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Megan Khang plays for her parents and their sacrifice at the U.S. Women’s Open
American Megan Khang is five shots off the lead at the U.S. Women's Open. (Kevin C. Cox/Getty Images)
SOUTHERN PINES, N.C. — When she was barely out of toddlerhood, Megan Khang would hit golf balls from her parents’ garage in Massachusetts, where her father, then a mechanic, fixed cars. Occasionally the dimpled orbs — her favorite was emblazoned with a Pokémon logo — sailed through the practice netting and into his office.
Lee Khang never minded the distraction because he was fully invested in his daughter’s budding skills, eventually retiring from his full-time trade and parting ways with a garage he managed in Rhode Island to support Megan’s dream of playing professionally.
That sacrifice was among many Megan’s family made for their daughter, who climbed the leader board Friday at the U.S. Women’s Open with a 4-under 67 in the second round, leaving her five shots off Mina Harigae’s 36-hole lead at Pine Needles golf club.
South Korea’s Choi Hye-jin’s 7-under 64, equaling the low round of the tournament so far, vaulted her into second place, two shots off the pace.
Her parents were children themselves when they fled Laos with their families following the Vietnam War. They don’t remember a great deal from that time, Megan indicated, with spotty recollections of having to wait in Thailand before being granted asylum in the United States.
When Lee Khang was 7, his older brothers arranged to have a boat meant for six passengers carry a dozen or so family members across the Mekong River into Thailand. They went through checkpoints bribing guards to allow passage and eventually settled in Brookline, Mass., thanks to American sponsorship.
“That’s a scary thing to do at any age, let alone a child’s age,” Khang said of her family’s harrowing journey. “My parents and my grandparents were very brave in that sense, and so I’m just trying to make all of them proud and myself proud as well.”
Megan’s dad learned about golf reading books detailing the sport and taught himself to play when he was in his 20s. Her mother, Nou, began working at 16, attended college and became a teacher.
After Lee quit the mechanic business, the Khangs made ends meet solely on Nou’s teaching income, hardly enough to allow for membership, for instance, at The Country Club in Brookline, site of the men’s U.S. Open later this month.
Khang said she was one of perhaps three Asian students at her high school, but her parents made certain to keep her embedded in the Hmong culture by attending events such as Hmong New Year’s parties, often with other relatives. They did not, however, teach her to speak Hmong, concerned it would interfere with her command of English.
Khang’s parents have not been back to Laos since arriving in America in the mid-1970s, but the entire family is keeping open the possibility of a return visit so Megan can become better acquainted with her roots. She is the only player on the LPGA Tour of Hmong and Laotian descent.
Super proud to share my family’s story. They sacrificed everything to give me the life I’m living now. Family Forever ♥️ #AAPIHeritageMonth #DriveOn pic.twitter.com/dneUQwXmhy
— Megan Khang (@megan_khang1023) May 20, 2022
Her family’s background also expanded Khang’s perspective about the world. Among her pursuits off the golf course is raising awareness of the need for potable water in Africa through her work with Golf Fore Africa.
The charity, founded in 2007 by Betsy King after the Hall of Fame golfer traveled to Rwanda, Kenya, Tanzania and Zambia the previous year, funds wells in rural communities in the continent that otherwise would have limited access to clean drinking water.
The foundation’s headquarters are in Scottsdale, Ariz., where Khang took part in a pro-am years ago and first learned of Golf Fore Africa’s mission through her playing partners.
“A couple women I played with were like, ‘Do you want to start your own well?’ ” Khang said. “I was like, ‘Yeah, I’d love to.’ I mean I can’t really see a reason why I wouldn’t I want to start one and grow it.”
Khang’s parents, meantime, have been following their daughter all this week, attending their first major championship since the start of the coronavirus pandemic.
It was during the initial throes of the pandemic in 2020 that Khang collected her fist top five at a major championship, coming in fifth at the U.S. Women’s Open at Champions Golf Club in Houston. She backed that up with a fourth-place showing at last year’s U.S. Women’s Open at the Olympic Club in San Francisco.
Khang has six career top 10s at major championships but is coming off a missed cut at this year’s first major, the Chevron Championship, formerly known as the ANA Inspiration, held annually at Mission Hills Country Club in Rancho Mirage, Calif.
“It’s definitely still a work in progress,” Khang said of her near-misses at majors. “Leader boards are out there everywhere, and at the end of the day I know that if I do my job out there and put in my best effort, scores will come, birdies will come, and results will come at the end of that.” | 2022-06-03T21:27:13Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Megan Khang plays for more than herself at U.S. Women's Open - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/06/03/megan-khang-us-women-open/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/06/03/megan-khang-us-women-open/ |
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman takes part in an Arab Summit in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, in 2019. (Hamad I Mohammed/Reuters)
BEIRUT — Saudi dissidents expressed anger Friday at reports that President Biden was planning his first presidential visit to Saudi Arabia — without any sign that the United States had demanded improvements in human rights in the kingdom, or accountability for the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, in return for the visit.
Most galling, they said, was the notion that Biden — who vowed to make Saudi Arabia a “pariah” state during his campaign and has touted his presidency’s focus on human rights — would probably meet with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the architect of Saudi Arabia’s crackdown on dissidents and the man the CIA said was likely to have ordered the killing of Khashoggi, in the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul nearly four years ago.
“We as Saudi activists harmed by MBS feel betrayed by Biden,” Abdullah Alaoudh, a U.S.-based researcher whose father has been imprisoned since 2017, wrote on Twitter. “Shaking hands with the same person who killed our friend #khashoggi, arrested our loved ones and tortured them, banned many of our family members from travel in order to blackmail us, and harass us here in the US?!”
The crown prince is often referred to by the initials MBS.
Turkey concludes Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi killed by ‘murder’ team, sources say
Three administration officials told The Washington Post that Biden is planning to visit Saudi Arabia this month. Biden, speaking to reporters Friday, said he had no “direct plans at the moment” to visit the kingdom but said there was a “possibility.”
When asked if he still views Saudi Arabia as a pariah state, Biden said, “Look, I’m not gonna change my view on human rights, but as president of the United States, my job is to bring peace if I can.” In answer to a question about whether he would meet with Mohammed, he said, “We’re getting way ahead of ourselves.”
Many Saudi pro-democracy activists, including those exiled from their homeland, had invested considerable hope in Biden, whose sharp words about the kingdom appeared to signal a dramatic shift from President Donald Trump, who rarely, if ever, criticized Saudi Arabia, even after the killing of Khashoggi, a contributing columnist at The Post.
But Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the conflict’s effect on oil and gas prices, appeared to radically change Biden’s calculus, hastening U.S. outreach to Saudi Arabia after the oil-rich nation repeatedly rebuffed U.S. requests to increase oil production.
Oil prices are just one of several issues on which the White House is seeking Saudi cooperation. The United States is also seeking Saudi help in ending the war in Yemen, and in easing tensions with Iran amid stalled negotiations to restore the multilateral nuclear deal abandoned by Trump.
From the Biden administration’s perspective, the outreach to the kingdom was bearing fruit. On Thursday, Saudi Arabia took steps to increase oil production. Also on Thursday, the United Nations said the warring parties in Yemen had agreed to renew a nationwide truce for another two months — one that has largely held so far, raising cautious hope for progress to end the bloody civil war and one of the world’s most severe humanitarian crises.
Saudi officials have denied that Mohammed ordered the killing of Khashoggi, or that the kingdom carries out serious human rights abuses, including torturing prisoners.
While prioritizing oil production was understandable, as Biden focused on U.S. interests, “we don’t understand this kind of dealing, or compromises, on American values, on human rights values,” said Saudi writer and activist Hala al-Dosari.
At the very least, the administration could demand a “goodwill gesture” that would include a commitment by Saudi Arabia to release political prisoners, she said. “We haven’t seen a single commitment," she added, including any pledge to release U.S. citizens who are banned from leaving Saudi Arabia for political reasons.
This trip explains “why there is more increased hostility towards the U.S.” in the Middle East, she said. The region’s people saw the United States "empowering the despots of the region, supporting them with arms, extorting any kinds of deals from those kinds of countries, irrespective of whether they are committed to improving human rights or democratic representation. So all these issues really fuel the anti-sentiment towards the U.S.”
And there was no clear road map from Washington, she said, on how it planned to bring accountability for Khashoggi’s murder, or how it would approach Mohammed, Saudi Arabia’s day-to-day leader.
Khalid Aljabri, whose father Saad, a former top Saudi intelligence officer and close U.S. intelligence ally, has accused the crown prince of targeting him for assassination and taking his children hostage, said the trip would send a powerful signal to Mohammed: “Regardless of who’s in the White House, no one will care about your vices if you can lower gas prices.”
The message, he added, was that the crown prince can “get away with a lot of things, not just with President Trump, but even with a Democratic administration that has sworn, or promised, to make [him] a pariah” he said. “But look at them now. They’re coming back.”
“The moment MBS feels like he has unconditioned backing from the U.S., he goes rogue,” Aljabri said.
Saudi crown prince once boasted it would be easy to kill a sitting monarch, ex-intel official says
Lina al-Hathloul, communication head of the London-based Saudi human rights group ALQST, whose sister, women’s rights activist Loujain al-Hathloul, was released from prison last year, said the planned trip was “shortsighted” if Biden did not raise issues like her sister’s travel ban or demand the release of political detainees.
Saudi Arabia still needs U.S. support, giving the Biden administration leverage to insist on improvements in human rights, Lina al-Hathloul said.
But most vexing, she said, was Biden’s rumored plan to meet with the crown prince — after Biden had promised to ostracize the Saudis for human rights abuses, and after Mohammed’s senior aide had directed the torture of her sister while she was imprisoned.
“This is the part I’m surprised at, that he’s willing to shake hands with MBS after all these promises.” | 2022-06-03T22:14:47Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Saudi dissidents call Biden’s planned visit to kingdom a betrayal - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/06/03/saudi-biden-mbs-khashoggi/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/06/03/saudi-biden-mbs-khashoggi/ |
A painting of Judge Judith W. Rogers of the U.S. Court of Appeals in D.C. on May 6. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
Rogers was nominated to the bench by President Bill Clinton in 1993. She has made significant marks throughout her career. She was one of 15 women in her Harvard Law School class, the third woman in the Criminal Division of the D.C. federal prosecutor’s office, the first woman on a D.C. mayor’s Cabinet and the first female chief legal officer for the city. She was intimately involved in the development of D.C.'s semiautonomous “home rule” after nearly 200 years of federal control, including legislation shaping the local court system. She was a judge first in on the city’s Court of Appeals, nominated by President Ronald Reagan.
Rogers wrote opinions upholding the D.C. Metro’s rejection of religious advertising, allowing construction of the Purple Line and endorsing patients’ access to experimental drugs. (The opinion on experimental drugs was overturned by the full circuit.)
During battles between the Trump administration and Congress during impeachment proceedings, she found that lawmakers must have access to some grand jury evidence and the right to enforce subpoenas in court. Just this March, she ruled in favor of an L.A. Times bid for search warrant records from an investigation into stock sales by Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), citing “the powerful public interest.”
In the past three years, three judicial assistants left her chambers, saying they were belittled and chastised by the judge, according to a Washington Post report last month. She did not respond to requests for comment on that story; former law clerks defended her as demanding but fair. After an employee survey of workplace conditions at the D.C. federal trial and appeals courts, court leaders this spring scheduled training, including for judges, although some have resisted.
The influential circuit court is often a steppingstone to the U.S. Supreme Court. Biden’s first nominee to the D.C. Circuit, Ketanji Brown Jackson, has already been confirmed to a seat on the nation’s highest court. Florence Pan, a judge on the D.C. District Court, has been nominated to fill Jackson’s appellate seat. Michelle Childs, a federal judge from South Carolina whom Biden also considered for the Supreme Court, is awaiting a Senate vote on her nomination to the D.C. Circuit. The Senate Judiciary Committee approved her nomination on a vote of 17-to-5 in May. | 2022-06-03T22:19:08Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Judge Judith Rogers taking senior status, expanding Biden's influence - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/06/03/judith-rogers-senior-dc-circuit/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/06/03/judith-rogers-senior-dc-circuit/ |
Monkeypox is a reminder of lurking global health threats. Prepare, or else.
Test tubes labeled "Monkeypox virus positive and negative" are seen in this illustration taken on May 23. (Dado Ruvic/Reuters)
It has been repeated often in the past two years that viruses don’t stop at passport control. We’ll say it again — just witness the new monkeypox outbreak spreading through Europe and North America. Actually, the scary name is a misnomer; monkeypox usually infects rodents. While it has sometimes caused serious illness in humans, the virus is not as transmissible or deadly as the coronavirus. But the outbreak should remind everyone that when it comes to combating disease, all roads run through the same global village.
The monkeypox virus belongs to the genus that includes smallpox, but it is not as contagious or severe as smallpox, which has been eradicated from the planet. Monkeypox was first identified in humans in 1970 in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Since then, it has circulated in 11 African countries. There are two lineages: one from the Congo Basin, which has historically caused more severe disease, and another from West Africa. Nigeria suffered a major outbreak in 2017.
Now the disease is spreading in Europe and North America without an obvious transmission mechanism, such as travelers from Africa. This is an unwelcome surprise, and the reason isn’t entirely clear. Monkeypox generally transmits by close contact with lesions, body fluids and contaminated materials such as bedding, clothing or eating utensils. It is not a respiratory virus like the one that caused the coronavirus pandemic. A person with monkeypox remains infectious while they have symptoms, which can include fever, headache, muscle aches, backache, lack of energy, swollen lymph nodes and a skin rash or lesions. The illness typically lasts two to four weeks. There have been no deaths outside of Africa. Some early reports indicate spread has occurred among men who have sex with men.
The World Health Organization director general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said the sudden appearance of the virus outside of Africa indicates it may have been spreading for some time. Nearly 800 cases have been reported worldwide since May 13, with the largest numbers in Britain, Spain, Portugal and Canada. As of Thursday, 21 U.S. cases had been identified in 11 states.
Monkeypox does not threaten a global pandemic. But it does underscore the enduring vulnerability of all nations to transnational global health threats and the consequences of underinvestment in preparedness, rapid response and disease surveillance. When the WHO set up an independent panel to examine the pandemic response, the co-chairs, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and Helen Clark, found “weak links at every point in the chain of preparedness and response. Preparation was inconsistent and underfunded. The alert system was too slow — and too meek. The World Health Organization was under-powered. The response has exacerbated inequalities. Global political leadership was absent.” In a follow-up report last month, they warned that the world was moving too slowly to fix these deficiencies. “New pandemic threats will emerge,” they said. “The risks of not being better prepared for them are great, and inaction is hard to fathom.”
Monkeypox may sound like a distant problem out of Africa. But it is another bell tolling for the future of global disease. We ignore the warnings at our risk. | 2022-06-03T22:23:35Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Monkeypox is a reminder of lurking global health threats. Prepare, or else. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/06/03/monkeypox-is-reminder-lurking-global-health-threats-prepare-or-else/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/06/03/monkeypox-is-reminder-lurking-global-health-threats-prepare-or-else/ |
With Sheryl Sandberg’s departure, the ‘lean in’ era is officially over
Sheryl Sandberg. (Fabrice Coffrini/AFP via Getty Images)
On Wednesday, Sheryl Sandberg announced that she would be leaving her position as chief operating officer of Facebook’s parent company later this year. It’s hard not to see her exit as yet another sign of the times for women — and a reminder of how the optimistic spirit of her signature book, “Lean In,” has faded.
“Lean In,” published in 2013, is at its heart a can-do treatise, a bit of self-help meets sociological analysis. In its day, the book argued that women needed to not let the judgments get to us — she’s too bossy, she’s too nice — but to persist despite them. We needed to speak up at the conference table, and do it again if a man spoke up over us. We needed to explain, to male bosses and boyfriends and husbands, over and over again, how important family leave, child care and help around the house were to female success in the workplace. And most important: We needed to not give up, not mentally exit the job when confronted by obstacle after obstacle.
Sandberg seemed convinced that the issue wasn’t that men wanted to keep women back. In her view, most of us, male or female, were victims of convention and self-defeating habits, and that could be changed. It always seemed a bit rosy. Was it really going to be as easy for the rest of us as for Sandberg, who, when she was heavily pregnant, marched into Google founder (and her boss) Sergey Brin’s office to explain why she and other women in her position needed special parking? But no one will ever go broke betting on the American appetite for advice that puts the responsibility for solving systemic economic and discriminatory issues on individuals. “Lean In” soared onto bestseller lists — and Sandberg’s reputation soared along with it.
It all began crashing down to Earth in the wake of Donald Trump’s election. Women began leaning in not just to the corner office, but in opposition to his presidency — and, at least in the short term, it seemed to have no effect at all. (Sandberg, initially, was nowhere to be found.) The #MeToo movement — which no doubt drew some of its rage from the fact that a man credibly accused of multiple instances of sexual assault was ensconced in the White House — made it clear that leaning in to your career would not always protect you from harm. Women faced substantive barriers to getting ahead that, in many cases, no amount of moxie or determination could surmount. And, in the wake of #MeToo, Sandberg’s request to men to mentor women at work fell flat, with some men refusing to hire women for positions in which they needed to travel with them or meet with them one-on-one.
Then there was this: Facebook, in pursuit of profits, kept ignoring serious wrongdoing. There was the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and the utilization of the social media site by white nationalists. Sandberg, who joined Facebook in 2008 as second in command to then 23-year-old co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, was a major architect of the business strategy that turned the social media site into a mass personal spying apparatus — one I’ve deemed morally indefensible — that earned $114 billion in advertising revenue last year, and shared responsibility for all this. Nonetheless, or perhaps as a result, Sandberg found herself somewhat sidelined as Zuckerberg shifted Facebook’s focus toward the emerging world of Web 3.0 and renamed the company Meta.
There is, I’ve been known to observe, a tension at the heart of the feminist movement. Do women simply want in on the turbo capitalist and corporate worlds that govern so much of our lives, or do we want to transform them? Sandberg, who accumulated a $1.6 billion net worth serving the interests of Facebook, clearly represented the former. But what we rarely want to admit is that this is often a false choice. The simple act of seeking equality is transformative, and people, male or female, rarely surrender or share power without a fight. Sandberg, part of the power structure herself, couldn’t see that.
What “Lean In” also failed to acknowledge is that whatever gains women make are not necessarily secure. Progress is not a line ascending ever higher; it can all go into a sudden reverse. Women’s workforce participation plummeted during the pandemic, and there are still more than 700,000 fewer women on the job today than in February 2020. We are probably weeks away from the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, which would result in abortion becoming either illegal or highly restricted in about half the states. If a woman cannot fully control her own body, she does not have full economic agency or control of her life. As if this were not bad enough, there are Republican legislators chomping at the bit to take on birth control next. Yes, birth control.
Sandberg has expressed horror about the possible abortion ruling, and says she is leaving Facebook to devote more time both to her personal life (she’s remarrying later this year) and to women’s advocacy issues. May she find happiness and success in that new focus. We’re going to need all the help we can get. | 2022-06-03T22:23:41Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | With Sheryl Sandberg’s departure from Facebook, the 'lean in' era is officially over - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/06/03/sheryl-sandberg-leaves-facebook-lean-in/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/06/03/sheryl-sandberg-leaves-facebook-lean-in/ |
Single moms cause mass shootings? One more cheap shot in the guns debate.
Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.) speaks to supporters in Huntsville, Ala., on May 24. (Vasha Hunt/AP)
Appearing on “Fox News Sunday” this week, Alabama Rep. Mo Brooks (R) attributed mass shootings in the United States to a decline in moral values — and he pointed to single-parent families as a major factor in the phenomenon.
“Those single-parent households,” Brooks asserted, “end up resulting in children who are more likely to be on welfare; who are less likely to get the kind of grades you expect to get in school; who are more likely to be involved in drugs; and who are, unfortunately, are more likely to be involved in criminal conduct.”
On a previous occasion, Brooks said the Texas massacre “reflects poorly on liberal policies that encourage out-of-wedlock childbirth, divorce, single-parent households and amoral values that undermine respect for life.”
Brooks is in a tight runoff in the GOP Senate primary in Alabama. He clearly will say and do anything for ink, so it comes as no surprise that he would resort to slurring single mothers and their “children who are more likely to be on welfare.” It follows, in Brooks’s telling, that those children are the ones most likely to be caught up in mass shootings.
Except Brooks is focusing on a target of convenience.
“Out-of-wedlock childbirth” plus “single-parent household” equals “mass murder”? Only in the congressman’s distorted view.
The record, shamefully long in the United States, defies such a formulaic explanation.
Eighteen-year-old white supremacist Payton Gendron, charged with killing 10 people on May 14 at a supermarket he targeted in a Black neighborhood in Buffalo, lived with his intact family in a three-story house with a backyard pool, in a small, majority-White suburb of Binghamton. Both parents are civil engineers for the state of New York.
Stephen Paddock’s 2017 rampage in Las Vegas is recorded as the deadliest mass shooting by an individual in American history, with 60 dead and hundreds more wounded. Paddock was no young, welfare-dependent product of a broken home. He was a 64-year-old, twice-divorced former auditor and real estate businessman.
What about Omar Mateen, the 29-year-old man who on June 12, 2016, killed 49 people and wounded at least 53 more in a mass shooting at Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando? A child on welfare caught up in criminal conduct? Not hardly.
Mateen trained to be a prison guard for the Florida Department of Corrections but flunked out. He also tried and failed to become a state trooper. He was working as a security guard and had an active firearms license, an active security officer license, had passed a psychological test, and had no criminal record. At the time of the shooting, Mateen was married with a young son. Oh, yes, reportedly in a 911 call made shortly after the shooting began, Mateen swore allegiance to the leader of the Islamic State.
Perhaps Brooks would point to Dylann Roof, the white supremacist facing the death penalty after being found guilty of the murder of nine Black church members in Charleston, S.C. Roof was born to parents who had divorced but were temporarily reconciled when he was born. His father divorced his biological mother and married a woman who essentially raised Roof and his older sister. His father and stepmother were together for 10 years before a divorce was filed in 2009, leaving Roof with his father.
Brooks might also note that the parents of Adam Lanza, who in 2012 slaughtered 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., were divorced and that Lanza lived with his single mother. But beyond that the story doesn’t match Brooks’s template. Lanza also shot and killed his mother, a former stock broker and gun collector who lived in a colonial-style home on two acres. She had enough resources not to “have to work another day in her life,” according to the Hartford Courant.
I’m trying to figure out how Patrick Crusius fits into Brooks’s picture. The 21-year-old man from Allen, Tex., allegedly killed 23 people and injured 23 others in El Paso in 2019 in what is described as the deadliest attack on Latinos in modern U.S. history.
Crusius’s parents, Lori Lynn Crusius and John Bryan Crusius — a mental health counselor — issued a statement following the shooting placing blame on outside influences.
“Patrick’s actions were apparently influenced and informed by people we do not know, and from ideas and beliefs we do not accept or condone. He was raised in a family that taught love, kindness, respect and tolerance — rejecting all forms of racism, prejudice, hatred, and violence.” Crusius’s grandparents, with whom he was living while attending a nearby college, made a statement saying they were “devastated.” Any “amoral values” lurking around there, or did I miss something?
And now comes Salvador Ramos, the 18-year-old gunman who last month killed 19 children and two teachers at an elementary school in Uvalde, Tex. As with so much that has come out about the massacre, accounts of Ramos and his family should be approached with caution.
A loner, troubled, antisocial youth? Estranged parents? Living with grandparents? Relatives with criminal background? Maybe “yes” to all four. But too soon to be pigeonholed into Brooks’s blanket stereotype.
Mass shooters have no single profile but share one common condition — they have guns and a willingness to use them.
Needed now: more actions on gun safety, fewer slandering cheap shots. | 2022-06-03T22:23:47Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Single moms cause mass shootings? One more cheap shot in the guns debate. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/06/03/uvalde-guns-mass-shootings-mo-brooks-blames-single-moms/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/06/03/uvalde-guns-mass-shootings-mo-brooks-blames-single-moms/ |
After intense spelling bee, winner plans for life beyond ‘chorepiscopus’
Ryan Bacic
Harini Logan, 14, of Texas spells a word during the Scripps National Spelling Bee finals Thursday in Maryland. (Jose Luis Magana/AP)
Harini Logan went into the finals of the Scripps National Spelling Bee on Thursday night feeling the weight of the past: the years of studying, her three previous attempts that fell short, her furious preparation for this one last shot at the championship before she aged out of the competition.
The next morning, the 14-year-old eighth-grader was dreaming of the future. She had just won the bee after a decisive, heart-stopping 90-second spell-off, and she was already making plans for her more than $50,000 in prize money.
Harini said she’ll save some of it for college — she dreams of attending Stanford University and studying medicine and business — and she hopes to learn about investing in the stock market. But she also wants to start a fund “for helping students in underprivileged areas where they can’t get access to the bee even if they want to do it.”
Runner-up Vikram Raju, 12, had a different take regarding his $25,000 prize.
“I don’t know what to do with it yet,” he said, “because I’m not really good at figuring out what to do with my money.”
Both spellers had been here before. Vikram, of Aurora, Colo., tied for 51st place in 2019 and for 21st last year. Harini, a San Antonio native, tied for 323rd place in 2018, for 30th in 2019 and for 31st in 2021. She had seen the 2020 competition canceled because of the pandemic, and the 2021 contest made partly virtual.
“There’s definitely a gravity about my fourth and final time,” Harini said Friday, following three days of competition at National Harbor. “I’m just so fortunate and grateful to have my final bee in person.”
As the winner, Harini will receive $50,000 in cash, a commemorative medal and the official championship trophy from the bee; $2,500 in cash and a reference library from Merriam-Webster; and $400 of reference works from Encyclopaedia Britannica. Vikram will receive a medal and the $25,000 in cash.
The prizes aren’t the only reward. At breakfast Thursday, the finalists learned they would visit the White House on Friday and “erupted in cheering,” said Corrie Loeffler, editorial director for Scripps National Spelling Bee. (The Bidens weren’t home, but it “was awesome,” Vikram said.) On Friday evening, there will be a banquet celebration, awards ceremony and farewell party back at the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center. As is tradition, the festivities will conclude with a dance party.
The bee stretched late into Thursday night, culminating in the first spell-off in the competition’s history, between Harini and Vikram. The spell-off provision was added last year, Loeffler explained, though it wasn’t used. Part of the rationale, she said, was that contestants had studied “thousands and thousands of words” only to be quizzed on a handful, so a rapid-fire tiebreaker would allow them “the greatest possible chance to show off how much they’ve learned.”
Another part of the thinking, especially for young kids still spelling away as midnight neared: “At some point,” Loeffler said, “the competition has to end.”
The finalists had rehearsed for a spell-off, she said, and knew it was a possibility.
“It was looming,” said Harini, who had started practicing speed-spelling a month or two before the competition. “Definitely I was a little bit anxious, and the fact that it actually came down to a spell-off was a bit unreal.”
Vikram went first and nailed 12 spellings to start, from “spealbone” (“the shoulder blade used by magicians or medicine men in divination”) to “teosinte” (a grass of Central and South America), finishing with 15 correct out of 19 words attempted.
Harini fired off the same 12 to start, but she operated at a quicker pace, getting to 26 words in total and spelling 22 correctly. Her last seven words, which Vikram never reached, ranged from “chorepiscopus” (a rank of Catholic bishop) to “moorhen” (a red-billed aquatic bird).
Vikram and his family planned to stick around D.C. until Sunday, after exploring some Smithsonian museums, said his mom, Sandhya Ayyar. A few Colorado news outlets have inquired about meeting him at the airport when he lands, Ayyar said; one asked him to fill in as weatherman for a day. He’s considering it, he said.
“You know, it has been quite the overwhelming roller coaster,” Ayyar said. “He was upset, but I think he then realized what he achieved last night and he feels proud about himself.”
“This year, I didn’t even expect to become a finalist,” Vikram said, adding, “I kind of learned my true potential from the bee. So that’s a really important thing the bee taught me: It really taught me how to not underestimate myself.”
Zaila Avant-garde, the winner of last year’s bee and the competition’s first African American champion, had prepared for a spell-off last year, she said, and had always thought it would be exciting to watch one. Sitting in the audience Thursday night in Maryland, “listening to the two of them go, it was really impressive,” she said.
“It’s suspenseful, an edge-of-your-seat moment,” said Zaila, a 15-year-old basketball player who recently moved to the District from Louisiana. “It’s great for TV.”
Zaila Avant-garde wins 2021 National Spelling Bee, becoming its first African American champion
She said she liked that the “nerve-racking” spell-off is such a different beast from the traditional format, which allows spellers to deliberate and ask questions. And she was “super happy” for Harini, with whom she had talked earlier in the competition.
“I was actually crying when she won and the confetti came down,” Zaila said.
Harini credited her mother’s coaching for her win. Her advice to other spellers? Work hard, don’t let your nerves overcome you and “be proud of yourself. No matter how far you come. Just realizing that you’ve done your best.”
Now Harini plans to take some time off to relax. “This will be my first summer for many years without spelling,” she said.
Vikram, meanwhile, vowed to return next year. “I’m very hopeful that I can keep up with my ranking and even become first,” he said.
After all, he’s only in seventh grade, so he still has one more shot. | 2022-06-03T22:49:36Z | www.washingtonpost.com | National Spelling Bee winner Harini Logan, finalists celebrate in D.C. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/06/03/national-spelling-bee-winner-harini-logan/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/06/03/national-spelling-bee-winner-harini-logan/ |
In this image from video provided by ABC7 Los Angeles, emergency personnel work at the site of a Greyhound bus crash after they blew a tire and weird into a sports utility vehicle and a center divider while heading from Los Angeles to Phoenix on INterste 10 on Friday, June 3, 2022. California Highway Patrol Officer Jason Montez says there were 33 people aboard the bus when it crashed in Banning, about 90 miles east of Los Angeles. (ABC7 Los Angeles via AP) (Uncredited/ABC7 Los Angeles) | 2022-06-03T22:53:57Z | www.washingtonpost.com | 13 hurt when Greyhound bus blows tire on California highway - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/13-hurt-when-greyhound-bus-blows-tire-on-california-highway/2022/06/03/39d5404a-e385-11ec-ae64-6b23e5155b62_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/13-hurt-when-greyhound-bus-blows-tire-on-california-highway/2022/06/03/39d5404a-e385-11ec-ae64-6b23e5155b62_story.html |
FILE - Hootie and the Blowfish performs during the Group Therapy Tour at Riverbend Music Center on July 20, 2019, in Cincinnati. Band member Rick Noble on Friday, June 3, 2022, donated his collection of all things Hootie & the Blowfish, including CDs, ticket stubs, an autographed guitar and T-shirts, to the University of South Carolina, where the band was formed in 1986. (Amy Harris/Invision/AP, File)
COLUMBIA, S.C. — Hootie & the Blowfish got its start at the University of South Carolina and the school is now home to a boatload of the Grammy Award winning rock band’s memorabilia. | 2022-06-03T22:54:23Z | www.washingtonpost.com | U. of South Carolina gets Hootie & the Blowfish memorabilia - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/u-of-south-carolina-gets-hootie-and-the-blowfish-memorabilia/2022/06/03/e0dcac9e-e389-11ec-ae64-6b23e5155b62_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/u-of-south-carolina-gets-hootie-and-the-blowfish-memorabilia/2022/06/03/e0dcac9e-e389-11ec-ae64-6b23e5155b62_story.html |
Yes, it has come to this. It’s time to arm teachers.
A truck passes crosses placed in honor of the victims of the shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Tex. (Eric Gay/AP)
The pros and cons of arming teachers have been bounced around since the Columbine shooting in 1999, and both resurface with each new school massacre. A Rand Corp. report in April 2020 found that as of Jan. 1, 2020, 28 states allowed schools to arm teachers or staff in at least some cases or as part of a specific program. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) signed a law in 2019 following the Parkland slaughter that allows teachers to volunteer as “school guardians," if they meet requirements and are trained by the county sheriff. In the wake of Uvalde, where police didn’t enter the school for an hour after the shooting began, Ohio has passed a similar bill.
Opponents worry that guns in schools will make children less safe and point to the possibility that law enforcement could mistake an armed teacher for the shooter. (Hint: Listen for the AR-15.) Even trained law enforcement officers miss their target roughly 70 percent of the time. In war, soldiers often die from friendly fire. How do we expect teachers to do better? | 2022-06-03T22:54:29Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | We're not doing enough. It's time to train and arm teachers. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/06/03/arming-teachers-uvalde-parker/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/06/03/arming-teachers-uvalde-parker/ |
Katherine Heigl and Leslie Mann in 2007’s “Knocked Up.” (Suzanne Hanover/Universal Pictures//Kobal/Shutterstock)
As we wait to hear how the Supreme Court rules on abortion access in America, we’ve been reflecting on what has and hasn’t change since Roe. v Wade was decided almost 50 years ago. Ann Hornaday, The Washington Post’s film critic, looked at how the film industry has portrayed abortion since the landmark ruling in 1973. After watching movies like “Dirty Dancing,” “Juno,” “Knocked Up” and “Obvious Child,” Hornaday says she noticed a “strange evolution,” in how Hollywood’s depiction of abortion has changed over time.
This week marks Queen Elizabeth II’s 70th year on the throne. The Platinum Jubilee celebrations are taking place all across England. Karla Adams, a correspondent based in London, reports on what this anniversary signifies for the future of the British monarchy. | 2022-06-03T22:54:35Z | www.washingtonpost.com | “Dirty Dancing” to “Knocked Up”: Abortion in the movies - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/podcasts/post-reports/dirty-dancing-to-knocked-up-abortion-in-the-movies/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/podcasts/post-reports/dirty-dancing-to-knocked-up-abortion-in-the-movies/ |
Daniela Santamariña named a projects editor for Emerging News Products
Announcement from Director, Emerging News Products Christopher Meighan:
I am excited to announce that Daniela Santamariña will become a projects editor for the Emerging News Products team. In this role she will focus on the development and building of new product initiatives targeting new and existing audiences. Responsibilities of her role will include shaping multi-channel strategies, creating timelines, analyzing data, conducting experiments and establishing key performance indicators.
Daniela takes on this new role after spending the past two and a half years as a graphics reporter with a focus on newsletters. Working with Politics, she established workflows, identified emerging trends and experimented with graphics to maximize impact and to create daily habits with the 202 newsletters and beyond. Outside of newsletters, Daniela contributed creativity and detailed research for projects such as the poor credit of your favorite mall brands visualized as a mall map, Virginia’s history of flip-flopping in gubernatorial elections and how to wrap presents and create less waste. She has also served as the department’s lead on abortion coverage, collaborating on such pieces as “What would happen if Roe v. Wade were overturned” and “How abortion laws in the U.S. compare with those in other countries.” Most recently she worked on The Post’s abortion legislation tracker and has been helping the team organize around incoming Supreme Court news. In 2021, she earned a certificate in product strategy from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management.
Before coming to The Post, Daniela spent seven years at National Geographic, where she was a graphics editor, production lead and associate producer-editor for the video department. Daniela is a 2012 graduate of the University of Miami, where she majored in visual journalism. She grew up in Venezuela and moved to Seattle when she was 17.
Please congratulate her on the new role, which she has already started. | 2022-06-03T22:55:24Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Daniela Santamariña named a projects editor for Emerging News Products - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/pr/2022/06/03/daniela-santamaria-named-projects-editor-emerging-news-products/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/pr/2022/06/03/daniela-santamaria-named-projects-editor-emerging-news-products/ |
Transgender bishop asked to resign by Lutheran denomination leader
Megan Rohrer is the first openly transgender bishop in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. (John Hefti/Associated Press)
The presiding bishop of the largest Lutheran denomination in the United States has asked its first transgender bishop to resign amid criticism over their removal of the pastor of a Hispanic congregation on the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe in December.
In a report published May 27, Bishop Elizabeth Eaton, head of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, announced she had asked for the resignation of Bishop Megan Rohrer from the Sierra Pacific Synod denomination.
The request comes after Sierra Pacific Synod removed the Rev. Nelson Rabell-González from his position as mission director at Misión Latina Luterana in California on Dec. 12. The Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, when many Mexican Americans celebrate their religious and cultural identities, commemorates the day in 1531 when many Christians, particularly Catholics, believe the Virgin Mary appeared in Mexico to a man named Juan Diego.
In a previous statement online, the Sierra Pacific Synod council said it had unanimously decided to vacate Rabell-González’s call after “continual communications of verbal harassment and retaliatory actions from more than a dozen victims from 2019 to the present.” Rabell-González denied those accusations to Religion News Service.
But Rohrer’s actions were criticized by the Asociación de Ministerios Latinos of the denomination as showing a “lack of empathy and understanding toward their Latinx siblings” and led Eaton to appoint a listening team to review what had happened.
The presiding bishop said she does not plan to pursue disciplinary charges against Rohrer, a decision the Asociación de Ministerios Latinos and other partner organizations also criticized. “I do not believe that the circumstances of these unfortunate events and Bishop Rohrer’s involvement in them rise to the level of formal discipline against Bishop Rohrer,” Eaton said.
“However, I believe that Bishop Rohrer has lost the trust and confidence of many constituents, both within and without the Sierra Pacific Synod.” According to the statement of the presiding bishop, “unwise decisions” are not automatic grounds for discipline in the denomination. But, Eaton said, she has asked Rohrer to respond after attending the Sierra Pacific Synod assembly next week, listening to constituents and prayerfully considering her request to resign.
In a statement published last weekend, the Asociación de Ministerios Latinos, the European Descent Lutheran Association for Racial Justice and Extraordinary Lutheran Ministries called the decision of Eaton not to pursue disciplinary charges against Rohrer a “culturally insensitive dereliction of duty.”
The three-person listening team also released a statement over the weekend saying her decisions “totally disregard the heart and intent of our report.” It said, “We do not want it to be supposed that our work is aligned with or supports the proposed actions.”
The listening team criticized Eaton for never once mentioning racism in her report. It urged the presiding bishop to make its findings public, saying it concluded “racist words and actions caused trauma and great pain to many people of color” in the Sierra Pacific Synod.
“To characterize racist actions as simply ‘insensitive’ or ‘misguided’ is to validate the charge against” the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America “that we are blind to the pain we cause our siblings of color. When we do not name and confess the sin of racism in our institutions, we are doomed to continue in its power,” according to the statement from the listening team. A spokesperson for the Sierra Pacific Synod did not respond to a request for comment.
During the 2021 synod assembly, where he was nominated for bishop, Rabell-González acknowledged allegations against him, saying he was accused of “verbally mistreating a pastoral intern and members of the church staff” in a previous position at a different church. The pastor, who is Afro-Caribbean, said he had been asked to resign from that church and sign a nondisclosure agreement, which he declined, after members complained about his support for Black Lives Matter and immigrant rights.
He welcomed an investigation into the allegations, he told the synod assembly. “I am not perfect. I’m just a sinner in need of God’s grace. But these allegations are a character assassination brought up exactly one day before this assembly,” he said.
In the end, Rohrer was elected bishop of the Sierra Pacific Synod. The synod council created an advisory council to look into the allegations against Rabell-González and identified “compassionate steps” for him to take, which became part of the terms and requirements of his call, according to the council statement on the Sierra Pacific Synod blog.
Rabell-González informed Rohrer on Dec. 9 that he would not fulfill those terms and requirements, according to the council, which took action Dec. 11 at its regular meeting. He was told the next morning, on the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, that his call had been vacated, it said. His congregation at Misión Latina Luterana was informed afterward and offered care by synod staff.
The synod council statement said the timing of its decision was necessary because staff continued to receive “communications of concern” regarding the pastor. “The synod council believed then and now that it would be irresponsible to postpone our decision until a later meeting for the severity of the situation required immediate action to safeguard the Latinx community,” it said. The council has apologized for disrupting the celebration of the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe at Misión Latina Luterana.
So has Rohrer. “I understand that trust can be lost with one action and must be rebuilt with hundreds of trustworthy actions,” they wrote publicly in late December. “I am grateful to all who have educated me about the needs of the Latino/x/é community and remain committed to doing the work needed to repair relationships. The Sierra Pacific Synod and I seek to be ever-reforming in our anti-racism and anti-bias work.”
In addition to criticism from Asociación de Ministerios Latinos and the African Descent Lutheran Association, Extraordinary Lutheran Ministries suspended Rohrer’s membership in late December after they dismissed Rabell-González.
In a written statement at the time, Extraordinary Lutheran Ministries, which organizes queer ministry leaders in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, accused Rohrer of “an existing pattern of behavior” that does not align with its vision, mission and values, “specifically as it pertains to being an anti-racist organization.”
The election of Rohrer in May 2021 made them the first openly transgender bishop in the largest Lutheran denomination in the United States, and of any major denomination in the country. Rohrer also has celebrated being a neurodivergent bishop, part of their identity they said gets less attention.
Rohrer responded to several posts on Twitter expressing support for the bishop. “As requested, I’m listening deeply and prayerfully discerning,” they said in one tweet. In another, they wrote, “There has been so much more kindness and compassion expressed to me than anger, frustration and hurt. This fully human appreciates all the prayers.” | 2022-06-03T22:55:30Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Lutheran denomination leader asks transgender bishop to resign - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2022/06/03/lutheran-transgender-bishop-resign/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2022/06/03/lutheran-transgender-bishop-resign/ |
Spirit striker Ashley Hatch battles for the ball against Yuki Nagasato, left, and Danielle Colaprico during NWSL match at Segra Field in Leesburg. (Scott Taetsch for The Washington Post)
The Washington Spirit has withdrawn from a major international tournament this summer in Portland, Ore., because of scheduling concerns.
As defending National Women’s Soccer League champions, the Spirit was slated to play in the Women’s International Champions Cup on Aug. 17-20 in Portland, Ore., with the Portland Thorns; Olympique Lyonnais, the UEFA Women’s Champions League winner; and English WSL champion Chelsea.
Organizers were to announce details Thursday, but with the Spirit planning to withdraw, the announcement was pushed to next Wednesday. Monterrey (Mexico) will replace Washington, multiple people close to the matter said.
“After internal discussion, we have decided to withdraw,” the Spirit said in a statement Friday. “This will allow our team a brief period to rest ahead of the final third of the regular season. The ICC tournament gathers some of the greatest teams in the world and we are honored to have been considered.”
Although the NWSL paused Washington and Portland’s regular season schedules to accommodate the WICC, Spirit officials wanted to use the time to recover from a busy several months.
Since mid-March, when the preseason Challenge Cup started, Washington has played 14 games overall. The Spirit advanced to the final of the Challenge Cup, which overlapped with the start of the regular season and added two matches to its calendar.
The club has another four regular season games over the next two weeks, then will lose several players for up to a month to national team assignments. For Wednesday’s 1-1 draw with the Chicago Red Stars, seven players were unavailable because of injury and one was in coronavirus protocol.
The WICC is preparing for its fourth edition. In the absence of a formal club world championship for women run by FIFA, the sport’s global governing body, independent tournaments have popped up. Louisville will host a competition in mid-August for the second straight year.
The FIFA Club World Cup for men has existed since 2000.
Olympique Lyonnais is participating in the WICC for the fourth time. Last year, the French club — which features U.S. stars Lindsey Horan and Catarina Macario — lost to Portland in the final. FC Barcelona and the Houston Dash were also involved. | 2022-06-03T22:55:36Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Washington Spirit withdraws from international women’s soccer tournament - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/06/03/nwsl-washington-spirit-wicc/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/06/03/nwsl-washington-spirit-wicc/ |
Pr. George’s school board chair vows to fight charges, stay on board
Juanita Miller, the chair of Prince George’s County Board of Education. (Prince George’s County Public Schools)
Prince George’s County Board of Education Chair Juanita Miller declined to step down in a video statement issued Friday on the board’s website despite a request for her resignation from County Executive Angela D. Alsobrooks.
“I have been committed to facilitating the board’s work of collaborative governance and competent oversight,” Miller said. “I will continue to fulfill my duties and responsibilities as board chair for transparency, integrity and dedication to principle.”
Miller, who Alsobrooks (D) appointed as chair in January 2021, was recently issued a notice of charges of misconduct in office, willful neglect of duty and incompetence by the state board. Those charges, announced late in May, could lead to her removal. Under state board policy, Miller can request a hearing before a state administrative law judge within 10 days of receiving the formal notice of charges.
Prince George’s school board chair could be removed by state ed board
Six former and current board members filed the request to the state board to intervene and remove Miller. They argue that she has a consistent pattern of intentionally violating board policy and working against board decisions.
“There is a system in place which will hopefully dispense with the potential for political machinations to affect the removal process for members of the Board of Education,” Miller said.
Alsobrooks wrote a letter to Miller on Wednesday requesting her to step down from the education board effective immediately. She did not cite the state board’s notice of charges in her letter, but noted the passage of legislation in the Maryland General Assembly that would allow the board to elect its own chair and vice chair beginning in December. Alsobrooks wrote that the request was made “to start fresh with a clean state.”
Miller did not reference the legislation or Alsobrooks’s resignation request in her video statement. Instead, she kept it centered on the state board’s notice of charges. She said she did not “relish the prospect of a hearing process” but that the process “should not be allowed to be unduly manipulated.” She pointed to a previous statement Alsobrooks gave reporters when asked if she would request Miller resign, that she would “respect the process currently underway” with the state board before reaching a conclusion.
“This advice was both legally correct and appropriate,” Miller said.
A spokeswoman for Alsobrooks did not immediately respond Friday.
Karina Elwood contributed to this report. | 2022-06-03T23:33:27Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Pr. George’s school board chair vows to fight charges, stay on board - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/06/03/prince-georges-miller-alsobrooks-resign/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/06/03/prince-georges-miller-alsobrooks-resign/ |
A sign for the Dallas Museum of Art.
A man broke into the Dallas Museum of Art, shattered glass display cases with a metal stool and damaged several ancient artifacts, according to museum officials and police.
Museum officials said the man, identified by authorities as 21-year-old Brian Hernandez, broke into the museum after hours on Wednesday night, entered exhibits and smashed art, including three ancient Greek artifacts and a Native American contemporary ceramic piece. Those four pieces were “seriously damaged” in addition to about a dozen smaller pieces that sustained minor damage, officials said in a statement on Friday to The Washington Post.
The museum is working with insurers and curators to determine what can be restored and the cost of the damages, but officials said the total could be much less than the $5 million price tag that was initially reported.
Museum director Agustin Arteaga said in a statement that the “entire collection is invaluable in the shared experiences and inspiration it provides to our visitors.”
Hernandez’s public defender did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday afternoon.
Dozens of artifacts vandalized in three Berlin museums
Authorities said surveillance footage showed a man wearing dark clothes walk toward the entrance Wednesday night with a metal chair in his hand. Moments later, he was seen entering the building, where he immediately began throwing items on the ground, the police said.
He proceeded to enter multiple exhibits, allegedly destroying property — at one point, returning to the entrance to retrieve a metal stool that he used to smash numerous glass display cases, according to an arrest warrant affidavit.
In an ancient exhibit, he allegedly shattered a display case containing two Greek artifacts — a black-figure panel amphora, a sixth-century B.C. pot, as well as a red-figure pyxis and lid dating back to the fifth century B.C., museum officials said. Officials said a second smashed case contained a black-figure kylix, an ancient Greek bowl. All three items were badly damaged, the officials said.
Near the end of the rampage, he allegedly picked up a hand sanitizer stand and used it to break another case, then reached inside and grabbed a Native American Batah Kuhuh Alligator Gar Fish Effigy Bottle statue, smashing it on the ground, according to an arrest warrant affidavit.
A witness told police that when Hernandez was found by security and asked what he was doing, he said he “got mad at his girl” so he broke into the museum and started destroying property, the arrest warrant affidavit stated.
Museum officials said he was not armed and no one was injured.
“This was an isolated incident perpetrated by one individual acting alone, whose intent was not theft of art or any objects on view at the Museum. However, some works of art were damaged, and we are still in the process of assessing the extent of the damages. While we are devastated by this incident, we are grateful that no one was harmed. The safety of our staff and visitors, along with the care and protection of the art in our stewardship, are our utmost priorities,” the museum said in a statement.
Hernandez was arrested without incident on a charge of criminal mischief of more than or equal to $300,000, police said. He is being held on $100,000 bond, jail records show. | 2022-06-03T23:59:14Z | www.washingtonpost.com | A man is accused of breaking into the Dallas Museum of Art, 'severely damaging' ancient Greek artifacts, museum officials say - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/06/03/dallas-museum-art-vandalism/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/06/03/dallas-museum-art-vandalism/ |
D.C. Circuit Judge Rogers goes senior
Rogers was nominated to the bench by President Bill Clinton in 1993. She has made significant marks throughout her career. She was intimately involved in the development of D.C.’s semiautonomous “home rule” after nearly 200 years of federal control, including legislation shaping the local court system.
In the past three years, three judicial assistants left her chambers, saying they were belittled and chastised by the judge, according to a Washington Post report last month. She did not respond to requests for comment on that story; former law clerks defended her as demanding but fair.
The influential circuit court is often a steppingstone to the U.S. Supreme Court.
— Rachel Weiner
GOP member quits race over call on guns
Rep. Chris Jacobs (R-N.Y.) announced he would suspend his reelection campaign Friday after facing pressure by his party to step aside for coming out in support of gun control as a solution to stem the tide of mass shootings in the country in recent weeks.
Jacobs was born and raised in Buffalo, a city that became the site of a racially motivated shooting last month that left 10 dead at a grocery store.
In an unprecedented step for a Republican endorsed by the National Rifle Association, Jacobs last week announced he would vote with Democrats to ban assault weapons, limit high-capacity magazines, raise the age to purchase a gun to 21 and ban civilians from acquiring military-style armor.
Just seven days later, he said it would be best to suspend his reelection campaign in a district that had become more reliably GOP after redistricting.
The first-term congressman was elected in a special election in June 2020 from New York’s 23rd Congressional District.
— Marianna Sotomayor | 2022-06-03T23:59:20Z | www.washingtonpost.com | D.C. Circuit Judge Rogers goes senior - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/dc-circuit-judge-rogers-goes-senior/2022/06/03/1fb8943e-de2e-11ec-a744-f4da26d516e8_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/dc-circuit-judge-rogers-goes-senior/2022/06/03/1fb8943e-de2e-11ec-a744-f4da26d516e8_story.html |
David McCormick concedes to Mehmet Oz in Pa. Republican primary Senate race
Oz will now move on to face Lt. Gov. John Fetterman (D) in the general election.
Republican Senate candidates David McCormick, left, and Mehmet Oz had been locked in a recount in their primary race. (AP)
Former hedge fund CEO David McCormick said Friday that he conceded to Mehmet Oz in the Republican primary for U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania, clearing the way for the celebrity doctor backed by former president Donald Trump to advance to the general election in one of the year’s most significant races.
Oz will now face Lt. Gov. John Fetterman (D) in a pivotal battleground in the fight for control of the Senate. The GOP primary race has been stuck in limbo for weeks, as Oz’s razor-thin lead triggered a recount and as Fetterman — a liberal candidate who easily won the Democratic nomination — recovers from a stroke that sidelined him just before the primary.
McCormick said Friday that he concluded he would not be able to make up the deficit between him and Oz.
“We spent the last 17 days making sure that every Republican vote was counted in a way that would result in the will of Pennsylvanian voters being fulfilled … That’s what this process is all about,” said McCormick.
“But it’s now clear to me, with the recount largely complete, that we have a nominee,” he added, noting that he called Oz earlier in the day to congratulate him.
Oz tweeted Friday evening that he “received a gracious phone call” from McCormick and said that with the primary over, they would ensure the Senate seat “does not fall into the hands of the radical left.”
McCormick told supporters that he told Oz, “What I always said to you — that I will do my part to try to unite Republicans and Pennsylvanians behind his candidacy. McCormick said it was important for the GOP to regain control of the Senate.
Democrats are defending a narrow Senate majority in this year’s midterm elections. Pennsylvania, a battleground state where Republican Sen. Patrick J. Toomey is retiring, is seen as a critical front in the fight for control of the upper chamber of Congress.
The Republican primary, in which Trump endorsed Oz, was also a high-profile test of the former president’s influence on GOP voters. His record has been mixed so far this primary season, with his endorsed candidate suffering recent gubernatorial primary defeats in Georgia, Nebraska and Idaho to go along with Senate victories by his picks in Ohio, North Carolina and now Pennsylvania.
Right after the May 17 primary, Trump had moved to baselessly discredit the then too-close-to-call Republican primary in Pennsylvania, urging Oz to declare victory before the vote tally was finished and seeking to raise concerns about mail-in ballots without presenting any evidence for his claims. Oz previously called himself the “presumptive” winner.
Fetterman on Friday said he “almost died” last month after his stroke and revealed in a statement that his condition was far more serious than his campaign had previously indicated. He said he should have taken medication prescribed for him in 2017.
“There’s so much at stake in this race, and I’m going to be ready for the hard fight ahead,” Fetterman said. “But our campaign isn’t slowing down one bit, and we are still on track to win this primary on Tuesday, and flip this Senate seat in November.”
Felicia Sonmez contributed to this report. | 2022-06-04T00:25:51Z | www.washingtonpost.com | David McCormick concedes to Mehmet Oz in Pa. Senate Republican primary - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/06/03/david-mccormick-concedes-mehmet-oz-pa-republican-primary-senate-race/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/06/03/david-mccormick-concedes-mehmet-oz-pa-republican-primary-senate-race/ |
Republican who supported assault rifle ban ends reelection campaign
Rep. Chris Jacobs (R-N.Y.) with his daughter Anna on Capitol Hill in July 2020. (Jacquelyn Martin/AP)
Rep. Chris Jacobs (R-N.Y.) announced that he would suspend his reelection campaign Friday after facing pressure by his party to step aside for coming out in support of gun reforms as a solution to stem the tide of mass shootings in the country in recent weeks.
Jacobs was born and raised in Buffalo, a city that became the site of a racially motivated shooting last month that left 10 dead at a local grocery store.
At a news conference in his district last week, just miles from Buffalo, Jacobs took an unprecedented step for a Republican endorsed by the National Rifle Association by announcing he would vote with Democrats to ban assault weapons, limit high-capacity magazines, raise the age to purchase a gun to 21 and ban civilians from acquiring military-style armor.
Biden calls for Congress to 'do something' on gun violence in primetime address
Jacobs’s position amid a trio of mass shootings over the past week proved costly. Just seven days later, he said it would be best to suspend his reelection campaign in a district that had become more reliably GOP after redistricting.
“I truly believed I could win this election, but it would be an incredibly divisive election for both the Republican Party and the people of the 23rd District, many of whom I’ve not ever represented,” he said at a news conference Friday. “The last thing we need is an incredibly negative, half-truth-filled media attack funded by millions of spent dollars of special interest money coming into our community of guns and gun violence and gun control.”
The first-term congressman, who was elected during a special election in June 2020, will serve the remainder of his term representing New York’s 23rd Congressional District.
Jacobs’s stunning decision to step aside rather than seek reelection proves how almost no room exists within the Republican Party for members who support banning assault weapons or limiting high-capacity magazines.
Though a bipartisan group of senators are negotiating modest changes to gun laws in the wake of the shooting at an elementary school in Texas, the quick dismissal of Jacobs is an indication of just how little appetite there is by Republicans to address modifications to gun use.
Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), the No. 3 GOP leader in the House, quickly announced her endorsement of Carl Paladino to replace Jacobs without mentioning either politician’s views on guns.
“Carl is a job creator and conservative outsider who will provide Western New York and the Southern Tier with strong representation and leadership. Carl will be a tireless fighter for the people of New York in our fight to put America First to save the country,” she said in a statement.
In an interview with the Buffalo News last week, Jacobs acknowledged his change of heart happened after an 18-year-old used an assault weapon to shoot 13 individuals at a Tops Friendly Markets in his hometown. Of the 13 people shot, 11 were Black.
'Progress is possible' on gun legislation after Uvalde shooting
“I hope I’ve been compassionate when I read and heard about previous incidents like this that have happened over the years, but I guess there’s just something markedly different when it happens in your city, to people you know,” he said. “This has been a profoundly impactful event for me.”
The subsequent shooting at a Uvalde, Tex., elementary school, in which 19 children and two teachers were killed, shook him even further.
His new position was too much for Republicans to handle, with many labeling him a Democrat for taking a position that strays far from the party’s norms.
“'Republican’ @RepJacobs already caved to the gun-grabbers whose proposals won’t do a single thing to protect our families & children from criminals & murderers. He knows this but he can’t resist getting a few glowing headlines from the mainstream media,” Donald Trump Jr. tweeted Sunday.
Jacobs told the Buffalo News on Friday that the writing was on the wall for him after “every Republican elected (official) that had endorsed me withdrew their endorsement.” He also alleged that someone had given out his phone number, making him the receiver of “an immense amount of calls and texts urging me to leave the race” which he described as non-threatening.
“And so obviously, this was not well received by the Republican base,” he said.
His announcement came one day after President Biden urged Republicans in Congress to end their decade blockade against supporting gun reform votes.
“How much more carnage are we willing to accept?” Biden asked during an evening speech Thursday.
House Democrats are set to vote on several gun revision proposals upon their return to Washington next week, including measures to raise the age to buy a semiautomatic rifle and ban high-capacity magazines, which Jacobs said he supports. It’s unclear if he would vote alongside Democrats on those proposals, however.
While House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has announced her intention for committees to hold hearings on banning assault weapons, its likelihood of getting a vote remains unclear as the issue also divides Democrats. A number of vulnerable Democrats facing reelection have expressed reservations about voting on such a proposal — even though several support it — because the issue has become so politically toxic.
The bipartisan group of senators continue to negotiate, but those changes are not likely to include a ban on assault weapons or high-capacity magazines since it is a poison pill for many Republicans at the table. Negotiators are considering revisions to address mental health issues, expanding background checks and passing red-flag laws that would allow law enforcement and family members to take guns away from individuals who pose a threat to themselves or others. | 2022-06-04T00:25:57Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Republican who supported assault rifle ban ends reelection campaign - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/06/03/gop-house-member-who-voiced-support-banning-assault-rifles-ends-reelection-campaign/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/06/03/gop-house-member-who-voiced-support-banning-assault-rifles-ends-reelection-campaign/ |
Amateur Bailey Davis misses cut but raises her game at U.S. Women’s Open
Bailey Davis shot 3-over 74 in the second round of her first U.S. Women's Open. (AP Photo/Steve Helber)
SOUTHERN PINES, N.C. — Even though she missed the cut at her first U.S. Women’s Open, amateur Bailey Davis allowed herself to smile plenty following her 3-over 74 in the second round Friday afternoon at Pine Needles golf club.
Davis’s almost festive attitude was a complete reversal from Thursday, when she endured one of the most disheartening experiences in her golfing career, carding an 87 that left the White Plains, Md., native unsure if she wanted to come back to the course the next day.
But the two-time Washington Post first-team All-Met selection summoned the mental fortitude to do so, telling herself to enjoy what was left of her time at the most prestigious event on the women’s golf schedule.
Megan Khang plays for her parents and their sacrifice at U.S. Women's Open
“I just think it shows my determination and the work ethic that I have and the mind-set that I have,” said Davis, the only Black player in the field. “When I was out there [Thursday] I was thinking, ‘I don’t know how I’m going to play tomorrow because I don’t want to go through this again.’ I think being able to sleep on it and come back the next day and post a much better score means a lot to me.”
Davis, 19, was selected to the all-SEC rookie team as a freshman at Tennessee this spring. She collected her only birdie of the tournament in the second round after sinking a 21-foot putt at the par-3 third hole.
Her parents accompanied her throughout the week, including to the amateurs reception Wednesday night where she had time to connect with Ingrid Lindblad, a junior at LSU who fired a 6-under 65 on Thursday for the lowest score by an amateur at a USGA championship. Lindblad followed that up Friday with a 71, leaving her at 6 under and just two shots off the lead, shared by American Mina Harigae and Minjee Lee of Australia.
Lindblad is the second ranked amateur player in the world and directed the Tigers to their first SEC team championship in 30 years. The two-time SEC player of the year has nine career victories, the most in school history.
For Annika Sorenstam, back in the field at U.S. Women's Open, it's family first
“Very impressive,” Davis said. “Ingrid’s a really good player. She knows how to handle the pressure, and she’s proven that time and time again. She’s won a lot of college tournaments, so I’m not surprised by what she’s doing.”
Davis qualified for the U.S. Women’s Open last month at Belle Haven Country Club, shooting 3 under across two rounds in Alexandria for one of two spots. She already is looking ahead to qualifying next year when the tournament moves to Pebble Beach.
She indicated she plans on keeping her schedule light for the immediate future and perhaps coming back to the D.C. area to catch some of the Women’s PGA Championship at the end of the month at Congressional Country Club, which serves as home base for her swing coach John Scott Rattan.
“It’s an unreal experience,” Davis said. “I mean, this is the peak of women’s golf, and to be able to play in it at 19 and get my first few rounds out of the way and try to play again next year, it means a lot. I’m proud to say I competed in it, no matter how I did, and I’m excited to try to come back again.”
Sorenstam, Wie West miss cut
Annika Sorenstam and Michelle Wie West were among the notables who missed the cut, which wound up at 3 over.
Sorenstam, 51 and a 10-time major winner, was playing in the tournament for the first time since 2008 when she announced she would be stepping away from the game. The three-time U.S. Women’s Open champion finished this week at 13-over 155.
Wie West (5-over 147) is doing the same, taking an indefinite leave after this U.S. Women’s Open to devote more time to other projects, including advocating for more representation and inclusion in the women’s game. She won her only major at the 2014 U.S. Women’s Open at nearby Pinehurst.
“I definitely teared up a little bit knowing that it would be one of my last times,” Wie West, 32, said. “It was really cool. Definitely had flashbacks of Pinehurst and just seeing all the same people.” | 2022-06-04T00:26:09Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Amateur Bailey Davis misses cut but raises her game at U.S. Women’s Open - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/06/03/us-womens-open-bailey-davis/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/06/03/us-womens-open-bailey-davis/ |
The governor also canceled funding for a Rays stadium after an anti-gun violence tweet, and threatened to fine the Special Olympics for its covid requirements
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) speaks at Miami's Freedom Tower last month. (Marta Lavandier/AP)
Over the last 24 hours, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis made it harder for transgender people to get Medicaid support, canceled funding for a Tampa Bay Rays practice stadium because of the team’s anti-gun violence tweet and threatened the Special Olympics with a $27.5 million fine over coronavirus vaccine requirements.
“We’ve got a lot of stuff going on in the state of Florida,” DeSantis said at a news conference Friday, highlighting the state’s robust economy, buoyed by high tourism numbers and an infusion of federal covid relief money. “I’s a good place to be.”
But critics say DeSantis (R) is ignoring real issues in the state to wage a war against “wokeness” that mainly appeals to his Republican base. DeSantis is up for reelection in November and is seen by many as possible presidential candidate in 2024.
“It’s a continuation of the DeSantis chaos tour. He doesn’t govern; he performs,” said state Rep. Anna Eskamani, a Democrat from Orlando. “In the process, he dunks on groups of marginalized people as he continues to fuel the culture war flames.”
Eskamani was one of the protesters outside of a ticketed event in Orlando on Thursday night where DeSantis appeared with conservative commentator Dave Rubin. DeSantis, who supports changing Florida gun laws to allow people to carry firearms without a permit, has not commented on mass shooting in Uvalde, Tex., which left 19 children and two teachers dead.
Florida has been the site of some of the nation’s most gruesome mass shootings. In 2016, 49 people were killed by a shooter in Pulse night club, a haven for the city’s gay community. Two years later, a gunman killed 17 people at a high school in Parkland, Fla.
DeSantis said last month that he would sign a “constitutional carry” law if it was presented to him during a special session of the legislature he called, which began May 23. The massacre in Uvalde occurred May 24, and the gun issue did not come up in the Florida legislature.
As DeSantis spoke on Friday, he was flanked by several Special Olympics athletes who had been told they couldn’t compete at the organization’s Florida event this weekend because they hadn’t been fully vaccinated against the coronavirus. The state Department of Health said it was assessing a fine of nearly $30 million against Special Olympics International for 5,500 alleged violations of the anti-vaccine mandate law DeSantis created last year.
The organization initially required all participants to be vaccinated, a violation of Florida law, which bans “vaccine passports” and carries a fine of $5,000 for each person a business or government agency requires to show a proof of vaccination.
The organization canceled the vaccine requirement on Thursday “based on the Florida Department of Health’s interpretation of Florida law,” a spokeswoman said.
The notice of the fine came nine days before the opening ceremonies of the Special Olympics USA Games being held in Orlando on June 5, according to Special Olympics spokeswoman Rebecca Simon. She said the event, which draws 5,000 athletes from all 50 states, Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico and the Caribbean, didn’t see a drop off in registrations because of the vaccine requirement.
Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo appeared alongside DeSantis on Friday and said the vaccine requirement “makes zero sense.” He falsely claimed that vaccines provide “basically zero protection from infection.” (Studies show that vaccines remain highly effective at preventing serious illness and death from the coronavirus.)
“This is a dangerous escalation of his assault on transgender Floridians,” said Brandon Wolf, press secretary for Equality Florida. Wolf described DeSantis’s rhetoric about transgender people as “incredibly dehumanizing,” suggesting it was a “quest to stir up right-wing fervor.”
Wolf, who is a survivor of the Pulse nightclub shooting, also decried DeSantis’s veto of $150,000 for mental health resources for other survivors of the Pulse massacre.
“In a year when they have enough money to go around for all kinds of things, it was such a minuscule amount for those resources that, when he vetoed it, it was hard for that not to feel personal,” Wolf said.
DeSantis is a baseball fan whose youth team went to the Little League World Series. He also played at Yale and on the GOP baseball team when he served in Congress. Last week, his election campaign offered Ron DeSantis “Classic Baseball Cards” for $49.
But the Rays lost state funding for their spring training camp because, DeSantis said, it would not have been a “prudent use” of tax dollars.
“It’s also inappropriate to subsidize political activism of a private corporation,” he said. | 2022-06-04T01:34:58Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and his surgeon gene - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/06/03/desantis-transgender-medicaid/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/06/03/desantis-transgender-medicaid/ |
Richard G. Olson admitted to misdemeanor ethics violations but asks why retired four-star Marine general John G. Allen has not been charged
Richard Olson, U.S. special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, testifies on Capitol Hill on Dec. 16, 2015. (Susan Walsh/AP)
A former U.S. ambassador to Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates pleaded guilty Friday to federal charges in connection with a secret lobbying campaign on behalf of Qatar to influence the Trump White House and Congress in 2017, after implicating a retired four-star American general in the effort.
Richard G. Olson, a 34-year career Foreign Service officer who served as the Obama administration’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan from 2015 until 2016, admitted to lying in ethics paperwork and violating revolving door laws by lobbying for Qatar within a year of retiring from federal service.
In pre-plea proceedings in federal court in Washington, Olson’s defense counsel said he admitted to the misdemeanor charges — each punishable by up to one year in prison at his sentencing Sept. 13 — and cooperated with federal prosecutors on the understanding that they were also investigating and pursuing criminal charges against retired four-star Marine general John G. Allen. The latter commanded U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan before retiring in 2013. He was tapped in late 2017 as president of Washington’s influential Brookings Institution, to which Qatar agreed in 2013 to donate $14.8 million over four years.
The two men are the latest high-level American officials to be enmeshed in a long-running federal investigation into a ferocious — and lucrative — battle for influence in Washington waged between the wealthy Persian Gulf nation of Qatar and its regional rival the United Arab Emirates, as Donald Trump prepared to take office and engage in new rounds of Middle East diplomacy.
Trump ally Thomas Barrack accused of trying to use influence to help United Arab Emirates
In July 2021, billionaire Thomas J. Barrack, Jr., Trump’s longtime friend and presidential inaugural committee chairman, was criminally charged with obstructing justice and acting as an unregistered agent for the UAE; while American businessman Imaad Zuberi, a major political donor to both political parties, was sentenced in February 2020 to 12 years in prison after pleading guilty to tax evasion, foreign-influence peddling and campaign-finance violations.
In plea papers, Olson acknowledged not disclosing as required in annual ethics forms that he had received a first-class airplane ticket from New Mexico to London and a stay in a luxury hotel in January 2015 worth about $20,000 from a Pakistani American businessman who was not identified by the government but whose description matches that of Zuberi.
Olson admitted meeting with a Bahrain businessman, who would offer him a one-year $300,000 contract for work after he left the State Department.
In June 2017, Olson admitted in plea papers, he contacted an unnamed third person — who his defense identified as Allen — to help “provide aid and advice to Qatari government officials with the intent to influence” U.S. policy during a blockade of Qatar by the UAE and its ally, Saudi Arabia. Zuberi, Olson and “Person 3” traveled to Doha, where the latter pair met with various Qatari officials including its emir, then returned to meet in Washington with members of Congress.
In court filings and a hearing May 27, Olson attorney J. Michael Hannon pressed U.S. prosecutors to say why Allen has not been charged.
Exculpatory evidence about Allen could mitigate Olson’s sentence or invalidate his plea agreement, Hannon argued, saying a decision not to charge the general could mean prosecutors improperly “induced” a guilty plea from the diplomat who relied on government representations that he might be recommended leniency at sentencing for his cooperation.
“If in fact there is no case against general John R. Allen [for allegedly violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act], we think that that is a significant piece of information for sentencing, just as we believe that an inducement to enter into this plea agreement is important to the court,” Hannon told U.S. Magistrate Judge G. Michael Harvey, who accepted Olson’s plea.
Prosecutor Evan Turgeon with the Justice Department’s national security division, said in the earlier hearing that any communications between Allen and U.S. government officials about the Qatar trip were not exculpatory for Olson, that Allen’s case remained open and that Olson’s signed plea deal contained no promise by prosecutors to recommend leniency in exchange for cooperation.
“We dispute the statement that the government has made a prosecutorial decision as to other persons,” Turgeon said.
He added, “Nothing related to General Allen has any bearing on the false statement the defendant made on an Office of Government Ethics form in May of 2016, and that was a full year before General Allen’s involvement in activities related to Qatar.”
Beau Phillips, a spokesman for Allen, declined to comment on the status of his investigation, but said in a emailed statement Friday: “John Allen voluntarily cooperated with the government’s investigation into this matter. John Allen’s only efforts with regard to Qatar in 2017 were to protect the interests of the United States and the military personnel stationed in Qatar. John Allen received no fee for his efforts.”
Phillips has previously said Trump’s national security adviser at the time, Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, “approved the [Qatar] trip and offered the assistance of his staff in preparation.”
Olson, who retired in November 2016, was recognized by then-Secretary of State John F. Kerry as “quite simply one of our most distinguished diplomats, a career member of the Senior Foreign Service who has been on the forefront of our work in the Middle East, Africa and most recently in Afghanistan and Pakistan.”
A criminal information charging Olson was filed under seal in federal court March 22, and a plea agreement signed by both sides in January was entered the following day. The case was transferred in April to Washington for a plea and sentencing, when it became public.
In charging papers, the Justice Department said Olson was paid to lobby the Trump administration to help lift the blockade against Qatar — which hosts a key forward operating base of the U.S. military’s Central Command — and mend relations among its Persian Gulf neighbors.
The department has not alleged that Olson or those he worked with violated the Foreign Agents Registration Act, which requires Americans to publicly register with the attorney general when they are paid to influence U.S. policy for foreign governments, political parties or politicians. The once nearly dormant law enacted in 1938 to thwart Nazi propaganda has been invoked since 2017 in more than two dozen federal prosecutions aimed at combating foreign interference in U.S. politics, but criminal prosecutions under it can be difficult as they require proof that violations are made willfully.
The law has been a land mine for Trump allies accused of secretly exploiting their insider access to affect U.S. foreign policy and peddling influence to further their own business interests. Barrack, one of his Trump’s closet associates on his road to the White House, pleaded not guilty last summer and was freed on $250 million bond pending trial on charges of conspiring to secretly lobby for the UAE, which invested significantly in his investment firm, Colony Capital.
In October 2020, Elliott Broidy, a Trump fundraiser and former Republican National Committee deputy finance chairman who also received a $200 million security contract with the UAE, pleaded guilty to acting as an unregistered foreign agent and accepting millions of dollars to secretly lobby the Trump administration for Malaysian and Chinese interests.
And last month, the Justice Department sued hotel and casino magnate Steve Wynn to compel the Republican megadonor and RNC finance chair with Broidy to register as an agent of China. The department argued that Wynn, former chief executive of Wynn Resorts, leveraged his relationship with Trump and members of his administration to advance Beijing’s interests in 2017.
Major RNC, Trump fundraiser Elliott Broidy pleads guilty to acting as unregistered foreign agent
Wynn’s attorneys have said he never acted as agent of the Chinese government and had no obligation to register under the law. Prosecutors alleged Barrack engaged in a two-year effort from April 2016 to April 2018 to advance UAE’s interests through Trump’s campaign and his presidency, trading in on his friendships and access to the president to influence his campaign, U.S. government officials and the media without disclosing his true allegiances.
Zuberi has appealed his sentence. A prolific donor whose major gifts to Trump, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Joe Biden and members of Congress of both parties gave him elite political status, Zuberi has claimed he was a longtime U.S. intelligence source for the U.S. government, a factor his attorneys say may offset his criminal charges, The Wall Street Journal has reported.
Prosecutors called the scope of Zuberi’s scheme unprecedented, in which he solicited foreign nationals and governments to hire him to lobby U.S. officials, arranged illegal campaign contributions and cheated on his taxes. Zuberi lobbied for the Bahraini citizen, as well as the Sri Lanka, Turkey and a Ukrainian oligarch close to Russian President Vladimir Putin, prosecutors said. | 2022-06-04T03:10:44Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Former diplomat Richard G. Olson implicates retired U.S. general John Allen in Qatar lobbying probe - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/06/03/richard-olson-qatar-lobbying-allen/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/06/03/richard-olson-qatar-lobbying-allen/ |
William E. Stoney Jr., NASA engineer during space race, dies at 96
William E. Stoney Jr. in 1951. (NASA)
William E. Stoney Jr., an aeronautical engineer who made important contributions to NASA’s mission during the space race as a developer of early rockets and a lead engineer on the Apollo program, died May 28 at a rehabilitation center in Ashburn, Va. He was 96.
The cause was complications from a fall, said his son Robert Stoney.
Mr. Stoney was in his early 20s, fresh out of MIT following service as an airplane mechanic during World War II, when he joined NASA’s predecessor agency, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, in 1949.
Working at Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va., he joined a group of engineers renowned for their imaginative work on pilotless aircraft and rocket technology.
Mr. Stoney thus was in a key position when the space race began in the 1950s, pitting the two Cold War superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, in a contest to reach what was seen as the final frontier.
A critical moment — and an embarrassing setback for the United States — came in 1957 with the successful Soviet launch of Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite.
“We were disappointed we weren’t the first,” Mr. Stoney reflected years later, “but in another sense it reassured us that we were really on the right track — that, boy, we really could get supported from now on, because this was important that the U.S. continue to try to catch up, and we were part of that game.”
Mr. Stoney became the program manager overseeing the development of the solid-propellant rocket known as Scout. NASA today describes the rocket as “one of the most successful boosters” in the history of the space agency, with payloads producing “critical advancements in atmospheric and space science.”
In the 1960s, as ambitions shifted to manned spaceflight, Mr. Stoney was appointed chief of advanced space vehicle concepts at NASA’s Washington headquarters and led the advanced spacecraft technology division in Houston. He served in top engineering roles during the Apollo program, whose signal accomplishment was the moon landing by astronaut Neil Armstrong in 1969. That year, Mr. Stoney received the NASA Exceptional Service Medal for his work on the Apollo mission.
After he had “rubbed the moon dust” out of his eyes, as he put it, Mr. Stoney became director of NASA’s earth observations programs in 1973, leading the development of satellites for meteorological purposes as well as the monitoring of atmospheric pollution and earth resources.
William Edmund Stoney Jr. was born on Sept. 13, 1925, in Terre Haute, Ind., and grew up in Charleston, S.C., and in Brooklyn. His father was a civil engineer who worked on the Panama Canal, and his mother was a homemaker. Observing her young son’s interest in flight, she once accompanied Mr. Stoney to an airfield where he flew aboard an airplane piloted by pioneering aviator Clarence D. Chamberlin.
After Army Air Forces service in the Pacific during World War II, Mr. Stoney received a bachelor’s degree in aeronautical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1949. He received two master’s degrees, one in aeronautical engineering from the University of Virginia in 1951 and another in industrial management from MIT in 1962.
Mr. Stoney retired from NASA in 1978 and later worked in the private sector, including with the RCA Corp. on advanced robotics and with Noblis, a nonprofit technology company.
Mr. Stoney’s first marriage, to Roberta Beckner, ended in divorce. His second wife, Joy Scafard Stoney, died in 2016 after 51 years of marriage.
Survivors include three stepchildren from his second marriage whom he adopted, Catherine Stoney of Vienna, Va., Jeanne Stoney-Disston of Weston, Conn., and Robert Stoney of Herndon, Va.; a son from his second marriage, John Stoney of Austin; seven grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.
Mr. Stoney had been a member since his 20s of the American Society for Psychical Research and had amassed a collection of more than 1,000 books and other materials on the paranormal and the possibility of life after death. | 2022-06-04T03:28:14Z | www.washingtonpost.com | William E. Stoney Jr., NASA engineer during space race, dies at 96 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/06/03/william-stoney-nasa-apollo-dead/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/06/03/william-stoney-nasa-apollo-dead/ |
Lane Thomas blasts three HRs, single-handedly ending Nats’ offensive funk
Lane Thomas was all smiles after the first three-homer game of his career. (AP Photo/Jeff Dean)
CINCINNATI — Lane Thomas walked down the first base line, watching his seventh-inning blast soar into the second deck in left field at Great American Ball Park, and had to catch his breath. After all, it was his third such trot around the bases Friday night in the Washington Nationals’ 8-5 victory over the Cincinnati Reds.
“I think, at that point, you’re thinking about, are you going to try to hit another one?” Thomas said. “And then I didn’t. But it’s all right. I tried.”
Though Thomas lined out to center in his final at-bat, he became just the seventh National to hit three homers in a game and the first since Kyle Schwarber accomplished the feat June 20 of last season against the Mets. The Nationals went deep five times in total, their bats finally breaking out to end a four-game losing streak in which they were outscored 36-6.
Nelson Cruz (solo shot in the second) and Juan Soto (solo shot in the third) also went deep for the Nationals (19-35). Soto, who entered on a 1-for-15 skid during this trip, finished 1 for 4 and is hitting .223.
The Nationals (19-35) trailed 2-0 after Josiah Gray allowed a first-inning, two-run home run to Tommy Pham. An inning later, the offense finally responded. Cruz was early on a change-up from Reds starter Mike Minor but got just enough of it to cut the Nationals’ deficit to one.
The next inning, after César Hernández’s single scored Victor Robles to tie the game, Thomas turned on a fastball that sneaked just inside the left field foul pole to give the Nationals a 4-2 lead. Soto followed him with a 400-foot line drive with an exit velocity of 110.3 mph.
Thomas primarily starts against left-handed pitchers because he hits them more effectively. But even when Minor was pulled after four innings, Thomas didn’t have any trouble against the right-handed bullpen arms for the Reds (18-33).
His fifth-inning home run was an opposite field shot off a center-cut fastball by Vladimir Gutierrez that bounced off the top of the padding in right-center and into the seats. On his third homer against Jeff Hoffman, he didn’t leave any doubt.
“Needless to say, he’ll be batting second tomorrow,” Martinez joked. “But he deserved that. I told him, ‘Hey, just take your first at-bat and just try to hit the ball hard again.’ ”
The Nationals entered Friday with just 33 home runs in 53 games; that placed them second-to-last in the majors behind only the Detroit Tigers (30).
“It was a good night for the team, too, scoring some runs,” Thomas said. “Glad it was a good night for everybody.”
Did Josiah Gray control his emotions on Friday? There was progress. He was much better than he was May 24 against the Dodgers, the team that traded him to the Nationals, who tagged him for seven runs in three innings. Friday’s matchup was Gray’s first time pitching against the Reds, the team that drafted him in the second round in 2018.
Gray said he struggled with command against the Dodgers because he didn’t harness his emotions. He didn’t make the same mistake against the Reds, even after the first-inning home run to Pham — one that Robles almost robbed — after Luis García made his second throwing error in as many games on the previous pitch.
Manager Dave Martinez has been asking for Gray to throw his breaking pitches more, and those pitches were extremely effective Friday. He allowed only one more hit, striking out six of nine batters on his slider. He threw his slider 40 times, four more than his fastball, and picked up seven whiffs on 17 swings. On his 14 curveballs, he got five whiffs in six swings.
“I felt in control of my body, felt like my pitches were doing exactly what I needed them to do, and I just felt completely confident out there,” Gray said. “Not letting one pitch take away from a whole outing, so I felt really good and felt really confident out there.”
How did Stephen Strasburg pitch in his third rehab start? He was dominant again, allowing just one hit and one walk over six innings while striking out four for Class AAA Rochester. In his last outing with Class A Fredericksburg, Strasburg walked one batter and didn’t allow a hit over five frames.
Martinez said Strasburg will try to get to Cincinnati tomorrow and talk to him about how he feels, but Martinez called it “great news” that Strasburg made it through six innings, a benchmark the team wanted him to reach before he returned to the majors.
Who was added to the team’s roster Friday? Lucius Fox was recalled from Class AAA Rochester to fill in for utility man Dee Strange-Gordon, who was placed on paternity leave Friday morning following the birth of his second child.
Why was Josh Rogers placed on the 15-day injured list? Rogers has a left shoulder impingement, and the team called up Andrés Machado to replace him. With Rogers sidelined, the Nationals have no left-handed relievers on the roster.
This is Machado’s third stint with the Nationals. Most recently, he was called up May 28 as the team’s additional player for the doubleheader against the Colorado Rockies before being sent back down May 31 ahead of Washington’s series against the Mets. | 2022-06-04T03:28:39Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Lane Thomas blasts three HRs, single-handedly ending Nats’ offensive funk - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/06/03/nationals-reds-lane-thomas-three-homers/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/06/03/nationals-reds-lane-thomas-three-homers/ |
CHAPEL HILL, N.C. — Connor Hujsak hit a three-run home run in the top of the first inning and added a solo shot in the seventh to help third-seeded VCU beat No. 2 seed Georgia 8-1 on Friday night at the Chapel Hill Regional, extending the Rams’ win streak to 16 games. | 2022-06-04T03:29:16Z | www.washingtonpost.com | VCU wins 16th straight, beats Georgia 8-1 in regional opener - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/colleges/vcu-wins-16th-straight-beats-georgia-8-1-in-regional-opener/2022/06/03/690bf096-e3b4-11ec-ae64-6b23e5155b62_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/colleges/vcu-wins-16th-straight-beats-georgia-8-1-in-regional-opener/2022/06/03/690bf096-e3b4-11ec-ae64-6b23e5155b62_story.html |
Mystics — short on bench and on the floor— fall at home to lowly Liberty
The Mystics, with their coach in health and safety protocols and their roster not at full strength, were looking for answers in a loss at home to the Liberty. (Jonathan Newton/The Washington Post)
Eric Thibault snickered at the suggestion that his game checks should increase with his extra workload. The Mystics associate head coach moved down a seat Friday against the New York Liberty, stepping in for his father to run the team for the second time in 11 days.
Coach Mike Thibault entered health and safety protocols earlier in the day, along with assistant coach Shelley Patterson. In addition, forward Alysha Clark had just cleared protocols and was out as she regained her conditioning.
Shorthanded and playing a hungry Liberty team, the Mystics faltered down the stretch and fell, 74-70, at Entertainment and Sports Arena. Eric Thibault is 1-1 at the helm this season after Mike missed a game last week due to personal reasons.
The Mystics (7-4) have started nine combinations in 11 games, and there is little reason to expect that to change. Clark will travel with the team to Chicago on Saturday but may not play against the Sky on Sunday. Elena Delle Donne will be in and out of the lineup throughout the season as the team manages her workload after a pair of back surgeries. The plan is for her to play the next three games.
Sparks' Liz Cambage denies using racial slur toward Nigerian players
“It’s been a little tough for us,” Delle Donne said. “What’s been a bit of a struggle is, different nights, different people are in, different coaches are coaching. It’s been just kind of hard to get a flow. Hard to know what we need to get in tough moments.”
The lineup changes have contributed to uneven offensive performances. Against the Liberty (3-7), the Mystics committed nine first-quarter turnovers and shot just 23.8 percent from beyond the arc for the game. Aside from Natasha Cloud (17 points), Delle Donne (15 points, eight rebounds), and Ariel Atkins (15 points), the rest of the team accounted for just 10 field goals.
“We just are still, early-season, trying to find that balance of calling plays or just playing with some freedom,” Eric Thibault said. “Learning our teammates and not having the ball just get stuck when stuff breaks down.”
Despite their offensive struggles, the game was tight throughout, and the Mystics had a final possession with 4.7 seconds remaining and trailing by just two. Taking the ball out on the baseline, the play was called for Delle Donne, but the Liberty plugged that up. The ball ended up in the hands of Myisha Hines-Allen, whose jumper was short. Rebecca Allen grabbed the rebound and made two free throws to seal it for New York, which closed on a 9-2 run.
Things to know about Friday’s game:
The Mystics and Liberty both wore orange T-shirts during warmups in honor of the victims of recent mass shootings. The teams gathered in a circle at midcourt before the game to have a moment of silence.
Much of the crowd wore orange, as did Mystics arena staff, and informational segments were shown on the video boards throughout the game.
New-look Liberty
New York won its second straight after a 1-7 start, not exactly the opening run new coach Sandy Brondello hoped for. Brondello adjusted to a bigger lineup, and the change is just starting to take hold.
“I suppose it’s not going as fast as we want it to, and mostly because of injuries,” Brondello said. “We had really disruptive training camp, and not many players in it. So now it’s about just having time, getting healthy players back. Building more chemistry with the players that we have. … Just making sure we’re limiting our unforced stuff. ...
“Yes, we’ve had some ups and downs, We’ve just got to get consistent. And that’s our goal. … And we don’t have a deep bench. We’ve got a lot of young kids there, so we’ll keep developing them.”
Liberty guard Sabrina Ionescu came into the league as the No. 1 overall pick in 2020 and one of the most heralded collegians in history. She leads the NCAA all-time in triple-doubles and is the only player — in either the men’s or women’s game — with 2,000 points, 1,000 assists and 1,000 rebounds. An ankle injury limited her to three games as a rookie, and she averaged 11.7 points, 5.7 rebounds and 6.1 assists while playing through injury last season.
Against the Mystics, Ionescu dominated the third quarter and finished with 24 points. Natasha Howard added 17 points and Rebecca Allen scored 11.
“It’s nice to finally be healthy,” Ionescu said. “It’s been kind of a breath of fresh air just to be able to work on my game, trust my body, know that I’m healthy. So, it’s been really nice and, obviously, still a lot of room for improvement and growth, and that’s kind of the fun part the process is knowing that I’m going to keep getting better and doing what I can to help [this team].”
Brondello said fans should be patient as Ionescu continues to adjust to life in the WNBA and looks at this season as her sophomore year. She said people should look at the maturation of Kelsey Plum as a similar example. | 2022-06-04T04:02:57Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Mystics — short on bench and on the floor— fall at home to lowly Liberty - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/06/03/mystics-liberty-wear-orange/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/06/03/mystics-liberty-wear-orange/ |
Ask Amy: I don’t want to be friends anymore, so I’m ghosting her
I quickly realized how unstable she is. She goes through cycles of sleeping with new people and posting them all over social media. Then the relationship ends, and she starts up with someone new.
Almost every weekend now, Mary asks me to go out drinking. I never message her first. I’ve been making up excuses, because I don’t feel comfortable telling her that I find her actions problematic.
Last weekend, I finally left her text as having been “read,” but I haven’t answered. I recently got a text from her telling me she misses me. I’m scared to tell her that I don’t want to be her friend.
No Chaos: If you are genuinely afraid of “Mary’s” reaction to any statement from you, then, yes, I would suggest a continued light ghosting. She will text you, you will read her texts, but you won’t respond unless you feel the need to answer a question. (For instance, if she asks you to meet her at a bar at a certain time, you should respond: “Sorry, I can’t make it. Hope you have a good time.”)
It was a nice and cordial visit, except I think she called me a liar without so much as saying those words.
Then she said: “Well, if you didn’t do it, I wonder who did? I know that ‘Susan’ didn’t do it.” (That’s her daughter, who visited the previous month.)
I let the subject drop, but then started thinking: Did she accuse me of lying?
Am I making too much of this? I don’t want to bring this up with my husband (her son), but it is certainly bothering me.
Mixed-up: You may have heard of the “non-denial denial,” brought into popular culture during the Watergate era. This refers to denying an accusation without actually or specifically denying it: (“That doesn’t sound like something I would do.”)
Of course this bothers you! And, yes, you should do your best to drop it.
— Mary Birnbaum
Mary: This question continues to receive a robust (zestful?) response.
This speaks to the importance that we all attach not only to food and nutrition, but also to notions of hospitality and generosity. | 2022-06-04T04:59:31Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Ask Amy: I don’t want to be friends anymore, so I’m ghosting her - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/06/04/ask-amy-friend-problematic-actions/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/06/04/ask-amy-friend-problematic-actions/ |
Carolyn Hax: Cancer patient wants others to grasp this might be the end
Carolyn Hax is away. The following is from March 2, 2008.
Dear Carolyn: I was recently diagnosed with an aggressive cancer and have been dutifully if miserably going through treatment. The prognosis? Who knows. The whole “every day is a gift” thing has somewhat cruelly — and somewhat wonderfully — become a daily, waking thought.
How do I get the people in my life to confess out loud that this could, and in all likelihood will, kill me? Everyone around me is insistent on being optimistic and denying the truth that this disease kills people every day, and I could be one of them. I try to talk to them about what will happen to my things, and what their plans are when and if I die of this, just as if I were hit by a bus, but they stick their heads in the sand and refuse to have the conversation with me.
Carolyn, I could die of this. I will die someday. These are both factual statements. So why will no one discuss it with me?
— V.
V.: I am sorry. I am sorry about the cancer and the miserable treatments and, in the spirit of your question, I am even more sorry that your well-meaning but cowardly intimates have left you no choice but to suffer alone.
Your question is, why? And my answer is, I don't know. I can guess, though: You live in a society that can't get enough of fictional death, but prefers the real thing to be pat, antiseptic and (this is key) offstage. The difference may be as simple as the ability to click “off” when the emotions start feeling too real. They might even think their forced optimism is a favor to you.
You probably can't call people cowards as easily as I can — you want openness about your impending demise, after all, not enthusiasm. However, I do think you want to use almost that level of bluntness to get your point across.
As your “somewhat wonderfully” observation suggests, you have clarity, urgency and courage on your side here. Gather these up, then recruit two more allies: specificity and selectivity. Narrow down exactly what you need, zero in on the person who represents your best shot at a straight answer, then ask.
For example: “I will need someone to distribute my things. Will you please help me?”
And when you get the oh-it-won't-come-to-that answer: “Yes, it will, and you will die someday, too, and I feel better talking about it than avoiding it. Will you please help me?”
And when heads start hitting the sand: “Can you explain why you won't help me?”
Clearly this is pressing someone well beyond the point where, under normal conditions, I advise backing off; you can't “get” anyone to confess, or even pretend, anything.
But these aren’t normal conditions, and your needs warrant extreme measures to flush loved ones out of hiding — as a favor to them, I could argue. Target the overlap between people you trust, and people who have said to you, “If there’s anything I can do … Collect on these offers, and tell people you’re doing it.
Ideally, it wouldn’t come to this, I know. Ideally, people wouldn’t try to escape life’s inescapable fact. But, ideally, you wouldn’t be sick. I am so sorry you are. Be with people as you have been with cancer: unflinchingly matter-of-fact. | 2022-06-04T04:59:37Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Carolyn Hax: Cancer patient wants others to get this might be the end - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/06/04/carolyn-hax-cancer-patient-death/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/06/04/carolyn-hax-cancer-patient-death/ |
Miss Manners: I think my brother’s baby registry is outrageous
My brother and sister-in-law have created a baby registry ahead of their shower, and it is, in our opinion, outrageous with a capital O. Along with big-ticket items costing several hundred dollars, there are also specific children’s book titles, loads of stuff no child would need at any age, and what I call “grocery store items,” such as petroleum jelly and plastic bags.
My mother is super embarrassed about having her friends and relatives who will be invited to the shower see this registry.
Conversations with the parents-to-be go nowhere, especially because we feel we should tread lightly in the first place. The expectant parents think it is reasonable and don’t understand how it could be offensive.
Is there a way to curtail any judgment on the part of our friends and relatives who will see this registry? I suggested to my mom that she tell her friends/family in advance that it is coming and it is ridiculous, and that she finds great shame in it.
Well, then they get first dibs on the plastic bags … would be your sister-in-law’s (still very rude) justification.
After the first gift, I sent a thank-you note, and, when my friend’s birthday arrived, I sent a long letter and some pictures, hoping she would take the hint that I would prefer not to exchange gifts. As senior citizens, we both thankfully have all that we need and more.
You do not have to reciprocate in kind, especially if the culmination of this journey will result in matching sports cars. Miss Manners suggests, instead, that you continue sending cards and letters. Eventually your friend will get tired of the one-sided expenditures. | 2022-06-04T04:59:43Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Miss Manners: I think my brother’s baby registry is outrageous - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/06/04/miss-manners-brother-baby-registry/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/06/04/miss-manners-brother-baby-registry/ |
WASHINGTON — Former Trump White House official Peter Navarro has been indicted on charges that he refused to cooperate with a congressional investigation into the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, but the Justice Department spared two other advisers, including the ex-president’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, from criminal prosecution. | 2022-06-04T04:59:55Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Ex-Trump aide Navarro indicted; Meadows won't be charged - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/ex-trump-aide-navarro-indicted-meadows-wont-be-charged/2022/06/04/71fde5de-e3bd-11ec-ae64-6b23e5155b62_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/ex-trump-aide-navarro-indicted-meadows-wont-be-charged/2022/06/04/71fde5de-e3bd-11ec-ae64-6b23e5155b62_story.html |
What to watch this weekend: ‘Fear the Walking Dead’ season 7 finale on AMC on Sunday
Saturday, June 4 & Sunday, June 5, 2022 I “Party at the Palace” is a concert special on ABC on Saturday, featuring performers including Elton John, in honor of Queen Elizabeth II.
Transplant (NBC at 8) Bash worries about two patients in different countries; Bishop’s newly set expectations for his department aren’t well received.
Would I Lie to You? (CW at 8:30) Guests include Brooke Shields, Sal Vulcano, Amber Ruffin and Ayad Akhtar.
48 Hours (CBS at 9) Two new investigations featuring a diary that implicated a Kennedy relative in the bludgeoning death of his neighbor, and a former ballerina and model who allegedly killed her husband.
Party at the Palace (ABC at 8) A concert performance honoring Queen Elizabeth II featuring performances from Elton John, Diana Ross and Rod Stewart.
Buried in Barstow (Lifetime at 8) A single mother is trying to live a peaceful life but her past as a contract killer comes back to haunt her.
Hidden Gems (Hallmark at 8) On the heels of her sister’s wedding, a woman loses her grandmother’s ring in the Hawaiian seas and hires a scuba diver, which leads to more than just the retrieval of jewelry.
The Real Housewives of Atlanta (Bravo at 8) Kandi is feted for her Broadway play; Drew’s new business seems fishy to the other ladies; Sheree and Tyrone’s long-distance relationship is on the rocks.
The First Lady (Showtime at 9) Eleanor sways Franklin to accept Jewish refugees; Betty seeks new friends at home; Michelle speaks out on race.
Barry (HBO at 10) Did Barry survive his apparent poisoning?
Fear the Walking Dead (AMC at 9) Madison (Kim Dickens, pictured) and Morgan find allies who present more problems than solutions in the Season 7 finale of the zombie thriller.
MTV Movie & TV Awards 2022 (MTV at 8) Vanessa Hudgens will host and Jack Black will be presented a lifetime Comedic Genius award.
Jurassic Park to Jurassic World: The Greatest Moments (NBC at 10) The cast of the upcoming “Jurassic World Dominion,” which includes current and past favorites, chat about their favorite memories of the saga.
Watergate: Blueprint for a Scandal (CNN at 9) The first two episodes air of the four-part series (the final two come next Sunday) chronicling the 50th anniversary of Watergate.
Deadly Yoga Retreat (Lifetime at 8) A woman in a crumbling marriage sets off to Hawaii on an exclusive yoga retreat, but it turns out the host has brought people there as prey in a twisted game.
Battle on the Beach (HGTV at 9) Season 2.
Beachfront Bargain Hunt (HGTV at 10:30) Season 29.
The Great Food Truck Race (Food Network at 9) Season 15. | 2022-06-04T06:09:09Z | www.washingtonpost.com | What to watch this weekend: ‘Fear the Walking Dead’ season 7 finale on AMC on Sunday - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/tv/2022/06/04/what-watch-this-weekend-fear-walking-dead-season-7-finale-amc-sunday/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/tv/2022/06/04/what-watch-this-weekend-fear-walking-dead-season-7-finale-amc-sunday/ |
FILE - A boarding team inspects the Merchant Vessel Royal Diamond 7, in international waters, 150 kilometers north of the Libyan city of Derna, on Sept. 10, 2020, as the European Union maritime force enforced the U.N. arms embargo on Libya. The U.N. Security Council approved a resolution Friday, June 4, 2022, extending the authorization for countries and regional organizations to inspect vessels on the high seas off the coast of Libya suspected of violating the U.N. arms embargo on the troubled north African nation. (EUNAVFOR Med Irini/Italian Defense Ministry via AP, File) (Uncredited/EUNAVFOR MED IRINI, ITALIAN DEFENSE MINISTRY) | 2022-06-04T06:31:37Z | www.washingtonpost.com | UN extends searches on high seas off Libya for illegal arms - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/un-extends-searches-on-high-seas-off-libya-for-illegal-arms/2022/06/04/9656d756-e3cc-11ec-ae64-6b23e5155b62_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/un-extends-searches-on-high-seas-off-libya-for-illegal-arms/2022/06/04/9656d756-e3cc-11ec-ae64-6b23e5155b62_story.html |
Russia-Ukraine war live updates Ukraine claws back part of Severodonetsk, but Putin shows no sign of slowing
Updates from key battlefields: Cities destroyed ‘beyond comprehension’ in 100 days of war
Putin blames Western sanctions for world food problems
A resident of Lysychansk, an eastern city near Severodonetsk, walks past his neighbor's burning house. (Serhii Nuzhnenko/Reuters)
Ukraine has managed to reclaim about 20 percent of the city of Severodonetsk, its last major foothold in Luhansk, the province’s governor Serhiy Haidai said late Friday. Britain forecast earlier in the day that the entire region, which is mostly controlled by Russia, could fall within two weeks. But Haidai struck a bullish note and called that timeline “completely unrealistic,” even as Moscow reportedly rushes more troops to the key eastern city.
As Russian President Vladimir Putin’s unsparing invasion grinds past the 100-day mark, calls for a negotiated settlement are growing. United Nations Secretary General António Guterres reiterated the need for an immediate cease-fire, urging both sides to resolve the conflict via diplomacy. President Biden acknowledged that a deal was possibly needed, but told reporters that only Kyiv could decide on whether it wants to cede territory to Moscow in exchange for an end to the war.
Talks to alleviate the global food crisis stemming from the war are continuing. Belarus, a close ally of Russia, said it is open to letting Ukrainian agricultural products be shipped to Western ports via Belarusian rail in return for an easing of sanctions on its exports. African Union Chair Macky Sall said after a Friday meeting with Putin that sanctions on Russian wheat and fertilizer should be lifted, as the specter of famine hangs over developing countries. Russia continues to blame the West for the hunger crisis.
Putin believes he can outlast the West and Ukraine in any standoff and intends to deploy economic weapons, such as the blockade of Ukraine’s Black Sea ports, to pressure his opponents.
The European Union has sanctioned Russian Col. Azatbek Asanbekovich, who it accuses of leading the massacre in the Kyiv suburb of Bucha.
Two Reuters journalists were injured and their driver killed after their vehicle came under attack on part of a road in Luhansk controlled by Russia.
After 100 days of brutal clashes, the scale of destruction inflicted on Ukraine’s cities is “beyond comprehension,” the International Committee of the Red Cross said Friday. British defense officials say Russian forces are likely to control all of the heavily contested Luhansk region in the next two weeks, but they warned that success will come at a significant cost to Moscow.
Severodonetsk: Gov. Serhiy Haidai of the Luhansk region, which encompasses this strategic city, said Friday that fighting continues in the center of Severodonetsk and in the surrounding villages. While Russian forces captured some 70 percent of this Ukrainian holdout earlier in the week, Kyiv has managed to regain control over 20 percent of the city, he told local media.
Elsewhere in Luhansk: Two Reuters journalists were injured and a driver was killed after an attack on their vehicle when they were traveling between Severodonetsk and the town of Rubizhne on a part of the road controlled by Russian forces. Reuters could not immediately determine the identity of the driver, who was provided by Russian-backed separatists. The journalists suffered minor injuries.
Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions: The Ukrainian military continues to conduct counteroffensives in the southern region of Kherson and has successfully prevented Russian troops from regaining ground in its northeast, according to the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War (ISW).
Occupying forces in Kherson and Zaporizhzhia have also reportedly started distributing Russian passports to local residents, according to the ISW, as Moscow seeks to exert its influence over the seized territory. This week, the Moscow-installed administration in Zaporizhzhia signed a decree to “nationalize” property owned by the Ukrainian government. Land, natural resources and parts of the economy will be seized, though it is not clear whether the administration has the power to enforce the policy.
Ellen Francis and Zina Pozen contributed to this report.
By Catherine Belton2:01 a.m.
Putin “believes the West will become exhausted,” said one well-connected Russian billionaire, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. Putin had not expected the West’s initially strong and united response, “but now he is trying to reshape the situation, and he believes that in the longer term, he will win,” the billionaire said. Western leaders are vulnerable to election cycles, and “he believes public opinion can flip in one day.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday blamed an emerging food crisis on sanctions by Western countries for the invasion of Ukraine.
Putin said on an appearance on Russian TV that “we are now seeing attempts to shift the responsibility for what is happening on the world food market, the emerging problems in this market, onto Russia,” according to the Associated Press, which described the comments as Putin’s most extensive comments on the food crisis.
Putin balked at allegations that Russia is halting grain shipments from Ukraine, calling it “bluster” and an excuse for the West to blame Russia for its problems.
As The Washington Post previously reported, Russia’s navy effectively controls all traffic in the northern third of the Black Sea, according to U.S. intelligence assessments, with Western officials accusing Moscow of using food as a form of blackmail. Ukraine is the world’s largest exporter of sunflower oil, as well as a major exporter of corn and wheat. | 2022-06-04T06:32:25Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Latest Russia-Ukraine war news: Live updates - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/06/04/russia-ukraine-war-putin-news-live-updates/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/06/04/russia-ukraine-war-putin-news-live-updates/ |
PHILADELPHIA — The Philadelphia Phillies fired manager Joe Girardi on Friday after the team’s terrible start.
BUFFALO, N.Y. — Quarterback Ryan Fitzpatrick is retiring, he confirmed to The Associated Press in a text message on Friday, ending a career that spanned 17 seasons and nine teams and made him one of the NFL’s most colorful and beloved journeymen.
PARIS —Rafael Nadal advanced to the French Open final Friday after Alexander Zverev fell during a point, injured his right ankle and stopped playing. | 2022-06-04T08:02:37Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Friday Sports in Brief - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/friday-sports-in-brief/2022/06/04/32112902-e3d3-11ec-ae64-6b23e5155b62_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/friday-sports-in-brief/2022/06/04/32112902-e3d3-11ec-ae64-6b23e5155b62_story.html |
By Theodora Yu
A Goddess of Democracy statue in Hong Kong's Victoria Park on June 4, 2010. (Kin Cheung/AP)
HONG KONG — A group of university students in Hong Kong have found an unusual and creative way to mark the 33rd anniversary of the June 4, 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown, as the city moves to stifle commemoration of the massacre.
Over the past week, 3D printed palm-sized figurines of the Goddess of Democracy — a symbol of the 1989 Beijing protests — have been placed around the Chinese University of Hong Kong’s campus. The organizers of the Finding Goddess of Democracy campaign invited CUHK students to look for the miniatures to remember victims of the massacre, many of whom were students.
CUHK hosted a large version of the statue, though it was removed in December, shortly after authorities tore down the 26-foot-tall “Pillar of Shame” sculpture at the University of Hong Kong that is also dedicated to victims of the crackdown. Hong Kong University cited legal concerns and safety risks, as the city’s government accelerates its campaign to erase one of the darkest days in recent Chinese history from public recollection.
Hong Kong tears down ‘Pillar of Shame’ sculpture honoring Tiananmen victims
“The Goddess of Democracy statue has witnessed our campus life that was once carefree and free from worries,” wrote the campaign’s organizers, who posted photos on Instagram with hints to where the figurines were hidden. They did not provide their identities due to fear of retribution from the Hong Kong government.
“Even though we are now unable to safeguard the statue, we still hope to pass this memory on,” they wrote.
Chen Weiming, the U.S.-based sculptor who created the statue that was removed last year, wrote to the students saying he fully supports the movement, the organizers said.
But in 2020, Beijing imposed a harsh national security law after months of youth-led protests that paralyzed much of Hong Kong’s city center. The legislation eliminated much public dissent in Hong Kong and opposition figures have fled into exile or are imprisoned; a once vibrant civil society now censors itself. The Victoria Park candlelight vigil has been banned since 2020, ostensibly due to the coronavirus pandemic.
And the city’s Catholic diocese said in late May that it would no longer hold memorial Mass to pray for victims of the massacre, eliminating the last organized memorial on Chinese territory.
At a news conference Thursday, police warned residents not to test Hong Kong law. They said that people risked being arrested for unauthorized assembly if they went to Victoria Park “for a common purpose to express certain views.”
The government has temporarily shut parts of Victoria Park since late Friday. It said it had spotted “messages on the Internet to incite others” to join unauthorized assemblies there on Saturday. | 2022-06-04T08:03:02Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Hong Kong students remember Tiananmen by hiding democracy goddess figurines - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/06/04/hong-kong-tiananmen-protests-democracy/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/06/04/hong-kong-tiananmen-protests-democracy/ |
Baseball’s universal DH is two months old. Here are four things we’ve learned.
Bryce Harper has been one of the top designated hitters in baseball. (Hakim Wright Sr.)
So two months into the season, how is the new rule working? Not surprisingly, the National League’s designated hitters have outperformed pitchers at the plate, but lineups are still lagging behind their historical peers by a wide margin, resulting in the NL’s lowest combined on-base-plus-slugging rate since 2014. Small-ball elements of the game, such as bunts and pinch hitters, are declining and on a path to extinction. Bryce Harper is showing how the new rule can help keep injured offensive stars in the lineup, while the San Diego Padres are flailing to fill the role with quality at-bats.
There is still plenty of time in this season for the dynamics to shift, and it remains to be seen whether NL roster construction will change with a full offseason to adapt. Still, here are some early takeaways after two months with the universal designated hitter as a permanent part of the sport.
Offensive numbers didn’t shoot up
Designated hitters in the NL, as a group, were batting .241 with a .320 on-base percentage and .402 slugging percentage through June 1. Perhaps surprisingly, that’s better than their counterparts in the American League, which has had the designated hitter rule since 1973. Designated hitters in the AL were batting .228 with a .305 on-base percentage and .381 slugging percentage through June 1, giving them an inferior overall OPS (.686).
Pitchers, by comparison, batted .108 with a .285 OPS last season. But while the universal DH clearly brought offensive improvement to one lineup slot, it perhaps didn’t have the sweeping impact many expected. The collective OPS in the NL has actually declined this season. Why? Batted balls aren’t traveling as far when solid contact is made this season — the ball is traveling four fewer feet than last year even off barrels — and more pitches out of the zone are drawing swings. There have also been fewer four-seam fastballs thrown this season and more sinkers and change-ups, which has reduced the effectiveness of hitters across the board.
These three teams have gotten the most production out of their DHs
The Philadelphia Phillies, by often using a two-time MVP as their DH, are getting the most from the position. Harper, thrust into the role because of an elbow injury that has prevented him from playing the field, was hitting .336 with 10 home runs, 32 RBI and a .940 OPS through June 1. Overall, Philadelphia’s designated hitters are creating runs at a rate 56 percent higher than the MLB average after adjusting for league and park effects. Only the Boston Red Sox are getting better production from their designated hitters this season.
The Miami Marlins and Pittsburgh Pirates are tied for second-most NL run creation from the DH slot; the designated hitters for both teams are creating runs at a rate 17 percent higher than the major league average.
The Padres are struggling with their designated hitters
The San Diego Padres, on the other hand, are seeing their designated hitters bat .177 with a .531 OPS this season, making them by far the laggards of the NL and the worst collection of designated hitters in the majors. They are also producing runs at a rate 41 percent lower than the MLB average after adjusting for league and park effects. That’s no small issue for a team with serious postseason aspirations.
The number of bunt attempts and pinch hitters has declined significantly
Despite the relatively lackluster performances by designated hitters, bunts and pinch hitters have all but vanished. In 1974, bunts accounted for a little more than 2 percent of all at-bats. This year — as in 2020, a pandemic-shortened season in which the universal DH rule was also used — the rate of bunts is down to less than 1 percent. Pinch hitters, meanwhile, took anywhere from 1.1 and 1.3 at-bats per game in every season since 1974 — except 2020 and 2022. In those years with the universal designated hitter, pinch hitters accounted for less than one at-bat per game. | 2022-06-04T09:29:20Z | www.washingtonpost.com | How the DH has changed the National League - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/06/04/national-league-dh-results/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/06/04/national-league-dh-results/ |
Hailey Haymond/The Washington Post illustration; Britta Pedersen/Getty Images
Earl and Lindsey Banning love, love, love their Tesla, a common sentiment among the Teslarati. Owners don’t tend to idle in neutral.
“I find him deeply problematic,” says Lindsey, 46, a clinical psychologist. “He is an attention-seeking person.” Musk’s tweets, which seem to have revved into overdrive since he announced a $44 billion hostile takeover bid of Twitter in April, make her “uncomfortable and anxious.” If Musk succeeds in acquiring the social media platform, she says, “it’s going to be a less-safe space — not that it is now. Potentially, it’s going to get worse.”
Earl, also 46, an Air Force major and neuropsychologist who has been retweeted by Musk, is more accepting. “I see him as human, as a genius with flaws,” says Earl. “He’s lacking some empathy. He’s definitely chewed up some relationships along the way.”
Tesla owners purchase the cars, and frequently the stock, because they care about the environment and adore the way they drive and look. But much of their passion has been complicated by Musk’s behavior and public musings.
Musk’s tweets and other commentary are so frequent and so absent a filter that to some of his nearly 96 million followers — though many may be bots — he has lost all ability to shock. Generating puerile and sexist tweets, offending the trans and nonbinary, deploying grossly inaccurate statements about the coronavirus. Trolling Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal with a poop emoji. Oh, and in 2018 engaging in securities fraud, resulting in Musk and Tesla each paying $20 million in penalties.
In the world of Tesla owners, Musk can be a constant source of conversation, in a way that few CEOs are. After all, how many can most of us name? “Elon Musk lives rent free in my husband’s head. All. The. Time,” says Colleen Shattuck, 66, a retired physician assistant and Tesla owner in Montana, of her husband, Paul, a retired mining engineer.
The argument that with every great genius comes greats flaws surfaces frequently. “Let Elon be Elon” his admirers say, uniformly addressing him by his first name. Genius has its privileges. Look, he gave us snazzy electric cars — provided you can afford the sticker price and tolerate delayed gratification, in some regions a delivery wait of more than six months. Last spring on “Saturday Night Live,” Musk announced that he has Asperger’s syndrome, part of the autism spectrum, which gained him sympathy among some followers while it was knocked by others as “self-serving and hollow” for implying that it explains his behavior.
“My experience is that geniuses are always messy,” says Sara Thorne, 63, an Episcopal deacon from D.C. and a Tesla X owner. “They may do society a lot of good. At the same time, they can cause a lot of problems.” To Thorne, Musk’s logorrheic commentary is beside the point: “I don’t have the bandwidth or the interest to pay attention. I don’t have to play in the sandbox with him.”
Still, she adds, “I would pray for the people who work for him because it can’t be easy.”
To many, Musk is akin to a fictional character, one who lives on Twitter. It’s as though he’s cosplaying at being the world’s richest dude, worth around $218.1 billion, depending on the day. Tesla drivers compare him to a wacky uncle, Albert Einstein, an undisciplined adolescent (albeit one who’s 50), Donald Trump, one of Reader’s Digest’s Most Unforgettable Characters, even George Constanza.
“I chose to view Elon Musk as this separate character aside from Tesla, a blessing and a curse,” says Andy Slye, 32, who works in information technology in Louisville and runs a tech YouTube channel with more than 270,000 subscribers. That said, “I’ve always admired how he can be himself, super-weird and super-polarizing.”
Robert Rosenbloom, 60, a Los Angeles emergency room physician and a co-host of the “Talking Tesla” podcast, views Musk’s social media salvos as a window into how the superior mind works. Imagine if Einstein or Edison had mused on Twitter? “We might see much of the same conversation,” Rosenbloom says. “If we put a filter on them, we would be back in the Stone Age. We wouldn’t have anyone putting their neck out. It’s a good thing we have geniuses that push the limits.”
There are his shifting politics. Some owners dislike Musk’s pronouncements in May that Democrats are the party of “division and hate,” he will vote Republican and, if successful in acquiring Twitter, he will reverse Donald Trump’s ban from Twitter, which he called a “morally bad decision, to be clear, and foolish in the extreme.” Two-thirds of electric and hybrid vehicle owners identified as or leaned Democratic, according to a 2021 Pew Research Center survey. What CEO offends the vast majority of his potential consumer base?
Shattuck describes herself as “a recovering Republican,” the recovering due to Trump. She has been taken aback by Musk’s “outrageous, misogynist comments. Again, it’s that complete lack of filter. Does no one call him aside and say, ‘This is not appropriate in this day and age’?” To her, allowing Trump’s return to the social media platform would be a tweet too far: “I understand freedom of speech but you can’t let lies go unchecked. You can’t cry ‘fire’ in a crowded building.”
Ben Sullins, a data-science educator and electric vehicle YouTube reviewer, calls Teslas “basically the best cars on the planet. They changed the entire industry.” He is wholly disappointed in Musk.
“Twitter has not been his friend,” says Sullins, 40, of San Diego. “You’re not just any other man. You’re a leader of a movement, of just cases. I believe wholeheartedly in the mission. I see him making bad choices, being controversial.” The company, Sullins says, “doesn’t need him anymore. Go. Please leave Tesla alone. This company is too important for him to screw it up.”
Sean Mitchell, 41, a real estate broker in Denver and president of the local Tesla club, says, “I often feel conflicted about him.” Letting “Elon be Elon” doesn’t always triumph: “From my perspective, he’s his own worst enemy. There are things he can create awareness and goodness around. But using social media to disparage Democrats? I think that probably does more harm than good.”
Musk can creep into a marriage, like the Bannings. “It’s part of my intermittent discomfort of owning a Tesla," says Lindsey, the clinical psychologist. Her values don’t align with his professed ones.
"Given Elon’s position and his level of power, I think that comes with responsibility,” which he’s abrogated with his comments, she says.
But Earl, the neuropsychologist and Air Force major, says, “Elon is super-successful. He’s incredibly rich and famous. Like, who would handle that well?”
There are times when Lindsey tells Earl, “I think you have a blind spot when it comes to Elon.”
To which Earl says, “I do have a bit of a blind spot when it comes to Elon.” | 2022-06-04T09:33:42Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Tesla owners love their cars. Elon Musk? Not as much. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/06/04/tesla-elon-musk-twitter/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/06/04/tesla-elon-musk-twitter/ |
Metro board eyes more hands-on, stricter oversight after crises
Board members are expecting Metro staff members to share more detailed and timely information about major issues
Metro Board Chairman Paul C. Smedberg attends a meeting at Metro's headquarters in Washington. (Astrid Riecken for The Washington Post)
As Metro stumbled from one crisis to another in recent weeks while commuter disruptions persisted, the chairman of the transit agency’s board publicly defended its oversight.
But since the revelation last month that half of train operators lack adequate certifications, the release of a report citing a “culture of noncompliance” and the resignation of Metro’s top two executives, the board has increased its scrutiny of the nation’s third-largest transit system. It has instructed Metro leaders to provide more timely and thorough information aimed at helping board members head off trouble before it emerges.
Metro Board Chairman Paul C. Smedberg said Metro and its board have a collaborative working relationship, but he acknowledged Friday that Metro is undergoing a transition due to the “moment” the agency is in. The changes come at a time of intense pressure on the agency to boost service and restore public confidence — moves that Metro leaders say will bring more pandemic-era ridership amid a looming budget crunch.
“We’ve changed a lot and there’s more coming,” Smedberg on Wednesday told a Maryland House subcommittee in Annapolis, where he was asked to testify about oversight. “We’re going to be looking at the way we do our meetings and the types of information we get — but [also] when we get it.”
Metro’s recurring problems raise questions about oversight, management
Metro spokeswoman Kristie Swink Benson said in an email that interim general manager Andy Off’s approach since taking the reins of the agency is “to bring everyone along, which includes providing updates to the chairman and board.” Randy Clarke, the chief executive of the Austin-based Capital Metropolitan Transportation Authority, will begin his role as Metro general manager this summer.
Former board members say part of the reason Metro’s board is briefed on a limited number of issues stems from the complexity involved in operating the rail system, which can require technical understanding of engineering concepts. But in less than a year, Metro has been cited for multiple safety failures that have severely affected transit service.
In many cases, the issues have also come to the Metro board’s attention at the last minute.
Tom Bulger served on Metro’s board for 11 years until December, when he stepped down because of a rule change that reduced the role of nonvoting members. During his time, he said, board members were typically briefed on issues of immediate concern or those that involved action, such as budget issues.
But Bulger said he believes Metro leadership kept board members in the dark so that they wouldn’t change the way employees have operated for years.
“My personal opinion is the less the board knows, the more management can do whatever the hell they want,” Bulger said.
He said he never heard of a defect that led to the suspension of all 748 of Metro’s 7000-series cars — a move that has created a seven-month train shortage — despite some Metro employees having enough knowledge to begin warranty discussions with the cars’ manufacturer.
“For the life of me, I could never understand how they couldn’t tell the board that they were having a problem with X, Y and Z,” Bulger said. “Like the trucks on the new cars. They never told us that, ‘Oh, we think it’s this or that, or the warranty issue.’ They never told us any of it. So you’re just in the dark most of the time.”
David L. Mayer, chief executive of the Washington Metrorail Safety Commission — the rail system’s regulatory agency — told Maryland legislators this month that Metro’s cultural problems are deep-rooted. The commission said in a 2020 audit that Metro managers have not only overlooked workers who disregarded safety protocols, but in some cases have instructed them to do so.
“It’s not an engineering kind of thing,” Mayer said. “It’s a people and culture kind of thing. It’s a procedures kind of thing.”
Top Metro leaders step down one day after agency announces training lapses
Metrorail ridership is hovering at about 40 percent of pre-pandemic levels. The transit agency has survived steep fare revenue losses during the pandemic with the help of billions of dollars in coronavirus relief aid that will begin to run out in summer 2023. Metro officials would probably need to make budget cuts at that time without a substantial increase in ridership or new revenue sources.
Metro’s recent misfortunes began when a Blue Line train derailed last October, resulting in a federal investigation and suspension of about 60 percent of Metro’s rail cars. The derailment was caused by a defect in the wheels and axles of the 7000 series, a discovery that led the safety commission to require Metro to come up with a way to operate them safely.
Federal investigators discovered some Metro employees had known for years about the defect, which forces wheels to migrate outward. Routine or emergency inspections revealed almost 50 cases since 2017, but the malfunction hadn’t been reported to the safety commission, as required, until last year’s derailment. Metro’s board also wasn’t told of the defect, board members have said.
Last month, Metro revealed that 250 train operators — about half of all its conductors — had not completed required recertification training and testing because Metro officials lost track of a waiver program created during the pandemic, then stopped the training program because of the train shortage. In that case, Metro Chief Safety Officer Theresa M. Impastato told board members as soon as she learned of the problem, Smedberg said.
The lapses resulted in Metro pulling 72 train operators from service for retraining, a move that created additional rail delays. At that point, elected officials became more critical of the transit agency’s leadership, with D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) saying Metro had a “management problem.” The lapses led to the resignations of then-General Manager Paul J. Wiedefeld and Chief Operations Officer Joseph Leader.
A day after their resignations, the safety commission issued a May 17 order that restricts how Metro controls power on its track. The safety commission found that Metro wasn’t following guidelines that help to prevent electrocutions and other worker incidents. The findings were the latest in a recurring problem the commission has brought up so often that Metro created a “power desk” in its rail operations control center to ensure safety protocols are followed.
Employees staffing the desk were still found to be deviating from those guidelines, according to the order. Smedberg told Maryland legislators he couldn’t remember being told of issues with power restoration, until recently.
“I can’t honestly recall,” he told the subcommittee. “I would have to check.”
After safety lapses, Metro board says agency is getting back on track
Smedberg said the board can only act and influence issues if its members know what’s going on — a responsibility he said falls on Metro’s directors.
“Communication is a two-way street,” Smedberg said in Annapolis. “And we cannot take any action or insist on any action unless we are getting the information that we need and that the staff — and the executive staff in particular — is communicating properly with the board, so we know the types of questions to ask and the types of things we need to do.”
Bulger said board members should be more involved in making decisions. He said many work in transit or transportation-related jobs outside of their board roles and have an understanding and connections that could help Metro solve problems.
Smedberg also noted the board’s experience. He cited members who have worked with the Federal Aviation Administration and the Federal Transit Administration as well as others who are transportation consultants.
“The group we have now,” he told Maryland House members, “is engaged.” | 2022-06-04T10:21:34Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Metro board eyes more hands-on, stricter oversight after crises - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2022/06/04/metro-leadership-train-shortage/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2022/06/04/metro-leadership-train-shortage/ |
Inflation persists but layoffs are at record lows, and households and businesses are still spending
An employee operates a high speed inspection machine to inspect ECG components at Marion Manufacturing in Cheshire, Conn. (Marion Manufacturing)
If there is a recession brewing in the United States, it would be news to Doug Johnson.
The president of Marion Manufacturing Co. in Cheshire, Conn., Johnson is enjoying some of the best times in his company’s 76-year history. Sure, he’s heard the negative chatter about rising prices, sinking stocks and mounting risks from trouble overseas. And he’s seen the polls showing that most Americans think the economy is headed for a tumble.
But as Johnson looks out over his 30,000-square-foot operation, all he sees are busy workers racing to keep up with new orders for a variety of vital steel and copper components, including those used in electrocardiograms and cable television hookups. His biggest problem is finding enough labor to handle all the metal-bending work that is coming his way.
“There’s so much pent-up demand, and everybody I talk to — our suppliers and our customers — says the same,” he said. “We’re up 40 percent over last year and climbing. This month, we were up 100 percent over last year. It’s incredible.”
Why Biden hasn't killed Trump's tariffs and made imports cheaper
Johnson’s upbeat view stands in stark contrast to more prominent figures’ deepening gloom. On Wednesday, Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JPMorganChase, warned that “a hurricane” is bearing down on the U.S. economy.
Tesla chief Elon Musk and Lawrence Summers, a former treasury secretary, also have warned of a looming recession. In a Quinnipiac University poll last month, 85 percent of Americans agreed a downturn was either “very” or “somewhat likely” in the next year.
Yet Marion Manufacturing’s good fortune — echoed by continued strength in consumer spending and signals from Wall Street — suggests that such dire assessments may be wrong. On Friday, the Labor Department said the economy gained 390,000 jobs in May, beating analysts’ expectations, while the unemployment rate remained at 3.6 percent.
“I’m not sure what’s driving all the talk of recession,” said Johnson. “There’s a lot of negativity out there that’s not well founded.”
The Federal Reserve’s recent change of course on monetary policy is the biggest source of recession fears. After repeatedly assuring investors last year that inflation would prove “transitory,” Fed Chair Jerome H. Powell this year has steered the central bank on a path of interest rate hikes designed to slow the economy and ease pressure on consumer prices.
The Fed’s about-face already has been bad news for financial markets. Lifting interest rates from near zero caused investors to rethink their portfolios, sending stocks plummeting and cementing the notion that something about the economy has gone seriously awry.
But recent indicators suggest that the two-year-old expansion — while slowing from an unsustainable pace of annual growth near 7 percent late last year — shows little sign of slipping into reverse. The labor market is churning out “help wanted” signs faster than employers can add workers. Consumers and businesses are flush with cash. And by some measures, the bond market appears less worried about inflation than do many pundits.
“After a rocket-like rebound from the pandemic, there has to be some moderation in growth,” said Ian Shepherdson, chief economist for Pantheon Macroeconomics. “But there’s an important distinction between moderation and recession.”
Economists describe recessions as a widespread decline in activity affecting output, income, industrial production and retail sales. The term is generally understood to involve two consecutive quarters with falling gross domestic product, although there is no official definition.
Despite Americans’ sour mood, economists surveyed by Bloomberg in May expect the economy to expand at an annual rate of 2.7 percent this year. That’s down from the 3.3 percent forecast in April, but far from a recession.
In April, layoffs hit their lowest level since the Labor Department began keeping track in 1999. The economy has added an average of 408,000 jobs in each of the past three months. And first-time jobless claims, though up from their all-time low in March, are running at roughly half their average over the past 50 years.
Continued economic strength is a double-edged sword. It means more people who want work will probably find it. But it raises the chances that the Fed, which already has raised rates twice and signaled plans for two additional half-point increases, might overdo it and trigger a recession.
Summers, a Democrat who has been critical of the Fed, told a Washington Post Live event this week that rates need to rise faster and higher than the central bank plans. Inflation won’t be brought under control without “higher unemployment,” he said.
Dean Baker, senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, said the Fed’s initial rate increases are working. Financial markets’ response to the Fed’s actions are further tightening financial conditions and may reduce the need for additional rate hikes.
“I’m ordinarily not the big optimist,” Baker said. “But things are generally going the right way. I don’t see the basis for a recession.”
Even before the Fed began increasing rates in March, financial conditions were growing tighter. First, banks started charging more for mortgages. On Thursday, the rate for a conventional 30-year home loan was 5.39 percent, up more than two percentage points since January, according to Bankrate.
Then, stocks stumbled. The technology-rich Nasdaq index this year is down more than 20 percent, which may help slow the economy as chastened investors retrench on spending.
At least for now, investors also seem to be siding with the Fed over Summers. Wall Street expects annual inflation of 2.76 percent over the next 10 years, down from more than 3 percent in late April, according to one popular market gauge derived from the yields on 10-year U.S. Treasury securities.
That’s a signal that investors believe the Fed will quell inflation before expectations of future price increases harden into a self-fulfilling prophecy. The central bank’s preferred inflation measure, the core personal consumption expenditures price index, also has declined for two straight months.
“The path may be narrow. But we believe the Fed still can thread that needle to a soft landing,” said Michael Pond, Barclays’ global head of inflation-linked research.
Americans are less sanguine. The University of Michigan’s monthly consumer confidence reading for May sits at an 11-year low.
War in Ukraine spreading fallout to vulnerable countries like Tunisia
It’s not difficult to see why consumers are unhappy. The retail price of gasoline appears headed for $5 per gallon. Persistent supply chain headaches have left shoppers facing a rotating series of product shortages, including for critical items such as baby formula. And even where wages are rising, they aren’t keeping pace with prices.
The economy also faces an unusually complex mix of risks.
The war in Ukraine drove up the price of key global commodities, including wheat and oil, and increased the chances of recession in Europe. Meanwhile, China’s inflexible zero-covid policy has triggered repeat lockdowns that disrupted factories in the world’s top export nation and left global supply chains shrouded in uncertainty.
These geopolitical forces are immune to higher interest rates, which could leave the Fed in an awkward spot if inflation remains elevated even after a significant increase in borrowing costs.
Further shocks from the European war or snarled Asian production networks also could drag the United States into a slump.
But, even as surveys show that consumers and executives are worried about recession, they are spending as if they expect good times to last. In late May, Macy’s raised its profits forecast after reporting that net income in its most recent quarter had nearly tripled compared with the same period last year.
Though Americans have begun dipping into their savings to support their spending, they still have more than $2 trillion in reserve. That should put a floor under growth, economists said.
“Fears of declining economic activity this year will prove overblown unless new negative shocks materialize,” Goldman Sachs economists concluded in a May 30 client note.
At DHL’s North American supply chain unit, CEO Scott Sureddin said he detects no sign of a downturn. The company has been adding new warehouses and working around the tight labor market by filling them with autonomous forklifts and smaller, package-grabbing robots. This year, it will spend hundreds of millions of dollars on such efforts.
“We’re still seeing good growth. We’re still making major investments in technology,” he said. “There’s nothing slowing down that’s having us stop investing.”
Indeed, the financial imbalances that often precede a recession are absent. On the eve of the 2008 Great Recession, for example, consumers were struggling to pay their bills, devoting the largest share of their income in history to their monthly loan and credit card charges. Today, Americans’ debt service payments consume just 9.3 percent of disposable income, near a 41-year low, according to the Federal Reserve.
Corporate debt burdens also are remarkably light. Two decades ago, interest payments ate up almost 25 percent of nonfinancial businesses’ cash flow, according to Moody’s. Today, the figure is less than 10 percent.
At Marion Manufacturing, Johnson this year is spending several hundred thousand dollars on new factory equipment to turn stainless steel and beryllium copper into a variety of industrial parts. He sees no reason to reconsider those plans.
“Our business as a whole has never been as robust as it is now,” Johnson said. “We’re pretty bullish.” | 2022-06-04T11:05:05Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Economic recession fears could be overblown - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/06/04/recession-fears-strong-economy/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/06/04/recession-fears-strong-economy/ |
Michelle Braxton holds her daughter, Dior Braxton, 4, when picking her up during the early dismissal at Franklin Square Elementary/Middle School in Baltimore, Md., due to lack of air conditioning in the school building and high temperatures, on May 31, 2022. (Vincent Alban/The Baltimore Sun/AP)
A study by the Government Accountability Office found that about 41 percent of public school districts in the United States need to update or replace the heating, cooling and ventilation systems in at least half of their schools. That represents about 36,000 schools nationwide.
The GAO pointed to a Michigan school district where 60 percent of schools lack air conditioning and extreme heat has forced the district to change its schedule. It also cited a Maryland district that botched its air conditioning retrofit in some schools, causing moisture and condensation problems that officials estimate could cost $1 million per building to correct.
Heat inhibits learning. In a study published in the journal Nature Human Behavior in 2020, researchers found that students scored worse on standardized exams for every additional day of 80-degree or higher temperatures. The study also found that in the United States, being exposed to higher temperatures mainly impaired the learning of Black and Latino students, who are less likely to have air conditioning at school and at home.
Experts say the problem is only becoming worse. The past seven years have, in succession, been the seven hottest years on record. Last summer was tied for the hottest on record with the Dust Bowl year of 1936.
The suffering is especially acute in cities, which are often significantly warmer than suburbs because of how the built environment amplifies heat — and because racist policies pushed developers to concentrate highways and industry in neighborhoods where people of color lived. Poor and minority neighborhoods that lack trees but have an abundance of pavement, parking lots, large buildings and other heat-absorbing surfaces bear the brunt.
Many cities have seen a rising number of days when the temperature hit 90 degrees or higher in May and June, when schools are operating, according to a Washington Post analysis. Philadelphia averaged four such days in 1970; now the figure is eight. In Baltimore, it went from six to 10; in Denver, from six to 11; and in Cleveland, from one to four. Portland, Ore., now averages three days over 90, up from one in 1970.
A decade ago, school districts canceled schools for heat an average of three or four days per year, according to research by Paul Chinowsky, a professor of civil engineering at the University of Colorado who led a study last year of schools and rising temperatures for the firm Resilient Analytics, which consults for governments and NGOs. That figure has about doubled, to six or seven days annually.
Chinowsky’s study also estimated that by 2025, more than 13,700 schools will need to install air conditioning, and an additional 13,500 will need to upgrade existing systems. Nationally, that amounts to about 1 in 4 public schools.
“You’re looking at hundreds of millions of dollars for these school districts to upgrade all their schools," Chinowsky said.
Teachers push back
In New York and New Jersey, teachers unions are pushing for state laws to address what they say are intolerable classroom temperatures. A bill that’s been floating around Albany for several years would require schools that hit 82 degrees to take steps to relieve extreme heat, and a classroom that reached 88 degrees couldn’t be used. In New Jersey, lawmakers have been trying for a decade to pass a bill requiring districts to maintain comfortable classroom temperatures.
“It is an investment we simply cannot afford to put off any longer,” said Steven Baker, a spokesman for the New Jersey Education Association. “Go into any 7-Eleven in New Jersey, and you’ll see that it is air-conditioned. If we can do that in the places that we run into for five minutes to buy Slurpees and lottery tickets, we can do it in the schools where our children spend hours every day learning.”
In New Jersey, rising temperatures also have made it increasingly difficult for school districts to keep students in classrooms for the 180 days that state law requires, said Elisabeth Ginsburg, the executive director of the Garden State Coalition of Schools, an advocacy group representing about 100 districts in the state.
She said most districts plan for several days of weather-related cancellations each year. But by the time May and June roll around, districts that have already used their bad-weather days are under pressure to keep students in school despite unseasonably high temperatures. Education advocates who argue for extending the school year run the risk of exposing students to even hotter weather.
City officials also are frustrated. On Tuesday, when Philadelphia schools closed early because of heat, city council member Helen Gym vented her frustration on Twitter.
“Teaching in these conditions is untenable. Learning in these conditions is unbearable. We can’t allow whether or not your school is equipped for AC to dictate the quality of your education,” she wrote.
And in D.C., city council member Robert C. White Jr., a candidate for mayor, voiced concern about the heat’s impact on schools. “[P]arents and teachers are sending us SOS tweets about hot classrooms & broken HVAC systems,” he tweeted Wednesday. “It is unacceptable that our students, teachers & administrators are dealing with this.”
Melting paints
If it’s steamy outside of Erica Weisfelner’s classroom in Farmingdale, N.Y., it’s a safe bet that it’s at least 80 degrees inside her cinder-block walls. The elementary school art teacher’s un-air-conditioned room on Long Island is swampy this time of year. Sheets of paper stick together. Oil pastels turn to mush in her student’s hands. The Wikki Stix projects made of yarn and wax melt together.
“I have 500 students who pass through my room each week, and when it is uncomfortable in here, it’s like trying to stop wet noodles from sticking to the wall,” she said.
On suffocating days, it’s “lights off, free draw,” she said. It’s not her first choice, but it’s the only option when it’s over 90 degrees inside and heat is turning the tempera paints strange colors.
“This is a problem for the whole Northeast,” she said. “We’re now starting to get hot and muggy days even in late April.”
In Oxnard, Calif., voters approved a $350 million bond measure in 2018 for the main purpose of installing air conditioning in every high school. It would not have been necessary a decade ago in this coastal district, said Oxnard Union High School District Superintendent Tom McCoy.
“We’re only a mile from the ocean,” he said.
Now, McCoy said, the district monitors daily air-temperature data and dismisses students early during heat waves.
Katherine Holden, 44, grew up in Ashland, Ore., and can’t remember ever feeling like she was baking in school. Now she’s the principal of a middle school, and it’s increasingly hot for the half of her campus that lacks air conditioning.
“There’s days when teachers will literally say it’s too hot to do anything productive,” she said. The sun beats into southern-facing classrooms, she said, and “heats them up like little sun rooms.”
In New Jersey, schools without air conditioning in classrooms are offering students water and rotating them through air-conditioned libraries and auditoriums for relief.
Before the pandemic encouraged social distancing, it was common for teachers to combine classes, packing dozens of students into the coolest rooms. Closing schools or dismissing halfway through the day is a last resort, but it’s becoming more common, said Ginsburg, of the Garden State Coalition of Schools.
“There has to be the will to improve these facilities,” she said. “The more that climate change advances, perhaps the will may be there.”
Valerie Wilson, the business administrator for Newark’s public schools, said there’s little public understanding of the high costs and logistical obstacles that districts such as hers would have to overcome to air-condition all their schools. Most of Newark’s 63 school buildings were built in the 19th century, she said, and the majority of classrooms are not air-conditioned. The oldest school, Lafayette Street School, predates Abraham Lincoln’s presidency.
The expectation that every student will have a laptop and every teacher an interactive whiteboard has already strained these schools’ electrical capacity, Wilson said. Simply rewiring century-old buildings to accommodate air-conditioning units would cost millions of dollars, she said.
Under New Jersey’s system, Newark’s board of education cannot ask voters to approve a construction bond to pay for air conditioning. It is wholly dependent on the state for capital funding.
The federal covid relief funding for schools is one source being used for HVAC upgrades in many districts and could total $40 billion nationally, according to AASA, the School Superintendents Association. About half the districts and charter schools sampled by Burbio, a data firm, planned to spend some of that money on heating, cooling and ventilation.
In White Plains, N.Y., Cayne Letizia, a member of the school board, recalls parents coming to him five years ago concerned about the heat and demanding the district add air conditioning. Their concern: It was hot and, with climate change, set to get hotter. Some offered to pay or raise money for window units, he said.
It wasn’t that simple. Schools needed to have their electrical capacity upgraded to handle the additional load. At first, the district had funding only to cool select portions of its buildings. Now, using a combination of federal, state and local dollars, the district is preparing to install air conditioning throughout its schools, Letizia said.
The district needed voter approval to use capital funds for the project, he said, and older voters would often note that they never had air conditioning when they were in school. Why was it needed now? Officials had to explain that it is getting hotter. | 2022-06-04T11:05:11Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Climate change is forcing schools to close early for ‘heat days’ - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/06/04/school-heat-days-climate-change/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/06/04/school-heat-days-climate-change/ |
Adult iguanas are fierce, but juveniles are falling prey to nonnative feral cats
A critically endangered Anegada rock iguana, Cyclura pinguis, at the Houston Zoo. The species lives on Anegada, which is part of the British Virgin Islands. (Joel Sartore)
ANEGADA, British Virgin Islands — Michael Young stands on a low bluff near a salt pond, gestures toward a snarl of head-high shrubs and says, “You can be certain there are some iguanas near here.”
“This is paradise for them,” says Young, who works on iguana conservation for the National Parks Trust of the Virgin Islands.
Aboard a chartered catamaran in the British Virgin Islands: The more the merrier
For millions of years, the iguanas — up to five-feet-long and 15 pounds — were the largest vertebrates on this landscape. Though the adults are fierce, the iguanas have been brought to their scaly knees by improbable predators — feral cats that prey on juveniles.
The iguanas are especially vulnerable when they emerge from eggs buried in sandy nests. Kelly Bradley, a conservation biologist with the Fort Worth Zoo who has been working with these iguanas since 2001, estimates that as many as half of the juveniles are eaten in their first week by native snakes and birds — Puerto Rican racers and American kestrels.
Video: Endangered iguana Gus gets a workout
Near the bluff, Young beats a few yards into the thorny brush, scanning the ground. He soon finds a horseshoe-shaped scrape in the sandy soil. It doesn’t look like much, but it’s an old nest, where an iguana laid its eggs in a recent year.
Each summer, he and Bradley painstakingly search for new nests excavated by the iguanas — tunnels leading to deep chambers where they lay their eggs. It can take days to find even one nest.
When they find a nest, they place large steel hoops to trap the emerging hatchlings, more than 40 in a good year. They bring them to a “head-start” facility, cages where they are raised for several years until they are large enough to defend themselves against cats. Then they are released back into the wild.
Limits of human intervention
The program has released 274 iguanas. Bradley has radio-tracked dozens and more than 80 percent survived the first two years after release. But as long as cats remain abundant on Anegada, Bradley says the iguanas will be a “conservation-dependent species” — one whose survival is predicated upon human intervention. Recent events show the limits of such intervention.
How climate change is reshaping the world
In 2017, Hurricane Irma hammered Anegada just before the trapping season. The team captured no juveniles that year. Then, while the island was still recovering from the hurricane, the British Virgin Islands was locked down during the pandemic. Both events have limited Bradley’s fieldwork in recent years, and she and Young have gathered fewer iguanas.
Tandora Grant, a conservation program specialist with San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance and an officer with the Iguana Specialist Group, says when most people think of iguanas, they think only of the green iguana, Iguana iguana. Its abundance obscures the scarcity of its cousins. As a family, Grant says, iguanas are among the world’s most endangered animals.
“There are 45 different species of iguanas,” Grant says, “and only one is the pest species that has been transported all over the place.”
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An unlikely wildlife haven on controversial Guantanamo Bay
“We have to keep doing that until all the threats are really and truly mitigated, that’s why they are conservation dependent,” Grant says. “If we could get the money together, and the political will, to eliminate all cats on Anegada, we could go home.”
“Head starting is not a solution, it’s just a Band-Aid,” Bradley says. “We’ve doubled the population on Anegada, and that sounds great, but it’s not enough. The cause of the decline hasn’t been removed or addressed.”
The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) still considers Anegada rock iguanas critically endangered and includes them on its “red list” of threatened species.
Cassander Titley-O’Neal, director of the National Parks Trust of the Virgin Islands, says an ongoing spaying and neutering project aims to limit Anegada’s cat population. She does not envision a more ambitious cat-control program for now, but says conserving the iguanas is a long-term priority for the agency.
“The conservation status by IUCN says it all,” Titley-O’Neal said. “They are critically endangered and need to be protected for generations to come.” | 2022-06-04T11:05:35Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Endangered Anegada rock iguanas are being eaten like popcorn by cats - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2022/06/04/anegada-rock-iguanas-endangered-cats/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2022/06/04/anegada-rock-iguanas-endangered-cats/ |
In this photo released by an official website of the office of the Iranian supreme leader, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei speaks on the anniversary of the death of the late founder of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, shown in the poster at top center, at his mausoleum in Tehran, Iran, Saturday, June 4, 2022. Khamenei acknowledged Saturday that Iran took the oil from two Greek tankers last month in helicopter-launched raids in the Persian Gulf. (Office of the Iranian Supreme Leader via AP) (Uncredited/Office of the Iranian Supreme Leader) | 2022-06-04T11:05:41Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Supreme Leader acknowledges Iran took oil from Greek tankers - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/supreme-leader-acknowledges-iran-took-oil-from-greek-tankers/2022/06/04/7f424b66-e3ec-11ec-ae64-6b23e5155b62_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/supreme-leader-acknowledges-iran-took-oil-from-greek-tankers/2022/06/04/7f424b66-e3ec-11ec-ae64-6b23e5155b62_story.html |
Live updates Iga Swiatek, Coco Gauff face off in the French Open women’s final
Coco Gauff will take on Iga Swiatek in the French Open women's final. (Anne-Christine Poujoulat/AFP/Getty Images)
The No. 1 player in the world, Iga Swiatek, will take on Coco Gauff in the French Open women’s final on Saturday. Swiatek, 21, is on a 34-match unbeaten streak and the 18-year-old Gauff is playing in her first Grand Slam final. Follow along for live updates.
In recently minted world No. 1 Iga Swiatek, women’s tennis may well have found the champion of staying power it has lacked since Serena Williams claimed her 23rd major in 2017.
Since February, the 20 year-old Swiatek has been the game’s most dominant player, as sure-footed on hard courts as she is on her beloved clay, claiming five consecutive titles in Doha, Indian Wells, Miami, Stuttgart and Rome.
Swiatek (pronounced SCHVON-tek) burst to prominence by winning the 2020 French Open as an unseeded teen without conceding a set, toppling then No. 1 Simona Halep en route. She is also an avid reader (currently consumed with Yuval Noah Harari’s “21 Lessons for the 21st Century”); owner of a cat named Grappa; a fan of AC/DC, Pink Floyd and nearly all classic rock; a dabbler on the ukulele, a gift from the sports psychologist who travels with her; and a curious young woman who believes the richness of life lies beyond the bounds of a tennis court.
But it’s what Swiatek has achieved on court of late that has made her the prohibitive favorite to win this year’s French Open.
PARIS — When Coco Gauff was a child, her father told her, “You can change the world with your racket.”
Now 18 and a recent high school graduate, Gauff took a major step in her rise to the elite ranks of tennis Thursday at Roland Garros by advancing to her first Grand Slam final with a 6-3, 6-1 victory over Martina Trevisan of Italy at the French Open.
Afterward, as is custom among victors as they walk off court, Gauff autographed the TV camera lens, writing “Peace” and “End Gun Violence” and signing “Coco” alongside a drawing of a heart.
Asked about her statement during the news conference that followed, Gauff recalled her father’s words years ago.
“He didn't mean [change the world] by just playing tennis,” Gauff said. “He meant speaking out on issues like this.”
Gauff, who has been tapped for greatness since she won the French Open’s girls’ championship at 14, has reached the final here without conceding a set through six matches.
Her reward is a meeting with world No. 1 Iga Swiatek of Poland, the 2020 French Open champion, who clinched her spot in the final with a 6-2, 6-1 rout of Daria Kasatkina earlier in the day. | 2022-06-04T12:14:43Z | www.washingtonpost.com | French Open women's final live updates - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/06/04/french-open-womens-final/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/06/04/french-open-womens-final/ |
After two years of covid restrictions, D.C.-area students head to prom
Students dance during Charles H. Flowers High School’s prom at The Hotel at the University of Maryland in College Park, Md., on May 28. (Eric Lee for The Washington Post)
Dayana Henderson smiled as she posed in her prom dress for nearly a dozen family members. The senior at Charles Herbert Flowers High School in Springdale, Md., flexed her muscles for one of the photos, as her family cheered her on.
“Yeah, flex the muscles!” one family member called out.
For Henderson, 18, and her family, her senior prom in late May was the last celebration before she left for college. She will be the first in her family to continue on to higher education, and she was an honor student at Flowers High. Senior prom was the “pinnacle," said her mother, Kelly McBride.
“She legit broke every generational curse,” McBride, 35, said. “This is like the perfect reward before she goes off to college.”
Across the D.C. region, many high school seniors were able to go to a school dance for the first time in roughly two years, after school systems prohibited mass gatherings to curb the spread of the coronavirus. Prince George’s County Public Schools — which includes Flowers High School and has been the most stringent system in Maryland with coronavirus protocols — lifted restrictions and let schools host prom events again this year.
School leaders, parents and volunteers flew into action. At Flowers, Nakisha Mebane — a teacher and the high school’s 12th-grade sponsor — had to come up with funds for a $10,000 deposit on a location. With fundraising frozen for the past two years, getting the money was tough, she said. Other schools were faster to put down deposits and were beating her in securing locations.
Eventually, Mebane was able to secure a room for roughly 600 people in February at The Hotel at the University of Maryland.
The venue saw two proms scheduled this year, compared with zero the year before, according to Adriana Niepa, director of sales and marketing at the hotel. The venue expects more next year when schools have more time to plan for such events and county health guidelines are less restrictive.
After the venue came the next step of logistics — coordinating decorations. The school’s go-to decoration company wasn’t doing prom decorations this year. Mebane had to improvise and find decor that would fit the prom’s theme: Hollywood. She and school volunteers got to work planning and decorating the venue themselves.
She found a 360 camera to capture panoramic photos of the celebrating students and set up a life-size cutout of an Academy Award in the corner.
Imani Brown, 17, and Mariah Mullins, 17 — both juniors at Flowers — blew up balloons hours before the event. Hotel staffers vacuumed around the room and set out the placards for the garlic green beans, baked salmon and Caesar salad the high schoolers would eat later that night.
It was the duo’s first dance during their high school tenure. Early in the pandemic, they didn’t get to see much of friends, except for the occasional drive-by birthday party. Prom at Flowers is usually reserved for seniors, but because the two were working the event as volunteers through their roles on the student government association, they were able to attend.
“At Flowers, we’re known for our prom looks, so I can’t wait to see what we come out with this year,” Brown said, adding that many of the students treated the event like the Met Gala. She referenced her brother’s prom in 2017 — years before the coronavirus shut down schools and sent students home to learn — when most of the students matched their attire with their cars.
The high school tradition that had been taken from students by a pandemic was back, and the new normal of covid-19 precautions were, too.
Outside the doorway to the ballroom, volunteers set up goody bags and a coronavirus testing site. Students had to submit proof of a negative coronavirus test to attend the event, but for the few who didn’t file in time, the school provided rapid antigen test kits at a table near the front doors. A failed test meant students were turned away.
Flowers Principal Gorman Brown said the last event many of the 2022 graduating class attended before the pandemic began was their sophomore year homecoming. Many of the students had to adjust at the beginning of the school year to seeing peers they hadn’t seen in person since they were 15 years old.
“With the experience they had, it’s wonderful to see that they still get to do this,” Brown said. "They’ll get a chance to celebrate entering adulthood, graduating and getting able to have this lifelong memory that so many of us have.”
Flowers was one of the last schools in Prince George’s County Public Schools — Maryland’s second-largest school system — to host their prom. Other school systems, like Montgomery County Public Schools, hosted their events earlier in May. Many D.C. schools have their proms scheduled through May and June.
In Upper Marlboro, Md., Michael Patterson, 17, bought a corsage online for his date the day before he was set to go to prom. His mother, Jackey Jackson, made sure the two made it to cleaners before 5 p.m. to pick up his pants and also talked him through swabbing his nose for his mandated coronavirus test.
“This year was really exciting, because we weren’t even sure if they were going to have a graduation,” Jackson said. “They made the decision that we could have the traditional graduation back at Show Place Arena, and then acknowledged that we could have a prom. The news started coming in slowly but surely.”
For Patterson, a a senior at Frederick Douglass High School, the minute he placed the order for his date’s corsage, the moment set in. “Oh, wow, I have a date to prom."
“For the longest time, my mom was way more excited than me,” Patterson said. “But I think now, I’m definitely caught up with her in the excitement.”
Back at the Flower’s prom, students arrived roughly an hour before to take photos and pose in front their families. One student was escorted by a motorbike motorcade into the building’s front loop. Others showed up in limos, drove or were dropped off by their parents.
Administrators checked that students paid their $100 ticket fee and tested negative for the coronavirus as they walked into the room. Students mingled as they complimented each other’s outfits. As one couple walked up from the escalator, administrators called out: “Get that dress!” He quickly picked up the back of her dress so that the train wouldn’t drag along the escalators steps.
It wasn’t until “Act Up” by the City Girls came on that students flooded the ballroom floor to dance.
“It was boring at first; the music wasn’t hype enough,” Melina Esparza, 17, said as she walked off the dance floor.
As students mingled and danced, Mebane passed out a QR code for students to vote for prom king and queen.
Malachi Travers, 17, and MacKenzie Hooks Harris, 18, had been campaigning for weeks on social media for their peers to award them with the crown.
As the music paused, Brown, the principal, stood atop the ballroom’s stage and called out, “Are y’all ready for the announcement of your prom king and queen?” and the group of hundreds of students cheered. It was the moment many of them had been waiting around for. More students flooded back into the ballroom with their phones recording in their hands.
Brown first called out Travers’s name, and the students cheered even louder. The 17-year-old walked up to the stage to put on his crowd.
Hooks Harris waited at the edge of the dance floor to see if her name would be called. A group of her friends circled around her, filming so they could capture her reaction. When Brown called out her name, she froze before walking to the stage and dabbing with Travers. She said afterward that the moment “felt surreal.”
“After the school year, and two years of not being around each other, I feel like this fills up for it," Hooks Harris said. "This definitely feels like a family celebration.” | 2022-06-04T12:32:08Z | www.washingtonpost.com | D.C. area schools revive prom after years of covid restrictions prevented them - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/06/04/dc-prince-georges-prom-covid/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/06/04/dc-prince-georges-prom-covid/ |
Do Swedes truly not feed their young guests? Maybe once upon a time.
Many people pride themselves on the generosity of their families toward guests, particularly when it comes to food. And so a conversation about whether, in fact, young guests in Swedish households would expect to be fed by their hosts roiled social media this week.
What came to be dubbed #Swedengate started with an innocent callout on a Reddit board. “What is the weirdest thing you had to do at someone else’s house because of their culture/religion?” one user prompted.
Since that post eight days ago, more than 16,000 people have responded, many offering tales of removing shoes or saying an unfamiliar grace. But one comment got particularly noticed. “I remember going to my swedish friends house,” a commenter recalled. “And while we were playing in his room, his mom yelled that dinner was ready. And check this. He told me to WAIT in his room while they ate.”
Others chimed in with similar stories, or secondhand ones, about guests denied food at Swedish homes. The discussion soon moved to Twitter, where Swedish pop star Zara Larson seemed to confirm the little-known practice.“ Peak Swedish culture <3 :’-)” she wrote. She later clarified that it usually only happened to kids.
Much of the reaction centered around people’s horror — rooted in their own family’s tendency to do the opposite — with many ascribing that impulse to a larger culture they identify with. “From the Southern US … the concept of not aggressively feeding a guest is literally unthinkable,” wrote one Reddit commenter. “Mexican person here, my family would illegally go back to Mexico before letting guests go hungry,” another chimed in.
The pile-on, and the attendant generalizations about his culture, frustrated Lars-Erik Tindre, the public diplomacy counselor at the Swedish Embassy in Washington. He says the practice wasn’t universal and doesn’t exist among modern Swedish families, including his own. “I believe that it has some truth to it, but what people miss in these comments is that this happened in the ’70s and ’80s,” says Tindre, 47. “I have children, and we have other kids over for meals all the time.”
He and his friends growing up had heard of families that didn’t offer food to their young guests, but it wasn’t something he ever experienced, he says.
Richard Tellström, a food historian and associate professor of meal science at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, says it wouldn’t have been uncommon for a child up until the 1990s to not be fed at a friend’s home, and remembers instances of it from his own childhood. Tellström, 62, says the practice had nothing to do with being cruel or inhospitable — it was a reflection of how Swedes viewed families. “Eating was something that you did at home,” he says. “You didn’t feed other people’s children — that would have been considered a sort of intrusion in another family’s life, with the subtext of ‘You can’t feed your children properly, so I will feed them.’”
Tindre said he wasn’t sure of the origins, but he speculated that it might have something to do with his sense that Swedish families are often more likely to gather regularly with their immediate families, rather than extended ones. Tellström echoed that, explaining that because of consolidating farmlands beginning in the late 1700s and urbanization, families often lived apart from their relatives. And so the communal dining with aunts and uncles and cousins isn’t as frequent in Sweden as it is in many southern European countries. “We just don’t do that up north,” Tellström says.
Plenty of Swedish people might never have experienced being denied food at a friend’s house, making the online debate around it murky. Johanna Kindvall is an illustrator and cookbook author who grew up in Sweden and now splits her time between her native country and Brooklyn. “I had never heard about this before,” she says. “I think this could have happened here, too,” she says, referring to the United States.
Kindvall, 55, remembers children from her village often going home from friend’s houses in time for dinner with their own families, but says her best friend, who lived further away, would often hang out at her house and be fed along with her family. “Of course there was food for her,” she says.
The tradition — wherever it might have existed — died out, Tellström says, because of the changing way that children are treated. Previous generations of Swedes typically considered children very different from adults. “Children were considered to be living almost in a parallel world,” he says. “Children were children, and parents and grown-ups were in their own sphere.” Now, those barriers have eroded; children are engaged and participate in grown-up conversations around the dinner table and elsewhere, he notes.
Tindre says he can’t imagine it working today, since modern Swedish families often rely on each other for something that many American parents can relate to: shuttling children around to multiple activities, from violin lessons to soccer games. In Sweden, parents call the daily dance of picking up and dropping off as figuring out “lives pussel” — life’s puzzle — which often involves carpooling and kids eating together.
Tellström finds the conversations around Swedish dining fascinating, noting that it’s something he and his Swedish friends are suddenly discussing on Facebook, all because it drew the world’s attention on social media. “Sometimes it takes a foreign eye to make you see something in your own culture in a different way,” he says. “If you are living in a culture, things are obvious and understood, and it has always been like this — but when someone from the outside notices it, then you suddenly see it.”
Tindre acknowledges that the idea of anyone not feeding a child under their roof seems strange, which makes it good fodder for social-media pile-ons that can ding reputations — not just for celebrities, but possibly for an entire country’s people. He hopes people don’t see Swedes as unkind, pointing to its spot at the top of the “Good Country Index,” which measures contributions to the common good of humanity, through such things as climate and food aid.
“On a societal level, it’s hard to argue that Sweden is not welcoming and has great hospitality,” he says. | 2022-06-04T12:36:29Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Is the Swedengate hospitality controversy real? Long ago, maybe. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/food/2022/06/04/swedish-hospitality-debate/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/food/2022/06/04/swedish-hospitality-debate/ |
U.S. was targeted with foreign propaganda and disinformation in WWI
By Peter Finn
John Maxwell Hamilton
Herbert Corey uses a pair of binoculars to look out from a fortified trench. (Corey papers/Library of Congress)
When we found Herbert Corey’s memoir of World War I in the Library of Congress, it was a rough first draft produced on thin, ragged paper with a typewriter that cried out for a fresh ribbon. But it sparkled with the distinctive voice of an American journalist who Pearson’s Magazine called the “premier anecdote man of the United States.”
Corey, a writer for the short-lived Associated Newspapers syndicate, covered all four years of World War I, a distinction that appears unmatched among American correspondents. He boarded the Lusitania in New York harbor on Aug. 6, 1914, two days after the British declared war on Germany. He witnessed the war from behind German and French lines and was with the first U.S. soldiers who charged the enemy.
By the end of the war, the staff of the American Expeditionary Force (AEF) considered him “the dean of the correspondents with the American Army.” He stayed in Europe through the peace negotiations in 1919.
And yet he is barely remembered. He focused on the human stories of soldiers and civilians rather than the grand stratagems of the generals. Unlike many of his colleagues, Corey did not write a memoir until the twilight of his career. It was never published and sat unnoticed among the papers his widow donated to the Library of Congress after his death in 1954.
That manuscript, now edited, annotated and with an introduction, was published Wednesday by LSU Press as “Herbert Corey’s Great War: A Memoir of World War I by the American Reporter Who Saw It All.” It is especially rich with Corey’s biting observations on the impediments reporters faced conveying the story of the war to Americans — and his tart commentary still resonates as our age struggles with disinformation.
The war marked the beginning of systematic, pervasive propaganda, including as employed by the U.S. government in the form of President Woodrow Wilson’s Committee on Public Information. Corey was frustrated by military censors, U.S. and Allied officials, and his own editors.
At the end of the war, Corey and four colleagues violated AEF rules against traveling into Germany. As punishment, the AEF killed their stories. In Corey’s case, this amounted to 17 insightful dispatches.
Corey’s memoir focuses on British manipulation of American public opinion. London cleverly cultivated officials and opinion leaders in the United States, planted stories in newspapers and took censorship to a new level by rewriting correspondents’ stories, a practice Corey exposed.
The excerpt below, one of Corey’s ruminations on the pervasiveness of propaganda, is a reminder of the ways in which foreign governments can distort our understanding of the world. It has been lightly edited for length.
One advantage of a democratic form of government is that it is not necessary to tell the democrats what is going on. If a question arises it is only necessary to repeat over and over three words—no, four words: “Duty—Humanity—Our Country.” The democrats will come along like sheep.
In retrospect it hardly seems possible that a large, throbbing land, practically filled with inspired editors and old ladies and professors and a few wage-earners, would bite into such an apple as the Allies offered us, without first determining that there was no worm at the core. But we did bite in. From August 1914 to April 1917, we had been well and copiously fooled.
Thousands of foreign volunteers are fighting in Ukraine. History suggests it could go badly.
Timeout while I thrum again on the single string. The Allies were not to be blamed for fooling us. It was their national duty to save themselves by any means possible. When the Germans refused to abandon the use of gas, in response to their tearful outcries, the Allies began contentedly to use gas themselves. If the Allies had told us everything they knew about their own desperate situation we might—perhaps—have signed up for a war which was to cost us an as yet unknown number of billions of dollars, and lives, and pension plans, and compensation schemes and second-rate congressmen and AEFs. On the other hand, we might not. Who can tell?
I landed in New York on April 5, 1917, which was the day we declared war against Germany. Everyone was excited and cheerful. It had been my intention to go straight to Washington and see for myself what was being done, but it happened that the New York Globe’s annual dinner was on the fifth, and I was easily persuaded to attend it. The dinner guests included the entire editorial and business and mechanical force. By permission I brought with me as my guest Edgar Brown of the Chicago Daily News. Our paths had crossed in Italy, Macedonia, Germany and France.
“Get up and say something,” commanded Henry J. Wright, editor of the Globe.
“Let Brown break the ice.” Public speaking is like chaff down the back. Annoying but inevitable at threshing time.
Brown broke it all right. An impulse of heavenly candor moved him. He went through the situation in the near East item by item, took up the fix in which the embattled European countries found themselves, and outlined the German plans and told of German successes and of Allied dissension and failures. His conclusion was:
“Today the Allies are licked and broke. The only way they can be saved is through the aid and sacrifice of the United States.”
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The Globe force listened with its collective jaw dropping. It had hoped for a nice, rousing speech of enthusiasm and cheer. Brown was as comforting as a wet rag. They called on me. Recent practice in hypocrisy had formed me into a fairly habitual cheat. Only by the repetition of glad words in which I did not believe had it been possible to stay on in Verona as a war correspondent. Brown’s example temporarily pushed me off my pedestal and I followed his truths with truths of my own. When it was all over, Mr. Wright asked: “Are these things really true?”
The editor of a New York paper, in constant touch, presumably, with every source of news, actually did not know how desperate was the state of the Allies in the spring of 1917, when they finally sold us the pup. It must not be understood that the newspapers of the United States did not get and print news from the various seats of war, which was to all intents and purposes accurate. But it was not truthful.
If a communique from either side stated that “An operation which has been in progress for several days has finally succeeded in moving the line from Mont Here to Lac de There,” that communique was perfectly accurate. But to be entirely truthful it should have continued with the statement that the side issuing the communique had just had all the bark beaten off it between the points named, and that the operation was successful only in that the bedeviled, starved, exhausted soldiery had been able breathlessly to dig in on a new line and hold on until the reserves could be rushed up.
It was not possible to keep the United States ignorant of a majority of the physical facts, but the careful censoring and the delaying of the news and the fairly complete control of the sources kept the United States in ignorance of much of the significance. In 1917, conditions in France seemed so desperate that several regiments were on the edge of revolt.
“They will not suffer much longer unless some hope is offered,” said a friend who was an officer of artillery in the French army. “It is not that we have lost courage, but we are a practical people. If we are to be beaten in the end, we had best take our licking now, and get it over with, and hope for better luck next time.”
I told my friends of the New York Globe of these things. For weeks my friend, the artillery officer, had been standing by, ready to turn his guns on the mutinous troops. He grieved over the necessity, for he sympathized with the men who felt that if further suffering were to be useless, the sensible thing to do was to end it. But he would have mowed down the mass as relentlessly as though they were Germans. War is like that.
The United States did not know these things. Yet people who do not know us speak of us as a practical people.
American correspondents were not to blame. They did their very damnedest to get the facts across. Their editors edited whatever guts out of their stories the censors had left in, and business managers prodded the editors constantly for more and better pro-Allies stuff. Pro-Allies stuff was popular stuff.
A century before Jan. 6, bombshell hearings on another assault on democracy
Again, I must repeat that this is not being said in criticism. Whatever American journalism may have been in the old days when editors wore high hats, with pistols under the spiked tails of their coats, journalism now has become a big business. W.L. Rogers left the New York Globe to establish a weekly paper for the technical instruction of newspapermen in the new factory idea. No business in which so much money is interested can be anything else than practical. It is, however, regrettable that this fact was not more fully recognized in 1917. The factory still had the golden rules of a past day pasted on its office walls.
For reasons of my own I will not use the name of the correspondent, but most newspapermen who were in France at the time will know him. He represented one of the great American papers. I had and have an intense admiration for it. The fight of the Chemin des Dames came on, in which France did not gain a victory. The cost in blood of the operation was extravagant. Behind it was an important story of the French army and parliamentary politics. This correspondent filed the story to his paper.
If that story had been published, at that time, it would have helped to open the eyes of the American public to what was going on. After holding it for some weeks the editors decided against publication. Their reason was a perfectly straightforward and logical one. The sentiment of the United States was wholly with France, and such disclosures might weaken us in the faith and give comfort to those who still were skeptics.
The correspondent asked permission to offer it to a weekly magazine that had asked for some of his stuff, and that permission was granted. The weekly magazine published it some weeks later, and the politicians in France who were offended by its disclosures began to raise merry hell. Mark this: The truth of the facts disclosed had never been questioned. The reputations for sanity and generosity of certain politicians was affected. The fuller and more dramatic revelation at the time of writing of the discord in French high politics—already well known to those Americans who followed such things—might have been a warning to the United States.
The upshot was that the correspondent lost his job with the daily paper. Then he went with the weekly magazine. Eventually he lost his job with the weekly. I do not know why, but I presume that the editors grew tired of having the French diplomatic corps dance around in the outer office every time one of his stories was published. He stayed on in France, and more eventually still he was decorated and has lived happily ever after. | 2022-06-04T12:36:35Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Herbert Corey memoir reveals World War I disinformation, propaganda - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2022/06/04/herbert-corey-memoir-world-war-i/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2022/06/04/herbert-corey-memoir-world-war-i/ |
A joint Washington Post analysis reveals for the first time that the United States supported the majority of air force squadrons involved in the Saudi coalition’s years-old air campaign
By Joyce Sohyun Lee
Atthar Mirza
As global attention focused on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine earlier this year, the Saudi-led coalition carried out more than 150 airstrikes on civilian targets in Yemen, including homes, hospitals and communication towers, according to the Yemen Data Project. It was the latest uptick in bombing during a grinding, and often overlooked, civil war that has upended the lives of Yemeni civilians for the better part of a decade and spawned one of the world’s most severe humanitarian crises.
Hundreds of thousands have died from the fighting or its indirect consequences, such as hunger, the United Nations says. The devastating air campaign alone — carried out by a Saudi-led coalition — has killed nearly 15,000 people, according to conservative estimates by the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED), which monitors war zones around the world.
While Russia’s bombings of a maternity hospital and other civilian targets in Ukraine have drawn widespread public indignation as war crimes, thousands of similar strikes have taken place against Yemeni civilians. The indiscriminate bombings have become a hallmark of the Yemen war, drawing international scrutiny of the countries participating in the air campaign, and those arming them, including the United States. U.S. support for the Saudi war effort, which has been criticized by human rights groups and some in Congress, began during the Obama administration and has continued in fits and starts for seven years.
New analysis by The Washington Post and Security Force Monitor at Columbia Law School’s Human Rights Institute (SFM) provides the most complete picture yet of the depth and breadth of U.S. support for the Saudi-led air campaign, revealing that a substantial portion of the air raids were carried out by jets developed, maintained and sold by U.S. companies, and by pilots who were trained by the U.S. military.
The Biden administration in 2021 announced an end to U.S. military support for “offensive operations” carried out by the Saudi-led coalition against Yemen’s Houthi rebels and suspended some munition sales. But maintenance contracts fulfilled by both the U.S. military and U.S. companies to coalition squadrons carrying out offensive missions have continued, The Post’s analysis shows.
The Post and SFM reviewed more than 3,000 publicly available images, news releases, media reports and videos identifying for the first time 19 fighter jet squadrons that took part in the Saudi-led air campaign in Yemen. More than half of the squadrons that participated in the air war came from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates — the two countries that carried out the majority of the air raids and receive substantial U.S. assistance.
An analysis of public contract announcements shows that the United States provided arms, training or maintenance support to the majority of the fighter jet squadrons in the campaign. The Post found that as many as 94 U.S. contracts were awarded to individual Saudi and UAE squadrons since the war began.
Despite Pentagon statements that it is difficult to pinpoint which units in foreign militaries receive U.S. assistance, The Post-SFM analysis identified specific airstrike squadrons that received U.S. support, proving the universe of squadrons carrying out airstrikes is a narrow and knowable one.
“For most coalition countries, there is no way for [America] to support their planes without supporting squadrons that may be linked to airstrikes that human rights groups say are apparent war crimes,” said Tony Wilson, the director of Security Force Monitor.
The analysis revealed that 39 squadrons from Saudi-led coalition member states flew aircraft with airstrike capabilities. The majority of these units flew fighter jets that were developed and sold by American companies.
The Post and the Security Force Monitor used visual evidence from state media, news reports and government releases to identify 19 fighter squadrons that definitely took part in the air campaign in Yemen since 2015.
A review of more than 900 publicly available sales announcements revealed that the four squadrons from Saudi Arabia that fly F-15S/SA planes benefited — and the remaining 15 squadrons probably benefited — from U.S. weapons and equipment contracts signed after the start of the war.
At least one squadron each from Bahrain, Kuwait and the UAE benefited from U.S. contracts because of support going to a type of plane, but lack of specificity in information published by the Department of Defense makes it impossible to know the exact squadron.
The Post additionally reviewed more than 1,500 videos, photos and public statements by the Department of Defense and coalition members since the war began and found the United States participated in joint exercises with at least 80 percent of squadrons that flew airstrike missions in Yemen. At least four times, these exercises took place on U.S. soil.
In some instances, The Post and SFM could only determine that certain squadrons were likely to have benefited from U.S. contracts. Sales announcements never name specific squadrons that will benefit, only a type of plane or piece of equipment being sold. Thus for certain squadrons, The Post and SFM could only determine probability because every coalition country has at least two airstrike squadrons flying the same type of plane.
The Saudi-led coalition and every member state except Qatar did not respond to The Post’s request for comment on the report’s findings. A Qatar official familiar with the country’s role in Yemen told The Post that Qatar left the coalition in June 2017, but they did not answer questions about the country’s involvement in the air raids over Yemen.
When presented with the findings, the Defense and State departments pointed to the steps the Biden administration had taken to end the war in Yemen, the U.S. decision to end aerial refueling for coalition aircrafts in 2018 and the ongoing trainings to reduce civilian casualties.
“America’s alliances and partnerships are our greatest asset, and so we are committed to standing shoulder-to-shoulder with our key partners in the Middle East,” said Army Maj. Rob Lodewick, a Pentagon spokesman. But, he acknowledged that “considerable work remains to be done” with the Royal Saudi Armed Forces’s targeting procedures and investigative capacity.
“Both [Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates] face significant threat to their territories,” State Department spokesman Ned Price told The Post, noting that the Houthis had launched hundreds of cross-border attacks on Saudi Arabia in just the last year. “We are committed to continuing to strengthen those countries’ defenses,” Price said.
The contracts reviewed for the analysis are only a small fraction of total U.S. arms sales to coalition countries. The specifics of certain sales are never released to the public. One such case is a direct commercial sale where American companies sell directly to governments, as opposed to foreign military sales where the U.S. government is the seller. Others — including arms deals that are valued at less than $14 million — do not require congressional review and so are not generally publicly announced.
Evidence of previous human rights violations is rarely enough to halt sales, former State Department officials told The Post, in part because the sheer volume of the contracts overwhelm human rights concerns in the vetting process.
“The staffing constraints meant that, over the course of a year, the State Department was expected to complete an analysis on human rights risks associated with a weapons export license every 5 minutes,” House Democrats wrote in an April 27 letter to a House Appropriations subcommittee.
Allies and airstrikes
Seven years and three American administrations into the war, each of the airstrike-capable squadrons from Saudi Arabia and the UAE received or is likely to have received U.S. weapons and support. U.S. forces conducted joint exercises with almost every squadron from Saudi Arabia and the three F-16E/F squadrons from the United Arab Emirates confirmed to have flown missions in Yemen.
In videos broadcast by the Emirates News Agency, two UAE squadrons — the 1st and 2nd Shaheen — were frequently shown taking off loaded with air-to-surface missiles for airstrike missions against the Houthis in Yemen. The UAE has also taken part in a separate campaign with the United States against al-Qaeda in the country. News reports and visual evidence show the same F-16E/F squadrons and an additional F-16E/F squadron — the 3rd Shaheen — participating in joint exercises with U.S. forces at Red Flag exercises hosted at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada in 2016 and 2019 as well as in the UAE as recently as last year. The U.S. Air Force holds these Red Flag exercises with allies simulating aerial combat several times a year.
An F-16E/F plane from the UAE Air Force’s 2nd Shaheen Squadron takes off to conduct airstrikes in Yemen in 2015. (Emirates News Agency)
A United Arab Emirates F-16E aircraft from the 3rd Shaheen Squadron takes part in a training exercise hosted by the U.S. military at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada in 2019. (Ian E. Abbott)
LEFT: An F-16E/F plane from the UAE Air Force’s 2nd Shaheen Squadron takes off to conduct airstrikes in Yemen in 2015. (Emirates News Agency) RIGHT: A United Arab Emirates F-16E aircraft from the 3rd Shaheen Squadron takes part in a training exercise hosted by the U.S. military at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada in 2019. (Ian E. Abbott)
Broadcasters reporting from Saudi air bases claimed to show the F-15SA, an American fighter jet sold to the Saudis in 2010 as part of a $29 billion deal, taking off to conduct airstrikes in Yemen as early as 2018. The F-15S and F-15SA fighter jets — flown by Saudi’s 6th, 29th, 55th and 92nd squadrons — were regularly promoted by Saudi state media as key to the coalition’s air campaign.
The last F-15SA was delivered to Saudi Arabia in 2020, and dozens of contracts supporting the new fleet and the upgrade of the other F-15s were awarded after 2015. A review of annual State Department reports by the Security Assistance Monitor show the Defense and State departments planned sales of approximately $2 million in F-15 trainings for Saudi aviators, including fighter jet trainings, through foreign military sales between fiscal years 2015 to 2020. The reports do not include any trainings that may have been purchased through direct commercial sales.
An analysis of news releases, videos and photos reveals for the first time at least three of these four Saudi squadrons not only received new equipment but participated in at least 13 trainings and joint exercises — including at least one on U.S. soil. A new training unit of F-15 SA fighter jets participated in a Red Flag exercise at Nellis Air Force Base in Nebraska with U.S. pilots as recently as March 2022.
An F-15 SA plane from the Royal Saudi Air Force’s 29th squadron prepares to hit Houthi targets in 2018. (Al Arabiya)
A U.S. Air Force bomber, top, flies alongside two Saudi F-15C aircraft from the 5th squadron and two F-15SA from the 29th squadron during a joint training exercise in 2021. (Saudi Arabian Ministry of Defense)
LEFT: An F-15 SA plane from the Royal Saudi Air Force’s 29th squadron prepares to hit Houthi targets in 2018. (Al Arabiya) RIGHT: A U.S. Air Force bomber, top, flies alongside two Saudi F-15C aircraft from the 5th squadron and two F-15SA from the 29th squadron during a joint training exercise in 2021. (Saudi Arabian Ministry of Defense)
Since 2015, human rights groups investigating the airstrikes have identified more than 300 that violated or appeared to violate international law, according to The Post and SFM’s survey of publicly available reports and documents. Although individual squadrons have never publicly been implicated in specific airstrikes, which are always described as being carried out by the coalition, the then-head of U.S. Central Command, Gen. Joseph Votel, confirmed in 2019 testimony that the United States had access to a detailed database of the coalition’s airstrikes in Yemen.
“We do have a database that does have that information and we have the ability to see that,” he said in response to a question from Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) asking if U.S. military personnel based at the Saudi-coalition headquarters readily had access to “a database that detailed every airstrike: warplane, target, munitions used and a brief description of the attack.”
The database’s existence suggests some American officials had more knowledge of which weapons were used and which squadrons participated in airstrikes leading to civilian harm than the public and members of Congress had been told they had. The U.S. Air Force declined a Freedom of Information Act request by The Post to access the database, claiming it did not have the records.
The United States is prohibited from providing security assistance to units of foreign security forces credibly implicated in the commission of a gross violation of human rights, according to two statutes known as “Leahy Laws” after their main sponsor, Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.). However, since the Clinton era, subsequent administrations have interpreted that the vetting of units under these laws only occurs when the security assistance — be it training, equipment or other assistance — is financed by the State Department or Defense Department, said Sarah Harrison, a senior analyst with the International Crisis Group and former associate general counsel at the Defense Department.
Wealthy countries, like Saudi Arabia and the UAE, are not subject to such vetting because they typically pay for all assistance through foreign military sales or direct commercial sales. Leahy “has long insisted that as a matter of policy, it makes no sense to have one such standard for weapons that we given to a foreign security force, and another for weapons that we sell to that same security force,” said Tim Rieser, the senior foreign policy aid to the senator.
The Defense Department did not respond to requests from The Post to clarify if and how these units might have been vetted or if Leahy’s provisions did not apply ahead of joint exercises or additional weapons deliveries.
As early as March 2015, U.S. officials worried that coalition airstrikes may have violated the rules of war. Internal State Department documents, written between mid-May 2015 and February 2016 and released as part of a Freedom of Information Act request by Reuters, revealed concern at the State Department about the Saudi-led coalition’s airstrikes and the legal implications for U.S. officials.
Aiding and abetting war crimes under international law has been applied differently in courts, including domestic ones. Under one standard, individuals or a state may be found guilty of aiding and abetting if they continued to provide assistance to a problematic actor with knowledge that their support would contribute to future crimes and despite assurances.
“As long as the international humanitarian law violations by the Saudis and U.S. sales to support those operations are both ongoing, there are serious concerns about U.S. complicity in the Saudi war crimes that result,” said Oona Hathaway, a professor of law and political science at Yale Law School.
The United States implemented multiple measures aimed at curbing civilian harm beginning in 2016, including sending advisers, adding “civilian casualty avoidance, the law of armed conflict, human rights command and control” training for the Royal Saudi Air Force and by 2019, four years into the war, adopting a policy requiring that precision-guided missiles be sold with appropriate targeting infrastructure.
People search the rubble for survivors after a Saudi-led coalition airstrike killed six, including children, in Sanaa, Yemen. (AP)
Human rights observers in Yemen said they did not see any meaningful change in the air campaign as a result of these measures. Airstrikes are still responsible for the vast majority of civilian deaths.
A 2020 review of an emergency transfer of arms to the Saudi-led coalition by the Office of Inspector General at the State Department found in the case of that specific transfer of precision-guided munitions “that the Department did not fully assess risks and implement mitigation measures to reduce civilian casualties and legal concerns.”
“The U.S. defense [against aiding and abetting] may be that they are trying to mitigate by working with the most problematic actors,” said Hathaway. “But if they attempt mitigation and violations continue, and they still continue support, then that undermines the defense [against liability].”
The pace of war
Since taking office, the Biden administration has repeatedly made clear ending the war in Yemen is a priority and banned “offensive support” for the coalition. But it has approved sales of “defensive weapons,” including a $650 million sale of air-to-air missiles to Saudi Arabia and a $65 million sale to bolster the UAE’s missile defense system.
The ongoing maintenance contracts have not been impacted by Biden’s policy shift and have drawn sharp criticism from some members of Congress. House Democrats introduced legislation in February to ban U.S. maintenance of planes carrying out airstrikes in Yemen. On Wednesday, a bipartisan group of representatives proposed a war powers resolution to further curtail American involvement in the war.
“If we don’t sell the particular ammunition, they can still fly,” Rep. Tom Malinowski (D-N.J.), who served as assistant secretary of state for human rights during the Obama administration, told The Post. “They have got a lot of munitions stockpiled. They might be able to find replacements today, but there’s no replacement for the maintenance contract and no ability to fly without it.”
Yemen is in its longest period of no airstrikes under a cease-fire that began during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan and was renewed Thursday. Biden welcomed the continued truce, noting the United States will remain engaged with the diplomatic process over the coming weeks and months.
The months preceding the truce saw the longest sustained period of airstrikes since 2018, according to Iona Craig, the director of the Yemen Data Project, a nonprofit organization that tracks air raids. Strike data showed the escalation began in October 2021, the same month that the United Nations Human Rights Council voted to end its independent investigatory group on Yemen.
Fatalities resulting from airstrikes throughout the war in Yemen
Transparency into the world of arms sales — particularly as it pertains to U.S. allies in the Saudi-led coalition — has long been muddied by complex laws, an alphabet soup of government agencies and deep U.S. interests abroad.
Still, “to have the U.S., over successive administrations, sell billions of dollars worth of weapons to governments that have carried out, over years, airstrikes on hospitals, markets, food production facilities and prisons: [Those] attacks have killed thousands of civilians,” said Priyanka Motaparthy, director of the Counterterrorism, Armed Conflict and Human Rights Project at Columbia University Law School’s Human Rights Institute. “It does not serve them well in the court of public opinion, or in the annals of history.”
Full database of airstrike and support squadrons that could have served in Yemen
Yemen involvement
Relevant U.S. Assistance
Country:Saudi Arabia
Squadron:55 Squadron
Aircraft:F-15S, F-15SA
Yemen involvement:Confirmed
Role:Airstrike
Relevant U.S. Assistance:
94 contracts and 12 trainings,
Squadron:6 Squadron
Aircraft:F-15SA
Country:Kuwait
Squadron:25 Attack Squadron
Aircraft:F/A-18C/D
78 contracts and 1 training,
Squadron:9 Fighter Squadron
Country:Egypt
Squadron:79 Tactical Fighter Squadron
Aircraft:F-16C/D
Yemen involvement:Possible
36 contracts and 7 trainings,
Missy Ryan, Kareem Fahim and Alex Horton contributed to this report.
Reporting, video and photo editing by Joyce Sohyun Lee, Meg Kelly and Atthar Mirza. Graphics, design and development by Atthar Mirza. Editing by Kareem Fahim, Nadine Ajaka and Elyse Samuels. Graphics editing by Danielle Rindler and Tim Meko. Copy editing by Anne Kenderdine.
Database of squadrons compiled by Security Force Monitor at Columbia University. Database of U.S. assistance contracts and joint training exercises compiled and analyzed by The Washington Post and the Security Force Monitor.
Airstrike counts and fatality totals reported by ACLED and Yemen Data Project.
Database of Foreign Military Training and Defense Department training compiled by Security Assistance Monitor.
Discovery and analysis of information in Arabic on the coalition air campaign by Security Force Monitor, Mwatana for Human Rights and The Washington Post.
Data on squadron and plane tail numbers provided by Scramble.
Joyce Sohyun Lee is a video reporter for The Washington Post's Visual Forensics team. Before joining the Post, she worked as an associate video producer for Time magazine. Twitter Twitter
By Atthar Mirza
Atthar Mirza is a graphics reporter and animator working on interactive storytelling. Twitter Twitter | 2022-06-04T12:36:36Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Saudi-led airstrikes in Yemen have been called war crimes. Many relied on U.S. support. - Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/interactive/2022/saudi-war-crimes-yemen/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/interactive/2022/saudi-war-crimes-yemen/ |
Georgetown Law did the right thing on Ilya Shapiro
By David Cole
The Georgetown University Law Center in D.C. in October. (Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post)
David Cole, national legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, is a professor at Georgetown University Law Center.
When legal scholar Ilya Shapiro, a few days before starting his new job heading a conservative constitutional law institute at Georgetown University Law Center, posted tweets in January criticizing President Biden’s pledge to appoint the first Black woman to the Supreme Court, the school community responded swiftly and unequivocally.
The law school’s dean condemned the tweets, and placed Shapiro on administrative leave. More than 1,000 students signed a statement calling for Shapiro’s ouster. The path of least resistance was clear. Dismissing Shapiro would have been loudly applauded by most of the Georgetown law community.
But on Thursday, Dean William Treanor announced that Shapiro would not be sanctioned for his speech, and will assume his job.
The decision will not please the many students and faculty who called for dismissal. There may well be demonstrations when classes resume in the fall. But in this case, the difficult path was the right one.
In his statement to the Georgetown community, Treanor acknowledged that Shapiro’s tweets — arguing that Sri Srinivasan, chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, was objectively the best pick for the Supreme Court, but that because of Biden’s pledge, the president would select a “lesser Black woman” — were offensive and demeaning. That is hardly in dispute; Shapiro himself acknowledged that his statement was “recklessly framed,” promptly deleted the tweets and apologized.
The dean rightly expressed concern on Thursday that Shapiro’s remarks were particularly harmful to Black and female members of the community, and could interfere with Shapiro’s ability to do his job.
But Georgetown’s decision also implicated a fundamental principle of university life: freedom of inquiry and speech. Because free inquiry is so central to the academic mission, Georgetown has adopted a strong free speech policy asserting that “it is not the proper role of a university to insulate individuals from ideas and opinions they find unwelcome, disagreeable, or even deeply offensive.”
Punishing Shapiro for his tweets would have violated that policy. If scholars can be dismissed for expressing views that many find offensive, free inquiry will be captive to the sentiments of the majority. And while discrimination and harassment are not protected, the tweets expressing an opinion on the propriety of Biden’s pledge could not remotely qualify as either.
As a technical matter, the dean concluded that because Shapiro posted the tweets before starting his job, they could not be the subject of discipline. Some will worry that, as a result, the decision does not make sufficiently clear that Shapiro could not have been fired for his tweets even if they had occurred after he started work.
But surely that is true: Offensive speech on an issue of public concern cannot be grounds for punishment. As the dean’s statement said, “Georgetown Law is committed to preserving and protecting the right of free and open inquiry, deliberation, and debate.”
Still, defending free speech is not sufficient in a context like this. As Treanor noted, the law school has “an equally compelling obligation to foster a campus community that is free from bias, and in which every member is treated with respect and courtesy.”
To that end, the dean reported, Shapiro, like all members of the academic staff, would engage in trainings “on implicit bias, cultural competence, and non-discrimination.” Shapiro has agreed to meet with students to address concerns about his ability to be fair to all, and to consult with his center’s faculty director about appropriate professional conduct.
More broadly, the law school has doubled down on its commitments to equity in concrete ways. It recently named the first associate dean for equity and inclusion and first director of a program that works with students from disadvantaged backgrounds. Forty-three percent of its new tenure-track hires are people of color, as are 37 percent of its adjunct faculty and one-quarter of its full-time faculty. Its entering class is the most diverse in the school’s history, with 40 percent of the class identifying as non-White.
In refusing to fire Shapiro, Georgetown has shown that a university can simultaneously uphold its commitments to free inquiry and equality. It would have been far more popular with the vast majority of the dean’s constituents to dismiss Shapiro. But it is precisely in such moments that principles of academic freedom are essential to uphold. A “free speech policy” is mere words on a page unless individuals in authority are willing to act against the crowd. | 2022-06-04T12:36:39Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Georgetown Law did the right thing on Ilya Shapiro - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/06/04/georgetown-law-ilya-shapiro-free-speech/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/06/04/georgetown-law-ilya-shapiro-free-speech/ |
Kelly Schulz at a news conference in Annapolis on April 24, 2020. (AP Photo/Brian Witte)
Kelly M. Schulz, a Republican running for her party’s gubernatorial nomination in next month’s primary, is a down-to-earth, even-keeled pragmatist with broad experience in state government who would be a viable candidate in November’s general election, judging by the enthusiastic support she has from the highly popular GOP incumbent, Gov. Larry Hogan. Her main primary opponent, who has courted QAnon conspiracists and called former vice president Mike Pence a “traitor” for upholding the 2020 presidential election results, is an extremist who would be trounced.
The Post endorses Ms. Schulz in the July 19 primary. We support her not only because she is a competent, results-oriented public servant, well qualified for the governorship, but also because Maryland benefits from a vibrant two-party system. Ms. Schulz would further that agenda. Her chief rival in the primary, Del. Daniel L. Cox of Frederick County, would render Republicans electorally irrelevant in a state where registered Democrats outnumber the GOP 2 to 1.
Ms. Schulz, by temperament and by apparent strategic design, has modeled herself on Mr. Hogan, who is leaving office after two consecutive terms, the constitutional maximum. Her campaign has borrowed heavily from his first gubernatorial bid, in 2014, when he won an upset victory. Who can blame her? The governor, having governed as an anti-Trump, relatively non-divisive centrist, enjoys stratospheric approval ratings, including from Democrats.
Like Mr. Hogan in 2014, Ms. Schulz has eschewed detailed policy positions in favor of a handful of brisk talking points, chief among them her opposition to higher taxes. She has also embraced school choice and a tough law-and-order response to the jarring spike in violent crime, especially in Baltimore. She favors Mr. Hogan’s plan to expand the Beltway and Interstate 270 in Montgomery County. What her stances lack in detail they make up for in message discipline — she repeats them metronomically, leaving no doubt about her priorities.
She is no lightweight. Having dropped out of college at age 19 while pregnant with her first son, she waited tables and tended bar before embarking on a career as a community activist, small business owner, state delegate representing Frederick County and, under Mr. Hogan, the head of two state cabinet-level agencies: the Labor Department and, for three years, the Commerce Department. In the latter job she played a key role keeping businesses afloat during the pandemic and was the state’s chief economic development officer, learning firsthand the challenges of recruiting businesses to relocate in Maryland. (At age 37, she also completed her college degree.)
We part ways with Ms. Schulz on some issues, but there is no doubt she is a moderate interested in sound governance, not partisan bonfires.
The opposite is true of Mr. Cox, who touts his endorsement from Donald Trump, denies President Biden’s election victory, and organized buses for last year’s Jan. 6 rally, which turned into a violent attack on the Capitol. This spring he spoke at a QAnon-infected rally in Pennsylvania, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported, where organizers played a video asserting the world is undergoing “a great awakening” that will expose “ritual child sacrifice” and a “global satanic blood cult.”
A vote in the primary for Mr. Cox is a vote for Republican oblivion in Maryland. A vote for Ms. Schulz is a vote for sanity. | 2022-06-04T12:36:49Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Washington Post GOP primary endorsement for Maryland governor: Kelly Schulz - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/06/04/kelly-schulz-maryland-governor-primary-endorsement-2022/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/06/04/kelly-schulz-maryland-governor-primary-endorsement-2022/ |
The Medicare and Social Security disaster that Washington is doing nothing to fix
A Social Security card is displayed on Oct. 12, 2021, in Tigard, Ore. (Jenny Kane/AP)
Inflation is up, the job market is tight, and oil markets are volatile: These indicators seem, for the moment, to be the key factors determining the United States’ well-being. But they will shift substantially in a matter of months or years. In the meantime, seemingly no one pays attention to the long-term picture, which has remained alarmingly consistent. The nation has made promises to its elderly that it cannot possibly keep while continuing to do right by younger generations. That the country has muddled through so far is a testament only to the fact that the worst has not yet hit.
The trustees for Medicare and Social Security released Thursday their yearly projections of how these cornerstone old-age entitlements will fare as more Americans begin drawing benefits and coverage costs rise. They concluded that the Old-Age and Survivors Insurance Trust Fund, which finances retirees’ monthly Social Security checks, will run through its reserves by 2034. At that point the tax revenue stream backing the fund could pay for only about 77 percent of promised benefits.
Meanwhile, the Medicare trust fund financing old-age hospital spending will run short by 2028, and spending on other elements of the Medicare program, which is backed by general tax revenue, is set to balloon. Taxpayers are on the hook to pay massive amounts to keep them running in their current forms. Medicare will gobble up ever-increasing amounts of national wealth — from 3.9 percent of gross domestic product this year to 6 percent by 2040 and 6.5 percent by 2070. If, as expected, Congress adjusts Medicare payments so that doctors continue to take Medicare patients, Medicare spending would expand to 8.6 percent of GDP by the end of the century.
These numbers may seem small. They are not; total federal spending has historically hovered around 20 percent of GDP. The trustees are projecting a vast expansion of outlays for the elderly that would hollow out the government’s ability to spend on education, infrastructure, anti-poverty programs and other investments in children and working-age adults.
In a more rational political moment, Congress would make the broader reforms needed to stabilize Medicare and Social Security. They have many options, and it is obvious that any plausible future settlement would require some mix of modest benefit adjustments and tax hikes. Time is precious, the trustees warned: “Taking action sooner rather than later will allow consideration of a broader range of solutions and provide more time to phase in changes so that the public has adequate time to prepare.”
The experts have, once again, projected a fiscal calamity on a generational scale. And yet fixing the problems are on just about no one’s to-do list in Washington. That is a scandal, and Americans — particularly young Americans who stand to lose the most — should demand better. | 2022-06-04T12:36:55Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | The Medicare and Social Security disaster that Washington is doing nothing to fix - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/06/04/medicare-social-security-disaster-that-washington-is-doing-nothing-fix/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/06/04/medicare-social-security-disaster-that-washington-is-doing-nothing-fix/ |
Yes, we can do something about gun violence
Flowers and memorials to honor the victims of the Robb Elementary School school shooting in Uvalde, Tex. on May 30. (Veronica Cardenas/Reuters)
“Not if but when.” That wrenching assessment of the seeming inevitability of mass shootings was delivered Thursday by Tulsa Police Chief Wendell Franklin as the city was still reeling from the deadly attack the day before on a medical building in which four people were killed. Underscoring the terrible truth about this country’s epidemic of gun violence were two more shootings on Thursday: one at a church parking lot in Iowa in which two women were killed before the gunman killed himself, and the other at a cemetery in Wisconsin in which two people were wounded.
Not a week has gone by this year without a mass shooting in the United States. Invariably, the victims have been innocents simply going about the routines of daily life. In Buffalo, they were grocery shoppers; in Uvalde, children and their teachers looking forward to the end of the school year; in Tulsa, medical professionals caring for patients.
The fatalism is misplaced: Of course it does not have to be this way. No other high-income country has the level of gun violence that has become commonplace in the United States. An average of more than 40,000 Americans die each year in gun homicides, suicides or accidental shootings. That is more than 110 people each day. Before the gunman opened fire Thursday at St. Francis Hospital in Tulsa, there had already been 232 mass shootings, according to the Gun Violence Archive, which defines a mass shooting as one in which four or more people, not including the shooter, are injured or killed.
Those grim numbers — brought into stark relief by the atrocities in Buffalo, Uvalde and Tulsa — make all the more urgent President Biden’s Thursday night plea that Congress finally act. Using the rare, prime-time address as a bully pulpit, Mr. Biden spoke powerfully about the suffering and agony caused by gun violence and outlined his vision for gun control reform. The common-sense measures he outlined included a ban on assault weapons and high capacity magazines; expansion of background checks; mandated safe storage for weapons; a national “red-flag” law; and repeal of the liability shield that protects gun manufacturers from being sued.
Chances of Congress enacting the president’s sweeping proposals are slim, thanks to Republicans in the Senate who have refused to even debate these issues. But the hope is that a political moment may have finally arrived in which some Republicans see there is peril in doing nothing. A small group of senators from both parties has been working to reach a compromise, and there are cautious reports of some progress.
We would urge them to take to heart the words of the grandmother in Uvalde who lost a granddaughter and passed a handwritten letter to Mr. Biden during his visit there. “Erase the invisible line that is dividing our nation,” she wrote. “Come up with a solution and fix what’s broken and make the changes that are necessary to prevent this from happening again.” | 2022-06-04T12:37:01Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Yes, we can do something about gun violence - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/06/04/yes-we-can-do-something-about-gun-violence/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/06/04/yes-we-can-do-something-about-gun-violence/ |
Biden has long pressed for an assault weapons ban, successfully negotiating a 10-year ban as a senator in 1994. Nearly three decades later, he is confronting the reality of a Congress that operates much differently and a landscape that makes the goal almost impossible to achieve.
Then-Sen. Joe Biden, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, holds a TEC-9 semiautomatic during a 1993 hearing on assault weapons. (Barry Thumma/AP)
Then-senator Joe Biden’s signature crime bill had ground its way through Congress after months of tedious effort. But after an unexpected flare-up over guns raised the threat of a filibuster, the lawmaker from Delaware took the Senate floor for an impassioned plea.
“We can vote to keep these deadly military-style assault weapons on the streets, where we know they have one purpose and one purpose only — killing other human beings,” Biden said that evening in November 1993. “Or we can vote to take these deadly military-style assault weapons off our streets. The choice is that simple. The choice is that stark.”
Later that night, after a vote showed a majority of senators wanted to add an assault weapons ban to the bill, he looked at his Republican colleagues and offered a modest taunt: “Why not lose gracefully?”
The assault weapons ban eventually passed, ushering in a dramatic change in the nation’s firearms laws and punctuating a years-long effort from Biden to enact gun control legislation. It would prove to be a seminal moment in his long legislative career, and would help cement his views of how the halting machinery of Congress can address the toughest problems of American society.
But nearly three decades later, as Biden attempts to resurrect that approach and puts an assault weapon ban at the center of his rallying cry on guns, the landscape is radically different. The ban he helped pass expired after 10 years and has never been renewed. As president, Biden is confronting the realities of a Congress that operates much differently and a political dynamic that makes the goal almost impossible to achieve.
U.S. has experienced more than 200 mass shootings this year
Even Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who with Biden led the effort to include the ban in the sweeping 1994 crime bill, is not focusing on a restoration. Instead, she has advocated for a new bill raising the minimum age for the purchase of assault weapons and high-capacity magazines from 18 to 21.
“You know how I feel about this,” Feinstein said after news broke of a shooting in Texas that killed 19 children and two adults. “Every [mass shooting] is sort of like a knife in me because I want people to be safe, and I want people to use these weapons appropriately, and they don’t.” But as for an assault weapons ban, she added, “Whether we have enough support to do something about it, I don’t know.”
But Biden, as he has in the past, has quickly embraced the assault weapons ban as a necessary solution. “It makes no sense to be able to purchase something that can fire up to 300 rounds,” he said on Monday. “The idea of these high-caliber weapons — there’s simply no rational basis for it in terms of self-protection, hunting.”
During his prime-time address on mass killings Thursday night, the president mentioned it first in a string of urgent proposals. “Why in God’s name should an ordinary citizen be able to purchase an assault weapon that holds 30-round magazines that let mass shooters fire hundreds of bullets in a matter of minutes?” he said.
Biden’s focus on the improbable ban is in part a way to rally Democrats on a powerful issue for the upcoming midterms, while depicting Republicans as so unreasonable they refuse to ban killing machines. And in his Thursday speech, he emphasized that if Congress would not ban the weapons altogether, it should at a minimum take more modest steps.
Adam Eisgrau, a former Feinstein aide closely involved in the ban’s adoption, said it was “critical and entirely appropriate” for Biden to discuss his legislative aspirations. “It’s not puffery, it’s not superfluous,” he said. “That’s what it means to lead. It means to have a vision and to articulate it, even when you don’t see a path to achieving it.”
But Biden’s push for the ban also reflects how he sometimes reaches into the past, to a very time when the parties were far more willing to compromise, as he struggles to confront the crises that rock American during his presidency.
It was back in 1989 that a disturbed drifter wielding an AK-47 variant killed five children and wounded 30 more people outside a Stockton, Calif., elementary school. That prompted two Democratic senators, Dennis DeConcini of Arizona and Howard Metzenbaum of Ohio, to draft the first bills singling out military-style rifles for regulation.
Their bills never passed, but a more opportune moment came four years later, when another horrific shooting handed a platform to a rookie senator. On July 1, 1993, a failed entrepreneur walked into a downtown San Francisco office building armed with a variant of the TEC-9 semiautomatic pistol. He took the elevator and entered the offices of a law firm, where he proceeded to kill eight and wound six more before killing himself.
“This happened in our own front yard,” Feinstein told the San Francisco Chronicle in 2003. “It really moved me that we had to do something.”
Biden, then chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, was helping newly-elected President Bill Clinton push a sweeping crime bill at the time, and Feinstein fought to make an assault weapons ban a part of it. That meant making concessions to skeptics, including an agreement to “sunset” the ban after 10 years so researchers could judge whether it had made a difference.
Debate was heated, but ultimately cordial in a way that reflects how much politics have changed.
Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah), who co-wrote the crime bill with Biden, warned that inserting the assault weapons ban could prompt opponents to torpedo the entire bipartisan package. “We could stop, it seems to me, the most important crime bill in history,” he said.
Biden, though, called his bluff, predicting Republicans were not “going to bring down a $21 billion bill because the NRA does not like it.”
A climatic moment came as Sen. Larry Craig (R-Idaho), one of the Senate’s staunchest gun-rights proponents, said Feinstein “needs to become a little more familiar with firearms and their deadly characteristics” as he argued against the ban. Feinstein interjected to remind Craig of the 1978 assassination of San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk, when Feinstein was the first to find Milk’s body and found herself announcing the killings to a horrified public. “I know something about what firearms can do,” she said.
Biden turned out to be correct: Republicans chose not to filibuster the sprawling crime bill over the gun ban, and Feinstein’s amendment was incorporated into the crime bill on a 56-43 vote.
In the House, Judiciary Chairman Jack Brooks, a Texas Democrat, firmly opposed the ban, but a key House Republican, Rep. Henry Hyde of Illinois, helped push it through. When Clinton signed the crime bill into law on Sept. 13, 1994, Biden was among those standing behind him, and it seemed a triumphant moment.
But two months later, rebellious Republicans led by Rep. Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) seized control of the House for the first time in nearly four decades — in part by mocking the crime bill as too soft — and American politics changed for good.
From Sandy Hook to Buffalo: 10 years of failure on gun control
Today in the Senate, the filibuster is deployed much more routinely, and the freewheeling amendment process that allowed the assault weapons ban to pass is now unheard of. Amendment votes, if they happen at all, are meticulously negotiated between party leaders due to filibuster threats.
“We are not in an age of relationship politics. We are in an age of macro-messaging and polarization politics, and that’s a big difference,” Eisgrau said.
That shift was evident by the time the ban expired: A 2004 amendment to reauthorize the ban won 52 votes in the Senate, including 10 Republicans, but its adoption prompted the NRA to change its position on underlying bill, causing it to fail on 90-8 vote.
As gun rights increasingly become a cultural touchstone on the right, support for the ban has continued to erode. After a gunman killed 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012, a proposed ban garnered just 40 votes in the Senate, with 15 Democrats being among the “no” votes.
Of those 15, five remain in office and eight others have been replaced by Republicans who embrace gun rights. That has kept an assault weapons ban almost completely out of the legislative conversations since last month’s mass killing in Uvalde, Texas.
At the same time, advocates and opponents are engaged in a fierce debate about whether an assault weapon ban would accomplish much. The 1994 law banned the sale not only of assault weapons, but also large-capacity magazines that hold more than 10 rounds. Because it had a number of loopholes and was in place for only 10 years, its full impact was initially difficult to measure.
A 2004 study for the Justice Department, for example, found that assault weapons were “rarely used” in gun crimes, but concluded that the law might have had a bigger impact had it remained in place for longer.
Christopher S. Koper, author of that study and an associate professor of criminology at George Mason University, has done research since then suggesting that mass killings increased after the assault weapons ban expired. He wrote in a 2020 study that the restrictions on large-capacity magazines were critical in reducing mass shooting deaths.
The Washington Post Fact Checker, analyzing a Biden comment last year that the assault weapons ban reduced such deaths, found that research increasingly suggests that to be true.
Biden has called the ban on assault weapons ban the toughest deal that has worked on successfully, and as president, he has brought up the notion of reenacting it nearly every month.
“We can ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines in this country once again,” he said in March 2021 after a shooting in Boulder, Colo. “I got that done when I was a senator. It passed. It was law for the longest time, and it brought down these mass killings. We should do it again.”
He mentioned it again in his first address to Congress. “Talk to most responsible gun owners and hunters,” he said. “They’ll tell you there’s no possible justification for having a hundred rounds in a weapon.”
And he has returned to it again following the tragedy in Uvalde. “What in God’s name do you need an assault weapon for except to kill someone?” he said after the shooting, turning to a line he’s used since the early 1990s: “Deer aren’t running through the forest with Kevlar vests on, for God’s sake. It’s just sick.”
Biden’s advisers note that the first assault weapons ban came only after years of debate. The president knows it may not be resurrected in the latest round of negotiations, they suggest, but believes that by emphasizing it he can nonetheless help pave the way.
Republicans, meanwhile, show little unease in defending the right of Americans to purchase military-type rifles. Many have seized upon the weaknesses of the 1994 ban, which struggled to precisely define what constituted an assault rifle. Standard hunting rifles, for instance, share the key attributes of assault rifles — semiautomatic fire of rounds from a detachable magazine — leaving lawmakers and regulators to focus on largely cosmetic traits to distinguish between the two.
“These [bans] all sound very good until you actually get into the practical side of it,” said Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.). “It’s not that we are trying to defend individuals that have evil intent. What we’re trying to say is there are millions and millions of individuals that purchase these systems without evil intent.”
Two Republican aides familiar with the talks underway in the Senate, speaking on the condition of anonymity to frankly describe their parameters, said any discussion of an assault weapons ban would be a nonstarter. More probable are provisions focused on keeping guns away from those who might harm themselves or others, they said.
The lead Democratic negotiator, Sen. Chris Murphy (Conn.), has acknowledged as much.
“We probably can’t get a universal background check bill. We probably can’t get the votes for a ban on assault weapons,” Murphy said last week on the PBS News Hour. “But maybe we can do some smaller things to at least show parents and kids in this country that we take seriously the fear, the anxiousness that they labor under every single day in their classrooms and at home.”
Even some White House officials concede that an assault weapons ban is less likely than other measures such as red flag laws and enhanced background checks. But the issue could prove to be a powerful rallying cry ahead of the midterm elections.
“For a while if they didn’t think they had the votes, they wouldn’t talk about something, and that didn’t really serve them well,” said Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster who worked on Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign. “They are now visibly showing they want to take action — and who is responsible for not taking action? It’s members of Congress, and particularly Republican member of Congress.”
In hindsight, Lake and others said, the coalition that Biden helped build in 1994 proved crucial to offsetting the powerful opposition. The assault weapons ban was supported by not just gun control advocates, but also by hunters and sportsmen, as well as police officers who were increasingly concerned about being outgunned in the drug wars.
That alliance is gone, at least for now. “Senator Biden built and maintained a coalition that broke through the usual gun control impasse in ’94,” said Chris Putala, a longtime Biden staffer who worked on the legislation. “We’ve now got the public attention and anger. The question is whether you can stitch together the kind of coalition that moves people past the obstinate ‘do-nothing’ minority.” | 2022-06-04T12:37:08Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Biden’s long quest on the assault weapons ban - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/06/04/biden-assault-weapons-ban/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/06/04/biden-assault-weapons-ban/ |
Mariah Carey in 2019. (Mario Anzuoni/Reuters)
Andy Stone, known as Vince Vance, part of country band Vince Vance & the Valiants, filed a lawsuit against Carey, 53, on Friday in a New Orleans federal court. He is seeking at least $20 million in damages and alleging copyright infringement and unjust enrichment, among other claims.
The court documents describe Vance as a self-employed artist who in 1989 co-wrote a song titled “All I Want for Christmas is You” and recorded it in a studio in Nashville. It was later released and “receiving extensive airplay during the 1993 Christmas season … began making appearances on the Billboard Music Charts.”
Mariah Carey to Texas bar that banned ‘All I Want for Christmas’ until Dec. 1: ‘It’s time’ | 2022-06-04T13:37:25Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Mariah Carey faces lawsuit over ‘All I Want for Christmas is You’ - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/06/04/mariah-carey-lawsuit-all-i-want-for-christmas/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/06/04/mariah-carey-lawsuit-all-i-want-for-christmas/ |
Analysis by Kami Rieck | Bloomberg
“Aren’t you happy your mother chose to give birth to you so you could be adopted?” As a transracial adoptee growing up in Indiana, I was often asked this question by people who identified as pro-life. It seemed only to embolden them that I was born in China at the height of the one-child policy.
With the US Supreme Court poised to overturn Roe v. Wade — the landmark ruling that established a constitutional right to abortion — pro-lifers are portraying private adoption as a solution for unwanted pregnancies. Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who adopted two of her seven children from Haiti, and others have suggested abortion is unnecessary because birth mothers can simply give up their babies.
But there is nothing simple about it.
For one thing, adoption is not an alternative to being pregnant and giving birth. Carrying a baby to term is a pretty big deal.
That’s one reason that unwanted pregnancies carried to term rarely end in adoption. Of women who were denied an abortion due to gestational limits, 91% who carried their babies to term chose to parent, according to a 2017 study by Gretchen Sisson, a sociologist at the University of California, San Francisco. If abortion is criminalized in two dozen states, perhaps that will change, but currently only 0.5% of births in the US end in adoption. Birth mothers who give up their babies for adoption report extended feelings of grief, anxiety and depression. Some have suicidal thoughts. “I have never gotten over it,” wrote one woman who had relinquished her child 20 years earlier.
If relinquishing a child is so terrible, why do some choose to do it? The most common reason mothers is financial strain — not because adoption is their first choice, says Sisson.
To better understand the demographics of mothers in the US who relinquished their infants for adoption, Sisson examined data from private adoption agencies between 2001 and 2020. Most of the mothers were in their twenties, unemployed, on public health insurance and earning less than $5,000 per year. Many were already parents. About 34% of the mothers in the study were people of color. Most had a high school degree and were unmarried.
According to a 2015 study by Sisson, most women who relinquished their babies would have preferred to parent. Adoption was a last resort. But unemployment, low-paying jobs, a lack of parental support and lack of health insurance all contributed to their feeling it was their only option.
These are some of the same reasons that women seek abortions. Many are already parents and choose to terminate their pregnancy because they want to devote their time and resources to the children they have. According to a 2004 survey, the main reasons women in the US sought abortions were that a pregnancy would interrupt education or the ability to work, and that they lacked support from their partners.
Pro-life and pro-choice activists should unite to push for investments in families to make parenting more viable. This would include living-wage jobs, paid parental leave, housing security and access to affordable childcare and health care. Many women in the US want more children than they end up having, according to a 2018 survey of 1,858 men and women ages 20 to 45 conducted by Morning Consult. About 64% of respondents cited expensive childcare as being the reason they had fewer children than they considered ideal.
Women who do give up their babies for adoption should have the power to make reproductive choices free of financial pressure. Adoption will of course be an answer for some. But it won’t — and can’t — be the only option. It’s never an easy one.
“Everything about how I was brought up says that abortion is wrong,” one of Sisson’s study participants said. “But I would never, ever wish this experience on anyone, and I would never strategically use adoption as a way to mitigate or negotiate an abortion issue. I think that people who suggest that girls do adoptions instead of abortions just don’t know how difficult and challenging adoption can be.”
It can also be hard on the child. Regardless of how successful adoption is, parent-child separation affects brain development, which can influence a baby’s ability to establish a secure attachment style early in life. I am no stranger to the psychological trauma of being separated from my birth mother. It took years to process the profound role that loss and grief play in my life.
When people ask if I’m grateful for being adopted, the simple answer is yes. But there is no guarantee my birth mother had access to safe abortion or had the power to make a decision free of financial deprivation. Twenty-three years later, I want women to have more choices, not fewer.
• How Abortion Pills Changed the Political Debate in Ireland: Clara Ferreira Marques
• After the Supreme Court Breaks Roe, Who Picks Up the Pieces?: Therese Raphael | 2022-06-04T14:07:53Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Adoption Is Not a Substitute for Abortion - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/adoption-is-not-a-substitute-for-abortion/2022/06/04/0e8aaaba-e407-11ec-ae64-6b23e5155b62_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/adoption-is-not-a-substitute-for-abortion/2022/06/04/0e8aaaba-e407-11ec-ae64-6b23e5155b62_story.html |
MIAMI BEACH, FLORIDA - OCTOBER 04: The PaykanArtCar, a new vehicle dedicated to highlighting human rights abuses in Iran, is unveiled at the Human Rights Foundation’s Oslo Freedom Forum on September 5, 2021 in Miami, Florida. (Photo by John Parra/Getty Images for PaykanArtCar) (Photographer: John Parra/Getty Images North America)
At the Oslo Freedom Forum, an annual gathering of political activists and dissidents, attendees are confronted with the challenge of making the world care about long-running tyrannies. The passage of decades makes it that much harder to draw international attention to the plight of Cubans, say, or Zimbabweans — and harder still because newer causes, such as the tragedy of the Uyghurs, clamor for our collective concern.
The forum awards the Vaclav Havel Prize for Creative Dissent to those who bring invention and imagination to their activism to alert the world to their causes. Previous winners have included Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, Indonesian comedian Sakdiyah Ma’ruf and Emmanuel Jal, a hip-hop artist from South Sudan.
If art, comedy and music have long been deployed in political causes, one of this year’s award-winning projects breaks new ground: It is a car.
The PaykanArtCar project has turned an Iranian-made sedan that was once gifted by Shah Mehammed Reza Pahlavi to the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu into a vehicle for activism against Iran’s rulers. The idea is to use the car as a canvas on which Iranian artists can protest the depredations of the regime in Tehran.
The first artist to have at it is Alireza Shojaian, an Iran-born, Paris-based artist who has chosen to draw attention to the plight of Iran’s LGBTQ+ community. Against a yellow background, Shojaian has painted images depicting Ali Fazeli Monfared, a 20-year-old man from Ahvaz, in southwestern Iran, who was allegedly beheaded last year by his own relatives for being gay. The style is redolent of the 10th century Persian epic known as Shahnameh, and the artist says he was especially inspired by one of its stories, the tragedy of Rostam and Sohrab, in which a father kills his son.
International and Iranian rights groups say the LGBTQ+ community in Iran faces discrimination in society and criminalization in law. Same-gender sexual activity carries the maximum sentence of death. The mores and laws are defended by the liberal and conservative factions of the theocracy. Former President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad famously declared there were no homosexuals in Iran, and former foreign minister Javad Zarif justified the execution of gays by invoking Iranian society’s “moral principles.”
Hiva Feizi, executive director of PaykanArtCar, told me the project is now seeking a second artist to use the car as a mural for another cause. “They can decide the specific issue — it could be about women’s rights, environmental concerns or anything else — as long as it is related to Iran,” she said.
A Florida-based nonprofit, PaykanArtCar is run by Mark Wallace, a United Nations diplomat under President George W. Bush. Wallace also heads United Against Nuclear Iran, which pursues more conventional means of advocacy — pressing policy makers in Washington not to make concessions to Tehran and pressuring companies to stop doing business with the country.
The PaykanArtCar project is in effect an acknowledgment that conventional efforts aren’t sufficient to keep the cause of freedom in Iran fresh in the public mind. It certainly speaks to the Iranian diaspora, for whom the Paykan, which means “arrow” in Persian, is a national icon. Based on the Hillman Hunter, a British car, it was the first car manufactured in Iran, starting in 1967.
Although production of the sedan ceased in 2005 (a pickup version was made until 2015), the Paykan can still be seen on Iranian roads. Hardly the most comfortable or reliable of rides, the car nonetheless invokes pride, symbolizing the can-do spirit of Iranian drivers and mechanics. It also inspires thousands of jokes, and I heard most of them from Paykan taxi drivers during a trip to Tehran in 2015, just months before authorities tried to ban them to address the city’s notorious air pollution. My favorite: “How do you make a Paykan accelerate 0-60 mph in less than 15 seconds? Push it off a cliff.”
The Shah’s gift to his fellow tyrant was made in 1974, when developing countries took special pride in making cars. (My native India was then producing the Ambassador, based on another British car, the Morris Oxford.) It was still roadworthy when Ceausescu was toppled in 1989, and was twice put up for auction before it was acquired by the PaykanArtCar project.
Since being repurposed as a moving mural, it has been displayed in the US, Canada and in Europe. Feizi says that although Iranian diaspora groups were initially skeptical of its use to promote LGBTQ+ rights, “they’ve been coming to see it, and most of them agree that using it as a vehicle of protest is a novel idea, a good way to get attention for people in Iran.”
At the OFF, it did a much better job of that than the motley gathering of Oslo-based Iranian dissidents who assemble regularly in front of the Norwegian parliament to chant slogans calling for the downfall of the regime in Tehran. They hadn’t got the memo about creative dissent.
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Biden Is Missing an Opportunity to Put Pressure on Iran: Bobby Ghosh | 2022-06-04T14:07:59Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Iranian Artists-in-Exile Find a Vehicle for Protest - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/iranian-artists-in-exile-find-a-vehicle-for-protest/2022/06/04/0f75fef2-e407-11ec-ae64-6b23e5155b62_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/iranian-artists-in-exile-find-a-vehicle-for-protest/2022/06/04/0f75fef2-e407-11ec-ae64-6b23e5155b62_story.html |
“The elites in society have the loudest megaphone when it comes to gun control,” Ted Cruz declared on Twitter last month, summing up his talk at the National Rifle Association’s Leadership Forum in Houston. “They live in gated neighborhoods and have private security.”
As a US senator, graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Law School and husband of a Goldman Sachs managing director, Cruz knows his elites. But is he right that such people tend to live in gated communities? And are those behind gates really more likely to favor gun control?
These are questions to which it seemed like there might be data-driven answers, so I started looking. I didn’t find a clear one to the second, although my guess would be that it’s “no.” But there are a lo of statistics available on how many people live in gated communities and what their demographics are, and some of them may surprise you.
Communities with walls and gates have of course been around for millennia, and in the US the pioneering gated residential development of Tuxedo Park outside New York City (which gave the formal suit its name) dates to the late 1800s. But the phenomenon only really took off here much more recently. “Gated communities...have been springing up around the country since the early 1980s,” University of California, Berkeley, urban scholars Edward J. Blakely and Mary Gail Snyder wrote in “Fortress America,” the 1997 book that announced the arrival of a major new topic of research and political debate.
The residences we are discussing are not multi-unit, high-density apartment and condominium buildings with security systems or doormen in which gates or guards prevent public access to lobbies, hallways, and parking lots. Gated communities are different: their walls and fences preclude public access to streets, sidewalks, parks, beaches, rivers, trails, playgrounds — all resources that without gates or walls would be open and shared by all the citizens of a locality.
Blakely and Snyder estimated that there were three million American households — out of either 99 million or 101 million total, depending on which Census Bureau survey you went by — living in such communities at the time, with their number growing rapidly. “These developments in part reflect the notion of community as an island, a social bulwark against the general degradation of the urban social order,” they lamented. “They also reflect the increasing attempt to substitute private controls for public organization, for the joint responsibilities of democratic citizenship all of us share.”
Many on the political left and center went on to echo these concerns, with some painting those behind gates as privileged reactionaries. The right-wing critique of gated-community dwellers as liberal hypocrites appears to be more recent, with then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions claiming in 2018 that critics of President Donald Trump’s Mexican border wall and other immigration policies “live in gated communities, many of them,” and Fox News host Tucker Carlson opining in 2019 that if Trump’s wall had to go, so did “the gated communities of Brentwood.”
Brentwood is an affluent neighborhood of Los Angeles that boasts a few high-end gated neighborhoods and a fair number of not-so-high-end-but-still-expensive apartment complexes with gates. The vast majority of its single-family houses are ungated, but many do have little signs out front alerting would-be intruders that if they set off the alarm system, armed security guards will respond. Brentwood is also quite liberal politically, with all precincts voting for Joe Biden over Trump in 2020 by margins of at least 2-to-1. So let us allow that there are at least a few grains of truth to the Cruz-Sessions-Carlson critique.
But the notion that gated communities have become so widespread in the US that they house large segments of the liberal elite or the conservative elite or whatever elite it is that you have a problem with seemed off to me, especially since in the three metropolitan regions other than Los Angeles that are most often identified as housing the nation’s agenda-setting elite — New York, Washington and the San Jose-San Francisco Bay Area — they are not a major visible presence, Tuxedo Park notwithstanding. And since 2001, there’s been data on that.
That year, the Census Bureau started asking about gated communities as part of the American Housing Survey it conducts every two years on behalf of the Department of Housing and Urban Development. The specific question was, “Is your community surrounded by walls or fences preventing access by persons other than residents?” If yes, there was a follow-up question about whether there was a “special entry system” — presumably a gate. The questions were included in every AHS through 2009, then dropped in 2011 (survey funder HUD was facing some pretty sharp cuts to its discretionary budget). The first question was restored, minus follow-up, in 2015. Here are the results, expressed as a percentage of total occupied housing units:
The AHS numbers seemed to fit pretty well with what Blakely and Snyder had estimated and projected in 1997: They showed almost four million housing units in 2001 secured with walls and fences and protected by a special entry system, according to the AHS, and that number grew 53% over the rest of the decade.
But given that almost all of that growth occurred between 2005 and 2007, and much of it evaporated when AHS survey takers started asking the question again in 2015, I suspect some change in survey design might be behind the inconsistency. The number and percentage of housing units in communities surrounded by walls and fences has grown since 2001, but not as fast as it did in the 1980s and 1990s or appeared to be doing in the late-2000s data.
A look at residents’ demographic characteristics and whether they own or rent changes the picture even more. The 2001 AHS data, three researchers reported in 2005, “shows that low-income renters are actually more likely to live in walled or gated communities compared to affluent homeowners.” That has continued to be true. More than two-thirds of the housing units reported in 2019 as being in communities secured by walls or fences were rentals. Meanwhile, the number of owner-occupied units that met this description rose just 14% (from a little under 3.1 million to a little over 3.5 million) from 2001 to 2019, and their share of total occupied housing units actually fell slightly.
The anomalousness of the 2007 and 2009 numbers is even more apparent in this chart, raising questions about the reliability of the data then, before and since. Also, breaking things down by owners and renters as I’ve done here doesn’t perfectly capture the divide between fancy gated communities and run-of-the-mill apartment complexes with fences around them — Florida’s Fisher Island is possibly the fanciest limited-access community in the country, albeit one secured by water rather than walls or fences, and there are plenty of places to rent there if you can spare $20,000 a month. Still, equating owner-occupied homes behind community walls with the gated communities of popular discourse seems close enough to being right for our purposes, and the AHS statistics showing a fizzling or at least plateauing of the gated-community boom over the past two decades match up with some other things we know about the period.
Violent crime in the US fell sharply starting in the early 1990s, for example. Cities, where that crime had been concentrated, revived. In 1980 the prices of houses in the US rose with their distance from city centers; by 2010 this relationship had reversed. The signature US housing trend of the 2010s was blocky wood-framed apartment buildings in cities and suburban downtowns. Guarded gates came to be seen as a pointless hassle by many, with “gated community” ranking No. 5 (just behind “only a shower stall in master bath”) on the list of features most unwanted by homebuyers in a 2013 National Association of Homebuilders survey.
The past two years have seen a mass adoption of remote work, a sharp increase in some violent crimes and a devaluation of real estate in big cities relative to suburbs and smaller cities. It’s possible that we’re at the beginning of a major trend reversal, and that gated communities will enjoy a revival (data from the 2021 American Housing Survey will be released in the third quarter of this year, although it’s unlikely to show much of a shift yet). Also, gated communities still appear to be on the rise in the developing world, and may well house significant portions of some nations’ ruling elites.
But in the US, as the much-criticized recent protests outside the suburban Maryland and Virginia homes of several Supreme Court justices made clear, that’s just not where things stand at the moment. Only 3% of Washington-area housing is in owner-occupied units in communities secured by walls or fences, according to the 2019 AHS, and if you subtract out (1) subdivisions that are surrounded by walls or fences but not gated and (2) retirement communities, it’s probably a lot less than that. Among major US metropolitan areas, those in the Sun Belt are most likely to have homeowners sheltered behind walls, with Miami on a different plane from the rest.
The Miami area is of course home to many retirees, and the modern gated-community boom got its start with the advent of master-planned developments for retirees in the 1960s. Nationwide, those 65 and older represented about 40% of householders in owner-occupied homes in walled or fenced communities in 2017 (the 2019 breakdown isn’t available), versus about 25% of householders overall. While people in that age group do wield an awful lot of power these days — they hold the US presidency and the top positions in the House and Senate, as well as spots three through six on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index of the world’s wealthiest people — retirees living in gated communities for the most part don’t fit the description of “the elites in our society.”
Most residents of walled communities don’t fit that description, in fact. In 2019, 57% of the owner-residents in walled or fenced communities had household incomes of less than $100,000 a year and two-thirds made less than $120,000. That of course does leave a third — about 1.2 million households — making $120,000 or more, which is where the AHS income breakdown tops out. There definitely are some rich people living in gated communities! But any ranking of the richest communities in the country, or Charles Murray’s list of “Super Zips” characterized by high incomes and high percentages of college graduates, is dominated by ungated suburbs and urban neighborhoods.
One might argue that I’m being too literal here. As a housing advocate said in an article about Atherton, a town between San Francisco and the tech campuses of Silicon Valley that comes in first or second in most national income rankings, “They aren’t literally a gated city, but they are metaphorically a gated one and they have done that by zoning.” In his actual talk to the NRA, as opposed to his Twitter summary, Cruz similarly extended the metaphor by saying that pro-gun-control elites “make their accusations … from gated communities equipped with private security or, at the very least, from expensive neighborhoods protected by high home prices and low crime rates.”
So yes, the very, very rich live different lives from the rest of us, lives often protected by private security. Even low-grade elites such as, cough, opinion columnists at major news organizations tend to cluster in relatively safe neighborhoods, send our kids to safe schools and spend most of our time hanging out with people whose views and lives are similar to ours.
That’s all worthy of examination and criticism, and it gets tons. But it’s not the same as the nation’s elites retreating behind actual gates. The rise of walled or fenced communities for homeowners in the US seems to have stalled out quite a while ago at about 4% of the nation’s housing stock, with those behind actual gates amounting to something less than that. Most of the residents of these communities aren’t rich.
Are they gun control supporters? I wasn’t able to track down much research on the political attitudes of gated-community dwellers, but the 2005 California study and 2010 Canadian one that I did find both came to the conclusion that those in gated communities are to the right politically of those living in nearby ungated neighborhoods — which in the US can be translated into meaning they’re less likely to support gun control.
Then again, Donald Trump’s gift for alienating affluent suburbanites may have had an impact in gated communities too. A perusal of the New York Times’ “Extremely Detailed Map of the 2020 Election” reveals that Tuxedo Park residents voted to the left of surrounding communities in New York’s Orange County, while those in the San Francisco Bay Area gated neighborhoods of Rossmoor (a retirement community) and Blackhawk (a high-end development favored by pro athletes and corporate executives) voted similarly to their mostly Democratic neighbors.
In Los Angeles the gated neighborhoods in Brentwood and nearby areas are generally too small to distinguish on the map. The gated city of Hidden Hills in the San Fernando Valley is distinguishable, and voted to the right of most of its neighbors, although it was still plus-18% for Joe Biden. The gated communities in the South that I could identify on the map, such as Hot Springs Village in Arkansas, were overwhelming pro-Trump, but so were most areas around them. All in all, not enough information from which to draw strong conclusions.
So basically, as you probably guessed at the beginning, Ted Cruz was just making stuff up. But I am most grateful to him for the learning experience.
Red-Flag Laws Can Cut the Toll of Mass Shootings: Editorial
Solving America’s Gun Culture Problem: Sarah Green Carmichael
Why Wall Street Can’t Escape the Culture Wars: Paul J. Davies | 2022-06-04T14:08:05Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Ted Cruz’s Anti-Gun Elites Aren’t Hiding Behind Walls and Gates - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/ted-cruzs-anti-gun-elites-arent-hiding-behind-walls-and-gates/2022/06/04/0f117e3c-e407-11ec-ae64-6b23e5155b62_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/ted-cruzs-anti-gun-elites-arent-hiding-behind-walls-and-gates/2022/06/04/0f117e3c-e407-11ec-ae64-6b23e5155b62_story.html |
By Josette Keelor | AP
Santa Fe, New Mexico sculpture artist Kevin Box watches as his piece titled “Light Boat” is lowered to the ground near the spring house at the Museum of the Shenandoah Valley in Winchester, Virginia on May 25, 2022 for the Origami in the Garden exhibit. (Jeff Taylor/The Winchester Star via AP)
WINCHESTER, Va. — Origami in the Garden is the latest exhibit at the seven acres of gardens at the Museum of the Shenandoah Valley. | 2022-06-04T14:08:29Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Origami exhibit combines nature with grand art sculptures - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/origami-exhibit-combines-nature-with-grand-art-sculptures/2022/06/04/8486e43c-e406-11ec-ae64-6b23e5155b62_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/origami-exhibit-combines-nature-with-grand-art-sculptures/2022/06/04/8486e43c-e406-11ec-ae64-6b23e5155b62_story.html |
Crosses bearing the names of the victims killed in last week’s school shooting are seen through a balloon at a memorial at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, Wednesday, June 1, 2022. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)
UVALDE, Texas — She wrote notes to her family, hiding them so that they could be found later and loved to feed animals on the family’s ranch. He liked to sit in the back of the school bus so he could talk with other kids. | 2022-06-04T14:08:53Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Uvalde 10-year-olds: Smart, funny, loving animals, football - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/uvalde-10-year-olds-smart-funny-loving-animals-football/2022/06/04/67688d0a-e407-11ec-ae64-6b23e5155b62_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/uvalde-10-year-olds-smart-funny-loving-animals-football/2022/06/04/67688d0a-e407-11ec-ae64-6b23e5155b62_story.html |
Kacey Wong, a 52-year-old Hong Kong dissident artist, shows his artwork “Attack of the Red Giant” at Taipei’s Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall to mark the 33rd anniversary of the June 4, 1989, Tiananmen massacre. (Vic Chiang for The Washington Post)
Hong Kong churches no longer off-limits as Beijing tightens grip on dissent
In Taipei and Tainan in the south of Taiwan, groups are hosting screenings of a play about an elderly couple in Beijing whose son was killed in the protests. The play ends with a rendition of the protest song “Glory to Hong Kong.” A church in Tamsui, north of Taipei, whose congregants are mostly from Hong Kong live-streamed a prayer session in commemoration of those who died.
In Taiwan — where student protests broke out a year after the Tiananmen crackdown and marked a key turning point in Taiwan’s democratization — June 4 has traditionally not aroused as much public sympathy as in Hong Kong. Small-scale events have been held for years, garnering little attention, compared with the vigil in Hong Kong.
Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen said in a statement Saturday on Facebook: “We believe such brute force cannot erase people’s memories. When democracy is under threat … it is more necessary to uphold democratic values.”
For Hong Kong students, marking Tiananmen may now require ‘hide and seek’
Lily Kuo in Taipei and Theodora Yu in Hong Kong contributed to this report. | 2022-06-04T14:09:30Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Tiananmen vigils move to Taiwan from Hong Kong - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/06/04/taiwan-tiananmen-vigil-china/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/06/04/taiwan-tiananmen-vigil-china/ |
A man mourns at a memorial at the scene of a shooting at a Tops supermarket in Buffalo on May 20. (Lindsay Dedario/Reuters)
As the United States is reeling from a recent string of mass shootings stretching from New York to Texas to Oklahoma, President Biden has called on Congress to take immediate action on gun control, seeking to transform emotion and anger into change. The president called for sweeping changes to the country’s gun laws on Thursday, including banning assault weapons and limiting high-capacity magazines, following the recent attacks in Buffalo, an elementary school in Uvalde, Tex., and a hospital in Tulsa. The political dynamics in the evenly divided Senate make the odds on those proposals remote.
Rogers had been standing behind the store’s customer service counter when the shooting began on May 14. As she ducked down to avoid the gunfire, she hurriedly called 911 at around 2:30 p.m. That’s when the Tops employee said the 911 dispatcher flippantly responded to her.
“She got mad at me, hung up in my face,” Rogers told the News. After the dispatcher hung up on her, Rogers told local media that she called her boyfriend and directed him to call 911.
When Rogers made her remarks to local media following the shooting, county officials began to investigate the allegations against the dispatcher. Poloncarz, the county executive, told reporters in May that Erie County emergency services combed through all of the 911 calls associated with the mass shooting. Officials were able to locate the call in question and found the alleged actions of the dispatcher to be “completely unacceptable,” Poloncarz said.
Even though Ayers has now been dismissed, New York state law suggests that it remains unlikely that the recording of the 911 call will be released. New York County Law 308(4), a measure that applies to all counties outside of New York City, says that “records, in whatever form they may be kept, of calls made to a municipality’s E911 system shall not be made available to or obtained by any entity or person, other than that municipality’s public safety agency, another government agency or body, or a private entity or a person providing medical, ambulance or other emergency services, and shall not be utilized for any commercial purpose other than the provision of emergency services.”
Rogers told WGRZ last month that she was initially on the fence about the dispatcher losing her job, but has concluded that being placed on administrative leave was not enough.
“She was not understanding at all, and she didn’t care and left me for dead,” Rogers said. “I just thank God that I’m here ’cause I could have died.”
Shayna Jacobs and David Nakamura contributed to this report.
After the shock fades, fear rises in the aftermath of Buffalo shooting
Poll: Black Americans fear more racist attacks after Buffalo shooting
Buffalo shooting suspect wrote of plans 5 months ago, messages show | 2022-06-04T14:12:15Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Buffalo shooting 911 dispatcher Sheila Ayers fired for allegedly hanging up on Tops employee - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/06/04/buffalo-shooting-911-dispatcher-fired-ayers/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/06/04/buffalo-shooting-911-dispatcher-fired-ayers/ |
Eric Young Jr. turned 37 in late May. (Katherine Frey/The Washington Post)
When Nationals first base coach Eric Young Jr. walks through Washington’s clubhouse, he sometimes blends in with the players. That could be because he still looks the part.
It’s not uncommon for former players to become coaches, but typically, they have to work their way up through the lower levels for a few years before getting a shot at the majors. Young, though, only had to wait a year.
Young was named Washington’s first base coach late last year, a position he landed after a year-long stint on the coaching staff for the Tacoma Rainiers, the Class AAA affiliate of the Seattle Mariners. Before he was with Tacoma, Young had been playing for the Guerreros de Oaxaca, a team in the Mexican League, but was released in November 2020.
Young, who just turned 37 in late May, is the fourth-youngest first base coach in baseball — only Minnesota’s Hank Conger (34), San Diego’s David Macias (36) and Seattle’s Kristopher Negrón (36) are younger. Even Nelson Cruz, Washington’s designated hitter, is four years older than Young.
Young — whose 10-year MLB career included stints with the Colorado Rockies, New York Mets, Atlanta Braves, New York Yankees and Los Angeles Angels — sees his age as a benefit.
“I’m not so far removed from playing, so I do understand what they’re going through on a day-to-day basis,” he said. “At the same time, I still can move a little bit, so if I need to go out there and really show what I’m trying to explain then I can do that as well. Being closer to the age of the guys makes it a lot of fun and they respond to me a lot quicker and probably can relate to me.”
Young’s responsibilities also include instructing outfield defense and baserunning. Manager Dave Martinez said Young has been “a godsend.”
“People often say, ‘you hired a guy that hasn’t got very much coaching experience,’ ” Martinez said. “But he’s been coached his whole life so he understands, and he’s been really good at it.”
Young credits his rise to the top to being around the game from a young age — his father, Eric Young Sr., played in the majors for 15 years and now serves as first base coach for the Braves.
Young spent years getting live mental reps and picking players’ brains, including his dad’s. Young Sr.'s role as a first base coach didn’t lead to his decision to become one.
“Obviously, I got a great role model, who’s already leading the way, but some things you just kinda take to and feel at ease with doing,” Young said. “And … being the first base coach, working with outfielders, base running, that’s something that always just came natural to me.”
On a typical game day, a laid-back Young greets players with a simple “What’s up, fellas!” before checking in with them about their days and how they’re doing. Before the team takes the field, he meets each player with a personalized handshake.
But Young also makes sure to use the extra time to teach, saying that he expects his young guys to make mistakes, but noted that’s part of the growing process.
He frequently carries an iPad around the clubhouse, searching intently for players at their locker or on a couch. When he finds his target, he gives them tips about an opposing pitcher’s delivery or shows them a scenario he saw play out in games.
Before games, he hits groundballs to the outfielders while they warm up and focuses on their technique, or he will stand behind outfielders like Lane Thomas and give them tips during batting practice.
“Obviously, you can get your work in in BP and the live reads off the bat,” Thomas said. “But he’s really good about just giving us the little things that are going to help us be prepared for the situations on the road in different stadiums.”
Cruz said age doesn’t matter as long as you prepare like he said Young does. The two have developed a bond and mutual respect over the years, so Young said it’s not awkward for him to be coaching Cruz. But how does Cruz feel about it?
“I had a manager who was younger than me, so,” Cruz, who played under the young Twins Manager Rocco Baldelli, said before laughing. “But it doesn’t matter the age if you prepare.”
Young, Cruz said, has “so much knowledge of the game.”
“He is always really well-prepared for his job,” he said. “He always got good information about where the infield and where the outfield is positioned. Well-informed, he gives a lot of energy. He’s one of the best first base coaches I’ve ever played for.” | 2022-06-04T15:17:31Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Why Nationals' Eric Young Jr. views age as benefit in coaching - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/06/04/eric-young-jr-nationals-first-base-coach-age/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/06/04/eric-young-jr-nationals-first-base-coach-age/ |
Black voters overwhelmingly support Democrats and still back Biden more than other groups. But that support has fallen, and fewer say the election matters than in 2020.
Stacy Mumford poses for a portrait at Cherokee Lake Park in Thomasville, Ga.. (Bryan Honhart for The Washington Post)
As far as Stacy Mumford is concerned, Joe Biden fulfilled the campaign promise that mattered most to her the instant he was inaugurated: simply not being named “Donald Trump.” But in the 18 months since then, she hasn’t seen Biden deliver on the myriad promises she believes he made to her and other Black voters.
There has been little movement on police reform or voting rights protections. Gas prices in her town of Thomasville, Ga., near the Florida border, approached $4 a gallon this week. Her most recent raise was gobbled up by the rising price of everything, including food and rent. And she worries about the students at the school where she works — because, she says, gun control is another thing Biden has not successfully delivered.
Mumford believes the president is well-intentioned and that his campaign promises were made in good faith. But she’d hoped that a politician who spent 36 years as a senator and eight as vice president “would have more of a deft hand.”
“He’s not really holding up to his end of the bargain,” said Mumford, 49, a school nutritionist. “Some things he’s promised. Some things he’s done. But we are still struggling as a whole. We are all still struggling.”
Like Mumford, roughly 9 in 10 Black voters supported Biden in the 2020 election, but a Washington Post-Ipsos poll of more than 1,200 Black Americans this spring finds what appears to be diminishing support: 7 in 10 approve of President Biden’s job performance, and fewer than one quarter “strongly approve.” A 60 percent majority of Black Americans say Biden is keeping most of his major campaign promises, but 37 percent say he is not.
Read Washington Post-Ipsos poll results
Writ large, the poll shows much stronger support for Biden in the Black community than among most others groups. But that support is growing less intense among this loyal constituency heading into the midterm elections, and younger Black Americans are significantly less enthusiastic about the president than older ones.
Black registered voters still overwhelmingly support Democratic candidates in the midterms, according to the poll, but they are less likely to say the election matters to them than they did before the Biden-Trump contest, and fewer say they are certain to vote.
Many also expressed relatively little faith in the institution of voting itself: Black Americans are less confident that all eligible citizens will have a fair opportunity to vote than White or Hispanic Americans who were asked the same question.
Black voters are particularly important to the president and the political party he leads. Voters like Mumford helped propel Biden to an 11,779-vote victory in Georgia, the first time a Democratic presidential candidate prevailed in the state since 1992. And a month after Biden won the White House, two Democrats narrowly won Georgia’s Senate seats, handing the party what many Black voters hoped would be a governing majority large enough to enact sweeping changes.
But those changes have been slow in coming, particularly on issues that matter to Black Americans. That’s in part because the Senate is split 50-50 between the parties (with Vice President Harris breaking ties), and passage of most bills through the chamber requires 60 votes.
Efforts to reform police — demands heard nationwide after the murder of George Floyd — stalled in Congress and ended with an executive order that Biden acknowledged did not go as far as he’d hoped even as he signed it. Rising inflation has eaten away at people’s incomes and threatens Biden’s political prospects. The federal government has done little to bolster voting protections, despite a raft of state legislation that activists say puts obstacles between Black people and voting booths.
Asked about the failure of a Democratic voting right effort in the Senate, 46 percent of Black Americans say they are disappointed and another 15 percent say they are angry. But among those with negative reactions, 84 percent blame Biden “a little” or “not at all.”
While several of the people polled who were later contacted by The Post expressed frustration at the slow or nonexistent progress, many stressed that the blame did not lie solely with the president.
Overall, Biden’s 70 percent job approval rating among Black Americans remains much higher than among the public overall. In an April Post-ABC poll, 42 percent of all Americans approved of Biden while 52 percent disapproved.
About two-thirds of Black Americans (66 percent) say that Biden is sympathetic to the problems of Black people in this country while 32 percent say he is not. That’s a decrease from 74 percent who said Biden was sympathetic in 2020, but still contrasts sharply with how Black Americans see the Republican Party. Three-quarters of Black Americans say the Republican Party is racist against Black Americans; a quarter say the same about the Democratic Party.
Republican leaders take issue with the notion that their party is racist and argue that their policies, from low taxes to abortion, are better for the Black community.
“There are voices that say if you’re a poor, Black, single mother like mine, abortion is your best option,” Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), the lone Black Republican in the Senate, tweeted last month. “They must not know that the story of African Americans is one of victory, overcoming odds, & triumph in the face of tragedy.”
But there is little doubt that most Black Americans support Democrats, even in the face of mounting frustrations. Rikki Johnson, a retired police officer from Fredericksburg, Va., said he agrees with many of Biden’s policy positions but believes the president has been outmaneuvered by a Republican Party set on obstruction and let down by a Democratic Party stymied by disunity.
“The Republicans are not going to let (Biden) be successful because it terribly diminishes their chances for 2024,” said Johnson, 60. But he said Biden has also similarly hobbled by his own party and “couldn’t pull the party together to have one thought. If you think about how the Republican Party always attacks, they attack together. The Democratic Party doesn’t attack like a fist, they attack like five fingers. They go in different directions.”
Deanna Whitlow, a 20-year-old college student in Chicago, said she started out with low expectations for Biden, since he followed “someone as extreme as Trump.”
“I honestly feel like I can’t be too picky,” said Whitlow, adding that she approved of Biden’s efforts to expand voting rights and advance climate issues, but believed not enough progress had been made on police reform and abortion rights. She described herself as a Democrat, but said Biden wasn’t her first choice for president.
“I think that it’s good that he’s tried, but with Congress working against him, I’m not surprised [that] nothing grand has happened,” Whitlow said.
But many Black Americans do not let Biden entirely off the hook. They say he has not done enough, for example, to push through changes to a criminal justice system that they widely condemn as slanted against minorities.
Just over 1 in 5 Black Americans say Biden has done “a great deal” or “a good amount” to reduce discrimination in the criminal justice system, while 76 percent say he has done “little” or “nothing.”
Biden has acted unilaterally in some areas to implement police reform. His Justice Department implemented a ban on chokeholds and carotid restraints for federal officers, began requiring agents to wear body cameras, and severely limited the use of “no-knock warrants” like the one that factored into the 2020 killing of Louisville resident Breonna Taylor. But because they are presidential orders and not laws, those changes affect only federal officers and agents, not the thousands of local and state police departments across the country.
Biden also recently pardoned three people and commuted the sentences of 75 nonviolent drug offenders, amid calls for leniency in a system that disproportionately affects people of color.
Age continues to be a dividing line in Black people’s opinions of Biden, continuing a pattern that was first evident in the 2020 presidential primaries. Biden’s approval rating peaks at 86 percent among Black Americans ages 65 and older, but drops to 74 percent among those ages 40-64 and to 60 percent among those ages 18-39. Biden’s approval rating is also much higher among Black registered voters than among those who are not registered to vote, 86 percent vs. 40 percent.
While Biden is not on the ballot, Black voters’ opinions of him mirror their opinions of other Democrats who are up for election. Asked who they support in congressional elections, 88 percent of Black registered voters say they would support the Democratic candidate in their district, similar to Biden’s share of the Black vote in 2020.
But just about half of Black voters, 49 percent, say the outcome of this November’s election matters “a great deal” to them, down from 77 percent who said the same thing about the presidential election in June 2020. Similarly, the share of Black voters who say they are “absolutely certain to vote” has dropped from 85 percent in 2020 to 62 percent this year, a 23-point drop that is larger than the 12-point drop among White voters.
Just about half of Black Americans (49 percent) say the things that Biden is doing as president are either “somewhat” or “very” good for African Americans, while 12 percent say what he’s doing is somewhat or very bad and 37 percent say the things he is doing are neither good nor bad.
Biden has said he is running for reelection, and as the 2024 Democratic primary approaches, 43 percent of Black Democrats say they would prefer Biden to have the nomination, followed by Harris at 29 percent. Seven percent picked Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) had 2 percent of respondents volunteer his name, and former first lady Michelle Obama had 1 percent.
Mumford, the school nutritionist from Thomasville, said she is certain to vote in the midterms and in the 2024 presidential election. She has always voted, she said, and considers it her duty as a citizen.
She said she does not align herself with either party, but routinely leaned Democratic in the years of Trump. Now that Trump is gone, she would like to see Democrats govern with the same determination — even ruthlessness — as Republicans did under Trump.
“Trump, to his credit, he kept some of his word,” she said. “I didn’t agree with a lot of it. And it was his racism that I didn’t like. And throwing a temper tantrum in the White House. But he did get results.” (Trump’s defenders say his unorthodox positions and unconventional leadership style are part of what many Americans appreciate about him.) | 2022-06-04T15:30:35Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Black voters support of Biden softens after bruising year - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/06/04/biden-black-voters-softer-support/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/06/04/biden-black-voters-softer-support/ |
Biden is everywhere, speaking on every issue. But to what effect?
President Biden delivers remarks on the recent tragic mass shootings and the need for Congress to act to pass laws to combat the epidemic of gun violence on June 2 at the White House. (Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post)
In recent days, President Biden has spoken about guns on prime-time television and written for the Wall Street Journal (about inflation) and the New York Times (about Ukraine). He’s traveled to Uvalde, Tex., to grieve over the mass shootings that killed 19 children and two teachers. On Wednesday, he led a White House meeting to discuss the infant formula shortage. On Friday, he was out again, this time from Delaware, speaking about the economy and inflation.
In other words, the president seems to be everywhere. But to what end? It is a question that worries Democrats heading toward the November midterm elections, and a question that, to the frustration of party members outside of the White House, neither the president nor his advisers have been able to offer a satisfying answer.
Is it a problem of messaging or of policy, of words without impact or simply a sign of a weary and unhappy electorate that has stopped paying close attention to a president? Whatever it is, the political ramifications are serious. Biden has little time to figure it out, if it can be figured out, before voters render their judgment on his first two years in office.
When Biden spoke about gun violence on Thursday night, there was applause from advocates of tougher gun laws for the specificity and passion with which he outlined measures to deal with the epidemic of mass shootings. He called for banning assault weapons and high-capacity magazines and enacting red flag laws to take potential killers off the streets before they kill. After signals that he would stay out of the debate on Capitol Hill, he jumped in, prodded lawmakers and preemptively pinned blame on Republicans if nothing serious happens.
To those who liked the speech, Biden’s remarks could be seen an example of presidential leadership in a time of national crisis, of a chief executive saying something with which many Americans agree, even if what he called for is not immediately achievable. But if the president’s words won’t move lawmakers to act, will they move voters to take out their dissatisfaction on Republicans in November, which was part of the president’s goal?
Thursday wasn’t the first time Biden has spoken out strongly with limited hope for real action. Last January, he spoke in Georgia about voting rights, demanding action and comparing those who opposed a federal law to expand access to voting — which was blocked by Senate Republicans from even being debated — with George Wallace, Bull Connor and Jefferson Davis. Yet neither he nor Senate Democrats has a strategy to move the bill forward, a fact exasperated civil rights and voting rights groups who wondered what was the point of it all.
The roadblock on guns is one of long-standing. Biden isn’t the first president to fail to move Congress after a tragic shooting. The president he served as vice president, Barack Obama, couldn’t overcome the gun lobby after the horrific Sandy Hook shootings a decade ago.
Biden in fact has a record of success on the issue: As a senator, he helped pass what he is asking for now, a ban on assault weapons. That was in 1994. It lasted a decade and was allowed to lapse.
On Capitol Hill, a bipartisan group of senators continues to work. Signals are mixed about eventual success. Even the most modest piece of legislation, one that gains 60 votes in the Senate and lands on Biden’s desk, will be described as a triumph. Short of that, Biden and Democrats will try to turn failure by Congress into a political rallying cry for November to mobilize Democrats and others around the issue.
Biden’s days are filled with challenges, but inflation continues to present the most politically potent issue facing his administration. The president has limited tools to deal with the problem. He must work around the edges while hoping the Federal Reserve’s tightening of monetary policy succeeds in tamping down inflation without bringing about a recession.
Nothing Biden has said or done to date has made things notably better, either in lowering prices or improving his political standing. Despite a strong jobs market, underscored again on Friday when the Labor Department reported that the economy added another 390,000 jobs last month and the unemployment rate held steady at 3.6 percent, inflation is the issue driving political attitudes.
An example of his limited powers is seen in his decision in the spring to authorize the largest-ever release from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Gasoline prices dipped a bit around the time of Biden’s announcement but have since leapfrogged past where they were and could hit an average of $5 a gallon later this summer. Biden has blamed the spike on Russia’s war on Ukraine and the disruption of supplies — “Putin’s price hike,” as he calls it. Democrats, however, fear voters will take out their anger on them.
Last week, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellin acknowledged that she was wrong about inflation last year, underestimating its staying power. Her honest admission was refreshing, even if it provided Republicans with ammunition to attack the administration for misjudging and perhaps worsening the upward spiral of prices.
Yellin’s comment on CNN was notable for another reason. It was a rare instance of a Cabinet officer in the Biden administration making news, bad or good, or of acknowledging error. The constant visibility of the president has come alongside the relative invisibility of senior administration officials. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin have been in the public eye because of Russia’s military aggression against Ukraine. Attorney General Merrick Garland, dealing with the aftermath of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, has made several well-covered speeches. Most domestic Cabinet officials have remained much more in the shadows.
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, Labor Secretary Marty Walsh, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, Housing Secretary Marcia L. Fudge, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra — all have important portfolios and responsibilities responding to the many challenges around the country. But they aren’t much seen. Even Anthony S. Fauci, once ubiquitous, has been seen far less frequently as the focus on covid has been reduced.
Last Tuesday, a frustrated Biden sent senior officials out in force across television programs to make their case that they are doing everything possible to slow the rise in prices. Some populate the Sunday morning talk shows. But while Cabinet officials take occasional bows, they are underemployed as messengers.
Instead, most things funnel through the president’s voice and through the White House communications and policy operations. That includes numerous background briefings to announce decisions that will be administered by agencies and departments. This has been an evolving pattern that started before Biden was elected, of the president’s advisers managing the bureaucracy — and they hope the message — from 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. NW. Still, few administrations have been as centrally run from the White House as this one.
Biden’s opponents will criticize him no matter what posture he takes. During the 2020 campaign, he was blasted by then-President Donald Trump and GOP officials for hiding in his basement in Delaware during the pandemic. His low-profile strategy worked. In that case less was more; he won the election. But the opposite approach, the always visible president, continues to show its limitations. | 2022-06-04T15:30:41Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Guns, inflation, baby formula: Biden is everywhere, speaking on every issue. But to what effect? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/06/04/biden-issues-strategy-sundaytake/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/06/04/biden-issues-strategy-sundaytake/ |
After getting rejected repeatedly by The New Yorker, Mike Mount started cartooning for an Arlington publication.
A cartoon created by Arlington, Va., resident Mike Mount. (Mike Mount)
In the first panel of a cartoon that Mike Mount drew, a crowd stands in front of a multistory building that is under construction. Together, they shout the name of a popular grocery store, expressing a communal hope that it will find a home on the ground level of that structure.
“Wegmans! Wegmans! Wegmans! Wegmans! Wegmans!”
In the next panel, the building stands in its finished form, and two signs reveal which businesses actually moved into the first floor.
“Nail — Spa,” reads one. “Tan,” reads the other.
If you live in a major city or in a small town, you might be thinking “Huh?” or “Is that supposed to be funny?”
But if you live in one of Washington’s suburbs, that sketched scene likely strikes at a familiar disappointment. Mixed-use buildings are constantly going up, bringing with them hope that they will draw exciting new businesses and then letdown when those occupants end up being similar to ones that already exist blocks away. The caption on Mount’s cartoon read: “The Arlington mixed-used lottery.”
“How many tanning salons, nail salons, and ABC (liquor) stores are needed around here?” Mount said on a recent morning when I asked him about that cartoon. “I can think of a thousand things that can go into these places.”
Mount is not a professional cartoonist. He will tell you that’s he’s not even that great of one. He is self-critical in that way. “Drawing hands is one of the worst things for me,” he said. “I just can’t master it.”
But the father of two has long been a fan of the art form and in the past year, he has become a community cartoonist. He creates weekly cartoons for an online news outlet in his Northern Virginia county, capturing within those scribbled squares the weird, comical and relatable parts of living in one of Washington’s suburbs.
He does that work at no charge because he believes in supporting local journalism — which has been dying one publication at a time across the nation — and because of that critical eye he takes to his work.
“I would feel bad being paid for stuff that wasn’t worth it,” he said.
Worth is subjective, but there is value in cartoons that focus on local communities. They reveal the issues, priorities and absurdities of places, and in the case of Mount’s cartoons, they do that about life in the 'burbs. When someone from another state hears that a person is from Washington, they likely think of monuments, memorials and city streets. But that term has become generic shorthand for D.C. and its neighboring counties in Maryland and Virginia. Those suburbs are places of concentrated wealth, power and social struggles. They are also where many of the people who make decisions that have national consequences live and work.
Arlington, where Mount has lived for more than 20 years, is home to the Pentagon, Reagan National Airport and the new Amazon headquarters.
One of Mount’s cartoons pokes at Amazon founder (and Washington Post owner) Jeff Bezos’s investment in space travel. It shows two people watching a rocket with the word “Arlington” on its side shoot upward. The caption: “The County Board consulted with Bezos on fiscally responsible ways to spend its budget surplus this year.”
Another of his cartoons features two couples talking outside of a home. The caption: “We moved to Arlington for the public schools, but our house payment really is the tuition.”
It’s funny (and groan-worthy), because it’s true. It’s become increasingly normal for a house in Arlington to cost in the seven figures. In January, a headline on the website of WTOP read: “Want a house in Arlington? $1.3 million should do.”
Mount didn’t plan to become a community cartoonist. His work grew from his admiration of others. He has every book by “The Far Side” creator Gary Larson. “Like Seinfeld episodes, I can read them over and over again and still laugh,” he said. So when an urge to create his own cartoons hit him about eight years ago, a few years after he went from working as a national security producer for CNN to doing public relations work for a defense contractor, he went with it. He searched for topics worthy of social commentary, sketched them into scenes and submitted them to The New Yorker.
The result: A lot of rejection.
“I would come up with these cartoons and I would show them to my wife, and she’d say, ‘Oh, that’s hilarious’ or ‘I don’t get it,’ and I’d send them off,” Mount said. At one point, he realized that he would have to submit hundreds of cartoons to maybe get one published. “I just didn’t have the time to do that with work and family. But every once in a while I would get 10 together and send them off, and then I would get email rejections.”
Eventually, Mount started looking around him and realized the stories that ran on ARLnow, an online news outlet that focuses on Arlington, provided plenty of material for cartooning.
He now creates cartoons for the publication that run monthly online and weekly in a newsletter for paying members.
“Mike has a great handle on those local issues that Arlington residents really care about but which can seem almost comically minor to everyone else,” said Scott Brodbeck, the founder and CEO of Local News Now, which publishes ARLnow, FFXnow and ALXnow. “The localness to the point of absurdity is where I — and I suspect many readers — find much of the humor. But there’s also some genuine satire and social commentary in there, which helps to highlight community topics that deserve more attention and scrutiny.”
So far, his cartoons seem to be resonating with residents, based on comments they have received on the site.
Of his mixed-used building cartoon, someone wrote, “I have never seen anything represent Arlington more accurately than the Wegmans cartoon.”
Of his cartoon on the high cost of housing, someone commented, “Taxes instead of tuition is a very real decision. Not a cartoon.”
And after he re-envisioned the county’s logo, depicting it with a flipped car at its center, someone offered praise of his work and then took a shot at the skills of Maryland drivers. That person wrote, “I am shocked — shocked and appalled — that the flipped car doesn’t have a Maryland license place.”
In an ARLnow piece that introduced Mount to readers in August, he talked about having a great collection of cartoons he calls “Rejected by the New Yorker.” He also set the expectations of readers.
“My cartoons don’t always hit a home run, and one of these days, I’m sure I’ll have a great collection of, ‘Rejected by ARLnow,'” he is quoted as saying. “In the meantime, I hope people have fun with them.” | 2022-06-04T16:27:10Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Through cartoons, he captures life in Washington's suburbs - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/06/04/cartoons-washington-suburb-life/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/06/04/cartoons-washington-suburb-life/ |
In the 1950s and '60s, the Steuart Building at Fifth and K streets NW shared the block with a Ford dealership and was home to such mundane tenants as an insurance agency and toy store. From 1956 to 1963 it was also home to the CIA's Photographic Intelligence Unit. In October 1962, analysts there discovered Soviet missiles in Cuba, sparking the Cuban missile crisis. (DC History Center/Emil A. Press Slide Collection)
In the middle of October in 1962, a nondescript office building in a not-great part of Washington suddenly became very, very busy and very, very important. The future of the world depended on what was going on inside 501 K St. NW.
“Every time I left the house, I kissed my wife and said goodbye. She didn't know it at the time, I figured it might have been the last time I saw her.”
Those are the words of a person who worked in the Steuart Building, the upper floors of which were rented in 1956 to the Central Intelligence Agency for its Photographic Intelligence Division, later named the National Photographic Interpretation Center. Even now, 60 years later, the man asked that his name not be used because of the nature of his work. We will call him “Bob.”
Last week in this space, Answer Man described how the CIA moved into the Steuart Building to process the avalanche of photos snapped by the highflying U-2 spy plane. Images of Soviet airfields, factories, missile bases, submarine pens and the like were analyzed under the leadership of Arthur C. Lundahl.
The agency’s photo unit had earlier occupied space on the Mall, in one of the many “temporary” federal buildings erected during World War II. The Steuart Building was different in that it was a private building, home to such mundane tenants as a car dealership, an insurance agency and a toy store.
“It really was hiding in plain sight,” said Jack O’Connor, a retired CIA intelligence officer and author of “NPIC: Seeing the Secrets and Growing the Leaders: A Cultural History of the National Photographic Interpretation Center.”
Also in plain sight — or plane sight — were the Soviet nuclear missiles photographed on the island of Cuba on Oct. 14, 1962. Two days later, after the images had been scrutinized and compared with what was known about Russia’s nuclear arsenal, Lundahl traveled to the White House with the briefing boards for which he was famed. These visual aids convinced President John F. Kennedy that it was time to act.
“Bob” said the missiles were not a complete surprise. Earlier, large crates had been photographed on the deck of a Soviet vessel steaming toward Cuba.
“At the time, they didn't know what they were,” said “Bob,” who served in a support role and was not a photographic interpreter. “That perked their interest up, to keep their eye on it. That’s when the term ‘crate-ology’ was invented. It started the research effort to find out what was in these size crates.”
Everyone in the NPIC was mobilized. Two, 12-hour shifts were instituted, with the latest intelligence delivered to the White House and the U.S. military.
Among those receiving that intel was a Marine staff intelligence officer named Michael Kirkland, who was aboard a Navy helicopter carrier in the Caribbean. “Photo intelligence from the CIA was one of our main sources of information,” he wrote to Answer Man.
Kirkland’s ship was involved in what happened next: Kennedy ordered U.S. Navy vessels to establish a blockade — he used the less provocative term “quarantine” — around Cuba, preventing Soviet ships from entering. (Kirkland, of Chevy Chase, Md., later went to work for the CIA at NPIC.)
The world hung poised. The situation was defused when Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev agreed to remove the missiles in return for assurances the U.S. wouldn’t invade Cuba. Though it was not made public at the time, Kennedy also agreed to remove U.S. missiles from Turkey.
Among “Bob’s” memories of the episode is Robert F. Kennedy’s reaction upon learning of the missiles. As attorney general, RFK was consumed by civil rights efforts. He asked if the missiles were capable of reaching Jackson, Miss. They were, and Jackson was later included on the range map Lundahl shared.
After visiting the Steuart Building — and reportedly stepping over a drunk in the vestibule — Bobby Kennedy asked Lundahl, “What are you doing in this hellhole?” (Some say he used a saltier expression.)
The Steuart Building must have provided good cover for the work that went on inside. Lundahl felt that if it bristled with armed guards, it would give the game away.
O’Connor said employees didn’t take their badges home after their shifts. They handed them over to Mrs. Stallings, a woman who sat at a desk in the lobby, and picked them up from her the next day. New employees were amazed that after just a few days on the job, she could select their badges as they approached.
Said O’Connor: “Essentially, she knew everyone who should or shouldn't have been there.”
Mrs. Stallings also was known for doing the New York Times crossword puzzle in ink.
Across Fifth Street from the Steuart Building was Center Market City, an old brick market. “Bob” remembers a lunch stand inside — run by a man named Sig or Sid — that served wonderful pastrami sandwiches.
“I probably gained 10 pounds while I was in that building,” he said.
In 1963, NPIC moved to what was known as Building 213, a government building inside a fenced and guarded perimeter at First and M streets SE. It was more secure than their previous but nowhere near as interesting.
Say, did you work in a secret building in Washington? Answer Man would love to hear about it. Write answerman@washpost.com, but please don’t endanger national security, obviously. | 2022-06-04T16:27:16Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Photos of Soviet missiles in Cuba were analyzed in downtown D.C. office building - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/06/04/cuban-missile-crisis-building/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/06/04/cuban-missile-crisis-building/ |
Victim identified in fatal shooting in Prince George’s County
Prince George’s County police on Friday identified the victim of a recent fatal shooting as 27-year-old Bernard Lewis Jr. of Temple Hills.
Lewis was found dead after officers responded at about 11:30 a.m. Thursday to a report of a shooting on the 4400 block of 23rd Parkway in the Temple Hills area. Detectives are seeking to identify a suspect and motive, and a reward is being offered of up to $25,000 for information leading to an arrest and indictment. | 2022-06-04T17:06:20Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Victim identified in fatal shooting in Temple Hills, Md. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/06/04/victim-fatal-shooting-temple-hills/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/06/04/victim-fatal-shooting-temple-hills/ |
FILE - In this photo provided by Gerber, Ann Turner Cook, whose baby face launched the iconic Gerber logo, arrives at NBC’s Today Show to announce the winner of the 2012 Gerber Generation Photo Search on Tuesday, Nov. 6, 2012 in New York City. Ann Turner Cook, whose cherubic baby face was known the world over as the original Gerber baby, has died. She was 95. Gerber announced Cook’s passing in an Instagram post on Friday, June 3, 2022. ( (Amy Sussman/Gerber via AP, File) | 2022-06-04T17:10:44Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Ann Turner Cook, original Gerber baby, dies at 95 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/ann-turner-cook-original-gerber-baby-dies-at-95/2022/06/04/3838d98e-e427-11ec-ae64-6b23e5155b62_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/ann-turner-cook-original-gerber-baby-dies-at-95/2022/06/04/3838d98e-e427-11ec-ae64-6b23e5155b62_story.html |
Flowers, toys, and other objects to remember the victims of the deadliest U.S. school mass shooting in nearly a decade, resulting in the death of 19 children and two teachers, are pictured at the Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Tex., on May 30, 2022. (Veronica Cardenas/Reuters)
The parents of a 10-year-old victim in the mass shooting in Uvalde, Tex., and a staff member at Robb Elementary School are taking their first steps toward legal action against the gunmaker that made the semiautomatic rifle used by the gunman in a massacre that killed 21 people, including 19 children.
President Biden called on Congress this week to take immediate action on gun control, including banning assault weapons and limiting high-capacity magazines. While the odds of such action passing in the divided Senate are highly unlikely, Biden, who noted that he respected the culture and tradition of lawful gun owners, argued that Second Amendment is “not absolute.”
Maker of Uvalde shooter’s rifle posted image of child with gun before massacre
Todd C. Frankel contributed to this report. | 2022-06-04T17:41:10Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Uvalde families, staffers signal first legal action against gunmaker Daniel Defense after shooting - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/06/04/uvalde-shooting-lawsuits-daniel-defense-marketing/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/06/04/uvalde-shooting-lawsuits-daniel-defense-marketing/ |
Manslaughter charges in street-race crash that killed 4-year-old
One of the two men indicted in the Montgomery County case was the father of the victim.
Two Montgomery County men have been indicted on manslaughter charges in connection with an impromptu two-car street race they staged last fall that led to a crash that killed a 4-year-old girl, police said.
One of those charged, Felipe Hernandez, 24, of Silver Spring, was the father of the victim, Iliana Hernandez, who was his passenger in a 2005 Acura RSX, Montgomery police said Friday. The other man charged, according to police, was Gilberto Duvan Guerra Posadas, 25, of Germantown, who was driving a 2021 Honda Civic.
According to police, the two men were driving at high speed southbound on Georgia Avenue in Silver Spring on the night of Oct. 21 when they collided with a 2020 Ford Fusion that was trying to turn left from northbound Georgia Avenue to Dexter Avenue. Iliana, who was in a back seat, was taken to a hospital with injuries and later died. County police spokesperson Shiera D. Goff said Saturday the girl had been wearing a seat belt and using a booster seat but did not meet all of the developmental guidelines for that kind of seat. In such cases, a child safety seat with a harness would be required, Goff said.
Hernandez surrendered to authorities and was released on a $10,000 bond, police said, while Posadas is in custody in Indiana on unrelated charges. The driver of the Fusion was cited for driving under the influence of alcohol. | 2022-06-04T18:37:45Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Manslaughter charges announced in collision that killed 4-year-old from Silver Spring - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/06/04/drag-race-death-manslaughter/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/06/04/drag-race-death-manslaughter/ |
As violence marks America, local leaders ask: Where will it hit next?
Gun attacks are ‘a sickness our country has to address and remedy,’ one mayor said, but he and others are not optimistic about new restrictions
Emmanuel Felton
David Nakamura
Robert Ramirez, 67, walks to his truck on May 30, 2022, after visiting the grave of his father at Hillcrest Memorial Cemetery in Uvalde, Tex., where most of the victims of the Robb Elementary School shooting will be buried. (Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post)
As the mayor of a small town in suburban Indianapolis, Emily Styron knows that her constituents count on her to remain calm.
“I am so sick and tired of the stupid useless rhetoric … when it comes to gun regulation,” Styron, the Democratic mayor of Zionsville, Ind., wrote, angrily lamenting the “mass murders” of the nation’s children.
Styron’s anger reflects a sober reality for local officials across the nation. They say they are pessimistic that a federal — or even state-level — solution to the violence is forthcoming, even as President Biden renews his push for Congress to act on gun restrictions. Instead, armed with little more than fresh outrage, elected officials, police chiefs and school leaders are scrambling to find other ways to keep their own communities from becoming the next to be shattered in the country’s unrelenting season of bloodshed.
Besides beefing up response plans and fortifying potential targets, local officials say they hope to revive public service campaigns that encourage even the nation’s youngest students to report suspicious behavior. Local governments also hope to scrape together enough funding to expand mental health services to try to reach troubled residents before they lash out in violence.
“Everyone is on high alert,” said John Tecklenburg, the nonpartisan mayor of Charleston, S.C., where 10 people were wounded in a mass shooting on Monday night. “I am fed up with this situation and will certainly try to do anything we can, but it is a daunting situation.”
Over the past month, gunmen have killed nearly three dozen people in attacks at a grocery store in Buffalo, the school in Uvalde and a doctor’s office in Tulsa. Those shootings were just part of a deeper pattern of violence besetting a rattled nation.
Since May 14, when an allegedly racist gunman attacked the grocery store in a predominantly Black neighborhood in Buffalo, there have been more than 35 mass shootings, including more than a dozen over Memorial Day weekend. So far this year, there has not been a single week in the United States without a mass shooting — defined as a gun attack in which four or more people are injured or killed — according to the Gun Violence Archive, a research group.
Other cities have been grieving over more isolated violence. Last Saturday, an 8-year-old boy was shot in Florence, S.C., after an alleged assailant randomly fired his weapon at passing vehicles. The boy died two days later. On Sunday, an 18-month boy was killed in Pittsburgh when he was hit by random gunfire. On Thursday, gunfire erupted in Racine, Wis., as a family was burying a son; two people were injured at his gravesite.
The nation’s recent bout of high-profile gun violence is part of a terrible trend that began in 2020, when a swirl of factors — including pandemic-induced stress, a spike in gun sales and a frayed relationship between police and the people they serve — drove shooting deaths to the highest level in decades. Last year was even deadlier, according to the archive.
Through June 1 this year, gun violence has killed more than 8,000 people across the United States, 300 fewer deaths than during the same period in 2021, but over 1,000 more than in 2020, according to a Washington Post analysis of the archive’s data.
With that, 2022 is on track to be among the deadliest years for shootings since the turn of the century, even if it falls short of 2021’s devastating toll.
Tecklenburg, the Charleston mayor, said he and other local officials are increasingly perplexed trying to understand what is driving the violence. Much of it, he said, appears to be connected to armed individuals who have a far lower “barrier for pulling out a gun” than in the past.
“It just feels like we are killing ourselves, and it just feels like as a nation we are on a suicide path,” Tecklenburg said. “It’s a sickness our country has to address and remedy, or I am fearful of the trend continuing to increase, and it will tear the whole fabric of the country over time.”
On Thursday, Wexler said, Franklin’s deputy briefed the conference on the timeline of the shooting, noting that the gunman, who shot and killed himself, bought a semiautomatic rifle just hours before carrying out the attack.
“These incidents are so time-sensitive; so much can happen within a few minutes,” Wexler said. He said chiefs are reviewing their policies and trying to determine “how they would respond in similar situations.”
In Los Angeles, Police Chief Michel Moore said threats of mass violence have been “an ongoing concern,” particularly in the local schools. Police on Thursday morning were helping investigate a threat discovered through a gaming application based in Mexico, he said.
“It used to be called an ‘active shooter’ situation, but we now term it ‘mass violence,’” Moore said. “The key is stopping the threat and at the same time recognizing that the threat has evolved, and we want to get to the location and gather information as quickly as possible. … Those are the strategies. The key, like anything else, is execution.”
In the nation’s capital, police said in recent days that they have added patrols at schools, hospitals and shopping centers after recent mass shootings elsewhere.
“We are worried about copycats,” said Ashan Benedict, executive assistant to D.C. Police Chief Robert J. Contee III.
“There are so many different ways things can play out” with an active shooter, said Benedict, who before joining the D.C. police was an agent with the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. “We have to be fluid and flexible in our response.”
But the executive director of the Texas Municipal Police Association said he worries the nation’s police agencies are unprepared to handle the volume of mass shootings taking place in the United States, in terms of manpower and equipment.
“Texas has four times as many law enforcement agencies as any other state in the union. We have almost 2,900 different agencies, almost 1,000 of which employ exactly one officer,” said Kevin Lawrence, the executive director. “Sixty percent of all the law enforcement [departments] in Texas employ fewer than 10 officers.”
“There are no bystanders in this crisis,” Norman said. “We all have a role, a personal responsibility to intervene early and often” when a friend or acquaintance is troubled or showing signs of distress.
“We’re fearful this problem will grow if we don’t continue to really focus and double down on resources for mental health services,” said Heather Perry, the superintendent of schools in Gorham, Maine. The district’s pandemic-era mental health needs outstrip its ability to provide care, she said.
“We’re doing the best we can to provide what we can on-site. But our school social workers and counselors are not meant to do long-term treatment; they’re intended for triage. They’re intended to pick up the issues and then pass them on to a community partner, but those partners are overrun as well. The whole system’s overrun right now.”
Rodney Shotwell, the superintendent of Rockingham County Schools in North Carolina, said he’s imploring students to speak out quickly if they see something suspicious, whether on social media or on school grounds. On the basis of his own recent visit to a playground, Shotwell said, even kindergartners have become more adept at sensing potential danger.
“I was two steps out of the door heading toward the playground, which was probably about 30 yards away. And I heard two kids say, Hey, Miss So-and-so, who’s that man coming right there? Who is that man?” Shotwell recalls. “You don’t want to frighten kids, but at the same time, one of the best deterrents is having people say something when they see something.”
Shari Camhi, the superintendent of schools for Baldwin Union Free School District on Long Island, said the threat of gun violence increasingly centers on “things that are outside of our control.”
“If we really want to solve a problem, you need to get to the root of the problem,” Camhi said. “Schools are not at the root of the problem. The guns are the problem.”
Many mayors also said they believe that the country’s violent trajectory will continue if stricter regulations on firearms sales are not introduced. The U.S. Conference of Mayors on Friday released a letter signed by a bipartisan list of 255 mayors asking congressional leaders to pass heightened background checks and other gun safety bills. (The Post separately sought comment from Republican mayors without success.)
“Our nation can no longer wait for our federal government to take the actions necessary to prevent people who should not have access to firearms from being able to purchase them,” the mayors wrote. They also pointed out that they had sent the same letter after a flurry of shootings in 2019, to no avail.
A few days after that shooting, DeWine announced that he would support mandatory background checks and “red flag” laws in Ohio. But the governor quickly backed away from those proposals. DeWine instead supported several measures to weaken state gun laws, including signing a bill that allows residents to carry a concealed weapon without a permit.
“You chose to put politics over the people of Dayton,” the letter stated. “You chose to put politics over the promises you made.”
The “Charleston loophole,” which the gunman at Emanuel A.M.E. Church used to obtain his weapon, allows some licensed gun sales to be completed before a background check has been completed.
“How would you feel being mayor of a city that is known for a loophole that allows someone to be able to buy a gun just because the government didn’t fully have the time to check their background?” Tecklenburg asked. “It feels pretty bad.”
Meanwhile, Styron, the mayor of Zionsville, is facing pushback from some of her constituents over her profanity-laced remarks. But Styron said she won’t apologize for them because the anger that spilled out represents the pain and despair gripping the nation.
“I am angry as a Mom. I am angry as a mayor of a community that has four elementary schools, two middle schools, a high school, churches, community centers, libraries,” said Styron, who has three children. “And I work in a public building, and I just don’t understand why we can’t elect policymakers who are going to introduce and pass meaningful, responsible safety measures for gun ownership.”
“Why aren’t we all screaming mad about it?” Styron said. “Why aren’t we all so frustrated and so angry that we want to see change?”
Peter Hermann and Tom Jackman contributed to this report. | 2022-06-04T18:42:06Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Cities boost efforts to prevent mass shootings after Uvalde and Buffalo - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/06/04/mass-shootings-violence-america/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/06/04/mass-shootings-violence-america/ |
Live updates:Russia-Ukraine war live updates: Ukraine claws back part of Severodonetsk a...
Smoke and dirt rise in the city of Severodonetsk during fighting between Ukrainian and Russian troops in the eastern Ukrainian region of Donbas on June 2. (Aris Messinis/AFP/Getty Images)
The eastern Ukrainian city of Severodonetsk has emerged as a focal point of Russia’s war in Ukraine in recent weeks. Fierce fighting continues to rage there as Ukrainian troops seek to prevent Russia from seizing the entire city.
Russian forces have pounded Severodonetsk with artillery, wreaking immense damage as part of a scorched-earth assault on the east that is inflicting massive casualties on Ukrainian forces. Russian troops entered the middle of the city Monday and are battling Ukrainian soldiers on the streets.
Serhiy Haidai, the regional governor of Luhansk, said earlier this week that as much as 70 percent of Severodonetsk was in Russian hands.
The city is key to Moscow’s aim of capturing Donbas, an area encompassing the eastern Ukrainian regions (oblasts) of Luhansk and Donetsk. Russia has concentrated its forces around Severodonetsk, the U.K. defense ministry said Friday. Russian forces will likely take control of Luhansk in the next two weeks, the ministry said, but at a steep cost.
Here’s what to know about the strategic city.
Where is Severodonetsk?
After failing to take Kyiv in an all-out assault across Ukraine in the early weeks of the war, Moscow in April pivoted its focus to the east — specifically, capturing Donbas. Severodonetsk, sometimes spelled Sievierodonetsk, is located in Luhansk near the boundary with Donetsk, about 90 miles south of the Russian border. It sits near the Donets river, which cuts across eastern Ukraine.
The battle for Severodonetsk is a continuation of the struggle that began with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2014. Since then, the region has been divided into territories controlled by the Kyiv government and by Russia-backed separatists, with protracted fighting over the past eight years along the “line of contact.” After separatists captured the city of Luhansk, which had been the administrative capital of Luhansk oblast, Ukraine made Severodonetsk the administrative capital.
The city had a prewar population of about 100,000. The Donbas region is known as Ukraine’s industrial center, and Severodonetsk contains several factories as well as the Azot chemical plant, one of Ukraine’s largest manufacturers of nitrogen fertilizers. Before the war, the fertilizers produced there were exported around the world.
Why is it strategically important?
Russian forces pushed past the line of contact to capture almost all of Luhansk in recent months. Severodonetsk is one of the last cities standing in the way of Russia controlling the region. The city offers strategic advantages, including its location on the Donets river.
It’s also one of the three cities Russia needs to claim victory in Donbas, Michael Kofman, director of the Russia studies program at the Virginia-based CNA, told The Washington Post last month. Russia has been trying to cut off Ukrainian troops there from their supply lines to the west.
Taking Severodonetsk would help Russia attack the neighboring city of Lysychansk and secure full control of the Luhansk region. From there, they could move southwest to Donetsk.
But the Donets river continues to serve as an obstacle to Russian troops’ advance to Lysychansk, located on the other side of the river, and into Donetsk. Haidai, the Luhansk governor, said Saturday that Russian forces were blowing up bridges to prevent Ukraine from bringing in reinforcements or aid.
Meanwhile, problems with combat power and morale have contributed to Russia making only incremental progress in neighboring Donetsk, according to the Institute for the Study of War.
Why Russia is struggling in eastern Ukraine, in maps
To Ukraine, holding onto Severodonetsk would prevent the Kremlin from clinching a major win in a war that has otherwise dragged on longer than expected and come at significant cost to Moscow.
Haidai told local media Friday that Ukrainian forces had managed to regain control over 20 percent of the city. But Ukraine appears likely to withdraw from the city to reinforce its troops elsewhere, rather than mounting a desperate last stand as its forces did in Mariupol, according to the Institute for the Study of War. Russia’s defense ministry said Saturday that some Ukrainian units were pulling back from Severodonetsk, France 24 reported.
What is the city’s symbolic significance?
Severodonetsk has been a flash point between Ukraine and Russia before: The city was briefly captured by Russian-backed separatists in 2014.
For Russia, taking the city would provide a much-needed symbolic victory after significant setbacks. It would allow the Kremlin to declare progress toward its goal of “liberating” Donbas, a region where a significant portion of the population speaks Russian as its first language.
Putin has described Russians and Ukrainians as “one people” and sought to undermine the idea of Ukrainian nationhood. He sees Donbas — and Ukraine broadly — as part of “Russky Mir,” or the “Russian World,” and has claimed he intends to “defend” the Russian speakers in the east.
Russian President Vladimir Putin recognized the separatist areas of Donetsk and Luhansk as independent before he invaded Ukraine in February. The United States said last month that Moscow was preparing to annex the regions, along with the southern city of Kherson.
But in areas of Donbas that Kyiv controlled before the February invasion, a majority of the population wanted the separatist regions to return to Ukraine. The war has also spurred many Russian speakers in Ukraine to abandon the language as a way of resisting Russian aggression.
And a Russian victory over Severodonetsk is likely to be Pyrrhic: Its population has largely left, with about 13,000 civilians still sheltering in the city. Oleksandr Stryuk, the Ukrainian mayor, said fighting has destroyed all critical infrastructure — and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said this week that 90 percent of Severodonetsk’s houses had sustained damage. Russia will gain a ruined city, with the stench of corpses filling the summer air. | 2022-06-04T18:43:09Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Ukraine: Why does Russia want to capture Severodonetsk? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/06/04/ukraine-russia-severodonetsk-donbas/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/06/04/ukraine-russia-severodonetsk-donbas/ |
Ann Turner Cook in 2004 with a copy of the drawing of her as a baby that is used on Gerber baby food products. (Chris O'meara/AP)
Gerber announced Cook’s death in an Instagram post on June 3 but did not provide additional details.
Mrs. Cook was 5 months old in 1927 when a neighbor in Connecticut, the artist Dorothy Hope Smith, drew a charcoal sketch of her that was later submitted for a contest Gerber was holding for a national marketing campaign for baby food.
The image was a hit. It became the company’s trademark in 1931 and has been used in all packaging and advertising since.
For decades, though, the identity of the baby was kept secret, spurring rumors about who it was with guesses including Humphrey Bogart and Elizabeth Taylor. In the late 1970s, it was revealed to be Mrs. Cook, who grew up to be an English teacher in Tampa and later a mystery novelist.
Mrs. Cook told the Associated Press in 1998 that her mother had told her when she was young that she was the baby in the illustration.
“If you’re going to be a symbol for something,” she said, “what could be more pleasant than a symbol for baby food?″ | 2022-06-04T19:25:38Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Ann Turner Cook, original Gerber baby, dies at 95 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/06/04/gerber-baby-ann-turner-cook-dies/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/06/04/gerber-baby-ann-turner-cook-dies/ |
Queen Elizabeth misses a favorite horse race, but top hats and fascinators abound
Richard Kingscote celebrates with Desert Crown after winning the 16:30 Cazoo Derby at Epsom Downs in England. (Andrew Boyers/Reuters)
EPSOM DOWNS, England — The Derby at Epsom Downs is one of the classics of British horse racing, but for just the third time in Queen Elizabeth II’s 70-year reign she missed the running.
This may be the new normal for the 96-year-old monarch.
The queen is not feeling well. She is feeling “some discomfort.” The palace said she would watch the races on television from her apartments in Windsor Castle, as she watched the service of thanksgiving from St. Paul’s Cathedral on Friday, part of her Platinum Jubilee, a joyous four-day celebration that began Thursday with all the pomp the British could muster, plus appearances by the elusive Prince Harry and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, and will conclude with a Platinum Jubilee Pageant on Sunday.
The Derby Stakes was first run in 1780, and named for the Earl of Derby. The Kentucky Derby and all the other Derbys around the world take their name from the Earl.
The royal box in the Queen’s Stand was strung with a garland of purple flowers, the queen’s racing colors. The monarch’s daughter, Princess Anne, a former Olympic equestrian, was there to represent the queen, but for most of the afternoon the balcony at Epsom Downs looked empty.
No Princes Charles, William or Harry. No Kate. No Meghan. The queen’s horses, in the end, did not compete, though some of her retired racers joined as part of a parade in her honor.
The queen is a fanatical horserace owner, horse breeder, horse shower, horse rider. She’s been around horses her entire life. Her parents gifted her a pony named Peggy when she was four. She was riding at age six.
Her biographers have written that the queen reads the “Racing Post” newspaper at breakfast, while munching on her bowl of Special K.
Even as her health began to slip a notch, presenting her with mobility challenges, the queen rode horses and ponies — well into her 90s.
The Derby is not quite the Royal Ascot, the queen’s other favorite, which is more elevated. More “members only.” More posh.
The Derby feels a bit more democratic.
It’s not what you think it is, if you watch it on television or see the photographs.
There were some minor royals and B-level English celebrities and gents in morning coats and top hats and ladies wearing fascinators, aplenty.
But mostly kept out of the broadcaster’s eye are stalls selling beer and sausage — and the rows and rows of betting machines. The Derby boasts the biggest purse in British racing.
There’s a 30-minute walk — past suburban cul-de-sacs and a golf course — to the track 45 minutes ride west of London.
Making their way to cheap seats on the lawn — at The Hill — were women in denim short shorts with tattoos and young men in tight suits carrying plastic bags filled with cans of beer, shouting and already a little bit unsteady.
There is a parking lot for helicopters, for the swells.
And there was a line of buses for the folk.
It is a bit fancy, but fancy with a plastic cup. Fancy with a slice of pizza.
Outside the Queen’s Stand, a pensioner with a Bic pen was jotting notes and numbers onto the folded pages of a betting form.
“The queen has been a gift to horse racing that is true,” said Patrick Johnston, an equine enthusiast. “But she is old, and well … time is time, isn’t it?” He shrugged.
The crowd did not come out to see the queen. They had already heard she was taking a scratch on this one, so they weren’t disappointed.
Sophie Brown and Paul Burke stood by the rail a few inches from the running horses.
Burke sells top hats and was wearing one of Parisian silk plush from the 1920s. He said the Derby at Epsom Downs was “all about tradition and a tribute to yesteryear and the queen has been a central figure in all of that.”
Brown said, “It’s a bittersweet feeling. It’s sad that she has to withdraw from the events and things she loves.”
Brown was philosophical. “That’s life.”
In a service of thanksgiving for the queen on Friday, the Archbishop of York, Stephen Cottrell, used horse-related metaphors to talk about her life, saying “your majesty, we are sorry you are not here with us this morning in person. But we are so glad you are still in the saddle.”
Desert Crown won the main race at the Derby, a mile and a half on the turf, over a course that rises and falls, which requires both stamina and speed.
The winning jockey Richard Kingscote told the racing reporters that Desert Crown showed “a huge amount of class. He jumped great, traveled great, turned in going really well. It was all lovely.”
DO NOT USE: Queen Elizabeth II
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The queen and the 13 presidents | 2022-06-04T19:29:59Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Queen Elizabeth misses a favorite horse race, but top hats and fascinators abound - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/06/04/jubilee-derby-queen-horses/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/06/04/jubilee-derby-queen-horses/ |
A mine was proposed at the edge of the Okefenokee Swamp's vast wildlife refuge. (Stephen B. Morton/AP)
The Army Corps of Engineers is blocking a proposed strip mine for titanium set outside the fragile Okefenokee Swamp in Georgia, reversing an earlier decision, after the project drew opposition from environmental groups and political leaders.
Environmentalists and federal agencies had previously cited the harm that the mine would inflict on the wetlands. But after the Trump administration rolled back various regulations, millions of acres of wetlands were no longer subject to federal environmental oversight.
Those rules, however, were thrown out by a federal judge last year, affording renewed protections to streams, marshes and wetlands.
The Army Corps, a unit of the military, said in a memo Friday that the previous decision allowing the project to move ahead was no longer valid because the corps had failed to properly consult with tribal stakeholders.
Trump rule eases effort to strip-mine near Okefenokee Swamp
The Army Corps decision came after Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.) sought to block the proposed mine, focusing on threats to Okefenokee’s environmental, cultural and economic integrity.
“For the last year, I’ve fought relentlessly to protect the Okefenokee from destruction,” he said in a statement Saturday to The Washington Post, adding, “I am pleased to announce the restoration of protection for this wildlife refuge and its surrounding wetlands.”
The Alabama company behind the proposal, Twin Pines Minerals, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. On the company’s website, Twin Pines claims that its proposed mining activities “will not impact the Okefenokee Swamp.”
The company also touts that the planned mine would “provide a significant boost to the local and regional economy.”
The mining project aims to extract titanium and zirconium from the land by removing the minerals and then replacing the soil to previous elevations and contours. The project could last up to 20 years, according to the company.
Federal judge throws out Trump administration rule allowing the draining and filling of streams, marshes and wetlands
The Army Corps said the backers of the Twin Pines project have the option to request a new review process, according to the memo. But experts said a subsequent review would take place under more robust Biden administration rules.
As one of the world’s largest intact freshwater ecosystems, the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge has an average of 300,000 visitors a year and thousands of overnight campers along its trails.
Environmental groups applauded the reversal.
“We are talking about a massive industrial mining complex along the edge of the country’s largest, intact blackwater wetland of significance, said Christian Hunt, Southeast representative at Defenders of Wildlife. “Essentially this decision is affording this project a level of review that’s commensurate with the value of the resources at stake.”
Unlike most wetlands in the United States, which groups are working to restore, Okefenokee is pristine, Hunt added, highlighting the urgency to protect it before it might be damaged.
“We celebrate the Biden administration’s restoration of protections to nearly 400 acres of wetlands that sit at the doorstep of the Okefenokee Swamp, one of the most celebrated natural resources in the world,” said Kelly Moser, senior attorney and leader of the Clean Water Defense Initiative at the Southern Environmental Law Center. | 2022-06-04T19:34:20Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Strip-mine near Okefenokee swamp blocked after environmental groups object - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/06/04/okefenokee-mine-blocked/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/06/04/okefenokee-mine-blocked/ |
Democrats hope narrow gun approach will pressure Republicans to act
A National Rifle Association meeting attendee holds a semiautomatic rifle last weekend in Houston. (Patrick Fallon/Getty Images)
Even before Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee put the finishing touches on their self-declared “omnibus” gun legislation package, a group of relative newcomers issued a plea Thursday to change course.
Bringing a massive, multipronged bill to the full House would give Republicans the chance to find something they oppose in the broader package and vote no. Instead, these junior Democrats, mostly from swing districts, want to apply the maximum pressure on House Republicans and asked to vote individually on each piece of the proposal, including some that deal very directly with the mass shootings in New York and Texas last month.
“As we focus on actually delivering for a hurting America, passing each bill individually will ensure that every common-sense measure we are putting forth arrives in the U.S. Senate with the maximum bipartisan support it may garner, recorded through individual votes,” wrote the Democrats, led by Reps. Chrissy Houlahan (Pa.) and Abigail Spanberger (Va.), two members of the class of 2018 that flipped the majority away from Republicans.
Late Thursday night, in a short but forceful tweet, a former federal prosecutor with a high profile summed up the tactical approach in a more blunt fashion. “Raise the age,” said Preet Bharara, the Manhattan prosecutor fired by President Donald Trump in 2017, referring to proposals to increase the minimum age for purchasing certain semiautomatic rifles from 18 to 21.
These Democrats believe the traditional approach to crises, compiling comprehensive bills that try to tackle multiple facets of a particular problem, has become a thing of the past over the last decade or so of congressional action. Or, in most cases, congressional inaction.
Rather than too big to fail, these mega-proposals turn into something that is too big to succeed. Lawmakers and lobbyists pick apart these 1,000-page or more offerings to find some particular political weakness, then watch the vast legislation slowly die amid various points of opposition.
Immigration and border security proposals, including sweeping proposals in 2006, 2007 and 2013 and several attempted negotiations during the Trump administration, regularly die of their own massive weight on Capitol Hill.
That proved to be the case with the recent Democratic agenda when President Biden tried unsuccessfully to cajole lawmakers into approving a roughly $2 trillion package that would have impacted almost every part of the domestic agenda.
Many of the individual proposals were very popular with voters, such as lowering the cost of prescription drugs and providing new dental benefits for seniors through Medicare, but the overall package scared many middle-of-the-road voters every time Biden or House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) promised it would be “transformational.”
On Friday, House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.) unveiled a compromise approach on how to debate the gun proposals. Votes will be held on each proposal and then also a final vote on the massive combined package, likely beginning in the coming days in a still-undefined process.
“The House will vote on each title as well as on passage of the full bill to place Republicans on record on each of these issues relating to gun safety,” Hoyer wrote to his colleagues. He said out loud what the junior Democrats were hesitant to state on the record: There’s some political gain to be had by voting on each proposal.
Democrats hope that these votes will produce either a solid amount of GOP support, well above the single-digit tallies of recent years, or give them new political ammunition to use against a couple dozen Republican incumbents in largely suburban districts — where Biden’s approval rating has plummeted but where these gun proposals are overwhelmingly popular.
Pulling out the proposal to raise the federal age from 18 to 21 to buy a semiautomatic rifle and requiring every member to cast a vote, will be a politically difficult vote for some Republicans.
In the killings in Buffalo and Uvalde, Texas, each alleged gunman was an 18-year-old who had purchased an AR-15-style weapon legally. In Uvalde, the killer bought his semiautomatic weapon a day after turning 18, and within three days of that birthday had purchased 375 rounds of ammunition. A couple days later, he killed 19 elementary school students and two teachers.
In 2019 and again in 2021, House Democrats approved two gun proposals that were meant to provide more thorough background checks on those purchasing weapons. Just eight Republicans joined all but one Democrat in supporting the popular measure, with many GOP lawmakers dismissing the proposal since many of the mass shootings involve legally purchased guns that would have been approved by every possible background check.
The background check bill lacks enough GOP support to clear the 60-vote hurdle needed to end debate in the Senate, leaving it in political limbo with a clear majority but unable to get past a filibuster. But in the aftermath of the shootings in Buffalo and Uvalde, raising the age for purchasing high-powered weapons will likely be more difficult for Republicans to oppose.
Federal law sets 21 as the minimum age to purchase handguns, but 18 for rifles, even those with high capacity such as the AR-15, but some states have raised the age minimum to 21, including Florida in the wake of the 2018 Valentine’s Day mass shooting in Parkland where a 19-year-old former student of the high school killed 17 people.
According to Hoyer, the House will likely begin the gun debate with a proposal to provide funding and guidance to encourage every state to adopt “red flag” laws that allow law enforcement to seize guns from people who have demonstrated they pose a threat to themselves or others.
Following background check enhancement, red flag laws and raising the age to purchase semiautomatic weapons are the most popular proposals, according to experts working in groups trying to rein in gun violence. A Reuters poll late last month found 72 percent of Americans support raising the age limit and 70 percent approve of a new federal red-flag law.
If a robust number of House Republicans join Democrats on some of these votes, that could bolster the momentum of bipartisan negotiations in the Senate that have also focused on red-flag laws and some other new gun restrictions.
For Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), this has been a decade-long effort of stops and starts, always ending in failure, ever since he led negotiations after a 20-year-old in Newtown killed 20 elementary school students and six educators with a legally purchased AR-15-style weapon.
“I’ve failed a lot in these negotiations. But these talks feel different, because I think members on both sides realize that there’s a real risk to the legitimacy of government if we don’t act,” Murphy told The Washington Post’s Early 202 in an interview that published Friday. “All I know is that there are signs all around me that this moment is different. Whether that results in the logjam being broken, I don’t know. But there are more signs that this could be the moment than at any other time in the last 10 years.” | 2022-06-04T20:13:54Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Democrats hope narrow gun approach will pressure Republicans to act - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/06/04/gun-age-minimum-legislation/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/06/04/gun-age-minimum-legislation/ |
Texas Rangers’ Josh Smith connects for a single in the first inning of a baseball game against the Seattle Mariners, Friday, June 3, 2022, in Arlington, Texas. (AP Photo/Tony Gutierrez)
ARLINGTON, Texas — The Texas Rangers called up infielder Ezequiel Duran for his major league debut Saturday after he had never played above the Double-A level. | 2022-06-04T20:14:10Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Rangers bring up Duran for MLB debut after Smith's big start - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/mlb/rangers-bring-up-duran-for-mlb-debut-after-smiths-big-start/2022/06/04/738858e8-e43b-11ec-ae64-6b23e5155b62_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/mlb/rangers-bring-up-duran-for-mlb-debut-after-smiths-big-start/2022/06/04/738858e8-e43b-11ec-ae64-6b23e5155b62_story.html |
Live updates:Russia-Ukraine war live updates: Ukraine takes back part of Severodonetsk; ...
Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, meets with Navy Capt. Tom Foster, the commanding officer of the USS Kearsarge, aboard the vessel on June 4. (Dan Lamothe/The Washington Post)
STOCKHOLM — The United States prepared Saturday to launch a sprawling naval exercise in the Baltic Sea with Sweden, Finland and 13 NATO allies, a visible sign of an expanding partnership as Stockholm and Helsinki apply to join the military alliance following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The Baltic Operations exercise involves more than 40 warships and has been held annually for decades, but will shift this year to include more involvement from Finland and Sweden, said Army Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He visited Stockholm on Saturday in a show of support for Sweden’s membership bid, one day after a similar stop in Finland.
The two countries have long partnered with the U.S. military but resisted applying to join NATO until last month out of concerns that it would anger Moscow. Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, however, that changed with significant shifts in public opinion in favor of joining the military alliance in both countries.
Four maps explain how Sweden and Finland could alter NATO’s security
The new dynamic was evident as the 843-foot amphibious warship USS Kearsarge sat in a narrow waterway running through Stockholm while packed with attack helicopters and other aircraft and more than 2,000 U.S. Marines and sailors.
The United States has never moved such a large warship into this capital city of nearly 1 million people, Milley said. Doing so created a spectacle for tourists snapping pictures and challenges for U.S. troops and Swedish personnel who squeezed the ship into the city.
“That was a big evolution for us to pull in,” said Tera Geoffrey, a lieutenant junior grade assigned to the ship. “Our depth beneath the keel sometimes was less than 10 feet.”
Milley told reporters aboard the Kearsarge that President Biden and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin have asked the Pentagon to develop new options to “modestly increase” American military involvement in Sweden where it is appropriate. Meanwhile, other long-scheduled operations like the naval exercise will continue.
“We’re looking at things we can do on the ground with either the Marines or Army, things we can do with Special Forces, things we can do with the air or maritime forces,” Milley said.
While the NATO alliance is designed to be defensive, Sweden and Finland joining would further enclose the Baltic Sea with NATO countries, something that would be “very problematic” for Russia militarily and “very advantageous” to NATO, Milley said. The Swedish military is not large, Milley said, but it has an excellent navy, modern equipment and well-trained ground forces.
The membership applications come as a NATO ally, Turkey, threatens to block Finland and Sweden from joining the alliance, citing the presence in their countries of militants from the PKK, a Kurdish separatist group that the U.S. and Turkish governments have labeled terrorist organizations.
Swedish Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson, appearing alongside Milley, said that the Finnish and Swedish governments will continue to discuss Turkey’s concerns, but that Sweden has taken a “very clear stance against terrorists.”
“There’s no question about Sweden’s position in that respect,” she said.
As Russia threatened and ultimately launched its invasion, the Pentagon expanded its number of forces in Europe from about 80,000 to more than 100,000 — including Marines and sailors at sea. Maj. Gen. Frank Donovan, who oversees personnel from the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit, of Camp Lejeune, N.C., said that the unit has in the past few months visited Iceland, Norway, Estonia, Greece and Turkey.
“We’re able to tailor the force for what the task is, and we’re very maneuverable,” Donovan said.
The Marines have deployed with newly adapted radar initially designed to help fishermen find a potential catch, Donovan said. It has been adapted to be placed on islands or shorelines to track the movement of vessels up to 60 miles away, with data tracked on a tablet device, he said. | 2022-06-04T21:10:04Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Milley visits Sweden in show of support for NATO bid - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/06/04/sweden-nato-milley/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/06/04/sweden-nato-milley/ |
(Left to right) Bryson Collins, 11; Carson Collins, 16; Hudson Collins, 11; Waylon Collins, 18; and Mark Collins, 66. (Family photos)
Waylon Collins had just graduated from high school, and his younger brothers, Carson and Hudson, along with their cousin Bryson, had finished classes when the four loaded up their fishing rods to visit the family ranch.
Accompanied by their grandfather, the boys planned to enjoy the start of summer at the property in Centerville, Tex., that one family friend described as “a kid’s dream” — filled with ponds for fishing and woods for hunting.
But when relatives were unable to reach them, they called on a neighbor Thursday to check on them.
Mark Collins, 66, and four of his grandsons were found dead inside the home. Authorities believe escaped inmate Gonzalo Artemio Lopez, who was serving a life sentence after being convicted of killing a man with a pickax, killed them and fled in the farm truck. Lopez was killed hours later in a shootout with law enforcement officers.
The family’s pastor, Steve Bezner, said in a phone interview Saturday with The Washington Post that the victims had no previous connection with the inmate.
“For whatever reason, he somehow came upon them on this particular day,” Bezner said.
Law enforcement officers had been searching the area after the inmate broke free on May 12 from his restraints during a bus transport, stabbed the driver and fled. It’s unclear whether he was already inside the Collinses’ ranch house when the grandfather and the four boys arrived or whether he broke in while they were there. But when authorities arrived, a white 1999 Chevy Silverado was missing from the farm and, hours later, they found the inmate driving it about 260 miles away in Atascosa County, not far from San Antonio, authorities said.
He led authorities on a chase before crashing the vehicle and shooting at officers, who returned fire, police said.
The pastor said the Collins family is devastated, describing Collins, of Houston, and his grandsons, Waylon, 18, Carson, 16, Hudson, 11, and Bryson, 11, as well known in the community and “incredibly loved.”
“Mark was a very active husband, father and grandfather who loved his grandchildren dearly and loved to spend time with them outdoors,” he said. “The boys were all involved in a variety of community activities — football, baseball, soccer.”
He said Collins’ wife Lisa is “definitely emotional, she’s definitely upset, but she’s also placing her hope in God.” Waylon, Carson and Hudson were the only children in their family, but Bryson has a younger brother, he said.
Following the tragedy, the family, who has requested privacy, released a statement stating, “These precious people who loved and were loved by so many will never be forgotten. The impact on their family and friends cannot be overstated.”
Law enforcement officials have not released details about the Collins family’s encounter with the inmate.
During a news conference led by Houston Crime Stoppers late Friday, longtime family friend David Crain said that Collins was aware an inmate had escaped in the area and that authorities had been in contact with the family, searching their weekend house multiple times. It’s not clear, however, whether the family had been informed that a burglary had occurred just next door several days before Collins and his grandsons went, and that it may be linked to the escaped inmate, he said.
Crain said he believes that had Collins been aware, “he would have never exposed those kids to that danger.”
All four boys were students within the Tomball Independent School District, which put out a letter Friday lamenting their deaths.
“The loss of a student, for any reason, is heartbreaking, but to lose four in such a tragic way is excruciating,” the district said. “We share a special bond in Tomball and we understand this will personally affect many students and families in our small community.”
The family is expected to hold services after authorities have finished their investigation. A GoFundMe campaign, which was created to help the family pay for expenses, had raised nearly $200,000 by Saturday afternoon.
“What has happened to the Collins family is just unspeakable,” Crain said at the news conference, choking back tears. “Those kids were bright, shining stars.”
Timothy Bella and Julian Mark contributed to this report. | 2022-06-04T21:45:06Z | www.washingtonpost.com | What we know about Mark Collins and 4 grandsons killed by Texas fugitive Gonzalo Artemio Lopez - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/06/04/texas-escapee-victims/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/06/04/texas-escapee-victims/ |
In photos: The Platinum Jubilee concert outside Buckingham Palace
As part of the ongoing celebrations for the queen’s Platinum Jubilee, a concert was held. Performers for the concert included Adam Lambert, Queen and Diana Ross.
Jonathan Buckmaster/AP
Although the queen herself wasn’t able to make it to the show, other members of the royal family, including Prince William and Catherine, the Duchess of Cambridge, were there taking in the festivities.
From center left, Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, Prince Charles, Princess Anne, Timothy Laurence and Sophie, Countess of Wessex watch the Platinum Jubilee concert.
Princess Eugenie and Jack Brooksbank.
Mimi Webb.
Prince William and Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, with their children Prince George and Princess Charlotte.
Hannah Mckay/AP
Eddie Mulholland/AP
Jason Donovan from the musical “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.”
Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, center, and her daughter, Princess Charlotte.
Ashley Banjo of the group Diversity.
Princess Charlotte and Prince George.
Actors from “The Phantom of the Opera.”
Sophie, Countess of Wessex, and her children, James, Viscount Severn, and Lady Louise Windsor.
Guy Garvey of the band Elbow.
Crowds on the Mall watch the Platinum Jubilee concert, taking place in front of Buckingham Palace.
Niklas Halle'n/AP
Craig David.
Crowds on the Mall watch the Platinum Jubilee concert.
Jax Jones.
Sam Ryder performs during the Platinum Jubilee concert.
The sun sets behind the stage during the Platinum Jubilee concert. | 2022-06-04T21:45:12Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Photos of the Platiunum Jubilee concert - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/photography/interactive/2022/photos-platinum-jubilee-concert-outside-buckingham-palace/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/photography/interactive/2022/photos-platinum-jubilee-concert-outside-buckingham-palace/ |
Jan. 6 committee set to make its case public with prime-time hearing
Sessions this month mark the culmination of a year-long investigation, with insider testimony and new video footage expected
On Thursday night, Chairman Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.) and Vice Chairwoman Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) will launch a series of televised hearings featuring a combination of live witnesses, pretaped interviews with figures that include Trump family members and previously unseen video footage.
The hearings mark the culmination of an inquiry that has involved more than 1,000 interviews and reviews of more than 125,000 records. Taken together, the work represents the most comprehensive record yet of the deadly assault, and which panel members have come to believe stands out as only the most visible evidence of a broader plot to undermine American democracy — one that emanated from the White House.
To tell that story, the committee will draw on testimony from administration insiders, including a previously obscure aide who has given the committee a detailed reconstruction of meetings and movements in the West Wing. The committee also has video recordings of interviews with Trump’s daughter Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner, that some inside the process believe will make for gripping television.
But the end result of the committee’s efforts remains an open question. Public opinions about Jan. 6 and about former president Donald Trump have long since hardened into competing blocs, making it difficult to break through, even with prime-time programming. The committee also has been bedeviled by a lack of cooperation from some Republicans — including some of those closest to Trump — leaving potential gaps in the evidence and an apparent deficit of high-profile figures willing to take the witness stand.
Still, a criminal referral by Congress of a former U.S. president would be an extraordinary step. And whether it is taken or not, the hearings will represent a historic moment, one in which the committee unveils evidence of what it has described in court filings as “a criminal conspiracy to defraud the United States.”
“Either way, these hearings are very important in getting that information out there,” said Norm Eisen, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who served as counsel to House Democrats for Trump’s first impeachment trial.
Lawmakers are also expected to focus on the ways in which Trump’s false claims of fraud continue to proliferate and threaten the integrity of future U.S. elections, according to people involved with the investigation who, like others interviewed for this story, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations. They cautioned that much of the plan remains under discussion and subject to change.
The witnesses set to appear at the first hearing have yet to be announced. But the committee will attempt to place the story of the violence at the Capitol in the context of a broader, multi-tentacled plot to overturn the results of Joe Biden’s electoral victory, with Trump’s involvement serving as the through line.
The hearings that follow this month — there are expected to be at least six — will drill down on particular aspects of that plot. Another hearing, for example, is likely to focus at least in part on alternate slates of Trump electors that could have been used to try to undermine Biden’s legitimacy, according to people involved with the investigation.
The final hearing is likely to be led by Reps. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) and Elaine Luria (D-Va.) and focused primarily on Trump: what he did, what went on around him, and what he said before Jan. 6 and on that day. A person familiar with the planning said the few remaining “bombshells” will come in the final hearing, though the person cautioned that the most notable piece of evidence against the former president — that he allegedly expressed support for hanging Vice President Mike Pence — has been reported.
The committee — which includes two Republican members and seven Democrats — is still finalizing witnesses. But the hearings are likely to feature senior officials in the Trump Justice Department and advisers in Pence’s inner circle. Investigators also have secured cooperation from relatively junior administration staffers who were witness to crucial moments.
People familiar with the committee’s dynamics said Cheney is taking an aggressive role in organizing the hearings. Members have debated over which witnesses should be featured, and several people involved said there was frustration among lawmakers that key final decisions had not yet been made.
Cassidy Hutchinson, a top aide to then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, has sat for multiple depositions with investigators — more than 20 hours — and is expected to play a starring role in the hearings, according to people familiar with the matter. Hutchinson, people familiar with the committee said, has provided extensive information about Meadows’s activities in trying to overturn the election.
The Washington Post reported late last month that Hutchinson had told the committee that Meadows remarked to others that Trump indicated support for hanging his vice president after rioters who stormed the Capitol on that day started chanting, “Hang Mike Pence!”
“Cassidy Hutchinson might turn out to be the next John Dean,” Eisen added, referring to the former presidential counsel who accused President Richard M. Nixon of having direct involvement in the Watergate scandal to Senate investigators and federal prosecutors.
Hutchinson has recalled for the committee various episodes in the chaotic scramble to sustain Trump’s election-fraud lie. A former mid-level aide, she kept detailed schedules of movements in the West Wing and had extensive conversations with Meadows.
Court filings show Hutchinson detailing a meeting in the lead-up to Jan. 6 between Meadows and House Republican lawmakers in which they discussed delaying the Joint Session of Congress — or altogether preventing the counting of electoral votes — so that state legislatures could select different electors.
Investigators have come to view Meadows as a key actor in the efforts to overturn the results of the election. He was in close touch with Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, and his outside legal team, which was operating out of the Willard hotel in Washington, according to people familiar with their interactions.
“Meadows would tell Trump we wanted to talk to him,” said a person involved with the operation.
Meadows was also warned before Jan. 6 about the prospect of violence that day, according to Hutchinson’s testimony. She told congressional investigators that Anthony Ornato, a senior Secret Service official who also held the role of political adviser at the White House, told Meadows “we had intel reports saying that there could potentially be violence on the 6th.”
The committee referred criminal charges against Meadows and top Trump advisers Peter Navarro and Dan Scavino to the Justice Department, for defying committee subpoenas. The department announced Friday that it had indicted Navarro, but would not be pursuing charges against Meadows and Scavino. Former Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon was charged with two counts of contempt last year, and is set to go on trial in July.
Unlike other boldfaced names who have been subpoenaed by the committee, Hutchinson is no longer a figure in Trump’s orbit or Republican politics.
“You’re going to hear from people who you haven’t heard from before or who haven’t had the opportunity to do any media,” said a person who provided a recorded account for the committee.
Although the committee has not made a final decision, people familiar with the investigation believe the panel will screen footage of testimony from Ivanka Trump and Kushner — including Trump’s account of her father’s actions in the West Wing on Jan. 6.
“Everybody will pay attention when Jared and Ivanka talk on video. It doesn’t matter how damning the presentations are,” said a person close to the investigation.
Accounts from panel members and testimony released in court filings depict a daughter who was in and out of her father’s presence while the Capitol was under siege, repeatedly attempting to get him to respond to the violence.
Former Trump national security adviser Keith Kellogg told investigators during his December appearance before the committee that, on the day after the riot, he had told Ivanka that he “appreciated what she did that day and by talking to her dad. And I said: ‘You know, I just thought what you did was to me pretty heroic.’ And she said: ‘Well, my dad’s stubborn.’ And I said: ‘Your whole family’s stubborn.’ ”
Michael Luttig — a conservative lawyer and former appeals court judge who advised Pence — is expected to appear as a witness, as are Pence’s former chief of staff Marc Short and the vice president’s former chief counsel, Greg Jacob, according to people familiar with the plans for the hearings.
Jacob and Short were in the room for a meeting on Jan. 4, 2021, among Trump, Pence and John Eastman, an attorney for Trump. In that session, Eastman made the case for Pence to unilaterally act during the counting of electoral college votes to halt Trump’s defeat, The Post has previously reported.
Jeffrey A. Rosen, the former acting attorney general, and other Justice Department officials are expected to receive formal invitations to testify in the coming days, a person familiar with the matter said.
Despite securing a handful of key witnesses and extensive closed-door testimony from former senior officials — including former attorney general William P. Barr — some former congressional investigators and individuals close to the committee fear that it does not have enough big names featured publicly.
“This has been their problem from the beginning: They have no one big who will talk to them — including Pence,” said a person close to the committee’s work. | 2022-06-04T21:45:18Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Jan. 6 committee set to make its case public with prime-time hearing - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/06/04/jan-6-committee-set-make-its-case-public-with-prime-time-hearing/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/06/04/jan-6-committee-set-make-its-case-public-with-prime-time-hearing/ |
Ex-judge killed in ‘targeted act’ against judicial system, state says
Juneau County Circuit Court Judge John Roemer sets bond for John G. Tetting Jr. (on screen) on Oct, 5, 2007, in Mauston, Wis. (Tom Loucks/Daily Tribune/AP)
“So far, the information that’s been gathered indicates that it was a targeted act and the targeting appears to be based on some sort of court case or court cases,” Kaul told reporters. The attorney general did not elaborate or specify whether Uhde had a previous connection to Roemer, saying the homicide investigation is ongoing.
“Those who may have been other targets have been notified of that, but we are not aware of any active threat to individuals,” Kaul said. “If we become aware of any specific ongoing threat, we will certainly notify people when we are aware of that.”
“While the news reports are deeply troubling, we will not comment further on an ongoing criminal investigation,” Pohl said in a statement. “Governor Whitmer has demonstrated repeatedly that she is tough, and she will not be bullied or intimidated from doing her job and working across the aisle to get things done for the people of Michigan.”
Britt Cudaback, a spokeswoman for Evers, told The Post that the governor’s office does “not comment on specific security threats or the governor’s security detail.” Representatives for McConnell did not immediately respond to a request for comment Saturday.
Neither the Wisconsin Department of Justice nor a relative of Roemer immediately responded to requests for comment.
The killing of the judge comes about 17 months following the deadly riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Yet following the worst attack on the home of Congress since it was burned by British forces in 1814, a Washington Post-University of Maryland poll earlier this year found that about 1 in 3 Americans say they believe violence against the government can at times be justified. The findings — which represent the largest share to feel that way since the question has been asked in various polls in more than two decades — offer a window into the country’s psyche at a tumultuous period in American history.
1 in 3 Americans say violence against government can be justified, citing fears of political schism, pandemic
Acts of violence against judges and their families have come up in recent years. Daniel Anderl, the 20-year-old son of U.S. District Judge Esther Salas of New Jersey, was shot and killed inside the family’s home in July 2020 by a gunman posing as a delivery driver. Salas’ husband was seriously wounded in the attack.
After graduating from Hamline University Law School in Minnesota in 1980, Roemer served as an assistant state public defender in Baraboo, Wis., and was one of Juneau County’s assistant district attorneys for more than a decade, according to his biography in the Wisconsin Judiciary’s newsletter. He retired from the U.S. Army Reserves in 2002 with the rank of lieutenant colonel, his biography says.
Roemer was elected to the nonpartisan position on the bench in 2004 after defeating Dennis C. Shuh, an appointee of Wisconsin Gov. Jim Doyle (D). Roemer ran unopposed in 2010 and 2016.
The judge had presided over some high-profile cases during his career. In 2009, Roemer sentenced Alan Bushey, the former leader of a religious sect in Necedah, Wis., to two years in prison for hiding the corpse of an elderly follower, who died of natural causes, on her toilet. Roemer told Bushey in court that the case was “horrific,” according to the Associated Press. In 2017, Roemer granted Donald Coughlin a new trial after the man had been convicted of more than 20 counts of sexual assault because the judge ruled that a juror was not credible, Capital Newspapers reported. Coughlin was convicted in the second trial and sentenced to 48 years in prison, according to the Wisconsin Supreme Court.
The early-morning call Friday was made by someone who escaped the residence, according to the attorney general’s office, and from a nearby home in New Lisbon, located about 80 miles outside Wisconsin’s capital. A neighbor told the Wisconsin State Journal that Roemer had been living in the home with two of his sons. The judge’s wife and another son had died in recent years.
According to an audio dispatch from Juneau County Public Safety, a dispatcher detailed how a “caller says his neighbor’s son from across the street is banging on the door, stating that someone murdered his father.”
A firearm was recovered at the scene, the state DOJ said in a news release.
The Wisconsin Department of Justice’s Division of Criminal Investigation is leading the probe into the killing, and will be assisted by several state and federal agencies, including the FBI.
Wisconsin state Sen. Howard Marklein (R), who initially identified Roemer as the victim to local media, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. He expressed his shock to the State Journal about the killing in Juneau County, which is in his district.
“We never expect violent tragedy to strike in our small, close-knit communities,” Marklein said in a statement.
Donna Voss, who lives next door to Roemer, echoed that pain to the Journal Sentinel, saying how nice the retired judge was to everyone in the community.
“I still can’t comprehend it,” she said. “It’s terrible.” | 2022-06-04T22:19:42Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Retired Wisconsin judge John Roemer killed in 'targeted act' by Douglas Uhde, state says - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/06/04/wisconsin-judge-killed-targeted-roemer-uhde/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/06/04/wisconsin-judge-killed-targeted-roemer-uhde/ |
U.S. carrier involved in drills, Seoul says
South Korea and the United States staged their first combined military exercises involving an American aircraft carrier in more than four years, Seoul’s military said on Saturday, amid reports that North Korea was preparing for a nuclear test. It was the allies’ first joint military exercise since South Korea’s President Yoon Suk-yeol took office last month.
The three-day drills took place in international waters off the Japanese island of Okinawa until Saturday, including air defense, anti-ship, anti-submarine and maritime interdiction operations, South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) said.
The USS Ronald Reagan, a 100,000-ton nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, joined the drills, alongside the guided-missile cruiser USS Antietam, the Aegis-equipped destroyer USS Benfold and the fleet replenishment oiler USNS Big Horn, the JCS said. South Korea sent the amphibious landing ship Marado, and the destroyers Sejong the Great and Munmu the Great, among others.
Explosion at factory in India kills at least 8: At least eight workers were killed and over a dozen others injured after a fire erupted in a chemical factory in northern India, police said Saturday. A boiler exploded in the factory in the Hapur area of Uttar Pradesh state, said senior police officer Pravin Kumar. The injured have been hospitalized and three of them were in critical condition, he said.
Man burned to death after arguing with Muslim cleric in Nigeria: A Nigerian man was burned to death on Saturday by a mob in the capital, Abuja, following an argument with a Muslim cleric, police said. "The heated argument degenerated into an outbreak of violence that led to the murder and setting ablaze of Ahmad Usman by the enraged mob mobilized by the clergy numbering about two hundred," said Josephine Adeh, police spokesperson for Abuja. Nigeria is a secular nation but some states in the mostly Muslim north observe Islamic sharia and have courts that punish those accused of deviating from its practices.
Body of fifth victim in Swiss train crash recovered: The body of a fifth victim was found beneath a train that derailed Friday in the Alps in southern Germany. The man's body was uncovered after a heavy crane was brought in to lift a train car near the resort town of Garmisch-Partenkirchen. About 140 people were on the train at the time of the accident, including students headed home from school for the Whitsun holiday. Police for the southern Bavaria region said 44 people were injured.
2 killed, 12 injured in crash of trafficker's car in Greece: Two people, one believed to be a Pakistani migrant and the other a known trafficker, died Saturday in northern Greece while trying to evade a police checkpoint, police in the northern Greek city of Thessaloniki said. Twelve more people riding in the passenger car were injured, with the most serious injuries suffered by those stashed in the stolen car's trunk. The car, traveling from Greece's land border west toward Thessaloniki, was flagged at a police checkpoint. It sped through, leading police on a 50-kilometer (31-mile) chase until it slammed into a protective barrier.
Albanian parliament elects new president: Albania's parliament elected a top military official as the country's new president after no candidates were nominated in three rounds of voting. Maj. Gen. Bajram Begaj won the post after the 140-seat parliament voted 78 in favor, four against and one abstained. The five-year presidency has a largely ceremonial role, though there is some authority over the judiciary and the armed forces. It is limited to two terms.
Iran's ayatollah blames protests on "foreign" enemies: Iran's Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is blaming recent protests in Iran on foreign "enemies" seeking to overthrow the Islamic republic. "Today, the enemies' most important hope for striking a blow at the country is based on popular protests," the nation's supreme leader said Saturday, referring to week-long protests over the collapse of a building in southwestern Iran last month that killed 37 people. Authorities have blamed the collapse on local corruption and lax safety. | 2022-06-04T22:37:13Z | www.washingtonpost.com | World Digest: June 4, 2022 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/world-digest-june-4-2022/2022/06/04/91751b70-e418-11ec-9f63-cd8ed77beb31_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/world-digest-june-4-2022/2022/06/04/91751b70-e418-11ec-9f63-cd8ed77beb31_story.html |
Man carjacks ambulance in Southeast
An ambulance in 2021. (Craig Hudson for The Washington Post)
A man carjacked a city ambulance in southeast D.C. Saturday morning, police said.
The man first tried to jump in the back of the ambulance after the D.C. Fire and EMS Department responded to Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue at about 9:30 a.m. for a report of a man down, according to District police spokeswoman Brianna Burch.
He then threatened the responders with what they believed was a handgun concealed in his waistband, Burch said. The man jumped in the driver’s seat and drove away, eventually leaving the vehicle at the 200 block of K Street SW and fleeing on foot, according to police.
There were no injuries, Burch said, adding that it was not immediately clear if there was any connection between the call and the carjacking. Police are still searching for the carjacker. | 2022-06-04T22:50:10Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Man carjacks ambulance in Southeast - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/06/04/man-carjacks-ambulance-southeast/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/06/04/man-carjacks-ambulance-southeast/ |
Jury finds Six Flags security falsely held man, awards him $250,000
Nicholaus Mims rushed shirtless in the park to look for his missing son in 2018. (Michael Robinson Chavez/The Washington Post)
Nicholaus Mims, of Prince George’s County, Md., had rushed shirtless from the Hurricane Harbor area of the amusement park to look for his missing 12-year-old son during a family outing in 2018, according to a lawsuit Mims filed against Six Flags that year.
After combing the crowds at the 500-acre park, Mims finally spotted his son playing arcade games. He said security guards had told him on a couple occasions while he was searching that he was in violation of park rules because he wore no shirt, but they allowed him to continue. Another employee pressed the issue later, and Mims said he was waiting for his wife to bring him his shirt, according to his lawsuit. The employee called security guards, who told him he had to leave the park.
$800,000 jury award for man who says Six Flags security beat him
Mims reacted with frustration and profanity at times as the events unfolded, according to a statement from his lawyers. After he made his way out of the park, Mims said, security guards slammed his head against the pavement, an allegation denied by the company. Mims was also photographed on the ground with a guard’s hand around his neck and he was handcuffed by Six Flags security until Prince George’s County police arrived and freed him, according to his lawyers, Donald Huskey and Governor Jackson III.
Mims sued Six Flags that July. Six Flags denied all of his claims in court documents. A company spokesman said at the time said “we believe this lawsuit has no merit.” The jury first found in favor of Mims in 2019, ordering Six Flags to pay him $800,000.
But the company successfully appealed over a procedural issue in the trial. In its 2021 order for a new trial, the Court of Special Appeals of Maryland noted “several verbal exchanges occurred between security and Mims. A struggle and altercation occurred at the park exit where Mims’ head hit the ground.”
In the Friday verdict, the jury did not find Six Flags liable for assault or battery, saying instead that Mims had been subject to false arrest and imprisonment, Jackson said. Representatives for Six Flags did not respond to requests for comment Saturday. | 2022-06-04T23:11:55Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Jury finds Six Flags security falsely held man and awards him $250,000 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/06/04/jury-finds-six-flags-security-falsely-imprisoned-man-awards-him-250000/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/06/04/jury-finds-six-flags-security-falsely-imprisoned-man-awards-him-250000/ |
A day after the verdict in the Depp v. Heard trial, the actor announced that he will release a new album with British guitarist Jeff Beck.
Actor Johnny Depp waves to supporters as he departs Fairfax County Courthouse Friday, May 27, 2022 in Fairfax, Va, (Craig Hudson/AP)
Less than a week after winning a defamation lawsuit against his ex-wife Amber Heard, Johnny Depp appears ready to restart his career.
British guitarist Jeff Beck announced a during a concert in Gateshead, England that he will release a new album with the 58-year-old actor, who stood beside him onstage.
The announcement came amid the fallout of the widely-publicized, closely-watched six week trial, during which Depp alleged Heard, 36, defamed him by calling herself a domestic abuse survivor in a 2018 Washington Post op-ed. The jury awarded Depp $15 million in damages and Heard $2 million — for defamatory comments made by Depp’s lawyer Adam Waldman in a Daily Mail article. Legal experts have called the verdict a decisive win for Depp, and it is being celebrated as such by fervent fans online and mourned by others, who see Heard’s loss as an sign the #MeToo movement is losing steam.
Beck and Depp’s album, which will come out in July, could signal a swift attempt to relaunch Depp’s career. During the trial, Depp said that Heard’s allegations had damaged his career and led Disney to drop him from “Pirates of the Caribbean 6.” “The best is yet to come and a new chapter has finally begun," he said in a statement after the jury returned its verdict.
The publicity surrounding the trial could help Depp with a restart, said Eve Ng, a communications professor at Ohio University and author of “Cancel Culture: A Critical Analysis. “I bet there are people who wouldn’t have even looked at this album, but now are going to be like, ‘I’m going to go out and buy that just to support him,” Ng said.
That process could be harder for Heard. She has appeared in multiple films such as “The Rum Diary,” and “Pinneapple Express,” but wrote in the Post op-ed that friends and advisers told her she would be blacklisted for coming forward with accusations against Depp (who is not named in the piece). Despite starring in “Aquaman," she wrote that she had to fight to keep her role in the sequel and attributed it to “wrath for women who speak out.”
“She can’t win,” said Ng. “If she lays low and waits for it to blow over, then people who think that she deserves all the horrible backlash that she got will have won. ... But if she tries to come up with a project like Johnny Depp did, her detractors will say, ‘Oh, she’s just trying to do that to make us forget her terrible behavior.’”
Heard, who accused Depp of physical violence, lamented the outcome of case. Her attorney has said she will appeal the decision. “I’m heartbroken that the mountain of evidence still was not enough to stand up to the disproportionate power, influence, and sway of my ex-husband," Heard said in a statement.
Depp’s turn to music is not a total surprise. While he is best known for acting in films such as “Pirates of the Caribbean,” “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” and “Alice and Wonderland,” before his career in Hollywood, he dropped out of school to become a musician. He played in the short-lived rock band “P,” which sometimes featured performers from Red Hot Chili Peppers and Sex Pistols. He has since collaborated with Oasis, Iggy Pop and Marilyn Manson, among others. In 2015, he formed “Hollywood Vampires” with Alice Cooper and Aerosmith’s Joe Perry.
At the show in England last Thursday, Depp bowed during Beck’s announcement and said that he and Beck met five years before and have “never stopped laughing since.” Depp has made multiple appearances onstage during Beck’s current tour and the two released a single together in 2020.
It makes sense for Depp to try to restart his career after the favorable verdict, said Sarah Kovoor, a professor at University of Colorado Denver Business School who researches crisis management. But he should be cautious, she said.
“He has to be very careful that he doesn’t shift from victim to villain,” she said. “He needs to show that this is not just a PR stunt, that this is something that he has been working on for some time. He needs to make it as if he’s moving forward and not trying to cause harm to Heard or anyone else.” | 2022-06-04T23:16:16Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Johnny Depp plots career revival after court win against Amber Heard - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/06/04/johnny-depp-new-album/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/06/04/johnny-depp-new-album/ |
The Pa. Senate candidate’s heart condition is much more serious than first revealed, raising concerns among some Democrats
Hannah Knowles
In this photo provided by his campaign, Pennsylvania Democratic Senate candidate John Fetterman fills out his emergency absentee ballot for the Pennsylvania primary election in Penn Medicine Lancaster General Hospital in Lancaster, Pa., on Tuesday, May, 17, 2022. (Bobby Maggio/AP)
With five hours left to vote last month, John Fetterman’s Pennsylvania Senate campaign released a confusing primary day statement: He would undergo surgery before polls closed to install a pacemaker with a defibrillator following his recent stroke.
“It should be a short procedure that will help protect his heart and address the underlying cause of his stroke, atrial fibrillation (A-fib), by regulating his heart rate and rhythm,” the unsigned May 17 statement read.
That sentence, which campaign advisers say was approved by his doctors, raised more questions than it answered. Though pacemakers are sometimes used to treat patients with A-fib — an irregular heartbeat caused by the upper chambers of the heart — devices that include defibrillators typically are not.
“You would never use a defibrillator to treat atrial fibrillation,” said Christian Thomas Ruff, a Harvard Medical School associate professor and director of general cardiology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. “The defibrillator is used to treat dangerous heart rhythms from the bottom ventricles.”
It would take 17 days for Fetterman’s campaign to explain the inconsistency. A letter from his cardiologist, released Friday, said that the defibrillator had been installed to treat a previously undisclosed cardiomyopathy, first diagnosed in 2017, that decreased the amount of blood his heart could pump.
The fact that Fetterman, 52, and his campaign won the nomination without fully disclosing the extent of his physical maladies has raised concerns among Democrats that there may be more bad news to come, potentially endangering the party’s hopes for retaining Senate control this fall. The politician, whose advisers have pitched him as an “authentic, straight-talking, no-B.S. populist” — sporting a shaved pate, graying goatee and Carhartt sweatshirts — now faces the challenge of explaining the confusion to voters.
Fetterman, currently Pennsylvania’s lieutenant governor, responded Friday with a more expansive written statement, making clear that he “almost died” from the stroke, was still not fully recovered and had seen the error of not taking prescribed medication to treat his heart condition starting in 2017.
“I didn’t do what the doctor told me,” he wrote. “But I won’t make that mistake again.”
Fetterman says he "almost died" after ignoring heart condition
His campaign advisers say they have been working to be as transparent as possible. According to one adviser, Fetterman’s campaign only found out about the surgery on the morning of the primary, and doctors never mentioned the separate heart condition at the time. Doctors described the defibrillator as “like an insurance policy,” the adviser said.
Spokespeople for Lancaster General Hospital did not respond Saturday to a request for comment.
“We have no doctors on our campaign team,” said Rebecca Kirszner Katz, a senior adviser for the Fetterman campaign. “We have been learning about these conditions and explaining them in real time.”
The concerns have been magnified by the progress of his stroke recovery after his wife, Gisele, described his situation on election night as “a little hiccup” and predicted her husband would be “back on his feet in no time.” The campaign adviser said the stroke was serious, and that Fetterman had escaped serious effects largely because of his wife’s early intervention and his proximity to the Lancaster hospital, where he received prompt treatment.
His physical well-being has improved since the stroke.
“He is walking a few miles daily,” Katz said.
He has, however, still not appeared in public, and his appearances on video released by the campaign have shown him speaking only a few sentences at a time. His ability to have conversations rapidly has not fully recovered, though he is improving and doctors still predict a full recovery.
Two Democratic political consultants — who like others for this story spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations and a sensitive issue — worried that the campaign’s handling of Fetterman’s health would undermine his image as a straight talker.
“When you are the godfather of transparency and social media, and you go dark, people notice,” said one strategist who has long supported Fetterman. “It’s not as if admitting some health issue would immediately cause people to seek a replacement.”
Another Democratic consultant who did not work for any candidate in the Senate primary said that the campaign’s disclosure of information has been at best “opaque” and at worst “misleading,” which “makes your imagination run a little wild.” Fetterman will face Republican candidate Mehmet Oz, a retired cardiothoracic surgeon and television personality.
“There were so many red flags,” in the days after Fetterman’s stroke, the consultant said, adding later, “If Oz and the Republicans wanted to sort of get to the [health] issue in a roundabout way, they would do it through the trust issue.”
Republicans have already jumped on the theme. “Wow, @JohnFetterman starts off his campaign for Senate lying about his health,” Chris Hartline, the communications director for the National Republican Senatorial Committee, tweeted on Friday.
“While John Fetterman has earned Pennsylvanians trust, Mehmet Oz is a fraud who will do, say, and sell anything to help himself,” responded David Bergstein, the communications director of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.
Pennsylvania is the marquee open Senate contest of the midterm election cycle, providing Democrats their clearest opportunity to pick up a seat after the pending retirement of Sen. Patrick J. Toomey (R-Pa.). His health challenges aside, Fetterman’s campaign has had a strong start, winning every one of Pennsylvania’s 67 counties in the recent four-way Democratic primary, with Rep. Conor Lamb (D-Pa.) coming in a distant second. In 33 counties, his vote share was 70 percent or higher, according to the campaign.
A former mayor of the small town of Braddock, Pa., Fetterman has made a name for himself as a politician who can attract support beyond his party’s brand, with blunt appeals to legalize recreational marijuana, revitalize manufacturing communities and eliminating the Senate filibuster to get more done.
Those close to Fetterman say one of the issues in his campaign has been his discomfort with speaking about his own health issues, or attending to them properly, something that the candidate admitted in Friday’s statement.
“Like so many others, and so many men in particular, I avoided going to the doctor, even though I knew I didn’t feel well,” he said.
It was a message some Democrats hope would appeal to the crossover voters that Fetterman is hoping to reach in November.
“Would I have liked to see more information come out from the campaign faster? Yes. But in the end, you know, I don’t think it’s indicative of the type of campaign [Fetterman] is running,” said Democratic consultant Mike Mikus, who voted for Lamb in the primary. He said Fetterman looks “relatable” for admitting on Friday that he neglected to take his medicine and disregarded his doctor.
“He is recovering well and following doctor’s orders. I’m looking forward to being on the campaign trail with him soon,” Sen. Robert P. Casey Jr. (D-Pa.) said in a statement, after having a Zoom call with Fetterman on Friday. “I’m not sure I’ve seen a candidate in recent history who is better prepared to serve the people of Pennsylvania.”
Ramesh Chandra of Alliance Cardiology said in a statement Friday that he had seen Fetterman in 2017 after he experienced swelling in his feet. “I diagnosed him with atrial fibrillation, an irregular heart rhythm, along with decreased heart pump,” he wrote in the letter.
Fetterman — who stands 6 feet 8 inches tall — previously announced that starting in 2017 he changed his diet and began exercising more regularly, resulting in significant weight loss. A June 2018 article by the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reported that he had lost 148 pounds in a year, coming down from a top weight of about 418 pounds.
“I was fat,” Fetterman said at the time. “It is embarrassing to talk about.”
Several cardiologists said the description of a “decreased heart pump” matches the diagnosis of cardiomyopathy, which Chandra said was the reason doctors in Lancaster decided to implant to pacemaker with a defibrillator. Cardiomyopathy is a disease of the heart muscle that makes it hard for the organ to deliver blood to the body, resulting sometimes in swollen feet.
“There are two broad reasons that we implant defibrillators,” said Matthew Tomey, an assistant professor of medicine and cardiology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mt. Sinai. “One is for somebody who has already suffered a cardiac arrest. The other reason is primary prevention for individuals who have never had a cardiac arrest but have risk factors.”
Tomey said recent pharmaceutical innovations have made cardiomyopathy a much more manageable condition than it was 10 or 20 years ago. Treatments are generally determined by a series of tests, including a measure of the ejection fraction of blood that is pumped from the heart’s left ventricle and the CHA2DS2-VASc score, which takes into account age, diabetes, hypertension, vascular disease and other factors.
Fetterman’s campaign has not released this data.
“The prognosis I can give for John’s heart is this: if he takes his medications, eats healthy, and exercises, he will be fine,” Chandra wrote in the statement. “[H]e should be able to campaign and serve in the U.S. Senate without a problem.” | 2022-06-04T23:16:35Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Inside John Fetterman’s changing health scare story - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/06/04/inside-john-fettermans-changing-health-scare-story/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/06/04/inside-john-fettermans-changing-health-scare-story/ |
Class 4 track: Loudoun County boys, Tuscarora and Loudoun Valley girls finish strong
Loudoun Valley's Ava Gordon won the girls’ 3,200 meters at the Class 4 meet in Lynchburg with a time of 10:17.46. (Jim McGrath/FTWP)
LYNCHBURG, Va. — For Northern Virginia’s smaller high schools, the results of the Class 3 and 4 state meets usually serve as an outlier data source for the talent that resides in the region. Only 12 schools represent the area, and for the past 10 years, Loudoun Valley has been the main provider of local highlights, especially from its nationally renowned distance program.
But the Vikings may have company after this year. Their neighbor to the east, Loudoun County, led local Class 4 boys’ teams with a seventh-place finish and 28 points at Liberty University’s Osborne Stadium this weekend.
Dominion — led by Arun Mantena, who took second in the high jump (6 feet 3 inches) and fifth in the triple jump (44 feet ¼ inch) — finished in the top 10 with 22 points.
The Tuscarora girls finished in seventh with 34 points, and the Loudoun Valley girls took ninth with 29.
Loudoun County — the boys’ runner-up in the spring of 2018 — displayed its balance, youth and ability to compete for future state titles.
“We won our district and region meets with points in the sprints, hurdles, and jumps,” said Loudoun County co-coach Steven Graham.
On Friday, the Captains’ 3,200-meter relay placed fifth, while Daniel Young took fourth in the shotput (50-3). The momentum carried into Saturday, with sophomore discus thrower Chase Kibble adding eight points with a second-place finish in the discus (153-8), followed by Ethan Stansbury’s runner-up finish in the 1,600 (4:18.39). Stansbury was roughly 14 seconds faster in the second half of the race than he was in the first half.
“The runner from Blacksburg [winner Conner Rutherford] just snuck up on him at the end,” said co-coach Courtney Campbell.
On the girls’ side, Loudoun Valley senior Ava Gordon, a Liberty commit running at her future home, won the girls’ 3,200 meters with a time of 10:17.46. She executed her race plan perfectly, running just a step behind Jamestown’s Caroline Bauer before breaking away with a 71-second final lap to win by seven seconds.
“I was feeling pretty good,” said Gordon, who had run on the Vikings second-place 3,200-meter relay on Friday. “I felt like I might as well go for it.”
Tuscarora led all area girls teams on the strength of Alysa Carrigan’s win in the high jump. Carrigan leaped 5 feet 6 inches to claim her title, only the second event won by Northern Virginia athletes over the weekend.
The Huskies were successful at scoring in diverse events to tack on points throughout the afternoon. Carrigan was third place in the triple jump and sixth in the long jump to tally 19 points for the meet.
No local Class 3 team placed in the top 15. The Meridian girls finished 16th with 18 points to lead Northern Virginia teams.
Individually, Philip Daniel of Manassas Park had the highest finish, placing second in the triple jump at 45-11.
The Abingdon boys and Heritage-Lynchburg girls won the Class 3 team titles, while the Pulaski County boys and Heritage-Newport News girls claimed the Class 4 state crowns. | 2022-06-04T23:16:41Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Class 4 track: Loudoun County boys, Tuscarora and Loudoun Valley girls finish strong - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/06/04/class-4-track-loudoun-county-boys-tuscarora-loudoun-valley-girls-finish-strong/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/06/04/class-4-track-loudoun-county-boys-tuscarora-loudoun-valley-girls-finish-strong/ |
Nelly Korda wears a compression sleeve over her left arm after surgery for blood clot. (Kevin C. Cox/Getty Images)
SOUTHERN PINES, N.C. — A white compression sleeve covers the left arm of Nelly Korda, a conspicuous reminder of the harrowing start to this year for the second-ranked golfer in the world.
Korda has been wearing the protective gear all week at the U.S. Women’s Open following a procedure in March to remove a blood clot from her subclavian vein. In a social media post showing her recovery, Korda also revealed she had contracted coronavirus in January.
A post shared by Nelly (@nellykorda)
So it was with a combination of uncertainty, limited expectations and gratitude that the former world No. 1 for 26 straight weeks, a record for a U.S. female player, arrived at Pine Needles this week seeking her second victory at a major championship.
“I’m out here in the heat competing at the U.S. Women’s Open,” she said, “and a couple of months back I wasn’t sure I was going to be doing that.”
Korda carded a 1-under-par 70 in the third round and briefly got within reach of 54-hole leader Minjee Lee by making a birdie at the par-5 15th hole to get to 7 under for the tournament, but three straight bogeys coming in blunted her charge.
Korda is at 4-under 209 for the tournament and trails Lee by nine strokes.
Still, making it to the weekend was not only a testament to Korda’s resolve after surgery in Florida and weeks of rehabilitation in California. It also ended a disappointing streak of two straight U.S. Women’s Opens in which she missed the cut.
“Definitely not the finish I wanted,” said Korda, who has shot below par in each of her rounds this week. “That was tough. I’m sure that was tough to watch, too, but yeah, I’m just happy to be out here even though that [finish] was a tough pill to swallow. I still have one more day, and I’m doing what I love.”
As an indication of how grateful she is simply to be playing, Korda even paused during her round when time allowed to sign for the legion of supporters in the galleries who followed her around the 6,638-yard layout hosting the U.S. Women’s Open for a record fourth time.
Korda is playing in her first major championship this year after sitting out of the Chevron Championship, formerly the ANA Inspiration, in early April while recovering from surgery.
“I really, really love when like the little kids and little girls kind of scream my name,” Korda said. “Some of them even ask me for an autograph during the round, and I just can’t say no. I’m just so happy to be out here.”
Ko goes low
The low round of the day belonged to New Zealand’s Lydia Ko, who had six birdies en route to a 5-under 66 to move into a tie for fourth place at 6-under 207 in her 11th U.S. Women’s Open appearance.
Ko opened her round with a birdie at the par-5 first and closed with another at the par-4 18th, drawing a rousing ovation when she landed her approach at the final hole inside of two feet.
Ko entered this week seeking her third win at a major championship and first at the U.S. Women’s Open, where the former world No. 1’s best finish is a tie for third in 2016.
“You just never know, right?” said Ko, who became the youngest woman to win a major when in 2015 she prevailed at the Evian Championship at 18 years 4 months 20 days. “There have been some lower scores at this course. I’m just going to focus on my game, just enjoy it. It’s such a great golf course, and it’s a fun course where I think you can be aggressive.” | 2022-06-05T00:47:53Z | www.washingtonpost.com | After surgery and covid to start year, Nelly Korda rediscovers her form - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/06/04/after-surgery-covid-start-year-nelly-korda-rediscovers-her-form/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/06/04/after-surgery-covid-start-year-nelly-korda-rediscovers-her-form/ |
After a forgettable performance in a Game 1 loss to the Boston Celtics, Draymond Green said that the responsibility to lead the Golden State Warriors to victory in the NBA Finals "falls on me." (AP Photo/Jed Jacobsohn)
SAN FRANCISCO — Draymond Green found himself embroiled in a brouhaha last week, when the straight-talking forward predicted during a TNT interview that his Golden State Warriors would face the Boston Celtics, not the Miami Heat, in the NBA Finals.
Though Green’s assertion was reasonable, it nevertheless rankled the Heat, who responded by beating the Celtics in Boston to force a Game 7 in the Eastern Conference finals. Miami forward Udonis Haslem accused Green of “[breaking] the code” with his “disrespectful” pick, while P.J. Tucker thanked Green for the added motivation.
With a triumphant series-closing performance, the Celtics spared Green a head-to-head showdown with the Heat and their hurt feelings, but that hardly meant he was let off the hook. On the contrary, Green’s play, rather than his words, was the subject of deserved scrutiny following Boston’s 120-108 Game 1 victory Thursday. For Golden State to even the series in Sunday’s Game 2, the key adjustment is obvious: Green, a three-time champion known for raising his game in the playoffs, must play more effectively on both ends.
“One thing I hate is leaders who, when everything is good, it’s all them,” Green, 32, said at practice Saturday. “They’re doing it all. They’re making everything happen. And when stuff hits the fan, it’s everybody else’s fault. As I’ve said before, we call those front-runners, and we don’t do that. We take it on the chin. That’s what I’ve always been taught my entire life. Ultimately, if I play well, we win. And if I don’t, we still can. But if I do, we win. So that falls on me.”
Indeed, Green’s best performances this postseason have come at timely moments. With an opportunity to close out the Memphis Grizzlies in the second round, Green posted 14 points, 15 rebounds and eight assists in a Game 6 victory. And in Game 5 victory over the Dallas Mavericks to clinch the Western Conference finals , Green had 17 points and nine assists to help slam the door.
For evidence of Green’s bellwether status, look no further than his three-point shooting, which has often been reluctant and not especially effective in recent years. When Green has made at least one three-pointer this season, Golden State has posted a 13-1 record during the regular season and a 6-0 mark in the playoffs. If Green is confident enough to pull the trigger rather than defer to Stephen Curry and Klay Thompson and in enough of a rhythm to connect, Golden State can look unbeatable.
That wasn’t the case in Game 1, when Green shot 2-for-12 from the field and missed all four of his three-point attempts. Wayward shooting was only one concern; Green fouled out, committed three turnovers and was overwhelmed at times by Boston’s front line of Al Horford and Robert Williams. During the Celtics’ decisive fourth-quarter flurry, Green had a careless turnover and an offensive foul that negated a Curry layup, while Horford found himself wide open for three-pointers on multiple occasions.
“You could just feel the momentum shifting dramatically and the avalanche started,” Curry said Saturday, adding that Golden State faced a “come-to-Jesus moment” after dropping Game 1 at Chase Center.
Horford and Williams represent this postseason’s toughest challenge for Green, who played a central role defending Denver Nuggets MVP center Nikola Jokic in the first round, went toe-to-toe with the Grizzlies’ physical front line in the second round and won the battle against the Mavericks’ perimeter-oriented big men in the West finals.
Horford is a savvy veteran who can shoot, pass and defend at the rim and in space. Williams, much like Memphis’s Jaren Jackson Jr., is a shot-contesting athlete who plays above the rim. Over the years, Green has been at his most effective when facing slow-footed centers who can’t stay with him on the perimeter or non-scoring threats who allow him to roam and provide disruptive help defense. Boston’s big men are versatile enough to stick with him and capable enough offensively to keep him honest.
What’s more, the Celtics deployed Marcus Smart, a 6-foot-3 guard who was named Defensive Player of the Year in April, to defend Green for stretches of Game 1. That maneuver allowed Boston’s big men to remain closer to the basket and put Smart in a position to switch onto Golden State’s guards when Green tried to set up handoffs for jump shots, one of his pet moves on offense.
Celtics Coach Ime Udoka said Saturday that strategy was intended to encourage Green to look for his own offense, which typically isn’t his preference. This season, Green posted a team-high 7.0 assists per game but was Golden State’s seventh-leading scorer, averaging just 7.5 points.
“We don’t feel [Smart defending Green is] a cross-match, by any means, or a mismatch,” Udoka said. “We put Marcus on bigs throughout the season to switch onto their guards at times. That’s something in our back pocket that we feel comfortable doing. In general, [we try to] help off [Green] when it’s appropriate and try to make him be more of a scorer. It’s a tough one: You help off, but he’s going right into a dribble handoff action or a pin-down action, and you have to be able to help and get back.”
While Golden State can potentially turn to Thompson and backup guard Jordan Poole for more scoring in Game 2, Green will be central to its hopes for defensive improvement. The seven-time all-defensive team selection highlighted the Warriors’ lack of defensive “force" in Game 1, saying the Celtics’ shooters performed so well in the fourth quarter because the Warriors let them get comfortable by conceding too many easy looks earlier in the game.
As has been the case throughout their title years, the Warriors will be counting on Green to set a fiercer or more physical tone on defense in Game 2. Golden State is 4-0 after a loss in this postseason.
“There’s no other scenario where I see it playing out any different than [Green] coming out with great energy and focus,” Curry said. “Just making his impact felt on the court. I know he takes all that stuff personally, in terms of his standard and what he knows he can do out there on the floor. When he doesn’t meet that, he’s usually pretty honest and accountable to himself, first and foremost, and to the team.
“You don’t win championships and be the team that we are if you don’t have that in your DNA at some point. We’ve got to go out and prove it, Draymond included.” | 2022-06-05T00:47:59Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Draymond Green steps up as Warriors seek to even NBA Finals with Celtics - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/06/04/draymond-green-warriors-celtics-nba-finals/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/06/04/draymond-green-warriors-celtics-nba-finals/ |
South Lakes boys, South County girls, plenty of individuals shine at Class 6 track meet
By Mike Holtzclaw
Viktorie Klepetkova of Yorktown set a meet record in the high jump. (Mike Holtzclaw for The Washington Post)
NEWPORT NEWS, Va. — Viktorie Klepetkova said she came to the Virginia track and field championships on Saturday at Todd Stadium just looking to enjoy the day and have a good time. The Yorktown junior did that and then some.
In the girls’ Class 6 high jump, Klepetkova repeated as state champion by clearing 5 feet 11 inches — breaking the meet record set three years ago by Osbourn Park’s Sydney Banks. Klepetkova, whose family moved to the United States from the Czech Republic two years ago, was ecstatic with her jump, bounding around the infield and accepting congratulatory hugs from anyone nearby.
“It’s hard to describe the adrenaline and the euphoria,” she said. “My body feels like it needs to scream.”
Klepetkova won the state title last year with a jump of 5-4. She set a personal best of 5-8 early this season. After clearing 5-11 on Saturday, she said she has just one goal for next year.
“Jump higher,” she said with a smile.
The South Lakes boys won the Class 6 team title, with Battlefield second and West Springfield third.
The South County girls won the Class 6 team title, with more than twice as many points as runner-up Oscar Smith. Catalina Sanchious won the 100 meters in 11.86 seconds. Also from South County, Victoria Higgins won the 200 and 400 meters and ran on the 4x400 relay team that took first place.
Austin Gallant of Battlefield won the discus with a toss of 169 feet 5 inches and the 400 meters with a time of 47.26. He also placed third in the shot put and ran on the state championship 4x400 relay team.
“Running is what I always wanted to do in high school,” said Gallant, a senior who is headed to Penn State. “But my dad did the discus and the shot, and he wanted me to try it because I’ve got the genetics. It worked out pretty well.”
Hayfield senior Xavier Carmichael, the All-Met Athlete of the Year during the indoor season, won the 100 meters, took second in the 200 and the long jump and placed third in the high jump. He narrowly missed out on the 200 title, finishing 0.03 seconds behind Fairfax’s Amir Green.
“I had a lot on my plate,” said Carmichael, a senior who will attend Norfolk State. “Mentally, I feel like I could still run another race, but physically I’m happy to rest.”
Gillian Bushee and Thais Rolly scored two wins for Fairfax County. Bushee, a junior from Herndon, won the girls’ 3,200-meter run, with Rolly four seconds behind her. A couple of hours later Rolly, a junior from McLean, won the 1,600 meters, less than a second ahead of Bushee.
They live about 20 miles apart and have been running against each other since they started high school.
“We’re just used to competing against each other,” Rolly said. “We’re so close that we never really know who’s going to win. It just depends on the day.”
On Saturday, Bushee won the 3,200 in 10 minutes 26.36 seconds. Rolly won the 1,600 in 4:54.92.
“We make each other better — absolutely, 100 percent,” Bushee said. “I know I wouldn’t have run as fast today if I didn’t have her.”
Other Class 6 boys’ state champions included Nicolas DeWolfe of Falls Church in the pole vault (13-6) and William Watson of South Lakes in the 110 hurdles (14.22 seconds).
Other Northern Virginia girls’ champions: Lena Gooden of Osbourn Park took first in the long jump at 18-9.25, and Wisdom Williams of Alexandria City won the shot put at 45-10.75.
In the Class 5 meet, Alexander Ryan of Stone Bridge won the 1,600 meters in a time of 4:21.84. | 2022-06-05T00:48:11Z | www.washingtonpost.com | South Lakes boys, South County girls, plenty of individuals shine at Class 6 track meet - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/06/04/south-lakes-boys-south-county-girls-plenty-individuals-shine-class-6-track-meet/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/06/04/south-lakes-boys-south-county-girls-plenty-individuals-shine-class-6-track-meet/ |
Minjee Lee sets 54-hole scoring record, leads U.S. Women’s Open by three
Australian Minjee Lee sets the 54-hole scoring record at the U.S. Women's Open. (AP Photo/Steve Helber)
SOUTHERN PINES, N.C. — Minjee Lee was grinning broadly for much her third round at the U.S. Women’s Open, waving to the galleries while navigating Pine Needles golf club as if the Australian barely had a care on a glorious Saturday afternoon.
Even on errant shots, so rare they could be counted on one hand, Lee simply shrugged her shoulders and summoned exquisite touch either to save par or extract birdie from uncomfortable positions on the way to the record for lowest 54-hole score at the U.S. Women’s Open.
Lee, 26, carded a 4-under 67 to reach 13-under 200 for the tournament and close in on the second major title of her career after winning the Evian Championship in France last year, where she stormed back from a seven-stroke deficit in the final round to defeat Jeong-Eun Lee on the first playoff hole.
“Yeah, I’m pretty calm,” said Lee, who was easy to spot on the course wearing a bright red long-sleeve top and reflective sunglasses. “My personality is pretty calm anyway. I don’t think I get too high or too low. That’s a strength of mine.”
Lee’s closest pursuer is Mina Harigae (1-under 70), who played in the final pairing with Lee and began the third round in a tie for first at 9 under. But Harigae, who trails by three, bogeyed Nos. 11 and 12 while Lee reeled off four consecutive birdies beginning at the ninth to swing the tide atop the leader board.
England’s Bronte Law was alone in third place, six shots behind Lee thanks to a third-round 68, and amateur sensation Ingrid Lindblad was part of a crowded field at 6 under. Included in that group of six was world No. 1 Jin Young Ko, who holed out from the fairway at No. 18 to complete her round at even-par 71.
Lee didn’t produce one of those unlikely shots in the third round, but her command around the course still allowed her to break by one stroke the previous 54-hole record Hall of Famer Julie Inkster established in 1999 at Old Waverly Golf Club in West Point, Miss.
Lee, ranked No. 4 in the world, hit 13 of 14 fairways for a second consecutive round and was perfect on 11 putts within five feet in her ninth start at a U.S. Women’s Open. She also hit 14 of 18 greens in regulation (77.8 percent) to rank tied for fourth for the round and tied for fifth in that statistic over 54 holes, hitting 43 of 54 (79.6 percent).
“I’m just going to stick to what I know,” Lee said of her strategy heading into the final round. “I’ve been to plenty of U.S. Opens and been in pressure situations like this before. Just take away my experience from the other events and the other Opens and try to get it done tomorrow.”
Lee, whose best showing at U.S. Women’s Open is a tie for 11th in 2017, rallied after a two-shot swing at the 188-yard par-3 fifth hole that is playing as the second-most difficult hole of the tournament.
Harigae pulled a 4-hybrid from her bag and coaxed her tee ball to five feet of the flagstick. Lee’s tee shot wound up on the right fringe some 45 feet from the cup. Her second shot stopped inside of eight feet, but Lee missed the par putt to fall to 8 under before Harigae’s bid hung on the left edge and dropped to get her to 10 under.
Harigae dropped a shot after bogeying the seventh for the second day in a row but followed with a near hole-out at the eighth, where her approach settled an inch from the hole for a tap-in birdie. Two holes earlier, Lee hit her approach at the 399-yard par 4 to within seven feet and drained the putt to get back to 9 under.
Harigae owned a one-stroke lead at the turn by rolling in a five-foot birdie putt at the ninth to reach 11 under, but Lee matched that by sinking an 11-footer to ignite her birdie barrage.
“You know, I was a little nervous in the beginning, but I was able to hit some good shots,” Harigae said. “My middle was pretty good. Then got a little — hit a little squirrelly shots, but then I made a good birdie on 16. I think overall I’m just happy with the way I was able to hang in there.”
Two groups ahead were Ko and Lindblad, the world’s second ranked amateur who continued her improbable run through the U.S. Women’s Open with putting and iron play in the early stages Saturday as crisp and confident as professionals with résumés far more extensive.
At the 391-yard par-4 fourth, for instance, the two-time SEC player of the year at LSU landed her approach to seven feet and sank the putt to reach 9 under and a three-way share of the lead.
But she gave a shot back at the fifth and made three more bogeys on her inward nine to dampen her hopes of becoming just the second amateur to win the U.S. Women’s Open.
“It was a really good start, and then I kind of hit a really bad shot on five, made bogey,” said Lindblad, whose 65 in the opening round set the amateur record for lowest 18-hole score in a USGA championship. “But still said keep the doubles off the scorecard and make bogeys instead of doubles. Overall it was okay today.” | 2022-06-05T00:48:17Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Minjee Lee sets 54-hole scoring record, leads U.S. Women’s Open by three - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/06/04/us-womens-open-minjee-lee-record/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/06/04/us-womens-open-minjee-lee-record/ |
At first blush, Yoshihide Suga, who left office last October after just 384 days in power, might seem to be another in a long list of flash-in-the-pan Japanese premiers.
But as the distance from his premiership grows and the pandemic that felled him moves to a new phase, there’s increasing recognition here for Suga’s accomplishments. While his time was overshadowed by the Olympic Games and Covid, his legacy is surprisingly formidable in a country where politics often moves at a glacial pace.
“I have no regrets,” Suga says during an interview on the 11th floor of the Diet members’ office building. It’s just a short walk from the prime minister’s office he occupied for most of 2021.
Perhaps because of his years as the face of Shinzo Abe’s administration, Suga never gained the reformer’s reputation he deserves. But as prime minister, he forced three of the country’s 10 biggest listed firms to lower prices; overrode ministry bureaucrats to commit Japan to an ambitious carbon-neutral goal; set up a new agency to digitize Japan’s creaking bureaucracy; and overcame domestic and international opposition to safely hold the Olympics.
Recent legislation Suga spearheaded, enabling expensive fertility treatments to be covered by public health insurance, brought his relevance back to the fore. His tweet on the subject generated half a million likes, the most by any Japanese politician this year.
Those accomplishments didn’t translate into public approval, however. It’s ironic that his successor, Fumio Kishida, enjoys record ratings despite relatively limited legislative accomplishments, thanks in part to his strong stance on Ukraine.
One of Suga’s most significant achievements was what he didn’t do. Suga eschewed the Covid lockdowns that became de rigueur in other nations, and despite initial opposition, time has been kind to his decision to focus on restricting infection sites such as bars and restaurants, while allowing most economic activity to continue.
“Compared to the rest of the world, Japan’s Covid response has been extremely successful,” Suga told me. Despite sometimes intense pressure from the media and the opposition to impose harsher measures, particularly during the summer delta wave, he refused to countenance a lockdown. The statistics bear him out: Japan remains one of the few countries with almost no excess mortality from Covid, has the lowest deaths per capita in the G-7, and soon will be the lowest among the 38 OECD countries.
Suga’s offices are dotted with mementos of his career: a framed picture from the day his Cabinet was formed; a cover of Newsweek, to whom he offered a rare interview during a trip to the US; a toy dog, representing his native Akita. The room is dominated by a scroll that reads “Reiwa,” the current imperial era. As chief cabinet secretary in 2019, Suga announced the name to the country on live television, earning him the nickname “Uncle Reiwa.” The publicity elevated him on the list of potential Abe successors.
His chance came unexpectedly in August 2020 when Abe resigned due to ill health. Entering office with high public support, many expected Suga could secure a long stretch in power. But Covid surged again in winter, and as other nations returned to lockdown, he initially resisted calls to impose another state of emergency. That would come to haunt him as the media slammed his response, but Suga remains unrepentant.
“The first state of emergency during the Abe administration was nationwide and uniform, shutting down all forms of economic activity. GDP fell about 30%, the most since the war,” he says. “I felt very strongly that we had to be cautious.”
At the same time, he bet the house on vaccines. With no domestic production capacity, Japan was slowed by the need to import vaccines as well as conduct domestic trials.
As supply improved, Suga pushed for a “deliberately ambitious” goal of 1 million shots a day, at a time when barely a quarter of that number was being administered. At the peak, the country was giving more than 1.6 million doses a day. His approach was vindicated as Covid deaths later dropped to less than one a day.
Suga’s willingness to bend the status quo is a pattern seen across across his career, which began in local politics in Yokohama, eventually becoming the first man to lead the Liberal Democratic Party without belonging to one of its powerful internal factions. One of his signature policies was taking on Japan’s mobile phone giants, which had little real competition and fat profit margins. Suga forced them to reduce monthly fees, with new plans so much lower that they depressed the nation’s inflation figures for a year.
Earlier, Suga also overcame opposition to spearhead the Furusato Nozei (Hometown Tax) system — a rare popular taxation scheme that lets people pay part of their taxes to rural areas, and get local treats in return. The amount spent could reach 1 trillion yen ($7.7 billion) this year, Suga said. Suga also commited Japan to become carbon neutral by 2050, the first Japanese leader to set such a timeline.
But perhaps nowhere was Suga’s willingness to fly in the face of opposition seen more than with the Olympics.
Having secured the Games in 2013, Abe postponed them when the pandemic struck. As the event approached, public opposition grew. In January 2021, the Times of London reported Japan had decided to cancel the Olympics, something Suga denies. In May, just weeks from the opening ceremony, the US issued a “do not travel” advisory for Japan. The world’s media warned of the potential for a superspreader event or an “Olympic Variant,” while Suga says he was asked by medical advisors to cancel the Games. “I turned them down,” he says. “That’s a decision for the government to make.”
In the end, just 33 of the 11,300 athletes tested positive. Far from a superspreader event, the Olympic Village bubble where athletes were tested daily may well have been the safest place in the country.
But although the public later approved of the Games, Suga himself received no uplift. His unimpressive performance in press conferences won him few fans and he continued to get hammered in the papers, to his frustration. As a vote neared for the next LDP leader, he shocked the nation by announcing he wouldn’t run, ending his term in power.
Under his more cautious successor, the nation is now debating its reopening while grappling with the weak yen. Tourists are salivating at the prospect and unsurprisingly Suga — also the driving political force behind the visa relaxation that led to Japan’s tourism boom — thinks the country should take bolder steps and open up quicker. “We need big economic policies that take advantage of the weak yen. That means inbound tourists,” he says.
Former Japanese leaders don’t usually get a second shot — and Suga doesn’t seem keen on trying. But there’s talk in local media of him forming a “study group” of like-minded lawmakers that could turn into one of the factions that dominate intra-party politics — and help decide future leaders. Suga declined to discuss the rumors, saying that his next step would come after this summer’s election. But behind the scenes, it seems he may not be done yet.
• Japan’s Subtle Covid Policy Is a Lesson for China: Gearoid Reidy
• Charts, ‘Catharsis’ and the Psychology of Crowds: John Authers | 2022-06-05T02:19:04Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The Long-Lasting Legacy of a Short-Term Prime Minister - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/the-long-lasting-legacy-of-a-short-term-prime-minister/2022/06/04/a904c724-e46b-11ec-ae64-6b23e5155b62_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/the-long-lasting-legacy-of-a-short-term-prime-minister/2022/06/04/a904c724-e46b-11ec-ae64-6b23e5155b62_story.html |
Construction and property sales have been the biggest engines of economic growth since President Xi Jinping came to office almost a decade ago. Home prices have skyrocketed as an emerging middle class flocked to property. The boom led to speculative buying as new homes were pre-sold by property developers who turned more and more to foreign investors for funds. In 2020 China tightened financing rules for developers to crack down on reckless borrowing, fearful that a collapse could undermine the financial system. But many developers didn’t have enough available cash to cover their liabilities. A sales slump that began during the pandemic was deepened by aggressive measures to contain Covid-19, aggravating the liquidity crisis. A default last year at one of the biggest, China Evergrande Group, shocked the market (China only started letting companies default on bonds in 2014). The ripple effects have hit other developers, including Sunac China Holdings Ltd. in May. As of June 1, every Chinese firm defaulting in 2022 has been a developer except for E-House China Enterprise Holdings Ltd., which provides real estate services.
2. How do credit risk hedging tools help?
Companies are still facing a cash crunch because of slumping new home sales, while high interest rates have closed off the offshore bond market to many builders. Domestic stock and bond investors have shunned stressed developers as well, especially the privately owned ones. A similar crisis in 2018 spurred China’s regulators to re-energize efforts to provide investors with ways of hedging risk. Now authorities are again encouraging the use of such tools as a way to restore confidence and incentivize investors to subscribe to issuances that they might otherwise have shunned.
Credit-default swaps (CDS), which allow traders to place bets on the creditworthiness of a company or a group of companies, have been around for decades in developed markets. Yet, such securities are little used in China. Instead, credit risk mitigation warrants (CRMW) are the most commonly used hedging tools. Despite being widely known as China’s CDS, the instrument is not exactly that. A CRMW offers insurance against default linked to a specific bond or loan obligation, while a CDS, which China introduced in 2016, can be linked to an issuer or its various debts.
Private developers including Longfor Group, Seazen, Midea Real Estate and Country Garden have been on the front line this year in selling domestic bonds protected by risk-hedging derivatives, indicating regulatory support. As of June 1, 54.8 billion yuan ($8.2 billion) of CRMW have been sold in the interbank market since 2018, Bloomberg-compiled data shows. That’s a tiny amount compared to China’s 138.2 trillion yuan onshore bond market, according to data from the People’s Bank of China. | 2022-06-05T02:19:11Z | www.washingtonpost.com | How China Is Reviving Tools for Hedging Credit Risk - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/how-china-is-reviving-tools-for-hedging-credit-risk/2022/06/04/4a968904-e473-11ec-ae64-6b23e5155b62_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/how-china-is-reviving-tools-for-hedging-credit-risk/2022/06/04/4a968904-e473-11ec-ae64-6b23e5155b62_story.html |
They feel frustrated, depressed and no more able to change their bleak situation than change the weather
A young man plays guitar as other applicants to the Moscow Art Theatre School wait for their turn at an admission exam in Moscow on June 2, 2022. (Alexander Zemlianichenko/AP)
RIGA, Latvia — For Russia’s urban middle class, the war on Ukraine has messed up plans, ruined longed-for vacations and stripped away joys like shopping for a favorite foreign clothing brand, turning the key in a new Japanese car, even biting into a Big Mac.
As the war drags on, many yearn for life to go back to normal, before prices went crazy and foreign companies quit the country over Russia’s invasion. But these Russians are equally sure that President Vladimir Putin will keep on fighting until he wins, because that’s what he always does.
After convincing the majority of the population that the war was necessary to “liberate” Ukrainians from “Nazis,” state television propagandists are now doggedly preparing Russians for a long war, ominously warning that it might end in nuclear war.
In Ukraine, that means more civilian casualties, bombed houses and dozens of soldiers killed daily defending the country’s east.
Russian hardships may be trivial by contrast, but the deadening gloom of a long war worries the Kremlin, according to analysts, because of the challenge of dragging the population along as sanctions bite, businesses retrench, prices continue to surge, and it dawns on people that life may never go back to the way it was.
But the old Kremlin playbook, accusing the West of plans to gobble up Russia, is working so far. Denis Volkov of independent polling agency Levada-Center said the latest polling for April showed almost half of Russians unconditionally support the war and about 30 percent support it with reservations, with 19 percent opposed. Many in focus groups saw it as an existential confrontation with the West, not Ukraine.
“People explain that a significant part of the world is against us and it’s only Putin who hopes to hold onto Russia, otherwise we would be eaten up completely. To them it is Russia that is defending itself,” he said.
Ominous rhetoric gains ground in Russia as its forces founder in Ukraine
The conflict, however, is taking a toll on Russians like Marina, 57, a language teacher, whose friends are so weary of the war, they avoid the topic. She succeeded in changing the minds of a few friends and relatives who supported the war. “But in general, it seems everyone is sick and tired of the war or special operation. People have their own problems and the main problem is survival, especially with the rising prices.”
Marina acknowledged that few Russians are opposed to the war and most are finding a way to “get by somehow.” But she added: “This ‘somehow’ is becoming boring. Most people got tired of it. I want to travel. Others want to be able to plan. We want to get back to our ordinary lives.”
Marina can’t help dreaming wistfully of her old life — just a few months ago. “I want to be able to watch Western movies on Netflix and shop at Uniqlo. I want to travel to Europe on affordable and reliable airlines. I want to be part of the world and not an outcast,” she said.
Many people, still in denial, are struggling to adapt, said Grigory Yudin, professor of political philosophy at the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences. “The natural question for Russians is not whether I support it or not — nobody asks you, actually — but how do I adapt to this?”
People want certainty about their incomes, travel plans and mortgages. Part of the Moscow elite, including middle-ranking bureaucrats who feel they are Europeans, are not happy about the war, he said, but tend to believe Putin will fight until he wins.
“I think the majority of Russians still honestly believe that this is going on with military success, or at least this is what people want to believe," Yudin said. He added: "The more-educated people who are more informed and tend to consume information from different sources are not that certain about that. They have significant doubts.”
Volkov said the latest polling showed interest in watching news about the war is beginning to wane, with people in focus groups wishing their lives could go back to the way they were.
“The best scenario is for this to end as soon as possible and then we hope things will go back to normal," said Ksenia, 50, a bookkeeper at a firm that sells foreign materials and has been hard hit by Western sanctions.
Most of her work colleagues began strongly supporting the war, but lately they avoid the subject, except to complain that ordinary people in Russia always pay the price of government decisions.
“My colleagues have finally started to realize that things are not great. In general, we try not to discuss it because we start to fight. They’re saying, ‘We didn’t start this war and now we have to pay.’”
Her plan to vacation in the United States or Italy this summer is ruined because she cannot get a visa.
“Now I feel as if there’s no future and it’s very depressing.” She ached when McDonalds’ golden arches were removed not for any love of the burgers or fries, but for the idea it represented.
“I’m really upset about McDonald’s, and I really mean it. McDonald’s has always been a symbol of freedom for me. I remember when the first McDonald’s opened in Moscow,” she said recalling the queues in 1990s months before the Soviet Union collapsed. “It felt like the light at the end of the tunnel.”
Putin’s purge of ‘traitors’ scoops up pensioners, foodies and peaceniks
For Ksenia and friends opposed to the war, the worst part is thinking of the Ukrainian civilians, including children, being killed and the women raped by Russian soldiers.
“I can survive without certain clothes. And I think I can survive without Western movies. But the main problem for me is that now Russians are outcasts, with whom nobody will want to shake hands. Psychologically, it's really hard for me to feel that I'm unwanted everywhere.”
Viktor, a 35-year-old carpenter, says his small business has lost most of its clients, as they’ve been forced to economize. He cannot finish building his own house because he says prices for building materials doubled while his income halved.
Viktor thought war would rage about two months. “Now it will take years, and it’s a disaster. It’s not only losing lives. In the years to come we will be living in poverty and we will be hated again like the fascists in Germany in World War II — like we are the new fascists.”
But 43-year-old Andrei from Moscow sees the war as “God’s plan” and believes Russians are willing to make sacrifices to see it through. A yoga-loving, vegetarian computer programmer, he is not the typical elderly, conservative Putin supporter. He gets his news from one pro-Kremlin blogger and shares a common Russian conviction that Western news of Russian war crimes is “fake.” He declined to give his surname.
“The idea is to remove fascism from Ukraine and to return the civilians who want to live in the U.S.S.R., like before the ’90s,” he said echoing the propaganda.
“Right now we don’t feel any meaningful impact from sanctions,” he added, although many of his friends in IT have fled for Armenia and elsewhere, and he can no longer afford to buy a beloved MacBook computer. Nor can he purchase the new Mazda 6 he had his eyes on; he had been hoping pay about 2 million rubles — five months’ salary — but the price went up to 3 million.
Andrei is convinced that Russia will win the war in a year or so, prices will fall and Apple products will find their way to Russia via the black market. Until then, he says he’ll make sacrifices (but not volunteer to fight.)
“Western people like comfort, they need comfort,” he said. “Russian people may have comfort, or they may not. This is not a problem.”
Political analyst and journalist Fyodor Krasheninnikov said many Russians hope that Ukraine would soon capitulate to Russian military power. “The mood in Russia now is that ‘We want this to be over as soon as possible because we just can’t live like this any longer. We want to get back to normal life,’” he said.
“It’s not that people really like what Putin does,” he continued. “No, but they feel frustration and depression because they cannot change anything. It’s like bad weather. They realize that it’s going to rain every day. But what can they do about it?”
Russian students are turning in teachers who don’t back the war
Russia’s war dead belie its slogan that no one is left behind | 2022-06-05T05:08:47Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Russians weary of Ukraine war want return to normal life - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/06/05/russia-war-public-opinion/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/06/05/russia-war-public-opinion/ |
Ask Amy: My mother-in-law is staying in our home and I’m overwhelmed
Thankfully, my husband and I are able to stay at my parents' place while my own folks are away, because our apartment is too small for four adults and three animals.
My mother-in-law is cleaning and doing our laundry at our place while we are at work. That’s nice, but my husband isn’t single anymore, and I feel uncomfortable that she’s doing that.
Also, she wants to cook him a roast and potatoes for dinner. I don't eat either of these things, so is it rude to cook my own meal?
I feel a little overwhelmed by it all, but I can't say anything because he hasn't seen his parents in almost a year.
Wife: Yes, you are being ridiculous. But this brand of ridiculousness is often brought on by the presence of in-laws, especially when they are staying in your home.
If she wants to cook a special meal for her son, then embrace it. If you decide to eat a separate meal, then praise her efforts, tell her it looks delicious — but say, “Unfortunately, I don't eat meat and potatoes, so I'm going to put together a little salad for myself. But I think it's really sweet of you to do this, and I know your son is going to appreciate it.”
Now that they are old enough, should we tell them that their mom’s affair with their stepdad is the reason for their parents’ divorce, or should we just let it ride?
Stepmother: This is a situation in which you need to ask yourself: What would be gained from gratuitously offering this information to your stepchildren?
Now that your stepchildren are older, they may have already discerned the truth. Certainly if they ask you directly about the timeline of their parents' breakup, they should be told the truth. They should also be corrected if they present information that is factually incorrect: “Actually, it did not happen that way …”
Dr. Diana: Thank you for lending your expertise to this challenging question. | 2022-06-05T05:21:50Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Ask Amy: My mother-in-law is staying in our home and I’m overwhelmed - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/06/05/ask-amy-mother-in-law-visit/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/06/05/ask-amy-mother-in-law-visit/ |
Carolyn Hax: Husband won’t set boundaries with abusive sister. Can his wife?
Dear Carolyn: My husband’s sister is very abusive to my husband, yelling at him and speaking down to him and blaming him for everything that goes wrong in her life. She has no respect for him at all and expects him to drop what he is doing and cater to her. He is a kind person and doesn’t stand up to her. He says it’s easier for him to just take her abuse and do what she wants rather than battle with her or even speak up for himself.
I think this has been a pattern all their lives. I have watched this for the 10 years we've been married and it's only gotten worse. She sometimes gets in his face and yells at him at the top of her lungs right in front of me. The issues she yells at him about are small, like leaving something out of place or not doing a chore exactly the way she wants him to.
For his sake I have not interfered other than to leave the room. But I find I can’t take it anymore. Do I have the right as a wife to tell her she is no longer allowed to speak to my husband that way, or does a sister have more of a right than a wife? I want to establish ground rules with her even if my husband won’t.
— Fed up
Fed up: The question is whether the victim has more of a right than a bystander. Your husband is the one she attacks, so, yes, he has more say than you do in how the two of you choose to handle this situation.
Plus, she's his sister; the direct relative gets the first word there as well.
However: You are a member of the marriage her yelling affects, and the household her yelling disrupts. You do have standing to set limits if your husband refuses to do it. Call it oh-hell-no power.
As with any preference you have that runs counter to what your spouse would want, it will turn out better if you discuss it as equals first and give each other room to be heard. You don't want to add this to his conflict-avoidant to-do list; I can easily see him assuming the burden of your feelings and not vice versa.
An example of such a conversation might be: “I understand this is your sister and absorbing her abuse seems like the easier choice for you. However, it hurts me, too, to see you suffer. And her tirades ruin gatherings for me, occur on my time, happen in my home, and insult my family.
“I've kept my mouth shut. But I'm done, and ready to absorb the consequences of standing up to her. I respect that you may feel differently so I am talking to you first.”
This allows him to give you his blessing, or pledge to stand up to her first, or work with you on an alternative. Maybe he'd rather just release you from any obligation to spend time with her ever again. Supportive, cooperative couples find their ways; just about any of them will do except for your joining his sister in drowning out his voice.
Because you two are all that matter here. Your love, your respect, your home and family environment. Both of you are responsible for leaving his family dysfunction far enough behind to give each other equal say in the life you share.
Hi, Carolyn: How do I tell my 19-year-old son and 16-year-old daughter I was married to someone else (for six months) before I married their father 20 years ago?
I never told them as kids because I felt it wasn’t important. Now that they are older and will have relationships of their own, I feel like I want to be honest with them. We have a great relationship. I don’t know how to just spring it on them without scarring them for life. I would like to be upfront with them before (God forbid) they somehow find out on their own.
— L.
L.: All you can do now is say it, no hedging and no excuses.
Explain exactly why you didn't say anything till now, as you said it here.
Encourage them to ask follow-up questions. Respect them enough to field these questions without getting defensive.
Where you feel you did something wrong, admit you were wrong. Where you feel you harmed or underestimated them, offer sincere apologies. Where you feel you exercised your best judgment, say that, too — they’ll read it on you if you’re angling for their mercy.
Whether you get it is ultimately up to them, so stick to your purpose: letting them know about a part of your life they deserve to know about. Your having a “great relationship” with them suggests you already taught them well that life is messy and forgiveness is one expression of love. | 2022-06-05T05:21:56Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Carolyn Hax: Husband won't stand up to abusive sister. Can his wife? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/06/05/carolyn-hax-husband-abusive-sister-wife-boundaries/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/06/05/carolyn-hax-husband-abusive-sister-wife-boundaries/ |
Perspective by Bob Woodward
Rebecca Hendin for the Washington Post
With a covert budget of just $250,000, a team of undercover Nixon operatives derailed the presidential campaign of Sen. Edmund Muskie of Maine, the Democrats’ most electable candidate.
Nixon then ran against Sen. George McGovern, a South Dakota Democrat widely viewed as the much weaker candidate, and won in a historic landslide with 61 percent of the vote and carrying 49 states.
Over the next two years, Nixon’s illegal conduct was gradually exposed by the news media, the Senate Watergate Committee, special prosecutors, a House impeachment investigation and finally by the Supreme Court. In a unanimous decision, the court ordered Nixon to turn over his secret tape recordings, which doomed his presidency.
Trump’s diabolical instincts exploited a weakness in the law. In a highly unusual and specific manner, the Electoral Count Act of 1887 says that at 1 p.m. on Jan. 6 following a presidential election, the House and Senate will meet in a joint session. The president of the Senate, in this case Vice President Mike Pence, will preside. The electoral votes from the 50 states and the District of Columbia will then be opened and counted.
In 1971, Howard Hunt, a former CIA operative, and G. Gordon Liddy, a former FBI agent, were hired to work for the White House in a “Special Investigations Unit” — known there as the “Plumbers.” Their initial mission: to plug leaks from Nixon administration officials to the news media.
With the onset of the campaign, Hunt and Liddy were moved to the Nixon reelection committee to quarterback spying and sabotage operations.
Memos discovered during the Watergate investigations identified Muskie as “Target A,” with the goal “to visit upon him some political wounds that will not only reduce his chances for nomination — but damage him as a candidate, should he be nominated.”
In one of the strongest and most effective espionage efforts, Elmer Wyatt, a Nixon campaign operative, was planted in Muskie’s campaign, where he became the senator’s chauffeur. Wyatt was paid $1,000 a month to deliver copies of sensitive documents he transported between Muskie’s Senate office and his presidential campaign headquarters. It was a spectacular yield. The volume was so great that Wyatt, code-named “Ruby I,” rented an apartment midway between the two offices, equipped with a photocopying machine.
Copies of Muskie’s documents were ferried to the Nixon reelection headquarters, where campaign manager John Mitchell, the former attorney general, took advantage of the almost total visibility the documents provided into the Muskie campaign: “itineraries, internal memoranda, drafts of speeches and position papers,” according to the Senate Watergate Committee’s final report in 1974. The Nixon campaign also received papers on campaign strategy debates, fundraising, personnel, media operations and internal disputes.
Meanwhile Gordon Strachan, the top political aide to White House chief of staff H.R. “Bob” Haldeman, and Dwight Chapin, Nixon’s appointments secretary, who was like a son to the president, hired Donald Segretti, an old college friend and former Army lawyer, to implement sabotage efforts.
Segretti in turn hired 22 individuals to inflict these “political wounds” and was paid $77,000 in checks and cash. Herbert Kalmbach, Nixon’s personal lawyer, secretly made the payments from leftover campaign funds.
In March 1972 one Segretti operative circulated a counterfeit letter on Muskie stationery with allegations of sexual improprieties involving rival Democratic candidates Henry “Scoop” Jackson and Hubert Humphrey. The letterhead cost only $20 to reproduce, but Chapin told Segretti that the $20 was a sensational investment and had obtained “$10,000 to $20,000 worth of benefit for the President’s reelection campaign,” according to the Senate Watergate Committee report.
Over the months of the Democratic primary race, heckling, pickets and “M-U-S-K-I-E spells Loser” signs trailed Muskie. Segretti and his operatives stole shoes left by the candidate and his staff outside hotel room doors for polishing before campaign events. Keys were surreptitiously snatched from campaign motorcades while the drivers stepped away for a smoke. Shoes and keys were then deposited in dumpsters outside town, making it impossible for the campaign to stay on schedule and function smoothly. Segretti’s operatives reported, “We did grandly piss off his staff and rattled him considerably.”
Muskie and his staffers were spooked. At a rally in New Hampshire, standing on the back of a truck, the candidate expressed how upset he was by published slurs on his wife, Jane. A gossipy editorial published by conservative William Loebin the Manchester Union Leader, headlined “Big Daddy’s Jane,” had suggested that the senator’s wife drank, smoked and liked to tell dirty jokes. The story was also published in Newsweek. Around the same time, Muskie had appeared to condone the use of the word “Canuck,” a derogatory term for Canadians, in a forged letter drafted by a Nixon White House aide.
Under assault, Muskie openly cried at the New Hampshire campaign stop. David Broder, The Washington Post’s senior political reporter, wrote in a front-page story that Muskie broke down three times, “with tears streaming down his face.”
Drip by drip, all this added to the implosion of the Muskie candidacy. Later, Muskie said, “Our campaign was constantly plagued by leaks and disruptions and fabrications, but we could never pinpoint who was doing it.”
“There were many players in the Watergate drama,” Nixon’s chief of staff, Haldeman, wrote in his 1978 book, “The Ends of Power,” “and behind them all lurks the ever-present shadow of the President of the United States.”
Haldeman added, “This tendency to strike too hard … reflected a belief in, and too great a willingness to accept, the concept that the end justifies the means.” In other words, Nixon believed that his political survival was a “greater good,” worth subverting the will of the people.
“A man is not finished when he is defeated. He is finished when he quits,” Nixon wrote in a note to himself in 1969. It was a classically Nixonian adage — embraced by Trump, who had been defeated in the 2020 election but, armed with falsehoods and a scheme to hold on to power, refused to quit.
On June 22, 2020, for example, nearly five months before Election Day, he tweeted: “MILLIONS OF MAIL-IN BALLOTS WILL BE PRINTED BY FOREIGN COUNTRIES, AND OTHERS. IT WILL BE THE SCANDAL OF OUR TIMES!”
At 2:30 a.m. on Nov. 4, as the presidential vote count solidified Biden’s path to victory in the electoral college, Trump told the nation and the world: “This is a fraud on the American public. This is an embarrassment to our country. We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win this election.”
Three days later the Associated Press and the rest of the media declared Biden the victor. Trump, however, said: “We all know why Joe Biden is rushing to falsely pose as the winner, and why his media allies are trying so hard to help him: they don’t want the truth to be exposed. The simple fact is this election is far from over. …
“Our campaign will start prosecuting our case in court. …
“I will not rest until the American People have the honest vote count they deserve and that Democracy demands.”
“JANUARY SIXTH, SEE YOU IN DC!” he tweeted on Dec. 30, 2020, from Mar-a-Lago, where he was spending the holidays.
Longtime chief strategist Steve Bannon, who had been in and out of Trump’s favor, picked up the thread in a phone conversation with Trump that same day.
“You’ve got to return to Washington and make a dramatic return today,” Bannon told him, according to reporting in Woodward and Robert Costa’s book, “Peril.”
“You’ve got to call Pence off the f---ing ski slopes and get him back here today. This is a crisis,” Bannon said, referring to the vice president, who was vacationing in Vail, Colo.
“We’re going to bury Biden on January 6th,” Bannon said.
If Republicans could cast enough of a shadow on Biden’s victory on Jan. 6, Bannon said, it would be hard for him to govern. Millions of Americans would consider him illegitimate.
“We are going to kill it in the crib. Kill the Biden presidency in the crib,” Bannon said.
Trump’s attack on Biden’s legitimacy included a stream of public statements, legal deceptions and a constant focus on disruption of the Jan. 6 certification in Congress.
In a two-page “privileged and confidential” memo, dated Jan. 2, ultraconservative lawyer John Eastman set out in six points how Trump would be declared the winner. It was a blueprint for a coup. The memo said, “7 states have transmitted dual slates of electors.”
Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, one of Trump’s strongest supporters, was shocked when he read the memo that the White House had sent to him. Alternative electors would be major national news if it were true. He had heard of none. Lee had launched his own investigation, and spent two months talking to Trump and White House officials and calling representatives in Republican-controlled legislatures. There were zero alternate slates. Lee was surprised that the deceptive memo had come from Eastman, a law school professor and former clerk to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.
Lee eventually went to the Senate floor and, holding up a copy of the Constitution, said he had spent an enormous amount of time looking into the matter and found “not even one” example of an alternate elector.
Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor, Trump lawyer and confidant, made similar allegations of a rigged election and massive voter fraud. Giuliani wrote his claims in long memos that he sent to Sen. Lindsey Graham, a Trump insider. When Graham investigated the claims, he found nothing. “Count me out,” Graham said dramatically on the Senate floor.
The evening of Jan. 5, the day before the formal certification process, Trump met with Pence. He urged Pence as the presiding officer at the certification session to throw Biden’s electors out.
Pence said he didn’t have the power.
“What if these people say you do?” Trump asked. He gestured outside, where a massive crowd of his supporters had gathered. Their cheering and bullhorns could be heard through the Oval Office windows.
“I wouldn’t want any one person to have that authority,” Pence said.
“But wouldn’t it almost be cool to have that power?” asked the president of the United States.
“No,” Pence said. “I’m just there to open the envelopes.”
“You don’t understand, Mike, you can do this. I don’t want to be your friend anymore if you don’t do this.” Trump’s voice became louder, and he grew threatening. “You’ve betrayed us. I made you. You were nothing,” he said. “Your career is over if you do this.”
“Isn’t that great?” he said. “Tomorrow is going to be a big day. It’s so cold, and they’re out there by the thousands. There is a lot of anger out there right now.”
Trump threatened to encourage primary challenges against those in Congress who supported Biden’s certification as president.
At 1 a.m. on Jan. 6, 2021, Trump tweeted: “If Vice President @Mike_Pence comes through for us, we will win the Presidency … Mike can send it back!”
Twitter and social media posts lit up with threats of violence. I’m going to kill this person. Shoot this person. Hang this guy.
In a 10 a.m. call to Pence, Trump gave it one more try. “Mike, you can do this. I’m counting on you to do it. If you don’t do it, I picked the wrong man four years ago.”
At Trump’s “Stop the Steal” rally that morning, several thousand people gathered on the Ellipse in the cold. “Let’s have trial by combat,” Giuliani said as the crowd cheered their approval.
Trump followed. “We will never give up. We will never concede. … You’ll never take back our country with weakness,” he yelled to the crowd from the stage.
A determined crowd of more than 1,000 descended on the Capitol. Soon after 2 p.m. the mob became violent. Glass began to shatter, doors were forced open. An unprecedented assault and insurrection were in full progress. “Hang Mike Pence,” they chanted, while roaming the halls of Congress. Some were dressed in garish costumes. Outside, a makeshift gallows was erected to hang Pence.
Both Nixon and Trump created a conspiratorial world in which the U.S. Constitution, laws and fragile democratic traditions were to be manipulated or ignored, political opponents and the media were “enemies,” and there were few or no restraints on the powers entrusted to presidents.
Our conclusions come from covering Nixon and Watergate for half a century. And from reporting on Trump for more than six years — Woodward in three books (“Fear” in 2018, “Rage” in 2020 and “Peril” with Robert Costa in 2021); Bernstein as a CNN reporter and commentator, analyzing Trump, his behavior and its meaning from 2016 through this year. Bernstein reported in November 2020 that 21 Republican senators were contemptuous and disdainful of Trump in private, despite regularly voicing their support for the president in public. After the story ran on CNN — which named the 21 senators — another senior Republican senator said that the number was closer to 40.
Though it took us months to establish, Nixon, his White House staff and his reelection campaign immediately began an unprecedented attack on the justice system, launching a comprehensive coverup involving lies, hush-money payments and offers of presidential pardons to conceal their crimes.
In a June 23, 1972, tape recording, six days after the burglars’ arrest at the Watergate, chief of staff Haldeman told Nixon, “The FBI is not under control … their investigation is now leading into some productive areas, because they’ve been able to trace the money.”
Nixon approved the plan and ordered Haldeman to call in the CIA director and his deputy. “Play it tough,” the president directed. “That’s the way they play it, and that’s the way we are going to play it.”
This was the tape that was released on Aug. 5, 1974, and was unfortunately called the “smoking gun.” It was really no worse than some of the other tapes that had been previously disclosed. By then Congress and the public had grown weary and disgusted with Nixon.
According to the Senate Watergate report, “Petersen directed Silbert not to probe the relationships between Segretti and Kalmbach, Chapin, and Strachan because he ‘didn’t want him getting into the relationships between the President and his lawyer or the fact that the President’s lawyer might be involved in somewhat, I thought, illegitimate campaign activities on behalf of the President.’”
“I realized that many problems in our administration arose not solely from the outside, but from inside the Oval Office — and even deeper, from inside the character of Richard Nixon,” wrote Haldeman.
“I soon realized that this President had to be protected from himself. Time and again I would receive petty vindictive orders,” Haldeman wrote about Nixon. One was, “All the press is barred from Air Force One … Or, after a Senator made an anti-Vietnam War speech: ‘Put a 24-hour surveillance on the bastard.’ And on and on and on.”
In one of the interviews Woodward conducted with Trump for his book “Rage,” he asked, “What have you learned about yourself?”
Trump sighed audibly. “I can handle more than other people can handle.”
“People don’t want me to succeed … Even the RINOs, even the RINOs don’t want me to succeed.” (RINOs are “Republicans in name only.”)
“I have opposition like nobody has. And that’s okay. I’ve had that all my life. I’ve always had it. And this has been — my whole life has been like this.”
“Remember we’re gonna be around and outlive our enemies,” Nixon said in the Oval Office on Dec. 14, 1972, the month after his reelection. “And also, never forget: The press is the enemy. The press is the enemy. The press is the enemy. The establishment is the enemy. The professors are the enemy. The professors are the enemy. Write that on a blackboard 100 times and never forget it.”
As is so well known, Trump publicly said the press was the enemy and an enemy of the state. He even once told Woodward during an interview, “In my opinion you’re the enemy of the people.” After Bernstein disclosed one of Trump’s secret meetings, Trump called him “sloppy” and a “degenerate fool.”
Asked if he was afraid of losing someday, Trump said, “I’m not afraid of it, but I hate the concept of it.”
“What do you hate about it?”
“I hate the fact that it’s a total unknown,” he said, giving a classic Trumpian response of total confidence, and adding, “If there is a fear at all, it is a fear of the unknown because I’ve never been there before.”
Trump said, “Real power is — I don’t even want to use the word — fear.”
After Nixon resigned and we embarked on our second book, “The Final Days,” on Nixon’s last year as president, we went to interview Sen. Barry Goldwater of Arizona, the 1964 Republican nominee for president. Goldwater was often thought of as the conscience of the Republican Party.
Goldwater was seated directly across from Nixon, who sat at his desk. He later dictated that Nixon seemed at ease, almost serene. He thought the president looked as though he had just shot a hole in one. Disappointment was audible, however, in Nixon’s voice.
“We’ve asked Barry to be our spokesman,” Scott said.
“Mr. President, this isn’t pleasant, but you want to know the situation and it isn’t good,” Goldwater said.
“How many would you say would be with me — a half-dozen?” Nixon asked.
Goldwater had dictated that he wondered if there was sarcasm in the president’s voice, because Nixon would need 34 votes in a Senate trial to stay in office. A two-thirds majority, or 67, was needed to remove him, according to the Constitution.
“Sixteen to 18,” Goldwater said, still well short of the needed 34.
“I’d say maybe 15,” Scott said. “But it’s grim, and they’re not very firm.”
“Damn grim,” the president shot back.
In a Senate trial, Goldwater said, “There aren’t many who would support you if it comes to that.”
Goldwater told us that he had decided at that moment to be absolutely blunt in his message. “I took kind of a nose count today, and I couldn’t find more than four very firm votes, and those would be from older Southerners. Some are very worried about what’s been going on, and are undecided, and I’m one of them.”
Forty-eight years later, the political climate had changed radically. Only two House Republicans — Reps. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) and Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) — joined all Democrats in voting 222 to 190 to establish a select committee to investigate the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. The Republican National Committee officially declared the events that led to the attack “legitimate political discourse” and voted to censure Cheney and Kinzinger.
After an hour of Trump defending his request to Zelensky, Trump’s media director, Dan Scavino, joined the interview. Trump asked that Scavino open his laptop and show a clip of the president’s 2019 State of the Union speech. Instead of Trump’s words, hyped-up elevator music played as the camera panned for extended shots of members of Congress watching and listening to the president.
Trump was watching over Woodward’s shoulder and was agitated.
“They hate me,” the president said. “You’re seeing hate!”
“Hate!” Trump said.
“Hate! See the hate!” Trump said.
The camera lingered a long time on Sen. Kamala Harris. She would be chosen as Biden’s running mate the next year. She had a bland, polite look on her face.
“Hate!” Trump said loudly within inches of Woodward’s neck. “See the hate! See the hate!”
It was a remarkable moment. A psychiatrist might say it was a projection of his own hatred of Democrats. But it was so intense that it did not resemble the subdued reaction of the Democrats. His insistence that it was “Hate!” was unsupported by the images on Scavino’s computer. Many Democrats, of course, did hate him. They were vocal and angry opponents of his presidency. But this Trump spectacle was unforgettable and bizarre.
Then suddenly, as if he had found a larger message, he smiled gently and offered his final counsel to all. “Always remember, others may hate you — but those who hate you don’t win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself.”
“I’ve got it in my wallet here,” he would reply, pulling out a folded, dog-eared piece of paper summarizing the Supreme Court decision Burdick v. United States in 1915. The justices had ruled that a pardon “carries an imputation of guilt; acceptance a confession of it.”
Nixon confessed by accepting the pardon, Ford said. “That was always very reassuring to me.”
Nixon said he had “let the American people down” but had not obstructed justice. “I didn’t think of it as a coverup. I didn’t intend it to cover up. Let me say, if I intended to cover up, believe me, I’d have done it.”
A year later, in his memoir “RN,” he continued his war on history. “My actions and omissions, while regrettable and possibly indefensible, were not impeachable.”
A president, he added in the Frost interview, has broad authority and cannot break the law. “When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal,” Nixon said.
In a later book in 1990, “In the Arena,” Nixon intensified his denials, claiming it was a myth that he had ordered hush-money payments.
Sen. Sam Ervin, the chairman of the Senate Watergate Committee, offered a final diagnosis. Nixon and his aides were driven by “a lust for political power.”
Though Ervin died 32 years before Trump became president, the label “lust for political power” applies.
Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward are co-authors of “All the President’s Men” and “The Final Days.” | 2022-06-05T05:22:14Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein thought Richard Nixon defined corruption. Then came Donald Trump. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/06/05/woodward-bernstein-nixon-trump/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/06/05/woodward-bernstein-nixon-trump/ |
Vigilantes and violence have migrants in South Africa scared for their lives
An altercation breaks out between a foreign national and members of the anti-migrant group Operation Dudula during an event in March in the South African township of Alexandra. (Leon Sadiki)
CAPE TOWN, South Africa — The street vendors paced nervously, huddling in pairs, wondering whether it was safe to unpack the carvings, baskets and wire sculptures they sell daily to tourists at one of the small crafts markets dotting the coastline.
A police notice the day before had warned of possible protests by a group known for attacks on immigrants, though nothing had yet happened.
“They want to take away our businesses,” said one vendor from a neighboring country, who feared for his and his family’s lives.
Anti-immigrant sentiment is a long-standing problem in South Africa, where the end of White minority rule failed to deliver meaningful changes for many Black South Africans. Attacks against migrants have sharply increased since May 2008, when an estimated 62 people were killed and scores injured in Johannesburg in one of the country’s worst xenophobic attacks.
The police notice in Cape Town in late May flagged possible “Operation Dudula action.” The group recently launched a branch in Cape Town, the nation’s main tourist destination, after months of targeting poor neighborhoods around Johannesburg and Pretoria. It has been blamed for intimidating and terrorizing migrants from countries such as Zimbabwe, Malawi, Mozambique and Zambia, who typically live in South Africa’s Black townships.
In early April, a gang in Johannesburg’s Diepsloot township stoned and burned to death Elvis Nyathi, a Zimbabwean father of four, when he failed to produce documents showing he was legally in the country. Seven men have been charged in connection with his murder.
The campaign by Operation Dudula is believed to be a coordinated effort, rather than a general response to the chronic poverty and inequality lingering almost three decades after the end of apartheid.
In a sudden bout of racial killings, a South African suburb sees a dark history repeating itself
Sharon Ekambaram, who heads the refugee and migrant rights program at Lawyers for Human Rights, said the latest wave of xenophobia appeared to be backed by well-funded organizations.
“What’s different is that the face of vigilantism is a new phenomenon in the way the violence is being organized,” she said, “It appears to be orchestrated and organized.”
“Dudula” means “to push back” in the Zulu language. Those involved in the Operation Dudula blame migrant workers for rampant crime and for contributing to the country’s high unemployment rate by taking jobs away from South Africans. Government statistics for the first quarter of this year show the official unemployment rate at nearly 35 percent, with joblessness for workers between the ages of 25 and 34 at a staggering 42 percent.
About 3.9 million foreign-born people were living in South Africa in mid-2021, according to StatsSA.
Efforts by The Washington Post to contact several Operation Dudula leaders were unsuccessful. But in a May 16 interview on Cape Radio, one of those leaders was clear on their motivation.
“Since 2004 we saw illegal immigrants coming to South Africa and taking the jobs,” said Sebele Tsoloane, who heads the Operation Dudula chapter in the Western Cape Province. “We are not a political party. It is a civil movement. We [are] not vigilantes. We just want to force the law to work.”
Ekambaram of Lawyers for Human Rights disagrees with that characterization.
“Operation Dudula is not short of funding, so our experience is that it is not an organic uprising or a movement of people borne out of anger about their living conditions,” she said. “This seems to be some hidden hand that has a vested interest in collective violence. … We’ve lived through the violence of 2008, 2014, 2016, and all of it came out of scapegoating by state officials.”
Repression and unlawful searches of immigrant homes by law enforcement agencies have increased, she noted, in scenes reminiscent of the apartheid years when police went door to door checking documents of Black South Africans.
“What we have experienced at LHR is increased repression with increased deportations and arrests of migrants, as well as unlawful search and seizure-type operations by law enforcement groups, knocking on doors asking people for papers, which is totally unlawful,” she said.
In Cape Town, the traders anxiously watching for any signs of Operation Dudula protesters blamed a hidden hand. “This is all politics,” said a vendor, who asked that his name and nationality be withheld for fear of intimidation.
‘I am broken’: South African communities are gutted by a wave of looting, arson and loss
Political leaders in South Africa have a history of stirring up xenophobia.
Herman Mashaba, the former mayor of Johannesburg who is now leader of the Action SA political party, has repeatedly blamed foreigners for taking jobs away from South Africans.
“I don’t want to live in a country where foreign nationals come and open hairdressing salons and spaza [convenience] shops. No. Those opportunities are for South Africans,” he said last September in an interview with the Daily Maverick. “For foreign nationals to come and work in restaurants and drive taxis and trucks, no ways. … I’m not going to apologize to anyone.”
In 2015, a Zulu king referred to foreign workers as “head lice” and told them to leave the country. “Let us pop our head lice,” said Goodwill Zwelithini, who died last year. “We must remove ticks and place them outside in the sun. We ask foreign nationals to pack their belongings and be sent back.”
He later claimed his comments were taken out of context.
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa has condemned “vigilante-type” groups acting against foreigners.
“We cannot support a vigilante type of move against a group of people and particularly targeting them as foreign nationals, because what we are doing then is just to divide our people on the African continent,” Ramaphosa told reporters in April. “People who are here illegally have to be dealt with within the framework of the law.”
The United Nations has expressed “growing concern” over South Africa’s treatment of foreigners and pointed to the country’s ratification of international codes on human rights and protection of refugees.
“Over the recent past we have noted with deep concern as movements such as Operation Dudula are illegally forcing people suspected to be undocumented foreign nationals to show their papers,” it said in a statement.
The human rights organization Amnesty International accused the government in April of not doing enough to protect migrants. It said migrants interviewed in townships described living in constant fear and feeling unsafe because of harassment from both the police and anti-migrant gangs. | 2022-06-05T06:40:11Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Operation Dudula intimidating migrants in South Africa - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/06/05/south-africa-operation-dudula-immigration/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/06/05/south-africa-operation-dudula-immigration/ |
13th-century media bias. (Photographer: Sean Gallup/Getty Images Europe)
However enlightened or bigoted you may think we are nowadays, we ought to be able to agree that our forebears really were god-awful prejudiced in the past. The reminders are all around.
Statues, monuments and other bits of public architecture teem with images of people who held views or committed acts we consider vile. Some fought to preserve slavery or became rich trading slaves. Others did, said or wrote things that were racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-Semitic, or chauvinistic in some other way.
The question is what to do about all those relics today. Can we remove them and scrub our past clean? Should we even try? Or is there a better way to confront the vestiges of the bad old times in the here and now?
If you happen to find yourselves on the frontlines of America’s culture wars, these debates sometimes get too heated to be edifying. So a better case study — still loaded with historical and emotional baggage, but currently subject to a refreshingly rational debate — may be medieval anti-Semitism in Germany and Christianity.
A German federal court this week held hearings in a case about a stone relief carved into the facade of a church in Wittenberg where Martin Luther once preached (though not the church with the door on which he allegedly nailed his 95 theses). The plaintiff is Michael Dietrich Duellmann, an elderly German who converted to Judaism in the 1970s. He wants the masonry removed because it’s obviously anti-Semitic and offensive.
Nobody is arguing with that assessment. The ornament dates to the 13th century, which wasn’t exactly the heyday of open-mindedness. It depicts a pig which is suckling two people who would have been identifiable at the time (by their headgear) as Jews, while a third person, meant to look like a rabbi, lifts the sow’s tail and looks into its anus.
Everything loathsome about medieval Europe and Christianity is in plain view. This was a culture of discrimination, persecution and pogroms. And the Wittenberg relief is the kind of smutty graffiti that served as the mass and social media of the time, propagating all that prejudice. Luther, who preached in that church more than two centuries after its masonry was chiseled, was notoriously anti-Semitic.
And yet, Duellmann already lost his case in two regional courts, and got to the federal level only by appealing. So what’s the argument against whacking the imagery off the wall?
One objection is that lots of other churches and cathedrals — about 50 just in Germany, and many more in the rest of Europe — depict similar filth, if you look closely enough. To be thorough, you’d be destroying much of Western heritage.
That’s not the reasoning of the lower courts so far, however. Instead, the judges took into account the changed context of the “Jew’s Sow,” as the carving is called. Since the 1980s, a brass plaque in the ground has explained the historical background. Another pedagogic sign was added later. In a subtle way, the texts connect the medieval anti-Semitism on display to the Holocaust. Overall, the courts decided, the ensemble is no longer insulting to Jews but rather educational to all.
That rationale won’t satisfy Duellmann — and the many others who, all over the world, want to get rid of similar shameful monuments. But it’s worth pondering an approach to the tainted art of the past that explicitly embraces it by draping it in our own cultural context.
Obviously, there are some remnants of past evil that would be too charged to keep around. With good reason, there are no more public busts of Adolf Hitler. The bunker in Berlin where he took his life lies demolished and buried in the ground, marked only by a small explanatory plaque. It’s actually hard to find next to the vast Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, which it abuts.
But that, too, is tantamount to context. In the same way, reinterpreting the setting around monuments — to slave traders, Confederate generals, imperialists, even Christopher Columbus — may be preferable to just tearing down the stone and metal.
Why lose it, when you can use it? These artifacts from the past could be invitations to teach and learn, to reflect on how far we’ve come in becoming tolerant and humane, and how much further we still have to go.
The fact is that people at the time — like the medieval Germans gazing at the Jew’s Sow in Wittenberg — thought nothing of this art, except that it was surely normal. That should be the real lesson to us. Of this we can be sure: We today do, say and think some things that our own descendants, too, will be ashamed of. But we can also leave them evidence that we tried to become self-aware and open to progress. That might even make them proud of us.
Our Past Is Racist and Bigoted. How Do We Face It?: Andreas Kluth
Watch Out for the Facial Recognition Overlords: Parmy Olson | 2022-06-05T06:53:14Z | www.washingtonpost.com | What About That Anti-Semitic Pig on Martin Luther’s Church? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/what-about-thatanti-semitic-pigon-martin-luthers-church/2022/06/05/8b258fd4-e495-11ec-ae64-6b23e5155b62_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/what-about-thatanti-semitic-pigon-martin-luthers-church/2022/06/05/8b258fd4-e495-11ec-ae64-6b23e5155b62_story.html |
A voter waits for her family members to finish voting at Shepherd Elementary School in D.C. in 2018. (Calla Kessler/The Washington Post)
When D.C. voters look at their ballots for this month’s Democratic primary, they’ll have to choose one candidate in each race, sometimes from a long list — in Ward 3, nine people are on the ballot for the council seat; in Ward 5, seven people; citywide, four people seek an at-large seat.
Narrowing it down to one can lead to strategic thinking among some voters — like those who favor a lesser-known candidate, but end up voting for the person they think has a better chance of defeating their least favorite in the race.
Advocates who are pushing a bill that would change D.C.’s election law to allow ranked-choice voting point to the June 21 primary as a good example of why they think it would be a better system.
“Voters have to decide who is electable, who is the person that might be splitting the vote, I really like this person but they’re probably not a viable candidate,” said Brianna McGowan, who runs the organization Delicious Democracy. “Voters have this weird mental calculus to figure out where their vote is going to matter instead of just focusing on what matters to them and the issues in their community. Ranked-choice voting would totally shift the conversation.”
Ranked-choice voting recently was adopted in New York City for its last mayoral election and is in use in other cities nationwide. How it works: Voters list their preferred candidates in order, from most favorite to least favorite. On election night, every voter’s first choice is counted up — and if no candidate gets more than half the first-choice votes, the tabulators drop the candidate who received the fewest votes.
For those voters whose first choice was struck, the tabulator then counts their second choices. The process keeps going until one candidate wins a majority.
While that might seem complicated, the current primary in D.C., advocates say, is a real-life example of why that system might work better.
With nine people running in Ward 3, Sean Dugar — who advocates for ranked-choice voting at the organization More Voice DC — notes: “Someone may win with only 15 percent of voters having voted for them.”
The winners of the November general election will be able to weigh in on the council’s hotly debated bill to implement ranked-choice voting.
D.C. debates whether to switch to a ranked-choice voting system
Some of this year’s candidates can see how their elections could go differently if ranked-choice voting were instituted in the District — such as in the at-large council race, where three candidates are seeking to oust incumbent Anita Bonds. “It’s a tool to really select candidates who are more representative of what everyone wants, versus purely who is the top vote-getter in a situation where the top vote-getter can get 21 percent and still win,” said Dexter Williams, a Democrat who is running in that race.
Before Williams decided to run against Bonds, he worked as an advocate for electoral changes like public campaign financing, which D.C. implemented before the last election and Williams is now using.
Bonds, who has been on the council for a decade, faced two challengers in her last primary election and still won 52 percent of the vote, with the two other splitting the rest nearly equally.
She opposes ranked-choice voting (and her office did not respond to inquiries from The Washington Post about the subject), while her three challengers this year all support it.
“I personally feel very strongly that it is a process to dilute parties,” Bonds said in a debate last month. D.C.’s Democratic Party also opposes the proposed ranked-choice voting bill, and a large group of party leaders have testified against it, saying that the process could confuse and disenfranchise some voters. “I believe in the one vote, one person. One person, one vote. And so to have the opportunity to say, ‘oh, maybe this person second, third,’ that does not in my opinion sit well with how people really view and value their one vote.”
Bonds’s detractors — including housing advocates displeased with her longtime leadership of the council’s housing committee — fear she is headed to another victory because her three challengers will split whatever anti-Bonds votes might be out there.
Anita Bonds, enigma of the D.C. Council
Ranked-choice voting, they say, could change that. “[Bonds is] hardly campaigning right now. I think she’s feeling very comfortable,” said McGowan, who has been door-knocking for several left-leaning candidates through the organization DC for Democracy but has not gotten involved in the at-large race. “Under ranked-choice voting, she would have to work harder and really have to gain people’s votes. I do think she could be a winner under a ranked system, but it would be a totally different campaign.”
This year’s candidates know they must win an election under the current laws if they ever want the opportunity to change the system. Williams believes that voters are frustrated with what he views as Bonds’s lack of response to residents’ inquiries and ineffectiveness at passing major legislation on the council. “What I’m hearing on the ground when I’m talking to voters is that there’s going to be a change, whether we’re using ranked-choice voting or whether we’re using our current system.”
Nate Fleming, who has won election in the past to be D.C.'s shadow representative to Congress and is now running in the at-large race, said he views himself as basically running against Bonds, not running in a four-person field. In 2014, running on a tiny budget, he came closest out of four distant challengers to unseating Bonds; this year, he has raised far more from donors, and the city is kicking in public financing dollars.
As of May 10, Bonds had outraised her opponents, with Fleming raising significantly more than Williams and Lisa Gore. Bonds had spent less than $10,000 of her campaign chest, leaving her with more than $200,000 in the bank, while Gore had spent the most, more than $102,000, and Williams and Fleming had both spent more than $55,000 and had much more than Gore left to spend.
“I hadn’t thought a lot about” ranked-choice voting, Fleming said. He touts his vigorous campaigning — along with mailers and text messages, he says he has knocked on more than 20,000 doors over the course of his near-daily canvasses. "I believe by doing that, we’re going to end up having the most votes in this race.”
When Fleming knocks on doors, some voters say they recognize his name from his gigantic sign on Capitol Hill, far larger than the yard signs pasted across the city. He starts each visit by describing his résumé — from Southeast D.C., to Morehouse College, to Berkeley Law, to a master’s degree he just completed at Harvard and a doctorate he’s close to finishing at Penn — and watches voters’ eyes widen with each school he names.
“This is a one-on-one race to me,” he said.
Of course, Gore said the same thing — she thinks it’s a two-person race, but the person other than Bonds is her, not Fleming.
“There was definitely this pressure early on to drop out and let people who other folks thought maybe had a better chance to win the race, win the race,” Gore said. “We hear that a lot about splitting the vote. Ranked-choice voting would pretty much eliminate all of that.”
As it stands, Gore said she does worry that she and the other two challengers will split the vote, giving Bonds the victory. “That’s what keeps me up at night,” she said.
She’s trying to make the case that her former job in the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s inspector general’s office makes her qualified to take over Bonds’s council role of overseeing city housing programs, a job she says Bonds is failing at because she is too cozy with the mayor.
McGowan, the ranked-choice voting advocate, pointed to endorsements as a sign that like-minded voters are torn between candidates. Groups that sometimes endorse the same candidates have spread out in this race, with Greater Greater Washington endorsing Gore, the Washington Teachers’ Union endorsing Williams and Jews United for Justice endorsing Fleming.
“You totally feel or see that there are some pretty solid, progressive people in the race who unfortunately are splitting the vote,” McGowan said. Speaking for voters who follow any of those organizations’ recommendations, she said, “It sucks that I’m voting for someone I feel doesn’t really have a chance at winning, because a lot of the candidates are splitting the vote to the point that it might just be a solid path for the incumbent to win again.”
Dugar, who has worked on elections in cities that do use ranked-choice voting, said he also hopes a new system would bring about a better attitude in D.C. politics.
“They never use the term ‘competitor.’ They say ‘my colleague in this race,’ ” Dugar said about cities where candidates are trying to win not just one vote against another person but second- or third-choice votes, as well. “You go from a place of no and a place of opposition to a place of ‘yes, and.’ Yes, that is a great idea, and here is how I would build upon it. It creates more of an aspirational campaign than the kind of mudslinging, dragging folks down, ‘your idea is horrible’ framework that we are definitely seeing in races across the District.” | 2022-06-05T11:23:10Z | www.washingtonpost.com | As crowded D.C. primary approaches, advocates push ranked-choice voting - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/06/05/dc-election-ranked-choice-voting-at-large/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/06/05/dc-election-ranked-choice-voting-at-large/ |
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