorously, and there’s movement on Capitol Hill to strengthen it. These efforts are obviously in order, but the fact that even kids trying to learn amid a pandemic are monitored so that someone, somewhere can make some money points to a societal problem. The solution is a comprehensive federal privacy law that applies to everyone. Sens. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) and Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), whose Commerce Committee has long been working on a bipartisan bill, should overcome their remaining differences to complete the job. | 2022-05-30T11:19:53Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Children couldn’t even learn during the pandemic without being surveilled - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/05/30/children-couldnt-even-learn-during-pandemic-without-being-surveilled/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/05/30/children-couldnt-even-learn-during-pandemic-without-being-surveilled/ |
It’s time for Biden to lift Trump’s China tariffs
President Biden speaks about inflation during a visit to a family farm in Kankakee, Ill., on May 11. (Bloomberg). (Bloomberg/Photographer: Bloomberg/Bloomber)
One of the many messes former president Donald Trump left behind are sweeping tariffs on thousands of Chinese products. Mr. Trump’s trade war has been a flop, escalating costs for Americans and generating little but ire from China. It’s past time for President Biden to end this. He should not wait months for a formal review of the tariffs.
The No. 1 problem facing the U.S. economy is inflation. Mr. Biden is fond of telling Americans that he’s doing everything he can to help, calling it his “top domestic priority.” He deserves credit for releasing oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to try to get relief at the pump, though sadly prices are once again setting record highs. But it’s surprising that Mr. Biden has not pulled the other major lever he has to try to help reduce inflation: removing — or at least reducing — Mr. Trump’s tariffs on more than $300 billion of imports from China. Mr. Biden himself described the tariffs as “reckless,” yet they remain.
Tariffs are a tax that raises costs on products imported from overseas. Mr. Trump put hefty ones in place on China starting in 2018, claiming they would force China to buy more from U.S. businesses and trade fairly. That hasn’t happened. China bought basically the same amount of U.S. products last year as in 2017, before the trade war. The pandemic didn’t help the situation. The crisis changed what people wanted to buy and reduced demand for services, where the United States has typically excelled. But four years later, a lot of U.S. industries are facing higher costs and very few have been able to get greater access to the Chinese market.
In an encouraging sign, Mr. Biden has said several times in recent weeks that he’s discussing the tariffs with top advisers and “considering” tweaking them. Removing — or at least reducing — them won’t get inflation from its current level of more than 8 percent back down to the goal of 2 percent, but it would help. Economists at the Peterson Institute for International Economics estimate the move would produce an immediate reduction of 0.3 percent in inflation with the potential for more than a full percentage point decrease in about a year. Many American families are desperate for ways to save wherever they can. Lowering costs on clothes and school supplies, among other products, would be noticeable.
China still doesn’t play fairly on trade. The Chinese government’s anti-competitive practices include subsidizing key industries, failing to protect intellectual property and, worse, making it difficult for foreign firms to enter the market. The best way to force China to change is for Mr. Biden to create strong trade partnerships with other nations to make the United States less reliant on China. The newly announced Indo-Pacific Economic Framework lacks real substance so far and is a poor substitute for the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which Mr. Trump pulled out of and 11 other countries went ahead and signed.
The White House should evolve from “tough on China” to being “smart on China.” That starts with rolling back at least some of the costly tariffs. | 2022-05-30T11:19:59Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | It’s time for Biden to lift Trump’s China tariffs - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/05/30/its-time-biden-lift-trumps-china-tariffs/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/05/30/its-time-biden-lift-trumps-china-tariffs/ |
Nationals pitcher Josiah Gray has looked like a rookie this season, showing glimpses of promise through growing pains. (Katherine Frey/The Washington Post)
Josiah Gray’s outing in the Washington Nationals’ 6-5 victory over the Colorado Rockies on Sunday encapsulated his performance this season: It mixed a young player’s growing pains with signs of promise.
After the right-hander allowed a leadoff home run to Charlie Blackmon, it appeared he might have an outcome similar to his previous outing, when he lasted just three innings against the team that traded him away in July.
The good was that Gray settled in and allowed just two more hits over five innings to avoid any additional damage. The bad was that he issued four walks, running up his pitch count and ending his day early.
“I think I’ve shown flashes of good outings and bad,” Gray said. “That’s any pitcher, but ... you have to continue to be consistent. So still working on that, but today it was definitely a step forward.”
Gray, 24, came to Washington as one of the most valuable assets in last summer’s deadline deal that sent Max Scherzer and Trea Turner to the Los Angeles Dodgers. The Nationals view Gray as a pivotal piece of their future, but what kind of pitcher he’ll be — an ace or a serviceable starter — remains to be seen.
“He’s progressing really well, and he’s matured a lot,” Manager Dave Martinez said. “For him, the training wheels are off. Although he hasn’t got up to that 100-pitch mark yet, he’s competing and he’s keeping us in games.”
In 10 starts, Gray has a 5.08 ERA — not an ideal figure. But that’s part of the learning curve that comes with trading for a young pitcher.
His ERA was 3.12 after he threw six scoreless innings against the San Francisco Giants on May 1. Since then, he has taken some steps back. Gray allowed five first-inning runs in a 6-1 loss to the Houston Astros. He allowed seven in three innings against the Dodgers, admitting that he let his emotions get the best of him while facing his former team for the first time.
Gray has allowed at least four runs in four of his 10 starts, but he has allowed one or zero runs in the same number of appearances.
One of the most important areas for Gray to grow is relying less on his fastball and more on throwing his off-speed and breaking balls for strikes. Martinez even sent Gray down to pitch in a few minor league games during spring training to work on that skill.
Martinez wanted Gray to use his change-up instead of his fastball against Blackmon in the first inning Sunday. Martinez has implored Gray to throw the change-up more, especially against left-handers. He has thrown the pitch just 28 times this season, but employing it could’ve messed with Blackmon’s timing. Instead, Blackmon slugged a fastball for a home run.
“He needs to start using it,” Martinez said. “We talked about it when he came out, and he agreed. So we’re going to get him in that bullpen and get him to really work on it and show him and talk to him about when it’s effective.”
Gray has dropped his fastball usage from 51.6 percent last year to 45.6 this season. Before Blackmon’s home run Sunday, José Altuve slugged a fastball for a homer on the first pitch of the game in Gray’s loss to the Astros.
“I think as good as they get, the more I can access the zone with them, it opens up the strike zone for me more,” Gray said.
Gray has had success when he plans to use his breaking and off-speed pitches often. Against the Marlins on May 18, he struck out six with the slider and got 15 whiffs with the pitch.
Beyond that, Gray is still working through pitch selection, dealing with how he responds to adversity and adjusting how he handles high-leverage situations when trailing early.
“There’s been some [starts] that have been rocky and haven’t gone my way. There’s been some that have been really good,” Gray said. “So now it’s just blending that consistency and making sure every outing is a good outing.” | 2022-05-30T11:20:05Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Josiah Gray strives for consistency in Nationals' rotation - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/05/30/josiah-gray-nationals-rotation/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/05/30/josiah-gray-nationals-rotation/ |
In Harriet Tubman’s home state of Maryland, a new school bears her name
An elementary school in Gathersburg was named after Tubman as the state celebrates the 200th anniversary of her birth
A statue of Harriet Tubman graces the plaza of the New York State Equal Rights Heritage Center. A school named in Tubman's honor is set to open in Montgomery County, Md. for the upcoming school year. (Andrea Sachs/The Washington Post)
Montgomery County school officials named its new elementary school in Gaithersburg, Md., after Harriet Tubman, making it one of the first schools — and the only one in modern times — in Tubman’s home state to have her namesake, according to a registry of schools from the Maryland Department of Education.
The Montgomery County Board of Education approved the school’s name at a board meeting earlier this month. Brenda Wolff, president of the school board, called it an honor to be a part of the process that named the school for Tubman, who Wolff referred to as her “shero.”
“It should have happened a long time ago,” Wolff said.
Historians say the famous abolitionist was born in modern-day Madison, Md. in 1822. She spent the first 27 years of her life on two plantations before she escaped enslavement to Philadelphia in 1849, according to Linda Harris, director of events and programs at the Harriet Tubman Museum and Educational Center in Dorchester County. She returned to Maryland in 1850, roughly nine to 10 months later, after hearing that her enslaved niece was going to be sold. Tubman came back to Maryland an additional 13 times to guide 70 enslaved people to freedom.
“She is the only one that we’re aware of that came back that many times anywhere on the Underground Railroad,” Harris said.
Harriet Tubman’s lost Maryland home found, archaeologists say
Tubman is credited with helping abolitionist John Brown orchestrate the raid on Harpers Ferry, W.Va. During the Civil War, she worked as a spy for the Union Army, collecting intelligence behind Confederate lines from enslaved Black people. She was the first woman to successfully plan and lead a military expedition during the Civil War.
“Everyone knows her general story, but they don’t know a lot of the detail,” Harris said. “And the common thread is her desire to help other people.”
The school’s naming process began in March, after the board passed a resolution that recommended three names: Kelley Park Elementary School, Celia Cruz Elementary School and Cesar Chavez Elementary School. A 13-person committee was assembled by the school’s principal, Cavena J. Griffith, to decide the official name of the school.
Through the process, the group pitched two other potential names: Harriet R. Tubman Elementary School and Lucille Bridges Elementary School. In a community survey, a majority voted for Harriet R. Tubman Elementary School as their first or second choice.
Board members officially approved the Tubman name at a May 10 meeting.
During a presentation to the school board on the chosen name, Griffith explained how Tubman’s legacy aligned with the school system’s five core values of learning, relationships, equity, respect and excellence.
“Harriet R. Tubman selflessly made the decision to risk her freedom and life by returning to Maryland in order to free countless enslaved Black or African Americans,” Griffith said in her presentation to the board.
Griffith added the naming process happened during March, which is Women’s History Month. It also coincided with Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan naming 2022 “The Year of Harriet Tubman,” to coincide with the 200th anniversary of Tubman’s birth.
“It is truly inspiring to think of how we can walk along the same path as she did, where she forged her indelible legacy of freedom,” Griffith said.
Board member Rebecca Smondrowski (District 2) said the presentation made her a “little teary,” because of how thorough it was in addressing Tubman’s history and the school system’s values.
“I feel very, very proud to be supporting this theme choice,” Smondrowski said.
Renowned as a Black liberator, Harriet Tubman was also a brilliant spy
The school is scheduled to open to students for the 2022-23 academic year.
When it opens, it will be her only namesake school in Maryland, according to state school listings. (D.C. has Harriet Tubman Elementary School in the Columbia Heights neighborhood.)
But it isn’t the first school in the state to be named after her. In 1949, Harriet Tubman School opened as Howard County’s only all-Black high school until it closed through desegregation in 1965.
Howard County community members, led by alumni from the school, began organizing in 2004 to preserve it. In 2018, the historic building’s ownership was transferred from Howard County Public Schools to the county government, to repurpose the site as an educational and cultural center.
Bessie Bordenave, 78, graduated from there in 1962. She said everyone in the school was like a family. It was a special place and a good school, she said.
“After it was closed, we decided that something really needed to be done about the school,” Bordenave said.
She now serves as the president of the Harriet Tubman Foundation and chair of the Harriet Tubman School Advisory Council. The building is projected to reopen in July, with an arts room, youth center and recreated classrooms from when the Tubman school was in operation.
Bordenave added that it was good another school in Tubman’s home state would be named after her.
Back in Montgomery County, Wolff said she believed the school would send a message of achievement to students — especially Black students — in the district.
“It gives you hope as to what is possible,” Wolff said. | 2022-05-30T11:20:11Z | www.washingtonpost.com | In Harriet Tubman’s home state of Maryland, a new school bears her name - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/05/30/harriet-tubman-school-montgomery-county-maryland/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/05/30/harriet-tubman-school-montgomery-county-maryland/ |
Emergency workers at Ground Zero in New York on Sept. 11, 2001. (Mark Lennihan/AP)
When the World Trade Center was destroyed on Sept. 11, 2001, survivors breathed in toxic dust, and first responders and cleanup workers, deployed in massive numbers, worked among the dangerous rubble. More than 20 years after the attacks, the health consequences of their time at Ground Zero are continuing to mount.
The World Trade Center Health Program, a government program that monitors and treats WTC-related health conditions, covers nearly every type of cancer. But a single type has never been added to its list: uterine cancer.
The mystery of 9/11 and dementia
That could soon change. Officials have proposed adding uterine cancer to the list of cancers covered by the program, and the rule change is in its final stage.
Uterine cancer makes up 3.4 percent of all new cancer cases nationally and will cause an estimated 12,550 deaths this year, according to the National Cancer Institute.
Uterine and endometrial cancers can be caused by the endocrine-disrupting substances found at Ground Zero. So far, however, data on how many people are affected has been scant.
Study finds clues to ‘puzzling and concerning’ rise in uterine cancer death rates
Part of that is because of the makeup of first responders and cleanup worker; an estimated 15 percent are female. In addition, a scientific advisory committee concluded that there could be other selection biases afoot in enrollment in health-related studies within the WTC-linked population.
That “makes it unlikely that a definitive association between 9/11 exposure and uterine cancer can be identified during the lifetimes of even the most exposed program members,” the WTC Health Program said in a statement. Nonetheless, scientific advisers and the program’s administrator say that there’s enough evidence to conclude that a plausible connection exists between dust and other WTC chemicals and uterine cancer.
The effort is backed by patients, caregivers, advocacy groups, physicians and more than a dozen members of Congress.
“I had already authored several studies that had shown an excess of all cancers in responders, and we knew that a lot of the chemicals people had been exposed to were endocrine disruptors that can lead to this type of cancer,” said Iris Udasin, who leads Rutgers University’s World Trade Center Medical Monitoring and Treatment Program and has treated several of the first responders and survivors for the cancer, in a news release.
The proposed change can be found in the Federal Register and is open for public comment through June 26. | 2022-05-30T12:16:50Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Uterine cancer may be added to the list of 9/11-related health issues - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/05/30/9-11-health-uterine-cancer/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/05/30/9-11-health-uterine-cancer/ |
A massive repatriation of World War II dead — and one body’s long journey
By Kim Clarke
The U.S. Army transport ship Joseph V. Connolly moves into New York Harbor in 1947, bearing 6,200 World War II dead being returned from military cemeteries in Europe for reburial in the United States. (AP)
When the United States began bringing home its dead from World War II, the body of Army Staff Sgt. Themistocles Zombas was in the first shipment of flag-draped caskets from Europe’s battlefields.
But it would be among the last to reach its final place of rest.
Years would pass before Zombas was buried for the last time. As the country shipped home hundreds of thousands of war dead to be mourned and buried, Zombas was repeatedly interred and exhumed, first by the military and then by parents so paralyzed by grief they could not bear being apart from their only child.
As Americans observe Memorial Day, few are celebrating the 75th anniversary of the start of the return of the dead from World War II. But in the early postwar era, this massive act of repatriation — the largest in history — reunited hundreds of thousands of families torn apart by war and death and created its own series of wrenching dramas like the one that saw Zombas moved back-and-forth across the Atlantic Ocean.
While the war was underway, the U.S. military banned the return of any overseas war dead. Money was to go toward fighting rather than shipping bodies back home. Instead, soldiers buried their comrades in temporary military cemeteries throughout the European and Pacific theaters.
When the war ended, the military gave families a choice: leave their loved ones in their overseas graves or bring them home for reburial. The plan — approved and funded by Congress — split public opinion, as well as many families. Some argued it would be sacrilegious and disrespectful to move the dead. Others pleaded for the return of the bodies of fallen husbands, sons and brothers.
For Daniel and Giaseme Zombas, there was no debate. They wanted their son Themistocles brought home to Haverhill, Mass. It was where the couple had married after emigrating from Greece and where Themistocles grew up, played football in high school, and worked at the Kent Shoe factory before enlisting in 1942.
“He was the only thing they lived for,” said a high school classmate, Arthur Karambelas.
An infantryman with the 310th Infantry Regiment, Zombas was killed by a shell fragment on March 18, 1945, after his company crossed the Rhine River into Germany. He was 21 years old. Soldiers from the American Graves Registration Service wrapped his body, still in its uniform, in a thin cotton mattress pad and buried him in a temporary military cemetery outside Henri-Chapelle, Belgium.
Henri-Chapelle grew to be the largest wartime cemetery in Europe. It was also the first to be emptied when the repatriation program began in 1947. Zombas’s remains were exhumed, placed in a casket and, with some 5,000 others from the cemetery, loaded onto the U.S. Army Transport Joseph V. Connolly at Antwerp, Belgium.
The Connolly arrived in New York harbor on Oct. 26, 1947, with the first of the war dead from Europe. The first bodies from the Pacific had arrived two weeks earlier when the Army transport Honda Knot sailed into Oakland, Calif., with 3,027 caskets in its hold.
The Connolly tied up at the Brooklyn Army Base, where soldiers moved its precious cargo into the base’s cavernous terminal, then onto mortuary trains that would fan out across the country. A military escort, Army Sgt. Johnnie K. Ward, accompanied the Zombas casket to Massachusetts.
There, for the second time, Themistocles Zombas was buried — this time in his hometown — in November 1947.
But his parents could not rest. Shattered and lost without their son, the couple wanted to return to their native Greece, but only with Themistocles. They asked if the military would assist in moving his remains, and the answer was swift: “Any action … with respect to the remains must be taken by the family on their own initiative and at their own expense.”
The Zombases went ahead with their plans. They had their son’s casket re-exhumed and set sail for Greece in June 1949. Their ship shared the ocean with the Army transport Carroll Victory, making its way westward with the latest shipment of war dead. By that summer, the repatriation program was well into its second year, with more than 150,000 sets of remains returned to families.
Themistocles Zombas was buried in Greece while his parents struggled to rebuild their lives. Yet after all of eight months, Daniel and Giaseme Zombas decided to return to Haverhill, again with their son’s remains in tow — the third time the body had crossed the Atlantic.
When the Zombases docked in Hoboken, N.J., in March 1950, they were penniless. Daniel was disabled and had been unemployed for years. The couple had been living on their son’s life insurance policy and military death pension. They could not afford the $395 bill to transport the casket to Massachusetts. They left their son’s body in Hoboken and returned home, alone, to await a government check.
For 34 days, Themistocles Zombas’s remains were on sawhorses on a New Jersey pier, draped with the same U.S. flag that had covered the coffin for its initial return from Europe in 1947. Only after a New York newspaper reported the abandonment was Zombas rescued when Greek war veterans and family friends came forward to pay the transport fee. Soldiers with the Graves Registration Service, who continued to process war dead at the Brooklyn Army Base, retrieved the body. A mortician drove the casket to Massachusetts.
Americans gave their lives to defeat the Nazis. The Dutch have never forgotten.
On April 17, 1950, in Haverhill’s Linwood Cemetery, Zombas was lowered into the ground for the fourth and final time.
Five years had passed since his death. His journey was an anomaly, but his parents’ grief was not. When the return program ended in 1951, more than 171,000 bodies — 60 percent of America’s World War II fallen — were reunited with waiting families. The remaining overseas dead were reinterred in new, permanent cemeteries, including Henri-Chapelle American Cemetery. The repatriation plan cost $163 million.
Today, an engraved granite marker issued by the government covers the grave of Themistocles Zombas. His parents, who died in 1953 and 1966, rest at his side.
Kim Clarke, a writer based in Michigan, is writing a book about the unacknowledged men and women who brought home the bodies of some 171,000 fallen Americans in the years after World War II. She is on Twitter @kd_clarke. | 2022-05-30T12:16:56Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Repatriation of World War II soldiers' bodies began 75 years ago - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2022/05/30/repatriation-world-war-ii-zombas/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2022/05/30/repatriation-world-war-ii-zombas/ |
(GCapture/Getty Images/iStockphoto)
CDC issues nationwide alert about mysterious hepatitis cases in kids
Hepatitis A is commonly contracted through the ingestion of contaminated food or water but can also be spread from person to person, according to information shared by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The illness can linger for several weeks and, in rare cases, can cause liver failure and death — although this is more common in people with liver disease or those older than 50, the CDC says.
Woman sues Kellogg over lack of strawberries in strawberry Pop-Tarts, seeks $5 million | 2022-05-30T12:25:08Z | www.washingtonpost.com | FDA: Hepatitis A outbreak linked to FreshKampo, HEB organic strawberries - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/05/30/hepatitis-a-strawberries-outbreak-fda/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/05/30/hepatitis-a-strawberries-outbreak-fda/ |
Nine months since the chaotic US exit from Afghanistan, tens of thousands of Afghans evacuated to the United States remain uncertain about their future status. The failure of America’s leaders to provide a pathway for these allies to stay in the US is nothing short of a national disgrace.
Of the 76,000 Afghans brought to the US through Operation Allies Welcome following the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan in August 2021, more than half either hold or qualify for the Special Immigrant Visas available to Afghans who worked directly for the US government. Another 36,433 evacuees came into the country under so-called humanitarian parole, which allows them to live and work in the US for two years but includes no pathway to a green card. To stay longer, they would need to apply for asylum, a process that can take years and requires extensive paperwork.
These Afghans include family members of US citizens, as well as lawyers, journalists and activists who feared retaliation after the fall of Kabul. Many worked in some capacity alongside the US and other Western governments. While the White House has extended Temporary Protected Status to Afghans, that designation only lasts for 18 months. There’s no guarantee it will be extended or for how long.
There’s a straightforward way to resolve the Afghans’ immigration status: Congress could pass an “adjustment act” that would allow them to apply for permanent status in the US after a year. The US has previously offered such adjustments to refugees from Vietnam, Cuba and Iraq.
Unfortunately, opposition from key Republicans has stymied bipartisan efforts to pass such a measure. The security concerns legislators have raised are spurious, since applicants would have to undergo additional vetting as part of the process. Moreover, the evacuees did not break any immigration laws or jump any queues; allowing them to stay would not set any controversial precedents. The numbers involved, in a country the size of the US, are minuscule.
Leaving these Afghans in legal limbo would dishonor the sacrifices of tens of thousands of others who fought alongside the US, whether on the battlefield or in civil society. It’s also impossible to imagine sending evacuees back to a Taliban-ruled Afghanistan. Needlessly adding years of struggle, red tape and uncertainty to their quest for a visa would be pointless and cruel.
Given how many Afghans eligible for SIVs or other immigration visas were left behind, the least the US can do is take care of the few who made it out. Congress should introduce and pass an Afghan Adjustment Act with bipartisan support and without delay, either as a standalone or as part of a larger bill. Swift passage would allow procedures to be established by the time most evacuees have been in the US for a year and need to apply for permanent status. Further delay risks dragging out the process uncomfortably close to when their parole status will expire.
Two related issues require urgent attention.
First, it’s important to note that while most of the focus has been on SIV applicants, who are mostly men, Afghan women risked just as much if not more to promote the values of a new Afghanistan. Female judges, prosecutors, journalists and human rights advocates are arguably more at risk now than ever before.
Second, many Afghans associated with the democratic project fled to other countries, including Pakistan and Turkey, in hopes of moving on to the US. While many should qualify for visas, it is incumbent on the US to increase embassy staff in these places so that Afghan cases can be properly processed.
There’s much to criticize about the Biden administration’s handling of the US pullout from Afghanistan. But innocent Afghans should not have to pay the price for US blunders. Doing right by those who helped the US in Afghanistan would be a first step toward meeting the country’s obligations to its allies.
Will Afghanistan’s Media Survive Under the Taliban?: Bobby Ghosh
The US Should Manage Afghanistan’s Money Wisely: Editorial
Can the Taliban Rule Afghanistan? History Says Not: Max Hastings | 2022-05-30T13:47:55Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Congress Is Dishonoring America’s Afghan Allies - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/congress-is-dishonoring-americas-afghan-allies/2022/05/30/38054a72-e019-11ec-ae64-6b23e5155b62_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/congress-is-dishonoring-americas-afghan-allies/2022/05/30/38054a72-e019-11ec-ae64-6b23e5155b62_story.html |
Learning idioms is no piece of cake
Idioms are phrases that have a meaning other than that of the individual words.
The expression “thinking outside the box” comes from the creative way needed to solve a centuries-old puzzle. It's an example of an idiom. So is a “piece of cake,” which is used to describe something easy to do. (The Washington Post illustration/iStock)
Learning languages is challenging. There are thousands of strange new words to know, along with how to pronounce them and use them correctly in a sentence.
One of the trickier parts is figuring out the meaning of a language’s idioms (pronounced IDD-ee-ums). An idiom is a phrase whose meaning is different from its individual words but is widely understood by native speakers of that language.
Do you know what clichés are?
For example, if someone says “don't cry over spilled milk,” they aren't talking about an actual puddle of milk. This idiom means that something is done with, and it's time to move on.
Many languages have idioms. Here’s a funny one in Polish: Nie mój cyrk, nie moje malpy. It translates to “Not my circus, not my monkeys” — in other words, “not my problem.”
Here are seven popular idioms in English and their generally accepted origins.
Off your rocker: Crazy or odd behavior.
In the 1890s, trolley cars were attached to overhead electrical wires with an arm and a wheel called a rocker. If a car disconnected, it was off its rocker and unable to work properly. The British version of this idiom is “off your trolley.”
Spill the beans: Reveal a secret.
In Ancient Greece, men voted in secret, using colored beans. If someone tipped over the vase holding the beans, the election results were no longer secret.
Turn a blind eye: Ignore someone or something unpleasant.
British admiral and war hero Horatio Nelson, who had lost sight in his right eye, claimed after an 1801 naval battle that he had not seen his commander’s flag signal to retreat. “I have only one eye. I have a right to be blind sometimes,” Nelson reportedly said. The British went on to victory.
It’s in the bag: Success is assured.
The 1916 New York Giants were in the middle of what became a 26-game winning streak. Back then, a bag filled with baseballs was left on the field during games to replace balls hit into the stands. The Giants became convinced that, if they led in the ninth inning, removing that bag guaranteed victory because the win was “in the bag.”
Hit the hay (or hit the sack): Go to bed.
Our ancestors didn’t have comfy foam mattresses. They slept on sacks stuffed with whatever they could find, often straw or hay. Before bedtime, they might punch the sack to make it more comfortable. That also helped get rid of bugs that would otherwise spend the night with them.
Think outside the box: Be creative or different in problem-solving.
This phrase gained popularity in the business world of the 1970s. It refers to a century-old puzzle in which nine dots must be connected using four straight lines, without your pen or pencil leaving the paper. It's easy ... once your mind leaves the box.
Barking up the wrong tree: Make the wrong choice.
This idiom dates back 200 years to when people hunted with packs of dogs. Sometimes a wily raccoon or other animal would trick the dogs into thinking their prey was up a certain tree. The dogs would then circle its base and yap away. They were, literally, barking up the wrong tree.
Check out Planet Word, the country’s first museum dedicated “to inspiring a love of words and language.”
It’s in the historic Franklin School at 925 Thirteenth Street Northwest in Washington, D.C. The museum introduces several aspects of language and has interactive exhibits. Entry is free (though donations are welcome); timed entry passes are required.
For museum hours, entry passes and other information, visit planetwordmuseum.org. | 2022-05-30T13:48:07Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Learning idioms is no piece of cake - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/kidspost/2022/05/30/what-are-idioms/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/kidspost/2022/05/30/what-are-idioms/ |
Spain’s King Felipe VI speaks with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, centre, and Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, right, as they attend a gala at Madrid’s Royal Theater, Monday, May 30, 2022. Stoltenberg visits Madrid for Spain’s celebration of its 40th year as part of the military alliance one month before the capital hosts an important NATO summit. (Alejandro Martínez/Europa Press via AP, Pool)
BARCELONA, Spain — NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said Monday that next month’s summit in Madrid will be a “historic” opportunity to strengthen the alliance in the face of Russian aggression against Ukraine.
But the leader of the 30-member alliance didn’t address Turkey's reluctance to opening the doors to Sweden and Finland. Turkey, which commands the second-largest military in NATO behind the United States, has cited the alleged support by the Nordic countries for Kurdish militants that Turkey considers terrorists as reason to reject their applications. Unanimous support is needed to add new NATO members. | 2022-05-30T13:48:20Z | www.washingtonpost.com | NATO looks to 'historic' Madrid summit, with Sweden, Finland - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/nato-looks-to-historic-madrid-summit-with-sweden-finland/2022/05/30/ea3d670c-e013-11ec-ae64-6b23e5155b62_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/nato-looks-to-historic-madrid-summit-with-sweden-finland/2022/05/30/ea3d670c-e013-11ec-ae64-6b23e5155b62_story.html |
Since the Uvalde, Tex., elementary school tragedy, there have been at least 14 other shootings that had at least four victims
Kountry Queens food truck owner Tiffany Walton at the scene of a shooting at a Memorial Day event that left one dead and seven injured in Taft, Okla., on May 29. (Ian Maule/AP)
After a shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Tex., that claimed the lives of 19 children and two teachers last week, many politicians, public figures and gun-control advocates said the U.S. government should ensure mass shootings could not happen again.
It’s ridiculous that I even need to publicly state that guns have no place in the hands of our kids. And that children shouldn’t be wandering around in the middle of the night with no supervision.
In the aftermath of the Uvalde shooting, many local leaders and community representatives issued emotional pleas for action. As The Post has reported, it’s unlikely that Congress will be able to pass gun-control measures. | 2022-05-30T14:09:35Z | www.washingtonpost.com | U.S. sees at least 11 mass shootings over Memorial Day weekend - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/05/30/mass-shootings-memorial-day-weekend-taft-chattanooga-uvalde/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/05/30/mass-shootings-memorial-day-weekend-taft-chattanooga-uvalde/ |
Andrew Wiggins has gone from draft disappointment to Finals X-factor
Golden State Warriors guard Stephen Curry said Andrew Wiggins is “understanding the nuances of winning basketball.” (Jeff Chiu/AP)
SAN FRANCISCO — When the Golden State Warriors were ramping up for the season back in October, they were still viewed as a collection of questions rather than surefire title contenders.
Klay Thompson was rehabbing a torn Achilles. Draymond Green was three years removed from his last all-star selection. And Stephen Curry had been outdueled by LeBron James and Ja Morant in the 2021 play-in tournament, causing the Warriors to miss the playoffs for the second straight year.
The biggest cause for uncertainty, though, was Andrew Wiggins, a starting small forward who would be critical to the Warriors’ playoff hopes. The former No. 1 overall pick had gradually acclimated to his new home following his February 2020 trade by the Minnesota Timberwolves. But Wiggins, like Kyrie Irving, held severe reservations about getting the coronavirus vaccine and would be ineligible to play full-time per San Francisco’s local mandate unless he got the shot. The decision dragged for weeks throughout training camp, until Wiggins finally relented shortly before the preseason.
“The only options were to get vaccinated or not play in the NBA,” Wiggins said at the time, citing his desire to provide financially for his family. “It was a tough decision. Hopefully, there's a lot of people out there that are stronger than me and keep fighting, stand for what they believe.”
Had Wiggins held firm like Irving, who remained unvaccinated and was only able to fully participate once New York’s local mandate was lifted in March, the Warriors probably aren’t in position to claim their fourth title since 2015.
As for Wiggins, whose hesitancy was grounded in fears of potential side effects and a desire for bodily autonomy, his eventual willingness to get a Johnson & Johnson shot set up what has turned out to be easily the most successful season of career. Over the past eight months, Wiggins has led Golden State in minutes played, been selected to his first All-Star Game thanks to an online voting push from K- Pop star BamBam and emerged as the leading X-factor in the upcoming Finals against the Boston Celtics, which opens Thursday at Chase Center.
Back when Wiggins, a Toronto native, was a high school prodigy, he reclassified so that he could enter the NCAA ranks a year early and boasted the grandest of dreams, proclaiming in 2012 that he wanted to “score like Kevin Durant and get to the basket like LeBron James.” With a prototypical wing’s frame, an incredible first step and excellent leaping ability, Wiggins earned the “Maple Jordan” nickname, graced the cover of Sports Illustrated during his one-and-done season at the University of Kansas, became the 2014 No. 1 draft pick and won 2015 Rookie of the Year honors with the Timberwolves.
While he emerged as a reliable 20 points per game scorer, his efficiency left much to be desired, as did Minnesota’s young roster. In his five-plus seasons with the Timberwolves, Wiggins reached the playoffs just once and appeared in a single postseason win. His quiet nature and tendency to float in and out of the action turned off fans who yearned for a transformational talent, as the Timberwolves missed the playoffs for 13 straight years before their 2018 breakthrough.
“That's a guy that has been criticized for being lackadaisical,” Green said last week. “No one talks about teams that guys are on or organizations that guys are in. No one ever talks about that. It's always the player's fault.”
Along came the Warriors, who viewed Wiggins as a distressed asset who could help fill a void following Durant’s 2019 free-agency departure. Golden State sent guard D’Angelo Russell to Minnesota for Wiggins and a 2021 first-round pick, which became rookie Jonathan Kuminga.
“I think the Wiggins trade is the key to all of this,” Coach Steve Kerr said recently, noting that the Warriors’ group of wing defenders had been “wiped out” by the 2019 departures of Durant, Andre Iguodala and Shaun Livingston. “The Wiggins trade allowed us to start us to rebuild that wing defense. Wiggs has just been so good. He’s a perfect fit next to our guys. I don’t know where we’d be without him.”
Wiggins averaged 17.2 points, 4.5 rebounds and 2.2 assists per game this season, settling into life as Golden State’s fourth-leading scorer and most important wing defender. His familiarity with Kerr’s motion offense improved during his second season with the Warriors, and he displayed a willingness to scale back his scoring upon Thompson’s January return from injury.
That unselfishness, along with his diligent on-ball defense and a no-complaints mentality, has won him rave reviews from his coach, teammates and opponents during this postseason run. His multipronged value was most evident in the Western Conference finals against the Mavericks, when he hounded all-NBA guard Luka Doncic with full-court pressure and still found a way to score consistently.
“Wiggs is understanding the nuances of winning basketball and how to key in on the little things,” Curry said. “Consistent effort on defense, taking those one-on-one challenges, being aggressive on the offensive end, using his athletic ability to get to the rim if he needs to, confidence shooting the three. It's not like he's out there scoring 30 every night. It's the other things that help you win.”
Thanks to the bounce that excited basketball scouts during his prep days, Wiggins’s knack for offensive rebounding was crucial against Dallas’s small front line. Of course, his athleticism was on full display when he threw down a poster on Doncic, who admitted that he wished he “had those bunnies.”
Doncic averaged 32 points, 9.2 rebounds and six assists in the West finals, but he left the series saying that he “played terrible” in Game 5 and that he was “still learning a lot” against the more talented and cohesive Warriors. Wiggins’s 27 points and 11 rebounds in a Game 3 victory were pivotal, helping ensure that Golden State would make quick work of Dallas and enjoy six full days of rest before the Finals.
“I gave Andrew a big hug and told him how grateful I am for him,” Thompson said at the end of the West finals. “The job he did on Luka all series. Luka is one of the toughest guards in the NBA. I told him, ‘Wow, you make my job so much easier. I don't have to chase these guys around like I once did.’”
After years of getting labeled as a draft disappointment — not a full bust, but also not a franchise player — Wiggins is suddenly in position to become the first player from the 2014 lottery to win a ring. To do it, he will be asked to play major minutes against Boston’s Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown, the most talented wing duo that Golden State has seen in these playoffs.
“The playoffs are different than the regular season,” said Wiggins, whose fateful October decision has become ancient history. “It’s very detailed, the physicality. You’re able to get away with a little bit more stuff. I love it. [My teammates] are future Hall of Famers. They won on the biggest stage. They’re consistent with it. They know what it takes and how to do it. Being here, being around those guys, I have just learned a lot.” | 2022-05-30T14:26:59Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Andrew Wiggins is perfect fit in Warriors' cast of stars - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/05/30/andrew-wiggins-warriors-nba-finals/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/05/30/andrew-wiggins-warriors-nba-finals/ |
The hurricane’s remnants could become part of a system in the Gulf of Mexico late this week.
Satellite view of Hurricane Agatha Monday morning. (NOAA)
Packing winds of 110 mph, Agatha is set to slam into Mexico’s southern west coast as a dangerous Category 2 hurricane — the strongest the country has endured in the month of May.
The National Hurricane Center warns the storm will unleash “life-threatening” winds and an “extremely dangerous” ocean surge close to where it comes ashore Monday afternoon or evening.
Both along the coast and through the interior of southern Mexico, the storm poses a threat “of potentially life-threatening flash flooding and mudslides,” according to the center.
Assuming Agatha maintains its strength when it crosses the coastline, it will become just the third hurricane to strike Mexico from the eastern Pacific Ocean during May — and the most intense.
There are increasing chances that the storm’s remnants will enter the Gulf of Mexico later this week and become part of a new system that could bring some stormy weather to Florida by the weekend.
For now, a hurricane warning covers the zone from Salina Cruz to Lagunas de Chacahua in Mexico’s Oaxaca state, with tropical storm warnings to the north and south.
At 10 a.m. Central time Monday, the storm was centered about 50 miles southwest of Puerto Angel, Mexico, and was churning to the northeast at 8 mph. The storm will probably make landfall close to Puerto Angel or Mazunte, both small coastal towns.
The storm’s peak winds of 110 mph are forecast to hold steady until coming ashore before rapidly weakening over land. Its hurricane-force winds extend 15 miles from the center but tropical-storm-force winds extend up to 90 miles.
Strong winds and heavy rain had begun across southern Mexico Monday morning and the Hurricane Center writes they will intensify as the day wears on. It is forecasting the following effects from the hurricane:
“Life-threatening” hurricane-force winds near where the center crosses the coast in Oaxaca on Monday afternoon and evening.
“Extremely dangerous” coastal flooding from the ocean surge, or a storm-driven rise in water above normally dry land, near and to the east of where Agatha’s center makes landfall. “Near the coast, the surge will be accompanied by large and destructive waves,” the center writes.
The potential for “life-threatening flash flooding and mudslides” in the Mexican states of Oaxaca and Chiapas, with up to 15 to 20 inches of rain in the high terrain.
Agatha will most likely fall apart crossing the rugged terrain of southern Mexico, but its remnants are expected to enter the southern Gulf of Mexico in the Bay of Campeche by midweek.
The Hurricane Center writes they may get drawn into a “large and complex area of low pressure expected to develop across Central America, the Yucatán Peninsula, and the southwest Gulf of Mexico.” There’s a 40 percent chance the low pressure zone develops into a tropical depression or storm, the center says.
Some computer models show the low pressure zone bringing rain to Florida by late in the week or the weekend but it’s unclear if environmental conditions will support more than a weak storm. | 2022-05-30T15:20:08Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Hurricane Agatha to make landfall in Mexico Monday as Category 2 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2022/05/30/hurricane-agatha-mexico-landfall/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2022/05/30/hurricane-agatha-mexico-landfall/ |
Man in disguise attacks Mona Lisa with cream in apparent climate protest
A security guard cleans smeared cream from the glass protecting the Mona Lisa at the Louvre Museum, in Paris, on May 29, 2022. (AP)
A 36-year-old man disguised as an old lady in a wheelchairsmeared a cakelike substance on the Mona Lisa Sunday. He has been referred to a police psychiatric unit following the apparent climate-related incident at the Paris Louvre.
Videos circulated online of the man urging artists to “think of the earth” after attempting to break the protective glass around Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece, which remained unharmed.
The Paris prosecutor’s office said Monday that it was opening an investigation into damage of cultural artifacts after hospitalizing the young man, according to the Associated Press.
One clip showed security guards escorting the man out as he yelled in French, “Think of the Earth. There are people who are destroying the Earth. Think about it. Artists tell you: think of the Earth. That’s why I did this," according to the Associated Press.
Other clips showed staff cleaning off what appeared to be white cake or cream from the bulletproof protective glass around the 16th-century painting.
The Louvre did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Mona Lisa, housed in one of the world’s most storied museums, has been targeted before.
In 1911, the painting was stolen by a museum employee. In 1956, in two separate incidents, it was hit by acid and a rock, after which the painting was encased in glass to prevent further damage. Decades later, in 2009 a woman attacked it with a ceramic cup, the AP reported. | 2022-05-30T15:27:58Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Mona Lisa smeared with cream by disguised man - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/05/30/mona-lisa-smear/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/05/30/mona-lisa-smear/ |
(Chet Strange/Getty Images)
It seems more likely than ever that Donald Trump will run for president again in 2024, and if you want to know what his campaign will be about, look no further than his journey to Wyoming this past weekend to try to destroy Rep. Liz Cheney, one of the few Republicans in Congress who turned against him.
Trump’s political project can now be described in a single word: spite.
His personal animosities and resentments always played a key role in his political decisions, but what’s different today is how little anything else seems to animate him. It’s why he went to Wyoming to campaign for Harriet Hageman — and why Hageman herself was an afterthought. All that matters is that she’s primarying Cheney, whose criticism of Trump has been unrelenting.
I suppose you could argue there’s a rational strategy behind Trump’s actions: Like the mob boss he has so often resembled, he must make an example out of a disloyal underling, so nobody else gets any ideas. The trouble is that one candidate after another has endured Trump’s fury and won anyway. The far-right clowns he endorsed in governor’s races in Idaho and Nebraska both lost. In Georgia, he targeted the incumbent Republican governor and secretary of state because they declined to steal the 2020 election for him; both won their primaries easily.
That doesn’t mean any Republican could successfully challenge Trump for the 2024 presidential nomination; his grip on the party remains too strong. But what kind of case can a politician so consumed with spite make to the general electorate?
When we look back on the bizarre spectacle of the 2016 election, we sometimes forget that amidst all the vitriol, Trump had an argument that was compelling to many Americans embittered about what had happened to them and their communities. The story of the past few decades, Trump said, is that the game was rigged. Manufacturing declined, jobs went away, and now you struggle to make ends meet with little hope for the future.
There was a lot Trump left out of that story. He didn’t mention how much worse his own party made those same people’s lives by waging war on labor unions, keeping wages low, and hampering access to health care and good schools. The message also was wrapped up in xenophobia and misogyny. But at least part of Trump’s diagnosis — that both parties had failed to bring millions of Americans along through tough economic transitions — was basically true, and resonated powerfully.
And in true Trumpian style, he promised the people left behind that he would wipe their problems away and deliver them to a nirvana of wealth and spiritual triumph.
Four years later, the promise had worn thin. While the economy continued on the robust path it had set out on during the Obama years, Trump didn’t bring back all the manufacturing and coal jobs he had promised. The people who nodded their heads when he told them the deck was stacked against them were no better off than they had been before, even before Trump mishandled the coronavirus pandemic.
But there’s still power in one of the central rationales Trump offered to his supporters: There are people you hate — immigrants, racial minorities, uppity women, gays, liberals of all kinds — and I hate them, too. I will be your weapon against them. His core supporters still thrill to that message. Some will even stand in line to hear him rant and rave about how the 2020 election was stolen from him.
Others notice, though, that despite Trump’s four years in power, the United States is still full of immigrants and growing more diverse every day. Social change on issues of sexuality and child-rearing has not been reversed. And it turned out you can put an Internet troll in the White House to spend every day owning the libs, but it won’t turn your struggling town into a paradise.
Trump no longer has a story to tell about America that ends with a better future. That’s not to say it’s impossible he wins in 2024. As we’ve seen again and again, elections are often determined by unforeseeable circumstances; a well-timed recession or crisis can change everything.
If and when Trump runs again, his bid will have all the anger and hate of his past two campaigns, but none of the optimism he had in 2016. He has been distilled to his bitter, resentful core. The result could be a race even uglier than what he subjected us to before. | 2022-05-30T15:36:38Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Trump's war on Liz Cheney shows 2024 will be nothing but spite - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/05/30/trump-cheney-2024-strategy-spite/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/05/30/trump-cheney-2024-strategy-spite/ |
Deana Martorella stands before the Memorial Honor Wall in Charleroi, Pa., where her grandfather's name is engraved. She killed herself in 2016, joining him on the wall. (Martorella family)
When she was growing up, Memorial Day meant a trip to the Honor Wall in the center of Deana Martorella Orellana’s hometown, where the names of Charleroi, Pa., men who died in the world’s battlefields are etched in black granite.
Memorial Day is about these warriors, too.
This warrior killed himself on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. His suicide note is heartbreaking.
Suicide has been the main killer of U.S. personnel since the Sept. 11 attacks. More than 30,000 of them have died by their own hands since, during a period that saw about 7,000 service members die in combat or training exercises, according to a project from Brown University.
Suicide in the military community is at its highest rate since 1938, according to a Department of Defense report released last month.
Increasingly, those killed are women.
In 2020, they accounted for 7 percent of military suicides — up from 4 percent a decade earlier, according to Department of Defense numbers. About one in six servicemembers is female.
The reports break down the deaths by gender, age and branch, but they hardly address the dramatic increase among women.
Deana’s story was featured in 22 Too Many, a project honoring the estimated 22 military suicides that happen every day.
The Brandon Act is a quick way for military members to find the help they need
Last month, three sailors on the Naval carrier USS George Washington stationed in Norfolk killed themselves in less than a week. One of them was electrician Natasha Huffman.
The very nature of the war business does little to discourage this mental health calamity.
“Women who are in these male-dominated settings in the military are trained to be strong, to push through,” said Melissa Dichter, associate professor in the School of Social Work at Temple University who published a report this year about women’s suicide in the military.
So when women are in mental health crisis, especially PTSD, they go back to the building blocks of basic training, and how they talked themselves out of letting anyone believe they didn’t belong there. The answer to everything, they learned, was to work harder. So they pushed through.
When female veterans try to find support in the civilian world, their stories of war and bodies and bombs aren’t the stuff of bonding, Dichter found. Support groups, from official meetings at VA to the unofficial ones at the VFW, are testosterone fests.
Dichter analyzed more than a million anonymized calls to the Veteran Crisis Line for her report.
About 53 percent of the women who called the line were at risk of suicide, compared to 41 percent of men, her study found.
Many had stories of PTSD and combat trauma. But Dichter found one key difference: While men were more likely to be struggling with substance abuse and addiction, most women called about intimate partner or sexual violence.
That was what ultimately pushed Taniki Richard to try to kill herself: the trauma of combat and a sexual assault that she never reported.
“When I came back from Iraq, I started having nightmares of being raped, and then it being on the aircraft,” the Chesapeake, Va., retired Marine and mom said in a video on Yahoo.
“One day, it just became too much. I was under so much extreme stress and pain that I just wanted it to end,” she said, so she crashed a car into a light pole outside a Marine Corps Air Station in North Carolina, “attempting to end my life.”
Richard survived. And she went into counseling, understanding that her nightmares weren’t only about the night in Iraq when her helicopter was under fire. She realized that among her fellow warriors — the family that the military became for her — was her rapist. She now works with the Wounded Warrior Project and tells her story in speeches and podcasts to help other women who survived assault.
Women in the military are dealing with PTSD, isolation and an experience so common that it has its own military acronym — MST, Military Sexual Trauma.
It’s a uniquely sinister form of abuse. It’s not like an assault by a stranger or a wicked date. Fellow warriors are supposed to be the ones who have your back in battle. The unit is about supporting each other. Imagine the danger and insecurity any soldier would feel when they are attacked by their own comrades. It’s a common theme among the women calling for help.
“In intimate partner sexual violence women often feel stuck, it’s hard to find a way out, to see a way out,” said Dichter, whose research has included interviewing sexual assault survivors in the military who struggle with the duality of attackers being colleagues.
Her work is showing the military how far-reaching and scarring their epidemic of sexual assault really is.
And how important it is for women leaving the military to find support in the civilian world, whether it’s for MTA, PSTD or both.
That was the platform that Deshauna Barber stood on when she swapped her combat boots for stilettos and became Miss USA 2016.
“I want to make sure they have what they need when they return from deployment,” she said after her win. “I have lost a soldier to PTSD, to suicide, so I have been directly affected by it.”
After taking off the crown, Barber continued that work as CEO of the Service Women’s Action Network, a powerful group based in D.C. that lobbies on behalf of military women and connects them to support groups.
Deana’s family wants to keep telling her story, so women like their athletic, energetic, compassionate daughter know they are not alone.
They tell her story, say her name, they created a scholarship in her honor.
And this week, they’ll go to that black, granite wall in her Pennsylvania hometown. Deana’s grandfather’s name is there, she once stood in front of it, in her Marine dress uniform.
Now, hers is too. | 2022-05-30T16:46:19Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Suicide takes more military lives than combat does. Among women, that rate is doubling. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/05/30/military-suicide-women-sexual-assault-ptsd/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/05/30/military-suicide-women-sexual-assault-ptsd/ |
How to get West Virginia off coal
Coal cars wait to be loaded at a loading facility in Belle, W.Va., on April 2, 2020. (Michael S. Williamson/The Washington Post)
Regarding the May 22 news article “In W.Va., pivot to clean energy rests with Joe Manchin”:
It is not just parochial interests that drive West Virginia’s stubborn adherence to coal and opposition to green power sources. Anyone who has ever been to deep Appalachia knows that there is more than a grain of truth to the shibboleth that the only things there are coal and disability.
What is needed is a viable alternative to coal as the economic mainstay of the region — the only economic mainstay. The West Virginia legislature should have been working on this a decade ago, but, instead, it continues to fight the inevitable with its advocacy of “clean coal” and stubborn refusal to recognize the increasing obsolescence of fossil fuels. Sen. Joe Manchin III (D) should be working on it today.
It is not an easy problem. Because of its rugged terrain and remoteness from major markets and transportation corridors, the area is not conducive to manufacturing or other industries involving the movement of goods. Nor is it conducive to large-scale farming. White-collar industries, such as any form of information or data processing, require an educated workforce, generally lacking in the region.
Until a large-scale replacement industry takes root, the people of deep Appalachia will continue out of desperation to oppose anything that diminishes the coal industry and will express that sentiment at the ballot box. These people, most of whom have lived there for generations, are not going to just quietly disappear as the coal industry dries up. Transitioning them must be part of any solution.
Paul B. Weiss, Hedgesville, W.Va. | 2022-05-30T16:50:58Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | How to get West Virginia off coal - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/05/30/how-get-west-virginia-off-coal/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/05/30/how-get-west-virginia-off-coal/ |
Flowers lay on the sign for Robb Elementary School on May 25 in Uvalde, Tex. (Sergio Flores for The Washington Post)
The gun lobby is already going into overdrive with comments we have all heard ad nauseam after these frequent occurrences. These include the bromide that guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens make our country safer. With about 400 million guns owned by civilians in this country, the United States should be the safest place in the world if this reasoning were sound. It is not. We are not safe in schools, supermarkets, churches, synagogues, mosques, cars, out in the street or in our homes.
Another fallacy is that mental illness is responsible for the frequency of these massacres. Are we to believe that the United States has more psychopaths than anywhere else on the planet? The only thing that distinguishes the United States from civilized countries that are not facing an epidemic of mass shootings is easy access to guns. When will we say enough is enough?
R.E. Brevetti, Washington
How can the GOP hypocrites sleep at night? Some are demanding to stop all abortions with no exceptions on the grounds that there is a “life,” but they look the other way when shooters murder schoolchildren and grandparents doing their grocery shopping. The legislators’ actions make it clear that they care about “life” only before birth, not about helping poor families feed their children. It’s clear that their motivation is to punish women for having sex, consensual or not.
The Second Amendment states, “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” The right to keep and bear arms under that amendment is not total; it is tied to belonging to an official militia. For originalists, those arms were single-shot blunderbusses or rifles, not semiautomatic military weapons. Those should be the kind of weapons that can be kept and borne.
If the Supreme Court can overturn Roe v. Wade, it can overturn the badly thought-out decision that ignored the first phrase of the Second Amendment.
Even the hero of the originalists, Justice Antonin Scalia, said there could be some constitutionally permissible regulation of firearms. We need gun control legislation from Congress.
Jennifer Stern, Williamsburg
I am literally shaking as I write this because I have a 2-year-old grandson who attends preschool every day and could become a victim of yet another madman. The latest was an 18-year-old who first shot his grandmother and then senselessly and brutally murdered 19 elementary schoolchildren and two teachers in Uvalde, Tex. The indiscriminate killing of children is so heinous as to revolt even the sturdiest among us. This man was killed by Border Patrol officers, but that will be little solace to the parents of the dead kids.
The Republican cowards in the U.S. Senate who refuse to support any action to curb the sale of assault weapons and pass the bills the House passed last year, which would require universal background checks for anyone wanting to purchase a gun, must be held accountable. We can do this by ousting them when they are up for reelection, beginning this November.
Henry A. Lowenstein, Newport, R.I.
For those who think laws on gun purchases have little effect, information in the May 26 news article “Gunman had troubled home life and violently lashed out at peers, friends say” suggested that Texas gun laws accomplished exactly as much as they attempted to. The Uvalde shooter was said to have posted his “wish list” of semiautomatic rifles online about a year ago at age 17 and waited until his 18th birthday to legally buy them. Texas law may have given 19 children and two teachers one more year of coming home to their families.
Imagine if Texas law required that one wait until turning 21. Maybe those adults and young children would have had three more years of life. Or imagine if the laws made every would-be gun purchaser prove they are a responsible adult, not a disturbed, violent person. Then 21 people might have enjoyed the rest of their natural lives without this tragedy. Why don’t gun laws even attempt to accomplish that? Every responsible adult should want them to.
Larry Shea, Leesburg
The unimaginable horror, seared into our senses, of the murder in Texas of 19 schoolchildren and two adults must awaken us to the shared responsibility of implementing gun control in the United States. This horror was predictable and preventable. The time is now for all Republicans and Democrats to come together on legislation to stop the lethal attacks on our children. Members of Congress and state legislatures must decide whether they can live with themselves if they decide it is more important to avoid being primaried by gun absolutists than to protect children.
Ellen Hayes, Fairfax
Republicans campaign on and enact legislation to “protect” schoolchildren from critical race theory, classroom conversations touching on gay or transgender communities, and psychological distress caused by mask-wearing during a public health epidemic. But they continue to be unwilling to enact legislation to reduce the wanton slaughter of our schoolchildren by weapons of war that can be easily procured by most anyone, as once again was the case in Uvalde, Tex.
How many children have died from critical race theory or mask-wearing? Can we just admit that Republican rhetoric and policies are about their own reelections and not about protecting our children?
Christopher Blood, Vancouver, Wash. | 2022-05-30T16:51:04Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | What separates the United States? More guns. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/05/30/what-separates-united-states-more-guns/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/05/30/what-separates-united-states-more-guns/ |
“Broken Doors” is a new investigative podcast series hosted by Jenn Abelson and Nicole Dungca about how no-knock warrants are deployed in the U.S. justice system — and the consequences for communities when accountability is flawed at every level.
In the fourth episode of this series, we head to Port Allen, La.
On July 25, 2019, a Black man was killed during a no-knock raid on a motel room in Louisiana. His fiancee was also inside. An investigation into what led up to the fatal shooting reveals the speed with which it happened — and raises questions about electronic warrants, a relatively new technology being adopted by law enforcement agencies across the country.
The full series is out now wherever you get your podcasts. You can email the “Broken Doors” team with any tips or feedback at BrokenDoors@washpost.com. | 2022-05-30T16:51:10Z | www.washingtonpost.com | "Broken Doors," Episode 4 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/podcasts/post-reports/broken-doors-episode-4/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/podcasts/post-reports/broken-doors-episode-4/ |
Severe storm outbreak, tornadoes forecast for north-central U.S.
The National Weather Service has a declared a Level 4 out of 5 risk for dangerous storms Monday, with ‘strong’ tornadoes possible
The Storm Prediction Center's outlook for Thursday. (College of DuPage)
Sunday featured six-inch hailstones bombarding central Nebraska, but violent storms on Memorial Day may be far more widespread in the Plains and Upper Midwest.
The National Weather Service’s Storm Prediction Center has declared up to a Level 4 out of 5 risk for dangerous storms between northeastern Kansas and Minnesota on Monday.
“Large to giant hail, 60-80 mph gusts, and tornadoes are probable, including the possibility for a couple strong/long-tracked tornadoes,” the center wrote.
Monday’s severe weather setup is a “rare” one, according to the National Weather Service office serving the area around Minneapolis. “We ask that people pay extra attention to the forecast, and make sure they can seek shelter if warnings are issued,” it said.
While violent storms are anticipated in some areas, there are some off-ramps that could mean others are spared.
Areas at risk
The Level 4 risk of severe weather encompasses much of western Minnesota and eastern parts of the Dakotas east of the James River Valley and along Interstate 29. Nearly 700,000 people reside within that risk area, including residents of Watertown and Brookings, S.D., and Willmar and Fergus Falls, Minn.
A Level 3 risk stretches from northern Minnesota along the Canadian border all the way south into northeastern Kansas.
Minneapolis and Sioux Falls, S.D., are all included in the Level 3 category, as are areas just west of the Kansas City area. A Level 2 risk reaches toward Wichita.
An intensifying surface low-pressure zone from western Minnesota to northeastern Kansas will shift north and east with time, swirling thunderstorms north and east into the Upper Midwest.
A cold front and dry line — or the boundary between warm, humid Gulf of Mexico air to the east and cooler, drier air to the west — will trail south of the low. They will be the impetus, or triggering mechanism, for severe thunderstorms.
Simultaneously, the jet stream will be racing overhead, with the resulting change in wind speed and/or direction with altitude set to foster rotation within storms.
Threats and uncertainty
The combination of ingredients in place is favorable for rotating thunderstorms, or supercells, with tornadoes. However, that’s predicated on discrete supercells forming and remaining isolated from neighbors.
While available instability and spin could support long-lived, significant tornadoes, it is uncertain whether they’ll materialize. If thunderstorms develop too quickly or become too widespread, they’ll interfere and reduce each other’s severity.
Still, large hail, destructive straight-line winds and tornadoes are all possible in storms that form. They’ll race off to the north-northeast at highway speeds, offering little time to seek shelter as they approach.
WHAT, WHERE, & WHEN: Not much has changed and the forecast remains on track. Severe storms likely this afternoon through evening.
Uncertainty remains regarding the storm mode (supercells vs. line of storms), which will affect the type and severity of threat.#MNwx #WIwx pic.twitter.com/QdFCaZO5gS
Some models show the potential for a few supercells as far south as the Kansas City area, which could bring a localized tornado threat.
There is also the chance that warm air doesn’t make it as far north into Minnesota as some models suggest, which would somewhat mitigate the tornado threat.
It’s crucial for people in the risk area to stay abreast of changing weather. They should have a way to be notified of watches and especially warnings, and make sure to never be more than a stone’s throw from a storm shelter as Memorial Day is observed. | 2022-05-30T16:51:53Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Severe weather outbreak with possible tornadoes over north-central U.S. on Monday - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2022/05/30/tornadoes-thunderstorms-minnesota-dakotas/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2022/05/30/tornadoes-thunderstorms-minnesota-dakotas/ |
India’s sex workers win new rights, but still fear police violence
Members of a women's rights organization celebrate in Kolkata, India, on May 27 to praise the Supreme Court's direction to treat sex workers with dignity and respect. (Dibyangshu Sarkar/AFP/Getty Images)
A long-awaited ruling by India’s Supreme Court has expanded the rights of sex workers by defining prostitution as a profession, ordering an end to police violence and affirming health and labor protections introduced during covid-19 lockdowns.
Sex workers, long marginalized in India, hailed the court’s landmark decision on May 19, but they say guaranteeing their hard-won rights will be an ongoing battle.
“The backlash is already beginning,” Meena Saraswathi Seshu, the general secretary of SANGRAM, a collective advocating for sex workers based in Sangli, in Maharashtra state. “The police are going to start looking for any kinds of arguments not to follow the Supreme Court.”
The difference now, she said, is that “when the police do not follow the [Supreme Court] order we have language and space that we did not have before. That’s our biggest weapon to fight against police violence.”
Sex workers are falling through the cracks in coronavirus assistance programs around the world
In recent years, more countries have moved toward regulating sex work. But despite pockets of progress, the pandemic was a particularly punishing time for prostitutes, who were suddenly without work and excluded from most social services and relief programs.
Unlike most places in the world, sex work in India has been legal for over three decades. Related activities, such as soliciting, running brothels and pimping, remain banned.
The exact rights of workers, however, have always been legally “ambiguous,” leaving them vulnerable to violence, exploitation, and run-ins with the police, said Tripti Tandon, a New Delhi-based lawyer involved with the latest case and the advocacy collective, All India Network of Sex Workers.
Most prostitutes do not have identification cards, and therefore cannot vote, open bank accounts, or receive aid and social services available to other trades recognized as part of India’s massive informal labor market.
About a decade ago, India’s highest court heard the appeal of a man found guilty of killing a sex worker. The judges upheld the verdict and launched an appeal of their own: they tasked a team with investigating how to improve conditions for prostitutes while also preventing human trafficking and providing ways out of the trade for those who want to leave, said Tandon.
The consultations lasted years, as a panel drew up a list of recommended reforms with input from sex workers. Pushback came from some arms of the government, as well as from anti-human trafficking groups.
The pandemic, despite its many challenges, accelerated the process.
The pandemic caused a global surge in domestic violence. For victims with few options, abuse has become the new normal.
In September of 2020, the court ordered state and local governments to provide sex workers with ration cards even if they lacked formal identification.
By then, collectives such as the National Network for Sex Workers had been hearing reports of desperate, even starving members, said Ayesha Rai, 31, a sex worker in Miraj, in Maharashtra state, and a coordinator with NNSW. Still, many local governments did not follow through.
In December of 2021, the judges went further and ordered state and local governments to register sex workers in India’s biometric ID system, known as Aadhaar, as well as issuing them ration and voter cards.
India’s abrupt lockdown forced millions to walk, bike and hitchhike home. Many lives will never be the same.
There are at least 1 million sex workers in India — many millions, by some accounts — but there are no exact figures because of the long-standing stigmas and lack of formal recognition, said Rai.
“We are part of the sexual labor community,” she said. “We are people who provide sexual services. We are part of the service industry. We must collectivize and work for our rights.”
Critics oppose the legal recognition of prostitution on moral and religious grounds, and they cite high rates of women being trafficked and sexually exploited.
The May 19 ruling sought to clarify the legal distinction between adults such as Rai, who consensually choose to engage in sex work, and minors and trafficked people, who cannot legally consent and be part of the trade.
The judges ordered local and state governments to hold workshops to educate sex workers about their rights, conduct surveys about members, and include them in the drafting of any related reforms. As a profession deserving equal rights, the court said, authorities cannot separate a child from its mother based solely on the woman being a prostitute. The state is also barred from arresting and forcing sex workers to stay in so-called rehabilitation homes against their will.
The court had harsh words for the media practice of revealing the identities of sex workers during arrests and raids. But it reserved its most stinging criticism for India’s police.
“It has been noticed that the attitude of the police to sex workers is often brutal and violent,” the court wrote. “It as if they are class whose rights are not recognized.” Police and other law enforcement must respect “the rights of sex workers who also enjoy basic human rights and other rights guaranteed in the constitution to all citizens.”
Seeking condoms or help after a sexual assault, it added, cannot be grounds for arrest.
The Supreme Court is set to meet again in July to hear a response from the Indian government.
“The state governments will have to take very strict action against the police,” said Seshu, from the sex workers collective in Maharashtra. “And I think when they don’t, we will have to go back to the Supreme Court.” | 2022-05-30T17:21:08Z | www.washingtonpost.com | India’s sex workers win new rights, but still fear police violence - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/05/30/indias-sex-workers-win-new-rights-still-fear-police-violence/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/05/30/indias-sex-workers-win-new-rights-still-fear-police-violence/ |
Baby caught from window of burning apartment in D.C., one of several rescues
Firefighters made several rescues in the District over the weekend — including one who caught an infant dropped from a second-story window.
The rescue happened Sunday night when firefighters responded to an apartment fire in the 700 block of Alabama Avenue SE. The fire appears to have started in a first-floor hallway, trapping residents on the second floor. Two adults and a child were rescued by ladder after a firefighter caught the infant.
Seven people were evaluated by emergency responders but did not need to be hospitalized, DC Fire and EMS said.
Earlier Sunday, a rookie firefighter rescued a woman from a separate apartment fire in the 2100 block of I Street NE in Trinidad. The woman was transferred to a trauma center; her current condition is unclear.
In a video posted to DC Fire and EMS’s Twitter account, an unknown person asked probationary firefighter Kojo Saunders, who has been on the job for only six months, “How does it feel to make a rescue as a probationary firefighter?”
“It feels nice to be able to do my job,” he responded.
Three people were displaced Saturday after a fire in the 4000 block of 8th Street SE, and one person was displaced Monday in a high-rise apartment fire in the 1200 block of M Street NW. No injuries were reported in these fires. | 2022-05-30T17:25:29Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Baby caught from window of burning apartment in busy days for DC Fire - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/05/30/firefighters-catch-baby/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/05/30/firefighters-catch-baby/ |
Commanders senior pro scout Don Warren, center, stands with former coach Norv Turner, left, and former head athletic trainer Ryan Vermillion during a rookie training camp practice in 2021. (John McDonnell/The Washington Post)
Don Warren, the Commanders’ legendary former tight end and current senior pro scout, is set to retire this week, according to a person with knowledge of the situation. The move has been expected internally — Warren informed Coach Ron Rivera of his decision months ago — but it remains unclear how the team plans to fill his role within the personnel department.
Warren’s retirement, which was first reported by Neil Stratton of InsidetheLeague.com, caps his tenure with the franchise at 21 seasons, including his entire 14-year playing career from 1979 to1992.
Drafted in the fourth round (103rd overall) out of San Diego State, Warren was an original member of Washington’s famed “Hogs” offensive line and a starter in four Super Bowls (XVII, XVIII, XXII, XXVI), helping the franchise win three of them. In 2002, he was named as one of Washington’s 70 greatest players.
“He was our prototype player as far as work habits, work ethic, attitude and play time,” then-general manager Charley Casserly said in 1993. “He didn’t come to us with all-pro talent. He came with an all-pro attitude … For 14 seasons, he was the best blocking tight end in the NFL. Players such as Lawrence Taylor and Carl Banks knew the toughest afternoon they’d face would be against the Washington Redskins because of Donnie Warren.”
Warren became a baseball and football coach at Centreville (Va.) High School following his retirement as a player, but rejoined the Washington franchise as a scout in 2005, spending five years in the front office before joining the Panthers’ scouting department. For the entirety Rivera’s tenure as head coach in Carolina (2011-19), Warren was a staple in the personnel department, so it was perhaps of little surprise that he rejoined him in Washington in 2020 as the team’s senior pro scout.
At 6-foot-4, Warren was stood out along the sidelines of Commanders practices. Though he was primarily a blocking tight end in an era when the position was generally thought of as an extension of the offensive line, Warren has been cited by Rivera as the model for many of his roster moves. Warren was notorious for creating problems for defenses.
“You guys see Donnie Warren walking around,” Rivera said last summer. “Donnie was in better shape back then, but he was a blocking tight end, and if teams didn’t adjust when they brought him in, they ran the ball down your throat. That really spoke to matchups and the advantage you can create.”
Rivera kept his coaching staff intact this offseason, save for the hire of tight ends coach Juan Castillo following Pete Hoener’s retirement. Washington’s personnel department, however, now has two vacancies. In addition to Warren’s impending exit, the team lost college scout Sheldon White last week to the Pittsburgh Steelers, who named him their director of pro scouting. | 2022-05-30T17:29:50Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Don Warren to retire as Commanders pro scout - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/05/30/don-warren-retire-commanders/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/05/30/don-warren-retire-commanders/ |
Stefanos Tsitsipas falls, Jessica Pegula advances in French Open
Holger Rune advanced to the French Open quarterfinals with an upset of Stefanos Tsitsipas. (Yves Herman/Reuters)
Holger Rune, an unseeded 19-year-old from Denmark, stunned Stefanos Tsitsipas, advancing to the French Open quarterfinals in his Roland Garros debut, and Jessica Pegula became the third American woman to reach the quarterfinals Monday.
The 7-5, 3-6, 6-3, 6-4 victory by Rune, ranked 40th in the world, placed him in a quarterfinal against eighth-seeded Casper Ruud, the first man from Norway to advance to the round of eight in Paris.
The first player in the men’s top eight to lose, Tsitsipas never found a rhythm in the match. “I was very nervous on the court, being frustrated a lot,” he said, “and I knew I was this way, but I couldn’t stop being like this.”
Rune was 0-2 in Grand Slam events until last wee. and his quarterfinal presence marks a generational change. With Rune and sixth-seeded Carlos Alcaraz, this will be the first Grand Slam with two teenagers in the men’s quarterfinals since Hendrik Dreekmann and Andrei Medvedev at the 1994 French Open.
Rafael Nadal wins a French Open thriller. Up next: Novak Djokovic.
“These kids are going to want to beat me badly because obviously they are chasing,” Tsitsipas said. “I’m chasing, too, but I’m at a different kind of position than they are. I’m hungry to beat them, too. Now that they have beat me, I want pay back.”
Pegula, the 28-year-old daughter of the owners of the Buffalo Bills and Sabres, advanced to a Grand Slam quarterfinal for the second straight time with a 4-6, 6-2, 6-3 win over Romanian qualifier Irina-Camelia Begu. Ranked 29th in the world, Pegula could vault to the No. 2 spot if she wins the tournament and next will play the winner of the match between world No. 1 Iga Swiatek and Chinese teenager Zheng Qinwen.
Pegula, seeded 11th in the tournament, joins Americans Coco Gauff and Sloane Stephens in the quarters. Gauff and Stephens play each other Tuesday.
American Madison Keys, a Roland Garros semifinalist in 2018 and a quarterfinalist in 2019, was less fortunate Monday, losing 1-6, 6-3, 6-1 to Russia’s Veronika Kudermetova, who advanced to the quarterfinals of a Grand Slam tournament for the first time. | 2022-05-30T18:00:18Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Stefanos Tsitsipas falls to Holger Rune, Jessica Pegula advances in French Open - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/05/30/stefanos-tsitsipas-upset-french-open/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/05/30/stefanos-tsitsipas-upset-french-open/ |
Police identify man fatally shot in Prince George’s County
Police have identified a man who was fatally wounded in a shooting Saturday morning in the Temple Hills area of Prince George’s County.
Around 12 a.m., police said, officers responded to gunfire in the 3200 block of Naylor Road, near Suitland Parkway.
One man, identified as Dexter Anderson Jr., a 28-year-old from D.C., was found on a sidewalk suffering from gunshot wounds. He was pronounced dead at the scene.
Police said no arrests have been made and they are working to determine a motive. Police asked anyone with information to call Crime Solvers at 1-866-411-TIPS (8477), or go online at www.pgcrimesolvers.com. | 2022-05-30T18:17:42Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Police identify man fatally shot in Prince George’s - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/05/30/prince-george-homicide-victim-identified/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/05/30/prince-george-homicide-victim-identified/ |
A D.C. resident holds a home medical test kit for the coronavirus. (Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post)
At-home tests for detecting the coronavirus have been in the news for the past year. But these are only one of the many types of home medical tests, for which users collect a “sample” — typically blood, urine, saliva or mucus — and get immediate results or send it to a lab the test manufacturer designates.
These over-the-counter products have been used to diagnose an illness or keep an eye on issues such as high blood glucose. In recent years, however, thousands of new tests of all types have begun showing up on store shelves and on the Internet — many from companies such as Everlywell, LetsGetChecked and myLab Box. Some are straightforward, such as those for the coronavirus, but others have squishier metrics such as “cell aging.”
No matter their goal, most of these products aren’t covered by insurance and the cost can range from less than $10 for strips to check urine for bacteria to $1,000-plus for certain genetic tests.
Some experts say the tests are convenient and their costs transparent. “In some ways this trend is positive because it can give patients more options on when and how to get care,” says Jeffrey Kullgren, an associate professor in the department of internal medicine at the University of Michigan Medical School in Ann Arbor.
But the quality of these home tests can vary dramatically, and some may have confusing results, lead to unnecessary follow-up testing and treatments, and delay needed care, he adds.
Tests to try
The Food and Drug Administration has authorized the marketing of 100 or so categories of home medical tests. Some have been reviewed by the FDA to make sure, for instance, that they can accurately and reliably measure what the manufacturer claims the test measures. Others may be exempt from review, in some cases because the agency considers them low-risk. (To find the list of authorized tests, go to FDA.gov, search for “in vitro diagnostics,” then click on Home Use Tests at left.) Some companies tout their products as “FDA registered,” but that doesn’t mean the FDA has reviewed them.
‘I’ve gained my life back’: New tests may help those with persistent urinary tract infections
The most useful home medical tests may be those that help people with chronic conditions such as diabetes, congestive heart failure and high blood pressure monitor their health, says Sterling Ransone, president of the American Academy of Family Physicians. Home checks of measures such as blood pressure can help people manage some conditions at home, saving them a trip to the doctor.
The FDA has also greenlighted a handful of products for diagnosing issues such as urinary tract infections and vaginal yeast infections. And the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that people consider using a rapid self-test for the coronavirus before joining gatherings with people outside their household.
If you have mild, straightforward symptoms, your doctor may be able to use home test results to treat you via phone or computer. “The combination of home testing and telemedicine has given us another way to take care of our patients,” Ransone says. “I call it the house call of the 21st century.”
Also useful is an FDA-approved home test for HIV, key for people without access to a health-care provider or who are concerned about privacy. And with your doctor’s approval, you can use a home fecal test to screen for colon cancer or a small blood sample to screen for hepatitis C.
A 15-minute HIV and syphilis test — from your iPhone
Be aware of these drawbacks
Tests that the FDA hasn’t okayed can have several drawbacks, our experts say.
Lax regulation: The FDA generally doesn’t review what it considers “wellness” tests. These are used to measure criteria such as hormone levels, food sensitivities, general heart health, blood levels of vitamins, stress and cell aging; they tend not to diagnose specific conditions.
In addition, the agency typically does not check “laboratory developed tests” (LDTs), which are developed and used by a single lab. But the FDA has been paying attention to LDTs and in a 2018 statement identified potential problems such as claims not supported by evidence, erroneous results and faked data.
Some home testing companies such as Everlywell say on their website that their tests are LDTs. Unsure? If the FDA has reviewed a test, that fact will probably be included in the company’s marketing materials, says Kathy Talkington, director of health programs for the Pew Charitable Trusts, a nonprofit group.
Got bloating or hives? Don’t diagnose your own food allergy or sensitivity. Do this instead.
Shaky evidence: Certain top-selling tests are purported to identify food sensitivities by checking a user’s blood sample for IgG, an immune system antibody. But the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma, & Immunology advises against this because evidence linking IgG levels to food sensitivities and allergies is lacking. The FDA has also warned about home genetic tests that manufacturers claim will predict how your body would respond to antidepressants, heart drugs and other medications.
Results with little use: Home tests for male, female and thyroid hormones are popular. But knowing your hormone levels doesn’t necessarily pinpoint why you feel, say, unusually tired. Numerous health issues, including anemia, depression, infections and sleep apnea, can all cause fatigue, Kullgren says.
OTC genetic tests that screen for risk of Alzheimer’s disease, cancer and other serious conditions are particularly concerning, says George Abraham, president of the American College of Physicians. They can’t tell you whether you will develop a disease or give advice other than to follow existing health guidelines. “It just leads to unnecessary worry and anxiety,” he says.
Keep your doctor in the loop
In general, our experts recommend consulting your doctor before using a home medical test. Some manufacturers make health-care professionals available to recommend tests, counsel users and even prescribe medications. But they can have a vested interest in the testing company they work for, Kullgren says. They also lack the full scope of information about you and your medical history. And factors such as your age and the medications you take can affect a home test’s results.
A doctor who is familiar with you will probably have a fuller understanding of how to identify what’s amiss than a single home medical test can: “It’s like looking at a photograph,” Ransone says. “If you are just looking at one pixel, it’s hard to understand the whole picture.”
Determine whether the test is authorized to be marketed by the FDA. For tests you send out, check the label or description to make sure the lab is “CAP accredited” or “CLIA certified.” This means that the test meets quality standards and that the lab undergoes regular inspections.
Ask your doctor if home testing is the best way to get the information you want. “There might be an alternative approach that could help you more effectively and quickly get to the bottom of what you are experiencing,” Kullgren says. Plus, tests your doctor orders are typically covered by insurance; most of those you can buy yourself are not.
Check storage directions and the expiration date. Some tests are sensitive to temperature and humidity.
Follow instructions. Factors such as time of day, food and drink consumed, and supplements you take can affect results. Many test providers have tutorials or trained personnel to guide you.
Know that no test is perfect. Coronavirus tests that provide immediate results are generally less sensitive than those you send to a lab, and home tests for a urinary tract infection can’t detect less common types of bacteria.
And remember to talk with your health-care provider about results and next steps. | 2022-05-30T18:22:10Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The good and bad about home medical tests - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/05/30/home-tests-coronavirus-safety/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/05/30/home-tests-coronavirus-safety/ |
She posts to the site constantly, often writing several short dispatches a day. They’re written in a deadpan, straightforward style, with a few snarky flourishes: hashtags that categorize each post include “#badidea,” “#hmm” and “#yikes.” The site’s header features an image of the Earth erupting in flames with a crying “Bored Ape” — a hugely popular cartoon avatar for crypto fans — looking on. The bottom-right corner adds up the money lost in the scams and hacks she’s documented. By mid-May, it was nearing $10 billion.
He has known White since she was a teenage Wikipedia contributor. “That’s what’s so great about her. She is like, ‘I’m not going to club you over the head with it. Just you read this conveyor belt of ridiculousness and draw your own conclusions.’ And I think that’s been the strength of her blog,” Lih said.
White takes it all in stride. “No one likes to read bad things about themselves, but I think I’ve also been around on the Internet long enough to see that that’s just what people do. People are nasty online,” she said. | 2022-05-30T18:43:51Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Molly White is becoming the crypto world's biggest critic - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/05/29/molly-white-crypto/?pwapi_token=eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJzdWJpZCI6IjM1MTIwNzEiLCJyZWFzb24iOiJnaWZ0IiwibmJmIjoxNjUzOTM0ODczLCJpc3MiOiJzdWJzY3JpcHRpb25zIiwiZXhwIjoxNjU1MTQ0NDczLCJpYXQiOjE2NTM5MzQ4NzMsImp0aSI6ImVjNjlhMjAwLWIwNzItNDk4OS1hYWRhLTJlYmQ3Mzc1ZmE3YiIsInVybCI6Imh0dHBzOi8vd3d3Lndhc2hpbmd0b25wb3N0LmNvbS90ZWNobm9sb2d5LzIwMjIvMDUvMjkvbW9sbHktd2hpdGUtY3J5cHRvLyJ9.wRXx2nPhbTaYXesHpLAaU5tvlH0Rd0FoQJ1hTAoq1Ro&itid=gfta | https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/05/29/molly-white-crypto/?pwapi_token=eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJzdWJpZCI6IjM1MTIwNzEiLCJyZWFzb24iOiJnaWZ0IiwibmJmIjoxNjUzOTM0ODczLCJpc3MiOiJzdWJzY3JpcHRpb25zIiwiZXhwIjoxNjU1MTQ0NDczLCJpYXQiOjE2NTM5MzQ4NzMsImp0aSI6ImVjNjlhMjAwLWIwNzItNDk4OS1hYWRhLTJlYmQ3Mzc1ZmE3YiIsInVybCI6Imh0dHBzOi8vd3d3Lndhc2hpbmd0b25wb3N0LmNvbS90ZWNobm9sb2d5LzIwMjIvMDUvMjkvbW9sbHktd2hpdGUtY3J5cHRvLyJ9.wRXx2nPhbTaYXesHpLAaU5tvlH0Rd0FoQJ1hTAoq1Ro&itid=gfta |
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